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June 6, 2024 - System Update - Glenn Greenwald
01:03:33
INTERVIEW: Sen. Rand Paul on COVID Cover-Ups, Ukraine, and More; PLUS: Israel's Disinformation Campaign in the U.S. Revealed and Hunter Biden Laptop Story Vindicated

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Good evening.
It's Wednesday, June 5th.
Welcome to a new episode of System Update, our live nightly show that airs every Monday through Friday at 7 p.m.
Eastern, exclusively here on Rumble, the free speech alternative to YouTube.
Tonight, We speak to Senator Rand Paul, the thrice-elected senator from the state of Kentucky, about a wide range of issues, an interview we recorded just before we went on air just a few moments ago.
Among the topics are the key revelations from this week's House hearings on COVID, at which Dr. Anthony Fauci testified.
The intensity of the repression and censorship that was imposed on any attempt to question or dissent from Fauci's claims, including ones we now know were false or baseless, including censorship that Senator Paul himself, an elected U.S.
Senator and a medical doctor, suffered at the hands of Google and Facebook.
We also talk about the remaining unresolved questions about COVID and why so many people in the scientific establishment and the Democratic Party have so little interest in investigating any of those questions.
And we speak to him about the ongoing futile and failing war in Ukraine and why the U.S.
government continues to fund it, and most important of all, how the U.S.
government could, if it really wanted to, find a solution to it.
But before we get to that interview with Senator Paul, today both the Israeli newspaper Haaretz and the New York Times reported Based on the research and journalism of the journalism watchdog group entitled Fake Reporting, that the government of Israel launched a large-scale disinformation campaign after October 7th aimed at Americans, mostly black Americans and young progressives, designed to manipulate them into having more positive views of Israel and that foreign countries were in Gaza.
Many of the tactics used should be now familiar.
They involve things like fake accounts, inorganic messages, and attempts to deceive people about the identity of those making the various pro-Israel claims.
Now for the same reason that I long scoffed at the supposedly grave attack on American democracy caused by Russian and Chinese messaging campaigns aimed at Americans, I am not going to pretend that I think this is some massive threat to our liberty.
But it does raise the question of why these revelations regarding Israel are treated so differently From revelations of similar influence campaigns involving other countries, for years we have heard from the top levels of our government that there are few things that threaten American democracy more than influence campaigns from Russia and China.
That rationale was even the basis of the banning or forced sale of TikTok recently, and was also the basis of four years of Russiagate hysteria that really never dissipated.
If those foreign influence campaigns are such an affront to our sovereignty and such a grave threat to our democracy, why aren't the ones that Israel has clandestinely launched against our own citizenry?
Why do all of the claimed beliefs and values of so many people instantly disappear when it comes to this one foreign country?
We will have the details on the Israeli influence campaign and remind you of what U.S.
officials previously said and how they treated such campaigns when coming from other foreign nations.
Also, before we get to Senator Paul, we will briefly report on an infuriating but unsurprising development today in the prosecution, the trial of the President's son, Hunter Biden.
In order to prosecute Hunter Biden, the FBI and DOJ needs to rely on documents that were taken from his laptop.
And obviously, in order to reuse such documents in court, the FBI has to claim, has to testify under oath, that they concluded that the laptop and the documents found on it were both authentic and unaltered.
And that is exactly what the FBI testified under oath, that they have confirmed the authenticity of the archive.
Now, That claim, while we know is true, is provably true, and has been clearly true since before the 2020 election, is the exact opposite of the claim that was continuously circulated by a union of the U.S.
security state, the corporate media, and the Democratic Party, namely that no reporting based on documents we were told that were taken from the Hunter Biden laptop could be trusted because the laptop is not authentic, but rather, quote, Russian disinformation.
That claim was long ago disproven, including by the very media outlets that first spread the original lie and then, once Biden was safely elected, admitted the laptop was authentic all along, but still not a single media outlet Or a major U.S.
official or politician who spread the CIA lie before the election with the obvious intent to protect Joe Biden in the weeks heading into the 2020 election from incriminating reporting about his family's business activities in Ukraine and China and to now see an admission this ironclad from the FBI made under oath and in fact basing the entire prosecution of Hunter Biden on the laptop's contents Is yet another reminder of how serious, how grave was the CIA media fraud before the 2020 election.
Now, before we get to all of that, a few programming notes.
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For now, Welcome to a new episode of System Update, starting right now.
American politics since 2016 has been dominated by grave warnings of the danger of Russia, and in particular, Russia's attempt to launch clandestine influence campaigns Russia's attempt to launch clandestine influence campaigns designed to manipulate the beliefs and minds of American citizens.
That was essentially the primary basis on which Russiagate was launched, in addition to the false conspiracy theory that the Trump campaign collaborated with the Russians to hack DNC emails.
Over the last four years, the focus has turned to Chinese disinformation campaigns as well.
And in fact, this extraordinary step that the U.S.
Congress and the Biden administration just took together to ban an app that a third of American citizens voluntarily use or at least force a sale of it to a more compliant American company, TikTok was also based on claims that the Chinese are using it to launch influence campaigns aimed at American citizens.
And yet, as it turns out, Israel, unsurprisingly, but not really proven until today, has been doing exactly the same thing as what Russia and China are alleged to have been doing, namely launching influence campaigns using manipulation and fake content and the like to manipulate American citizens namely launching influence campaigns using manipulation and fake content and the like to manipulate
Hear from Haaretz, the Israeli newspaper, earlier today, quote, Israel secretly targeted American lawmakers with Gaza war influence campaign.
In an attempt to sway global public opinion on the war in Gaza, fake accounts and sites spread pro-Israel and Islamic phobic content.
Remember this is an Israeli daily newspaper.
The operation was orchestrated by Israel's diaspora affairs ministry and run by a political campaign firm.
And here's what the article reports.
Quote, the Israeli government is behind a large-scale influence campaign primarily aimed at black lawmakers and young progressives in the United States and Canada.
The operation, whose existence was first reported by Harris in March, was launched after the start of the war in Gaza and was intended to sway certain segments of public opinion on Israel's conduct.
The influence campaign made extensive use of fake websites and social media to promote content that is pro-Israel, anti-Palestinian, anti-Muslim, as well as disinformation about anti-Semitism on American campuses, according to an investigation by the watchdog site Fake Reporter Organization published according to an investigation by the watchdog site Fake Reporter Organization The influence operation was run by a private Israeli online political campaigning firm called Stoic that was hired for the project.
According to sources and information obtained by Haaretz, the operation was commissioned by Israel's Diaspora Affairs Ministry but carried out by a different party for fear that its exposure could entangle Israel in a crisis.
The ministry oversees a number of firms for a number of different purposes and goals.
Among the candidates for the job was the organization Voices of Israel, which received half of its original funding from the Israeli government, though it was not tapped for the task in the end.
Now, as I said, and I said from the beginning of Russiagate when all this hysteria emerged about Russia using fake Facebook accounts and Twitter bots, that every major country does this to every other country.
You don't think the United States government uses these kinds of clandestine influence campaigns aimed at the people in foreign countries, especially adversary countries?
There's been a ton of reporting on how the United States does exactly that.
And that was the main reason I was so resistant to this idea that Russia was some grave threat to American democracy, that what it had done in 2016, and what they're saying they're ready to do in 2024 again, is somehow a unprecedented threat to American democracy.
But the question remains, Why has the US government treated similar influence campaigns from Russia and China in such maximalist and shrieking ways and yet has issued thus far at least no warning or concern about a very similar influence campaign that is secret and manipulative and deceptive aimed at American citizens from Israel?
Just to remind you of what has been in the discourse about these kinds of information campaigns, here from BuzzFeed News in October of 2017, quote, Hillary Clinton suggests that Russian interference in the U.S.
election, quote, was a cyber 9-11.
The former presidential candidate made repeated references to Russian interference in U.S.
US politics while on a speaking tour in London.
Quote, "We had really well-respected security intelligence veterans saying this was a cyber 911 in the sense that it was a direct attack on our institution," she said.
The journalist who was responsible for introducing the Steele dossier hoax into American discourse before the 2016 election was David Korn of Mother Jones.
And obviously he was never fired for perpetuating that fraud.
In fact, he's been richly rewarded for having done so.
He still writes at Mother Jones, and just last week he wrote an article with this headline, quote, here come the Russians again.
The Russians are coming again.
Quote, the Director of National Security recently warned that Russia remains, quote, the most active foreign threat to our elections.
And it goes on and on about the threat of Russian influence campaigns and bots and fake accounts and the like.
Just today, the EU Commission issued a warning ahead of the 2024 elections, not just for the United States, but also in Europe, that, quote, disinformation actors have pushed, among other things, False information about how to vote, discouragement of citizens from voting, division and polarization, and fake accounts and manipulation.
Now, obviously, they weren't warning about Israel having done this.
They don't speak ill of Israel, only about Russia and China doing it.
Here's their report as well from earlier today, quote, in European elections, EU institutions are prepared to counter disinformation.
Being in the global forefront of addressing threats related to foreign information manipulation interference, the EU is working in close cooperation with its like-minded partners outside of the EU via force such as the G7 Rapid Response Mechanism, among others.
To raise resilience to external interference attempts, the US, the EU rather, has developed a dedicated toolbox to counter foreign information manipulation interference, including a set of tools ranging from situational awareness Now remember that fear-mongering...
Over foreign influence campaigns, they ultimately ended up blaming not only Trump's victory over Hillary Clinton, but also Brexit on Russian disinformation.
This hysteria built up around foreign influence campaigns has been one of the primary excuses invoked to justify having the government be able to censor the internet, that we need to protect our populations from influence and disinformation campaigns launched by foreign countries.
They'll never say that about Israel, only about China and Russia.
The New York Times in September 2023.
China uses, quote, deceptive methods to sow disinformation, the U.S.
says.
The accusations reflect worry in Washington that China's information operation poses a growing security challenge to the United States.
According to the State Department's report released on Thursday, China's efforts have evolved from a primary focus on promoting or defending the country's political views on issues like Taiwan and Hong Kong, to one that aims to sow disinformation to discredit the United States at home and abroad.
This has included accusations about the origins of a COVID pandemic, the new security partnership between the United States and Australia, and Russia's invasion of Ukraine.
Here from Reuters at 2024, just to give you a sense for how dominant and pervasive these threats are regarding Russia and China, foreign attempts to sway U.S.
election dangerously high and are rising, officials say.
Quote, an increasing number of foreign actors, including non-state actors, are seeking to influence U.S.
elections.
And Russia, China, and Iran, while the most significant, are far from alone, U.S.
officials told a Senate committee on Wednesday.
Specifically, Russia remains the most active foreign threat to our elections, Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines said.
Quote, the Russian government's goals in such influence operations tends to include eroding trust in U.S.
democratic institutions, exacerbating sociopolitical divisions in the United States, They regard any messaging that's contrary to the U.S.
financing of the war in Ukraine as being a Russian government plot.
That's why if you oppose their war in Ukraine, the Biden administration, you will immediately be deemed either an asset of or an operative for the Kremlin because, according to them, you're promoting their views.
Quote, Democratic Senator Mark Warner, the Senate Intelligence Committee's chairman, said declassified information assessments identified not just Russia, China, and Iran, but also Cuba, Venezuela, and Islamic militants, and a range of foreign activists and profit-motivated criminals are seeking to influence U.S.
politics.
I mean I just read you the report from the Israeli newspaper Heriot's based on reporting from this watchdog site also reported today by the New York Times that Israel has a massive campaign of deceit and disinformation designed to secretly influence American citizens and American lawmakers to adopt poor pro-Israel views.
It is inconceivable That our government would ever condemn that at all, let alone in the terms we're hearing here.
Here from CNN in January of 2024, Nancy Pelosi spoke on, oh she has a title, House Speaker Emerita.
Nancy Pelosi, she spoke on what she claimed was Russian They're in front of my house all the time.
So I have a feeling for what feelings they have.
But we have to think about what we're doing.
And what we have to do is try to stop the suffering and gossip.
This is women and children, people who don't have a place to go.
So let's address that.
But for them to call for a ceasefire is Mr. Putin's message.
Mr. Putin's message.
Make no mistake, this is directly connected to what he would like to see.
So American citizens protesting outside Nancy Pelosi's house and elsewhere who are calling for a ceasefire, according to Nancy Pelosi, are not only doing Russia's bidding, somehow Russia has prioritized a ceasefire in Gaza as its main foreign policy goal and is using American citizens, including young students, to Direct and manipulate them to do that?
Not only that, said Nancy Pelosi, but she also said this.
Same thing with Ukraine.
It's about Putin's message.
I think some of these protesters are spontaneous and organic and sincere.
Some, I think, are connected to Russia.
And I say that having looked at this for a long time now.
You think some of these protests are Russian plants?
I don't see their plans.
I think some financing should be investigated.
And I want to ask the FBI to investigate that.
Do you see how much they weaponized fears about foreign information campaigns, foreign influence campaigns?
There are protesters who oppose Nancy Pelosi's support of Israel who are protesting and she immediately accuses them of being plots from the Kremlin and says, I want the FBI to go after them and investigate them.
To see if they have ties to the Russians.
I mean, this is derangement.
You have no basis whatsoever for saying that these protesters have any connection to the Kremlin, but she wants to call on the FBI to go investigate them.
Now, she also had a different conspiracy theory about foreign influence campaigns and these protesters outside of her house that she shared with us in late January of 2024.
Here's what she said.
So those are protesters outside of her house and she said go to China, you're all paid by China.
So those are protesters outside of her house and she said, go to China.
You're all paid by China.
This is what they do with all dissent in the United States.
Let's just hear the rest of this. - What about the city?
So she just said again, go back to China where your headquarters is.
These are people, American citizens protesting against the war in Gaza.
And she first says they're Russian and now she says they're Chinese.
Here was Nikki Haley in 2023, warning about the same exact thing.
The two parties are in complete cahoots on this script.
We really do need to ban TikTok once and for all.
And let me tell you why.
For every 30 minutes that someone watches TikTok, every day, they become 17% more anti-Semitic, more pro-Hamas based on doing that.
We now know that 50% of adults, 18 to 25, think that Hamas was warranted in what they did with Israel.
That's a problem.
I mean, every official who supported a ban of TikTok did so based on the claim not only that it's used by China to launch disinformation and influence campaigns in the United States, but more importantly, that it allows too much anti-Israel disinformation or anti-Israel content.
And that it's contaminating the minds of our young people to be opposed to the Israeli war in Gaza.
That's why, after four years of lingering in Washington, TikTok got banned.
Not because it was simply controlled by the Chinese, but because specifically it was permitting too much criticism of Israel to flourish on the platform.
This is how continuously our government uses fear-mongering of influence campaigns that originate with foreign governments of exactly the kind that we discovered today Israel has been launching in secret using deceptive means against American citizens.
Here from the New York Times, November of 2023, lawmakers renew calls to ban TikTok after accusations of anti-Israel content.
The criticism has put the popular video app on the heels at a precarious time.
So, and it quotes all sorts of people saying that the reason TikTok has to be banned is because it's a foreign influence campaign from China to turn American young people against Israel.
So you can see how much, not just fear mongering, but how much actual control of the internet has been seized and censorship imposed based on the claim that Russia and China are manipulating American citizens to think a certain way.
And yet, I can guarantee you, That none of the people who are warning of that will raise a single iota of voice of objection to learning that Israel is doing exactly the same thing.
And I think the question that we should ask is what accounts for those extremely different standards?
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Now, I have frequently said that I think one of the gravest journalistic scandals of the past five years is the way in which the corporate media,
the corporate media in the weeks before the 2020 election decided that they did not want to report on or talk about extremely incriminating reporting that was first published by the New York Post and then other media outlets that was not about Hunter Biden's private life, That was never the issue.
Instead, it was about the way in which Joe Biden's family, and often Joe Biden himself, was trading on his name and influence to seek and obtain profit and other business deals in places like Ukraine and China, where obviously they knew he would exercise great influence if he ran for president and won.
That was what that reporting was about.
It was highly incriminating of Joe Biden and his family and the way that they are willing to use power and influence to corruptly profit in foreign places.
And because the media was so desperate to protect Joe Biden in the weeks headed to the 2020 election, not do anything to allow any reporting that might have harmed his chances of winning that election, they took a lie from the intelligence agency These former intelligence operatives like John Brennan and James Clapper, people who reviled Trump, manufactured a complete fabrication.
They just decided to issue a letter saying, we think the Hunter Biden laptop has all the hallmarks of a Russian disinformation campaign.
And the corporate media took that letter.
Which had no evidence, and even in the letter, even those Intel officials admitted they had no evidence for that claim, and they converted it into an absolute truth, and they spent weeks on the air and in print repeating this claim over and over, that reporting based on documents from Hunter Biden's laptop could not be confirmed and might even, probably should be ignored, because it was a Russian disinformation campaign.
As you might recall, this was in the weeks before the 2020 election.
That was when I wanted to write about the contents of the Hunter Biden laptop and the documents on it and what it revealed about Joe Biden, but I was banned by The Intercept, the media outlet that I had founded and where I was reporting from even mentioning the contents of the laptop because a week earlier, they too had ratified and spread the CIA lie that these documents were Russian disinformation.
Now, since the election happened and Joe Biden was declared the winner, safely put into the White House, almost every one of these same media outlets purported to be able to now authenticate that the Hunter Biden laptop was never Russian disinformation, was never anything than fully authentic and unaltered.
In fact, began using documents from his laptop to do a whole wide array of reporting.
Obviously, they had concluded that those documents Which were obviously authentic before the election, and they were after the election, they were willing to admit it.
And I've always regarded this as such a grave journalistic scandal because they lied over and over.
They took a CIA lie, exaggerated it even further, and spread it over and over, even though it was a complete lie, to dismiss reporting about Joe Biden that could have harmed his election chances because they were so desperate to ensure that Trump was defeated.
Now it's one thing to have watched all these corporate media outlets admit that the laptop was authentic all along, which they've done.
But something happened today in the courtroom where Hunter Biden is being prosecuted by the federal government for a wide range of crimes, including lying on an application for a gun permit where he has to certify that he's not abusing drugs, when in fact he was, and other banking and tax claims.
In order to prosecute Joe Biden, the FBI needs to use, to prove his guilt, the documents from that laptop.
That's a major part of their case.
And so obviously they need to put an FBI agent on the witness stand and have her testify under oath that she was able to confirm, and the FBI was able to confirm, that the Hunter body laptop and the contents of it were in fact authentic.
And that's exactly what the FBI agent did today.
She took the stand and under oath testified about how it is that the FBI confirmed that the documents on which they're relying for this investigation and for this prosecution are in fact authentic and not Russian disinformation at all.
Here from NBC News, which was one of the outlets most aggressively spreading this lie, Hunter Biden trial highlights.
FBI agent testifies about Hunter Biden's drug use and large cash withdrawals.
The agent, a witness for the prosecution, testified about the authenticity of Hunter Biden's laptop.
Which has been the subject of rumors and speculation for years.
Yes, not just rumors and speculation, but lies.
It's been the subject of lies for years.
And not by trolls on the internet, but by our leading media outlets and the leaders of our intelligence agencies.
Democratic Party operatives.
As a reminder, here was a tweet from Jen Psaki, the current MSNBC host and former Biden administration press secretary, who tweeted on October 19th, 2020, Hunter Biden's story is Russian disinformation, dozens of former Intel officials say.
And she cited the first article ever published on this by the serial liar Natasha Bertrand.
And you see here that the letter said, we believe it has all the hallmarks of Russian disinformation, though we can't prove it.
And in the hands of Jen Psaki and Tasha Bertrand in Politico, it morphed into the far more definitive claim, which you see right on the screen, in that tweet, the Hunter Biden story is Russian disinformation.
Dozens of former intel officials say, do you see how the people who constantly claim That you have to rely on them to combat disinformation are in fact the people who spread disinformation most aggressively and most casually.
Just to give you a small sense of what the media was doing on the airwaves in the weeks and days leading up to the 2020 election to protect Joe Biden.
Here was CNN, who put James Clapper on their show.
And you see there, US officials investigating if recently published emails are tied to Russian disinformation advert targeting Biden.
They barely ever talked about the contents of the reporting.
They instead tried to lie about it to call into question and even deny its authenticity by claiming it was Russian disinformation when all along it never was.
And I was so convinced Before the 2020 election, that it was completely authentic based on the same methods I had used to authenticate other archives, exactly the same ones used for the Snowden reporting, for WikiLeaks, for the big Brazil investigation that we did, where we had to authenticate large archives before putting our name and credibility at stake.
I could see that this archive was completely authentic, and yet the Intercept was one of the media outlets created to oppose propaganda from the U.S.
security state that instead published This lie as well saying the CIA has warned that this archive is Russian disinformation and then prevented me from reporting on it on that basis until I finally quit.
That's how devoted they are and committed they were to this lie because it was so important to them not to do anything to risk Biden's election even if it meant doing their jobs as journalists and reporting authentic documents.
Not a single one of those outlets has ever accounted for, explained, apologized for, or retracted any of these lies.
Listen to the stuff that they were just constantly putting on air.
There was a 20-minute montage that was excellent by a Twitter user called KanokaTheGreat, and I published it on my Twitter feed as well, but it's a 20-minute song.
I'm not going to show you that, but it's just...
And it's just a partial iceberg, tip of the iceberg, of how these media outlets just over and over and over and over and over again told people to ignore this reporting because it was Russian disinformation.
Here's what James Clapper, the former Director of National Intelligence under President Obama, and at the time a CNN analyst, went on the air and said with Aaron Burnett.
Listen to this.
Obama.
So, Judge, a bunch of questions from this.
Let me just start with this.
How much does the source matter, right?
So you hear the story of this laptop, we don't know a lot.
We do know that the way that this information is getting out is through Steve Bannon and Rudy Giuliani.
How much does the source matter here?
Well, source matters a lot, and the timing matters a lot, I think.
And to me, this is just classic textbook Soviet-Russian... By the way, you see here James Clapper, CNN National Security Analyst.
Just before that, he's identified as former Director of National Intelligence.
To me, just this graphic alone shows the complete union.
Of the U.S.
intelligence security state, the intelligence community, and corporate media.
This used to be clandestine.
The CIA and intelligence agencies would use secret programs to influence media outlets.
They wouldn't do it out in the open.
Now it's just right out in the open.
They go right from the CIA, or the FBI, or DHS, or the NSA, right to the newsrooms of all these corporate media outlets where they are presented as the experts that you should believe.
The trained liars of the U.S.
security state who are presenting the news.
And here's what they had James Clapper saying.
This classic textbook Soviet Russian tradecraft at work.
The Russians have analyzed the target.
They understand that the president and his enablers crave dirt on Vice President Biden, whether it's real or contrived, that doesn't matter to them.
And so all of a sudden, two and a half weeks before the election, this laptop appears somehow, and emails on it without any metadata.
And here you see on the screen as well, Washington Post, quote, White House was warned that Giuliani was being used by the Russians to, quote, feed misinformation to Trump.
So the entire media project was to join with the U.S.
intelligence agency when their whole function supposedly is to be adversarial to it.
And to join together with them and to ratify this lie to convince the American people that this reporting was based on fabrications that came from Russia.
The same script they had been using against Trump for four years, of course.
And you had Jen Psaki spreading it, and then when Donald Trump brought it up in the debates to say, look at all these documents that show how your family was corruptly seeking profit in places like Ukraine and China, Biden immediately said, oh, you're just doing the Kremlin's work and spreading Russian disinformation.
One time a reporter asked Biden about the substance of these revelations once, Bo Erickson of CBS.
He was mauled by Democratic Party operatives and by his colleagues in the media for even raising the question, saying that he was doing the Kremlin's dirty work by even mentioning this in Joe Biden's presence.
If you live through this, you just remember what it is that they did and the fact that we don't just suspect That this is a lie, but we have it so proven, even to the point where these corporate media outlets admitted it, and now the FBI is willing, in fact meeting, to go onto the witness stand under oath and say that the reason they're relying on these documents to prosecute Hunter Biden is because they know for certain that it's authentic.
You can't get a journalistic disgrace, a scandal, more grave or more visible than this.
And the reason I always point out that not one media outlet who spread and ratified this lie has retracted it is not because I hope that they will or trying to pressure them to do so.
I know that they won't.
They never will.
It doesn't matter how much evidence merges.
And the reason they never will, and this more than anything is what has corrupted American corporate journalism, the reason why the public doesn't trust any of them anymore, The Washington Post publisher had to tell an angry newsroom after they fired the executive editor that the reason we have to make fundamental changes is because he told the Washington Post reporters, no one reads your work anymore.
No one's reading your stuff.
Because the public doesn't trust it.
And the reason is, is that they understand that the reason these media outlets lied right before the election and now will never retract it is because they regard as their primary duty, not the function of journalism, But doing anything and everything, including lying and spreading fake news and deceit, and the much overarching and more important cause of defeating Donald Trump.
They are really explicitly political activists who do not believe that serving the journalistic role and journalistic values is their highest duty.
They don't care about that at all, at all.
All they care about is fulfilling their political activism of sabotaging the Trump campaign and then Trump presidency, and they believe that anything and everything, including lying, is justified to do it.
And that's why they'll never apologize or retract it, because they believe that even though they spread a lie, it was for the much higher cause of ensuring that Joe Biden won the 2020 election.
I regard Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky as one of the very few voices in Washington who is very often willing to analyze issues and even to advocate for issues by refusing to rely on partisan talking points.
He very often criticizes the people in his party As much as and with as much fervor as he does in the other party.
He's an obvious opponent of the foreign policy, the prevailing neocon foreign policy that continues to dominate both parties, including the Republicans.
And because he's a medical doctor, he was one of the leading voices questioning Dr. Fauci, who appeared this week before Congress, supposedly to answer questions.
And Senator Paul himself was often the victim of censorship imposed on our debates over whether what Dr. Fauci was saying was true.
We were not even allowed to discuss it or debate it online.
We talk about those COVID issues and many others with him.
We talk about the ongoing and increasingly futile war in Ukraine and the reason why we continue to fuel it and fund it, even though it's obvious that victory can never be achieved as NATO has defined it.
And a lot of other issues regarding the public health establishment and scientific establishment, as well as the bipartisan foreign policy community.
We sat down with Senator Rand Paul just a few moments before we went live, just probably an hour ago or so, and I found this conversation with him, as we always do when we've had him on our show, very illuminating.
I believe you will, too.
And here it is.
Senator Paul, it's always good to see you.
I know there's a lot going on.
So thanks so much for taking the time to talk to us.
Glad to be with you, Glenn.
All right.
So let me start with the hearings that took place in the House where Dr. Fauci was interrogated.
And before I get into the substance of that, I just want to remind people of how repressive and censored the discourse and the debate about COVID Was two of the most extreme examples involved yourself, one of which where you convened a hearing in the Senate, you and your colleagues, and had scientific experts there that then ended up getting banned by Google when you tried to put it on YouTube.
And then you yourself, as a medical doctor, got suspended from YouTube for seven days for speaking about or questioning the efficacy of these cloth masks.
Can you just talk about how How intense this kind of repression was, the banning of any questioning of Dr. Fauci and how you yourself experienced that?
Well, to put it into even more context, Facebook for over a year suppressed the story that the virus could have originated in a lab.
They just basically were told by government, by FBI and CISA, which is the Cyber Intelligence Security Apparatus, Basically, they went to Twitter, they went to Facebook, and they said, you know, really, these are conspiracy theories, this is misinformation.
And so, so much of this was suppressed, some of it even hard to calculate, except for that, you know, Elon Musk let us get behind Twitter and see what happened, because when someone suppresses an algorithm, you don't necessarily see it go away, you're just thinking, wow, it doesn't seem to be transmitting as much as it normally would, and it's very hard to see from the outside looking in, but
I think we can thank Elon Musk for actually opening the window and letting us see under the hood, letting us see exactly what was happening in this collusion between government and big tech.
Yeah, just to add to that in terms of Facebook, it was only once the Biden administration finally came out Let me ask you about that.
and a half into the pandemic and admitted that they didn't know what the origins of the virus was, which was something you were not permitted to say for at least a year.
Only then did Facebook come out and say, okay, now we're going to lift the ban on questioning whether this might have come from a lab.
Just the collusion between big tech and government, the way our free speech was censored online is really remarkable.
Well, let me ask you about that.
I think one of the most disgraceful journalistic and scientific scandals was this Lancet letter that Dr. Fauci engineered at the very start of the pandemic when they obviously had no idea, let alone certainty, where this virus came from.
But they announced that it most definitely did not come from a lab, that any attempt to suggest that is a conspiracy theory or even attack on science that we know for sure by overwhelming consensus.
That it came from natural occurrences and now, of course, we know that the evidence is far more likely than not that it came from the lab, even government agencies like the FBI say that.
Why was it so important, do you think, for Fauci and his colleagues and the public health establishment to ban any attempt to question their assertion that it was naturally occurring?
I think they knew early on they had funded the bulk of this research in Wuhan, and that if the lab leak were correct or there was any kind of suggestion that this came from the lab, it would also link to them, that there would be culpability, moral culpability, fiscal responsibility for having funded this dangerous research.
And they knew this in the very beginning.
We know that there were emails sent to Anthony Fauci, we got these under Freedom of Information Act, And in these emails, the first emails arriving on his desk in late January 2020 were saying, here's the research we're funding in Wuhan, it's gain of function, we're not sure how it got passed since it never went before the Safety Committee.
That was one of the first emails he ever received.
So he knows from the get-go he had funded it, His own staff was calling it gain of function and he knew it had never gone before the Safety Committee.
That one email alone should be enough to indict him in the annals of history and to be reviled for generations as having made a terrible, terrible mistake to fund this research, but then also to spend months covering it up Only to come back yesterday or the day before and say, oh I was always open-minded.
What hogwash!
He was never open-minded and he literally orchestrated a cover-up of any connection of him and his money and NIH to that lab.
It absolutely without question was a cover-up.
It was amazing they had essentially succeeded in banishing it by calling a lab leak theory racist against the Chinese, even though the argument all along was that Dr. Fauci and other American companies and scientists had cooperated with the Chinese or funded it, and their theory was the far more racist one that, oh, the Chinese are so filthy and unsanitary that they eat bats and that's how it emanated from their unsanitary
But the one thing that also confuses me is in addition to the email that you referenced that Dr. Fauci got in late January, at the same time, maybe a week later in early February, he was getting emails from some of the top epidemiologists in the world saying, we've analyzed this virus, the DNA, it seems overwhelmingly likely it was not naturally occurring, it had to have been manipulated, it had to have come from a lab, or others were saying, we don't know, it's 50-50.
And yet it was those very scientists who, a week later, he somehow maneuvered to sign on to the Lancet letter to assert as certainty what a week ago they were rejecting.
Why would they do that?
What was the motive behind their willingness to sign on to that letter when they knew from their emails that it wasn't true or was at least baseless?
So February 1st, there's a group of internationally known virologists, Christian Anderson, Ernie Holm, Bob Gary, all of these folks, Ian Lipkin, they're all talking about this, and they're all sending notes back and forth, and we have their emails from Freedom of Information, and they have a phone call, and basically the conclusion of the phone call on February 1st, 2020 was, They're all pretty convinced.
The majority are convinced that this came from a lab, that the virus looks manipulated, that there are aspects of the virus that aren't seen in nature and they haven't found in this particular family of viruses ever before.
But within two or three days, they begin working on an article that says the opposite.
The article is called Proctomal Origins, and in that article they unequivocally say that this virus is not a laboratory construct.
They don't say it's implausible, they just say it is not a laboratory construct.
We also know that Anthony Fauci suggested they write this paper, and that he offered some useful edits, and that he was involved with the process.
He now denies all of this, but we have email evidence contradicting everything he said.
But what's extraordinary is in private they're all saying they think it came from the lab, and in public they're saying the opposite.
I think nobody can give an actual readout on what their motives are, but they all receive a large amount of money.
They all work for government.
They all work for government grants.
We do know that Christian Anderson, who was saying in private, no way is this a conspiracy theory, no way is this real, this looks like it came from the lab.
That we do know that he got a $9 million grant signed off by Anthony Fauci in March of 2020 after he wrote the article Proximal Origins.
Now they all deny it and they say there is no quid pro quo, but there's a lot of things that add up to them.
The ones who funded it being worried that they would get blamed for the pandemic.
And then the ones who do the bidding and work closely with Anthony Fauci, knowing that the gravy train might slow up if Anthony Fauci or the science that Anthony Fauci represents is in any way besmirched, that there might be less money flowing to them.
So they all have skin in the game here, and it all points towards, hey, we didn't have anything to do with this, and this wasn't scientists, give us more money, basically we'll find a cure for this, instead of being honest enough to say that really the responsibility did come with scientists doing research that really was too dangerous and probably should not have been done.
Yeah, and the reason I call that letter not just a scientific scandal and disgrace, but also a journalistic one is you had Peter Daszak, who signed on to that letter, helped organize it, and of course, through his Echo Help Alliance, was funding and participating with the Wuhan Institute of Virology, obviously had a huge conflict of interest to try and exonerate them, say that they had nothing to do with it.
And that conflict was not disclosed until about a year later when Lancet quietly went back.
And appended it.
It was just so much corruption.
And then on top of that, you know, a huge censorship.
Just last question on this.
Beyond the question of COVID's origins and how we were clearly deceived, at least to the extent that they claimed a certainty that they obviously didn't have, what other issues that are still unresolved from the COVID pandemic and all the measures that were undertaken do you think still need further examination?
Well, because Anthony Fauci still denies that it was gain-of-function, we don't know precisely.
They haven't really admitted to the problem.
We have to admit that either the definition was improper or they didn't use the right definition if we're going to regulate this.
So I'm proposing legislation in the next month or so that will have a commission that will be independent of the money.
I think you can't be involved with dispersing or receiving the money and be objective in this.
So it needs to be a council of people outside of the funding mechanism that makes a judgment on gain of function.
And I think any combination of viruses that leads to enhanced lethality or transmission among humans is gain of function.
What they've done is they've defined that away and said, oh it has to be known pathogens.
We have to know that they're human pathogens instead of acknowledging that you can actually manipulate animal pathogens.
And here's what they do.
They take a virus that's not known to infect humans, they combine it with like an S-protein or a part of another virus, but then they run it through human cells.
This is called serial passage.
And what you do is you select out for any bits of the virus or segments of the virus that will infect the human cells.
But if you do this over and over again, it's like natural selection, but it's forced to natural selection.
So you can push the evolution of a virus towards extracting a virus that comes out of these human cells that is actually much more dangerous to humans.
And that kind of research needs to be severely constrained.
And some people don't believe, many scientists don't believe we've ever gotten any useful information out of this.
But to take the avian flu that has 50% mortality, or Ebola, that has 50% mortality, and to try to mutate it to become aerosolized or spread through the air, I think is a death wish.
And, you know, there's a scientist that we quote, Kevin S. Felt, from MIT.
He's not a partisan.
I don't know what party he belongs to, but he's an objective scientist.
He's a guy who works in CRISPR technology.
He's at the cutting edge of things.
But he says some of this gain-of-functions juicing up of viruses could be a gamble or a threat to civilization that we shouldn't take.
That's a big statement.
I mean, we're talking about and trying to imagine what would happen if 50% of the world died.
You can see a little bit historically when that happened, when about a third of Europe died from smallpox in the 14th century.
But imagine now, where we're much more dependent on division of labor.
We all don't get our own water, our own food.
What happens when nobody's around to put chlorine in the water?
What happens when there's no sewage removal?
What happens when there's no trash removal?
What happens when there is no commerce?
What happens when everybody's shooting each other to get the food that they've preserved in somebody's house?
I mean, that's what happens when 50% of the people die.
and we shouldn't be working on viruses or manipulating viruses that have that kind of death rate because they can accidentally get out of labs.
And I can't imagine we can't get unanimity on this on both parties, but it's been very difficult because the left, I think, love so much the idea of government being in charge of things that Anthony Fauci represents to them government and an attack on him is somehow an attack on government control of things.
But it has been very, very partisan and we've had a great deal of difficulty getting Democrats interested in the origin and interested in reform.
But I'm trying very hard to bridge that difference and I think I have a very good chance of of getting a Democrat chairman of a committee to co-sponsor a bill of reform on this and I'm working hard to try to get that done in the next couple of months.
Yeah, it's become an almost religious prong of the culture war that liberals have to venerate and never question Dr. Fauci.
And as a result, the idea is we'll just move on from this, even though it's hard to think of anything more consequential in our lifetime than this pandemic.
Let me just ask you one more question about this idea of either banning this type of research I remember very well when the anthrax attacks on the United States took place in the month after September 11th and people like John McCain and others immediately blamed Iraq.
And we were told that this was a highly manipulated, weaponized form of anthrax, not the type that grows naturally.
And then we found out seven years later, at least according to the FBI, that in fact, that anthrax came from a U.S. Army lab in Fort Detrick, and it was released by a scientist who wanted to scare Americans to fund this research even more.
And the argument at the time was, yes, we're weaponizing anthrax, but we have to do that, not because we're trying to weaponize anthrax to use against others, but because if they use it against us, we need to be able to research how to prevent its spreading or its killing huge numbers of Americans.
I suppose that's the argument for gain-of-function research as well, that, well, look, the reason we have to make it more contagious is because it might be that contagious, and we need to research how to develop a vaccine.
Do you think there's any validity to that argument? - No.
Yeah, you're exactly right.
And I think that's what they will tell us, that if they're trying to mutate Ebola, they're doing it because they think the Chinese are doing it.
We've got to do it first so we can figure out a cure for when the Chinese do it.
But the thing is, that could escape from a lab.
I don't know that they're doing this to Ebola.
What I will tell you, the sad truth is, I'm elected and represent a state and they won't tell me.
And so I can't even get unclassified information.
Most of what I'm asking for on COVID and the deliberations about why they funded it is unclassified.
And the NIH refuses to give it to me.
HHS refuses to give me this information.
So imagine what it's like for me to try to find out what's happening at the Rocky Mountain Lab run by, you know, spooks and intelligence agency people.
Are we doing this?
In all likelihood, yes.
I do recall seeing a CIA official responding and saying, hey, we need not to be too hard on the Chinese, mixing civilian and biological weapons research, because guess what?
We do the same.
But there's at least a dozen labs in the U.S.
doing gain-of-function research that could be dangerous, and that's just the unclassified side of it.
The classified side of it, somebody needs to look at it.
They're out of control.
The intelligence agencies have no oversight.
They won't even give to people on the Intelligence Committee things.
They hide things even from people on the Intelligence Committee.
But for the most part, there's only eight people in Congress that are privy to any information of any real things that go on.
And I believe that these people within the intelligence agencies worry that it's too important to reveal to elected officials.
Let me ask you, and that Gang of Eight refusal to brief Congress on anything meaningful outside of it is its own problem that maybe we can talk about another time.
Let me just shift gears a little bit to Donald Trump's conviction by a Manhattan court.
When all four of these cases against him first emerged, even a lot of liberals who hate Trump and want to see him behind bars admitted that this was by far the most dubious, even frivolous case, that it should never have been brought.
I worked as a lawyer, as a litigator in Manhattan for 13 years before I became a journalist, and I could have easily told you that when you convene a Manhattan jury with a judge like that, these are hardcore Democrats.
There was no chance he was ever going to be acquitted with a judge leading the jury that way.
Some of your colleagues think that the only solution is to start doing it to Democrats, to have Republican prosecutors kind of bring cases that they otherwise wouldn't bring but that are legally viable in order to kind of say, here's a taste of your own medicine.
What do you think is the proper response to what you just witnessed in Manhattan?
I think everybody should always try to put themselves in someone else's shoes and see how they would be treated.
I'm disappointed that most people on the left can't understand how bad it would be to have people run for office.
Let's say you're in a very Republican state.
I'm in a very Republican state.
And let's say our prosecutors begin running on, if elected, I will prosecute Joe Biden.
I'll bring Hunter Biden down.
We'll prosecute them in Kentucky.
Well, that would be awful, and I would be opposed to it.
But where are the people on the left that say, these people ran for office.
Alvin Bragg ran for office, so did Letitia James, so did the prosecutor in Atlanta.
They all ran for office saying they'd get Donald Trump and they've gotten him.
But that's not constitutional.
You can't selectively prosecute people.
But they also ought to look at something where He's being arrested for something that I know of no one else ever being tried for.
These are bookkeeping entries that had expired.
The statute of limitations is run.
And then they said, well, he did these in furtherance of another crime.
We're not sure exactly what that is picked from a, you know, grab bag of what it could possibly be.
But the Sixth Amendment says you have to be notified of what you're being accused of.
You know, when it's so complicated that you say, well, what was Donald Trump convicted of?
It's kind of hard to say because it wasn't the bookkeeping violations.
It was bookkeeping violations in favor, you know, in furtherance of something that, well, which is not really well known or a clear cut.
Yeah, and the prospect for appeal before the election is almost zero, as is the possibility that an appellate court would overturn that conviction.
Just in the little time we have left, let me just quickly ask you, we're currently financing two major wars.
One of them, Ukraine, is one we've talked about before.
There's a big change in the Western media narrative, which is they're essentially finally admitting that the Russians are advancing, the Ukrainians are in a very fragile and weak position, that there's obviously no chance that NATO can achieve victory as they defined it, which is the expulsion of every last Ukrainian troop from every inch of Ukrainian soil, including Crimea.
What do you think the United States and NATO should be doing?
Either continuously funding this war indefinitely or trying to find a solution to end it?
And if it's solution to end it, what would that look like to you?
You know, I took this question directly to Anthony Blinken, the Secretary of State.
By all accounts, the commander in chief, the one that was fired by Zelensky, said that this war is at a stalemate.
By all accounts, the Russians have a bigger army, they're able to suffer more attrition, and they occupy the eastern part of Ukraine called Donbass, and they occupy Crimea.
I don't think they're going to be dislodged, or there is enough military to dislodge them.
And so the thing is, I don't think it's possible.
So what does Ukraine have to offer in a peace settlement?
The one thing they could offer is neutrality.
They could offer to be a neutral nation.
They could offer to trade with both Russia and with Europe, but not to be militarily aligned, to be a neutral nation.
That's something they could offer that costs them nothing.
But it's something that Anthony Blinken, Joe Biden, and frankly, most of the hawkish Republicans as well have taken off the table.
And I can't promise you that Putin would accept that, but Putin has indicated that that's one of the provocations.
And so offer it, you know, take Putin at his word and offer and say, you know, if you'll leave the Donbass or if you'll allow independent elections and gradual removal of troops, that we would agree to be a neutral nation and see what happens.
But to take it off the table is a real problem, and they have very little left to negotiate.
The other thing that people have to realize is that in Crimea, if there were free elections, and I'm not sure if there are, but if there were, I think the Russian-speaking, ethnically Russian people dominate Crimea, as they do one or two of the cities in the Donbass as well.
And it doesn't make it right that Putin invaded.
But at the same time, perhaps part of the solution would be saying, why don't we have internationally monitored?
If Russia will agree to remove troops, Ukraine would agree to have internationally monitored elections throughout the eastern part of the country that has more Russian influence and see if see what comes and see if there can be more local control.
I've always sort of believed when there's great dissension in a country and great ethnic strife that the more you devolve the control of power to the localities where the people can elect their own leaders, the less likely they are to fight.
Um, But those are the things that need to be offered.
Instead, I just hear bullying from Blinken and that Ukraine will be in NATO.
There's no way.
We have an obligation to put them in NATO and we're never going to reconsider that.
Well, that's a recipe for prolonging the war and prolonging the death, and I think it's a huge mistake.
Senator Paul, it's always great to talk to you, in part because you are one of the few people in Washington who refuse to follow partisan talking points, often as critical of your own party as you are of the other, and I think you bring a lot of light and information to whatever topics you're working on, and we appreciate hearing from you tonight.
Thank you.
Have a good evening.
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