Steve Bannon's Contempt Charges Reveal Historic Double Standard; Interview with RFK Jr.'s Running Mate Nicole Shanahan on the 2024 Election and More
TIMESTAMPS:
Intro (0:00)
Steve Bannon Ordered to Prison (6:21)
Interview with Nicole Shanahan (30:58)
Outro (1:04:54)
- - -
Watch full episodes on Rumble, streamed LIVE 7pm ET.
Become part of our Locals community
- - -
Follow Glenn:
Twitter
Instagram
Follow System Update:
Twitter
Instagram
TikTok
Facebook
LinkedIn
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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, Steve Bannon, one of President Trump's top White House advisors in the first part of his presidency, and currently one of his closest and most important allies, was ordered to surrender by a federal court to a federal prison on July 1st, three weeks from now.
Bannon had been out on bail pending appeal of his 2022 conviction on charges of refusing to comply with a congressional subpoena that ordered him to testify about the events of January 6th.
He had a variety of legal arguments as to why he was not required to do that.
Bannon was sentenced to four months in prison by a court that rejected those defenses.
He was allowed to be out on bail pending appeal.
The appellate court rejected his appeal and now the judge has ordered him to surrender to prison even though he has more appeals left.
In addition to President Trump himself, who was just convicted of 34 felonies on obviously dubious and, no pun intended, trumped up charges, Bannon is not the first top Trump aide to be jailed for alleged violations of a congressional subpoena.
In March of this year, Peter Navarro, President Trump's trade advisor, reported to a federal prison to serve a four-month sentence on similar charges.
And of course, a large group of key Trump White House officials and other allies, including General Michael Flynn, Paul Manafort, Roger Stone, and many others, have also been convicted and imprisoned, or at least accused and convicted of crimes, all of which is unprecedented, unprecedented.
in all of American history.
Indeed, Congress often issues subpoenas to Washington officials that are simply ignored or violated in one way or the other where these officials concoct excuses as to why they don't have to appear.
This conflict between the executive branch on the one hand and Congress on the other is a central part of our system.
It's been happening for decades, if not centuries.
And almost never do those events result in anything close to what has been done to Peter Navarro and now to Steve Bannon.
We'll go through the relevant history to illustrate how yet again the Biden DOJ and Democratic prosecutors are so transparently weaponizing the legal system and judicial system against their political enemies for partisan ends.
And in general, as I learned firsthand when I started writing about politics in the second term of the Bush administration and then into the Obama administration, where there was a lot of talk at the time about the potential that Obama would prosecute Bush officials and CIA officials for committing crimes like torture and kidnapping and illegal domestic spying, the consensus in Washington politics and media, believe me, Has long been, for decades, this is what they always said, that only banana republics prosecute their political enemies and prosecute their prior administration.
Now, I never agreed with that consensus.
Indeed, I wrote countless articles against it, and even a 2011 book arguing against it, entitled, With Liberty and Justice for Some.
But these prosecutions of Trump and his allies do not represent an abandonment of that rotted Washington rule.
If it did, I would be cheering it.
Like so many other things, it represents merely a temporary suspension of this Washington rule for one and only one political official named Donald Trump.
Then we will speak to Nicole Shanahan, now officially the vice presidential running mate of RFK Jr.
And if polls are to be believed, and if they hold up at all, that independent ticket will be one of the most successful independent presidential candidacies in decades.
Bobby Kennedy's choice for a running mate baffled a lot of people, while Shanahan is reasonably well-known in Silicon Valley, in part for accumulating a net worth estimated at $1 billion, largely but not entirely, as a result of her marriage to one of the world's richest billionaires, Google co-founder Sergey Brin, and in part due to her own accomplishments and initiatives.
Very few American citizens had ever heard of Shanahan and know very little about her, in large part because she never held office of any kind.
Now that does not mean that she has been uninterested in politics.
She has indeed donated a large amount of money, primarily, if not exclusively, to Democratic Party candidates, including Hillary Clinton, Pete Buttigieg, and the 2020 campaign of Joe Biden, as well as more left-wing candidates and causes.
That of course raises a lot of questions about her current political views, which can reasonably change for a lot of people, her past political trajectory, and the role of big money in our politics.
We'll talk to her about all of that, as well as her views on current US finance wars in Ukraine and Israel, the issue of online censorship, whistleblowers, and Much more.
Before we get to all of that, just a few quick programming notes.
First of all, we're encouraging our viewers to download the Rumble app.
If you do so, it works on both your smart TV and telephone.
And if you download that app, you can follow the shows you most like to watch on System Update.
And then once you're following those shows, you can activate notifications, which we hope you will.
Which means that the minute any of those shows begin broadcasting live on the platform, that minute, Not before, not after, but the minute it starts, you'll be notified by text, so you can just click on the text and begin watching.
It really helps the shows on Rumble and the live audience numbers, as well as the platform itself.
As another reminder, System Update is also available in podcast form.
You can listen to every episode 12 hours after their first broadcast live here on Rumble on Spotify, Apple, and all of the major podcasting platforms.
If you rate, review, and follow our program on those platforms, it really helps spread the visibility of our show.
Finally, every Tuesday and Thursday night, Once we're done with our live show here on Rumble, we move to Locals, where we have our live interactive aftershow.
That aftershow is available only for members of our Locals community, and if you want to join, which gives you access not only to those twice a week aftershows, but to multiple interactive features that we have there.
It's the place where we publish transcripts of every program we do here.
Transcripts get published there.
It's the place where we publish first our original written reporting and we're going to have a new report on Friday morning that you should look out for there.
And it's also the community, most of all, on which we rely to support the independent journalism that we're doing here every night.
Simply click the join button right below the video player on the Rumble page and it will take you directly to that platform.
For now, welcome to a new episode of System Update, starting right now.
After I first began writing about politics in late 2005, within the next couple of years, years, one of the issues on which I focused most, which I talked about most often, was how there was a two-tier justice system in the United States where financial elites and especially political elites are largely immunized from the rule of law.
And oftentimes this is taking place in the controversy over many obvious illegal programs that the Bush and Cheney administration have adopted in the name of war on terror, torturing detainees, kidnapping off the streets of Europe, and sending them with no due process to Syria or to Egypt to be tortured, spying and sending them with no due process to Syria or to Egypt to be tortured, spying on American citizens These were all crimes.
And when Barack Obama ran in 2008, he was often asked whether he believes that those crimes should be prosecuted.
And he always gave the same answer, which is, absolutely, nobody's above the law.
And one of the first things I'm going to do when I win is direct my attorney general to investigate whether crimes were committed there and whether or not there should be prosecutions.
And yet the minute he got into office, the media started haranguing him That you don't go and prosecute your political adversaries in the United States.
You don't go and prosecute prior administrations.
This is only done in banana republics, not in the United States.
And my argument always was, well, what if they actually did commit crimes?
What if the prior administration actually committed crimes?
What if your political adversaries committed crimes?
Are they supposed to be exempt from the same rule of law that applies to all other citizens?
So if now this were a case where that prohibition, that consensus that has long existed in Washington by the media and politicians, That you don't go and prosecute your political adversaries or the prior administration.
If that were being really lifted permanently because people and media and journalism and politics realized they were wrong, I'd be the first to applaud.
That's not what's happening here.
Another issue that I've been long talking about is how journalism is corrupt when it does nothing more than say, the Republicans say this, the Democrats say this, and it's not up for us to decide.
We're just going to report what officials say in the U.S.
government.
We're not going to tell you if it's true or false.
And so when the media started after Trump saying, oh, we're going to start calling him a liar all the time, I would also be cheering if it really meant an abandonment of that kind of lazy journalism, that kind of corrupting journalism where you don't investigate what powerful people claim, you just report it and mimic it and then leave it at that.
But again, this practice is only for Trump.
You will never hear them saying those kind of things about Joe Biden or Democratic Party officials or really anyone else.
So this isn't a form of progress or evolution in how we understand things.
This is obviously the political persecution and the judicial and legal persecution of Trump and his closest allies, not in the name of equal justice for all, but solely in the name of weaponizing the judicial system against a political movement that they regard with great fear and that they do anything and will do anything to stop, including abusing the legal system.
Here from the Wall Street Journal earlier today on the Steve Bannon case, quote, Steve Bannon ordered to report to prison on contempt of Congress conviction.
Former Trump advisor was convicted in 2022 and recently lost an appeal.
Quote, a federal judge Thursday ordered Steve Bannon to surrender by July 1st to serve a four-month prison sentence for defying the House committee that investigated the January 6, 2021 Capitol attack and former President Donald Trump's efforts to overturn the 2020 election.
In a unanimous decision last month, a three-judge appellate court panel rejected Bannon's arguments that his conviction wasn't valid because he was following his lawyer's advice when he refused to comply with the House subpoena demanding documents and testimony.
The panel said Bannon's advice of counsel defense wasn't valid in contempt of Congress cases and would impede the legislature's investigative authority.
Bannon was the first of two former Trump White House officials to face prosecution for denying the House panel.
A year after Bannon's conviction, former Trump advisor Peter Navarro was found guilty of defying the same committee, the January 6th Committee, and was also later sentenced to four months in prison.
Both cases stem from House referrals recommending that the Justice Department bring prosecutions.
Now, someone might say, who hasn't looked at these issues for very long, well, if Congress issues a subpoena, you're legally required to obey it.
And if you don't obey it, Or you go there and you don't give the documents that they asked for and the evidence and testimony that they demand truthfully, you will be held in contempt of Congress and that is a crime.
The problem is that there is a long history of the executive branch refusing to comply with congressional subpoenas on the grounds that they have the power as the executive branch that is supposed to be separate from the legislative power.
That they have rights as the executive branch not to turn over information or appear to testify when a co-equal branch, which is Congress, demands their appearance.
Steve Bannon and Peter Navarro are by far not the first people to give a middle finger to Congress when they've issued a subpoena, people who are in the executive branch or who were in the executive branch, and yet you'd be hard-pressed to find another case Where people explicitly were held in contempt of congressional subpoenas but who were referred to the Justice Department and or then prosecuted by the Justice Department for it.
This is a case where the Biden Justice Department took a referral from a Democratic-run committee, the January 6th Committee, that was created under Nancy Pelosi's speakership, a committee where for the first time in the history of our country, the House Speaker rejected The members that the minority, the Republicans, wanted to put on that committee.
She said, no, those are not going on this committee.
The first time in history that a House Speaker refused to empanel the members of Congress indicated as members of that committee by the House Minority Leader.
And instead, as a result, no Republicans agreed to serve on that committee in protest except for two Republicans, Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger.
Who obviously are far more aligned with the Democratic Party when it comes to Trump, January 6th.
So in effect, it was a fully partisan panel.
And so the Democrats in Congress referred these contempt citations to the Biden Justice Department, which in turn decided to prosecute something almost unprecedented in our history.
I just want to give you a few similar cases to understand what a complete deviation this is from how things have typically been done in Washington.
Here from CNN, In February of 2008, during the Bush administration, there you see the headline, Attorney General declines to investigate Bush advisors.
U.S.
Attorney General Michael Mukasey on Friday said he will not ask a federal grand jury to investigate whether two top Bush administration officials should be prosecuted for contempt of Congress.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi Thursday asked Mukasey to look into whether White House Chief of Staff Josh Bolton and former White House Counsel Harriet Myers committed contempt of Congress in the investigation of the 2006 firing of several U.S.
attorneys.
Earlier this month, the House voted to find Bolton and Myers in contempt of Congress and pursue charges against them, but the White House argues that forcing the aides to testify would violate the Constitution's separation of powers.
And that has been the longstanding view in Washington, that if Congress orders a private citizen to appear for a legitimate investigation, and there are all kinds of limits on what Congress is permitted to investigate, and I think it's extremely questionable whether or not they have the authority to investigate private citizens for January 6th, because in general, the only two types of investigations that Congress has permitted to initiate
are one, to exercise oversight over the executive branch, and number two, to hold hearings for the purpose of deciding what legislation they want to pass.
So if they're, for example, thinking about various legislation related to a certain industry, you call the people in that industry, you call the activists against that industry, and you hear from all the sides, and then you decide what kind of legislation is appropriate.
That's one example when Congress can convene investigative hearings.
The other is solely to investigate executive branch officials.
It's never to investigate private citizens, and yet that's exactly what the January 6th committee here did.
In fact, those precedents saying that Congress can't investigate private citizens for their political views came out of the McCarthy hearings.
When the Supreme Court twice in the 1950s told Congress, you're vastly exceeding the scope of your investigative powers by trying to investigate and harass people for their political views.
And that's exactly what the January 6th Committee did.
But even leaving all that partisanship and all that precedent aside, There have been so many other cases where Congress declared a certain executive official to be in contempt of Congress and it never went to the point where Steve Bannon and Peter Navarro's case have gone.
Here from CBS News in June of 2012, another example.
The White House says Eric Holder, the Obama Attorney General, won't be prosecuted for contempt.
One day after the House voted to hold Attorney General Eric Holder in contempt of Congress for failing to provide documents relating to the Fast and Furious gun walking program.
Many of you may not even remember what that was, but it was a scandal involving the Justice Department and whether they were permitting All kinds of serious weapons to come in through the border with Mexico through illegal integration.
And the Congress was investigating that.
Eric Holder refused to turn over documents.
The House held him in contempt.
And yet the White House spokesperson for the Obama White House, Jay Carney, said the criminal prosecution of the contempt charges will not move forward.
He said the President's assertion of executive privilege over the related documents makes the matter moot.
And a letter sent to the House Speaker John Boehner, Deputy Attorney General James Cole, confirmed that justice would not move forward with contempt prosecutions.
I'll take you all the way back to 1983, during the first term of the Reagan administration, where you can see just how long-standing this issue is that has not resulted in these kind of prosecutions.
From the New York Times, March of 1983, There you see the headline, the Attorney General, that was Ronald Reagan's Attorney General, William French Smith, defends action by the Justice Department in the contempt case.
Quote, under sharp questioning today by Democrats on the House Judiciary Committee, Attorney General William French Smith repeatedly maintained that there was no way to prevent conflicts between the executive and legislative branches, like the battle over access to EPA documents.
So Congress was trying to get documents to investigate what the Reagan administration was doing with the Environmental Protection Agency, and EPA officials and others refused to hand them over, claiming that that was the executive prerogative to formulate policy and Congress had no right to intrude.
And so when William F. Smith went before the Congress and they grilled him on why he wasn't prosecuting them and why the Justice Department was, he said, quote, there is a built-in conflict And tensions between the branches, Mr. Smith asserted, adding, quote, as long as we have the system of government, I don't see how we can avoid the kind of problem we've had here.
Several committee members expressing dissatisfaction with Mr. Smith's responses demanded a guarantee that the House would not be ignored the next time it cited an official in the executive branch for contempt and sought to have the case prosecuted.
The dispute involves the DOJ's action in the contempt case against the head of the Environmental Agency, Anne McGill Burford, These are all causing very ancient memories to return from an old political scandal, but this really was the same conflict between the EPA and Congress.
And the EPA director, the one by the name of Ann Burford, who was highly controversial, she was extremely conservative and put in charge of the EPA, was very pro-industry, anti-environmentalist.
And the Congress, run by Democrats for years, the House, wanted to investigate her and she refused to turn over documents and the Reagan Justice Department refused to prosecute her for it.
Representative Peter W. Rodino, the New Jersey Democrat who is chairman of the committee, told Mr. Smith that by law, the United States attorney had a quote, mandatory duty to present the contempt case to a grand jury.
But he suggested that the department seemed to believe it was free to make its own decisions on whether to prosecute.
So just look at how many cases involving Republican administrations and Democratic administrations.
Where members of the executive branch or people close to the president refuse to turn over information demanded by subpoena by congressional committees who are trying to investigate the executive branch.
And typically because of this notion that the two branches are co-equal, one is not in charge of the other, one can't order the other one around.
Congress can't, Nancy Pelosi can't pick up the phone and order Donald Trump to appear before Congress or order his White House Chief of Staff to appear before Congress because that would make the Congress supreme and not a co-equal branch.
And that's why the two parties, the two agencies, the two branches of government are constantly fighting with one another over when they have to turn over documents.
And it's an inherent and natural part of our system that has often been revolved politically, but almost never with prosecutions, even when As in the case of Eric Holder and other instances, the Congress declared that official in contempt of Congress and referred the contempt charges to the Justice Department.
In all these cases, Congress refused to, the Justice Department refused to prosecute until, as always, that consensus, that ethos, that rule in Washington for how Washington runs was completely abandoned solely for Donald Trump and his aides.
I mean, there's just no denying that all of these longstanding precedents in Washington, for better or for worse, and I'm against a lot of them, I'd be the first one applauding if they were really undone.
That's not what's happening here.
This is a one-time only suspension of these longstanding rules, not an abandonment of them.
In the name of criminalizing the Trump movement and doing everything to sabotage Donald Trump's attempt to return to office.
This ethos in Washington was a major part of my journalism for the first 10 years.
It was a topic on which I focused incessantly.
And that was because I had started writing about the War on Terror and I began to see that a lot of what was being done by the Bush and Cheney administration and the neocons who ran the relevant agencies was not just misguided or dangerous or destructive, but was illegal, criminal.
That definitely included the way the Bush administration was spying on American citizens without the warrants required by law.
Something that Congress went and retroactively legalized in 2008 that became the FISA law that now gets renewed all the time and that just got recently renewed to allow spying on American citizens with no warrants, but at the time it was plainly illegal and criminal.
Same is true for torturing detainees, which had always been a crime in the United States, kidnapping with no due process, and other similar ones as well.
And so every time I was arguing that these were crimes and that they should be prosecuted, what I always heard from longtime journalists and media and from the consensus in Washington was that, well, it doesn't really matter if those acts are illegal or not, because here in Washington, we don't prosecute top-level political officials for the acts they've undertaken as part of their executive branch duties.
That only happens in banana republics.
That's called criminalizing policy differences.
or criminalizing legal disputes between the two branches and you just don't do that.
Otherwise you're going to have a never ending cycle of retribution where one party is putting the other in prison the minute it gets hold of the levers of the Justice Department.
One of the first debates I ever had with a classic member of the corporate media was when NBC News' Chuck Todd went on the air and basically scoffed at the idea and this is in 2009 the first year of the Obama administration that there should be any investigations at all criminal investigations of Bush officials or what Bush officials did in the past or CIA officials did or the NSA did.
Because it's just a distraction, he said.
It doesn't really matter.
It's not the stuff that Obama should be doing.
He should be caring about appearing as a centrist, those sorts of things.
And that in Washington, we just simply don't prosecute prior administrations or our political enemies.
And I can't tell you how many columns like that were written, how many TV pundits went on cable news and said that.
It was the overwhelming consensus.
I can't think of anyone in corporate media who believed that President Obama should investigate, criminally investigate, or prosecute prior acts of the Bush administration.
And in fact, so intense was the media pressure on Obama That despite promising repeatedly in the 2008 campaign that he would give it to his attorney general with the instructions to look into it, to investigate it, and to prosecute if there was reasonable grounds for believing crimes were committed, saying, I'm not going to be involved.
This is a legal question.
Nobody's above the law.
I'll ask my attorney general to look at it.
Two months into office.
Obama announced that he was not going to allow any prosecutions of anyone in the prior administration, including in the CIA, for any of these crimes, pronouncing, it's more important that we look forward than backward, which never made any sense on its own terms because all criminal prosecutions, by definition, require looking backward.
By definition, they're acts that were undertaken in the past.
And so if, when it comes to the prior administration, we're going to adopt the view that we don't look backward, we only look forward for the good of the country or whatever, then it is a complete immunity or exemption for politicians from being prosecuted by the law in the same way that ordinary American citizens are prosecuted.
And I was indignant about this.
I wrote article after article.
I wrote, as I said, a 2011 book arguing against this mindset.
And in 2009, I had a big enough platform that I Really couldn't be ignored any longer by people in the corporate media, and so I wrote an article about Chuck Todd's comments and heavily criticized them, and he said, hey, I wish you had talked to me before, and I said, well, I don't think I have the obligation.
I'm just criticizing your public remarks, but I'd love to engage you on this, and why don't you come on, and we'll do a podcast, and I can ask you questions, and you can ask me, and we'll debate this issue.
And here you see Huffington Post in August of 2009 reporting on that debate.
Chuck Todd and Glenn Greenwald debate torture and the media.
So I'm just going to give you one passage from this discussion that I had with him to illustrate to you how adamant these people were.
That we cannot have prosecutions of our political adversaries or past administrations.
So I said to him, quote, let me ask you about that then.
If a president can find, as a president always will be able to find, some low-level functionary in the Justice Department, a John Yoo, to write a memo authorizing whatever it is the president wants to do and to use and to say that it's legal, Then you think the President ought to be immune from prosecution whenever he breaks the law, as long as he has a permission slip from the Justice Department.
I mean, that's the argument that's being made.
Don't you think that's extremely dangerous?
He then replied, that could be dangerous, but let me tell you this, is it healthy for our reputation around the world And this, I think, is that we have to do what other countries do more often than not, so-called democracies that struggle with their democracy, and sit there and always put the previous administration on trial.
You don't think that we just will start having retributions on that going forward?
Look, I am in no way excusing torture.
I'm not excusing torture, and I personally like the attack when it comes on this specific issue, but I think the political reality in this, and I understand where you're coming from.
You're just saying just because something's politically tough doesn't mean we shouldn't do it.
I don't disagree with you from 30,000 feet.
That is an idealistic view of this thing.
Then you have the realistic view of how this town works.
That is what he was saying.
He said, oh, it's very idealistic to think that prior administrations or political officials in Washington are going to be held accountable under the criminal law the same way ordinary citizens are.
He said, I don't disagree with you.
Looking at things from 30,000 feet, this very kind of idealistic, academic view that you have, this idealistic view that you have that people in Washington should be held accountable when they violate the criminal law like everyone else does.
And then he went on to say, then you have the realistic view of how this town works.
Lecturing me.
You're not a lead in Washington.
You don't understand Washington.
You don't live here.
You don't work here.
You don't know these government officials.
I'm going to tell you what the realistic view of how this town really works.
Not the idealistic view that you think that people can be prosecuted from the prior administration if they break the law.
This is really how the town works.
And he said, quote, and what would happen, and is it good for our reputation around the world if we're essentially putting on trial, is it good for our reputation around the world if we're essentially putting on trial the previous administration?
We would look at another country doing that and say, geez, boy.
This is, you know, essentially like what tyrannies do or what banana republics do.
And the reason I was so interested in having this conversation with Chuck Todd is not because he was some aberrational voice in the U.S.
media.
Look at, I mean, just look at this, this ethos here.
That you just, in Washington, the hardcore reality, if you know how Washington works, is you do not go around prosecuting your political opponents, people in the other party, people from the prior administration.
This is what they had been saying for decades.
For decades.
It's how they excused the pardon of Richard Nixon by Gerald Ford, even though the evidence was overwhelming that you could have convicted Richard Nixon of crimes the way you did with many of his top aides, all of whom got pardoned.
During the Reagan administration, there was an Iran-Contra scandal that involved highly likely criminality on the part of Reagan officials who wanted to fund the war in Nicaragua, fund the Contras in a civil war, even though Congress had passed a law saying any funding of the Contras in Nicaragua is illegal and hereby banned.
The executive branch went and ignored that law, but they couldn't get funds from Congress.
So what they did was they sold highly sophisticated missiles and other weapons to Iran, got the cash at the White House in secret accounts, and then sent that money secretly to fund the Contras, even though Congress had said you can't.
And a lot of the top officials in the Reagan administration were at risk of being prosecuted, including George Bush, the then vice president.
And the minute George Bush got elected, the first thing he did was issue a pardon of Caspar Weinberger and of every other Reagan administration official.
And most people in the media applauded that and said, yeah, we can't be distracted by these kinds of prosecutions.
We can't be prosecuting people in Washington.
It's too much of a distraction.
It makes us seem like a banana republic.
This has been the argument for so long.
And if I really believe that this was finally being lifted, And the idea was, look, we're going to prosecute people no matter how powerful they are in Washington.
Anytime they actually break the law, I would be the happiest person.
I'd be the first one to stand up and cheer.
But it's so obvious that's not what's happening.
There's no remorse or regret about how this was done previously.
The minute Trump is out of the scene, they're going to return right again to this rule, this ethos, this hardcore reality, independent of the idealistic view, that in this town you can't really go around prosecuting political adversaries and prior administrations because it's going to make us look like a banana republic.
It's a one-time exception only as so many things are.
For abusing and weaponizing the justice system against one person and one person only, and that is Donald Trump.
Nicole Shanahan is, in many respects, a classic American success story.
She grew up in poverty, worked her way through college and law school, including by working in various hourly jobs like a maid and a paralegal, and is now a 38-year-old, highly respected lawyer in Silicon Valley.
She is also one of the richest women in the world, with an estimated net worth of $1 billion.
That is largely, though not entirely, a result of her marriage to Google co-founder Sergey Brin.
But most notable of all, she is now the running mate of Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
And if polls are even remotely correct, they will likely be the most meaningful and significant independent presidential candidacy in many years.
Now many things made Shanahan's choice as vice presidential candidate somewhat notable, including the fact that she had never held political office previously.
But that is also true of the man who leads the ticket, R.K.
Jr., and was also true of someone named Donald Trump before his 2016 victory.
Whatever else is true, she's an extremely interesting person with a very rich and, I would say, vintage American life, and she also has a robust political trajectory, and we are delighted to welcome her tonight to System Update.
Ms.
Shanahan, it's great to see you.
Thanks so much for taking the time to talk to us.
Thanks for having me, Glenn.
And just a quick correction, my mom was a maid, but my first job was busing tables and I just wanted to... Yeah, I appreciate that.
I apologize for that.
But the story that is true, that you did grow up without any advantages, essentially in poverty, had to work your way through college and law school and build up what you became, which I think everybody can and should respect.
All right.
Let me start off by asking you about just a couple of I think crucial issues, including the two wars that our country is currently financing and arming and supporting.
The first one is in Ukraine.
When I had R.K.
Jr.
on my show several months ago, we spent a lot of time talking about his view on that war.
And since then, the war has gotten even worse from the perspective of the Ukrainians.
I think it's a consensus that the Ukrainian military is in deep trouble, that the Russians are advancing, that the idea that they could ever expel Russian troops from all of Ukraine is a pipe dream that will never happen.
Do you support the ongoing financing by the US government of the war in Ukraine?
And if not, what do you think should be done to try and bring about a resolution? - Well, first of all, this war should have never happened.
The United States should have never egged it on as it has.
The U.S.
has been involved in Ukrainian affairs for decades now.
We've been involved in their elections and have been pushing certain kinds of candidates that have been anti-Russia and anti-normalization of relationships and trade relationships with Russia.
And so the moment that we're in right now, watching Ukrainians lives lost at incredible rates, young men getting dragged into duty who have no interest in fighting and risking their lives.
You have the will of the people wanting peace with Russia in this moment.
I was devastated when the foreign aid bill went out, sending an additional, I believe it was $70 billion to finance this war.
In this moment, I think that it is imperative for the United States to understand what is going on.
The United States has intentionally aggravated the situation, has continued to escalate it.
is looking at deploying troops, has allowed the Ukrainian military to use U.S. military supplies.
I mean, this is every day.
There's a new escalation that would is it's taking us to a point of of World War three scale risk for our people.
And we need to think about what our job is right now.
And our job is to take care of this country and to not escalate foreign wars. - Yes.
So with regard to that last argument that our job as a country, the government's duty, it seems so basic, but for whatever reason it has to be debated because so often it's not done.
But the idea is, as you said, that the US government's primary duty is to take care of our citizens here at home.
Our citizens are suffering.
Communities are being ravaged by all kinds of pathologies.
People are in economic difficulty.
And so as you say, why should we be sending $60 billion to Ukraine to fuel a war that I want to know whether you apply that same line of thinking, that same rationale, to the billions and billions of dollars that we're sending to Israel to finance and arm its war against Gaza, one that has resulted in more civilian casualties by a long distance than the one in Ukraine.
I think that the U.S.
sending funds to Israel to support the Iron Dome makes a lot of sense.
And I've supported that in the past.
I think historically it's been a great way to show support for the State of Israel.
I believe October 7th was one of the worst terrorist attacks I've witnessed in my lifetime, might be the worst terrorist attacks I will witness in my lifetime, and I do think a response was warranted.
I think that when I think about Israel participating in wars of the past and the role that the United States played, you know, I often think of leadership like Golda Meir, who ended the Yom Kippur War in about a month. who ended the Yom Kippur War in about a month.
And she was fighting on multiple fronts against multiple armies.
And what I see right now happening on the ground in Gaza is devastating.
I think that, you know, there's arguments to be made that we've long past the point of a ceasefire.
I think there's lots of arguments to be made that Israel should be showing more restraint.
And there's very strong arguments.
And, you know, Bobby and I, this is one of the areas that we have the most heated debate And I think that there's an argument that the United States should have delivered the last aid package to Israel with greater affirmation as to how that money would be spent.
And we're in a moment right now That I really don't think we should have been in.
And you have to go back historically to really look at the United States' involvement in the Middle East.
There's a direct line between our involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan and Hamas.
Israel feels that, and many people will agree, that a two-state system is not possible in a world in which Hamas is running Gaza.
And I tend to agree with that.
But is it possible or likely that the Israeli military is going to be successful in destroying Hamas in totality in this moment?
I don't think so.
And I think that was actually clear as early as February.
And so I think that in this moment, the United States really needs to take responsibility for what it's done in arriving to this moment.
And I do think that there needs to be greater coordination, greater levels of sophistication in how we're operating ourselves in the Middle East in this moment.
So when you began, you started talking about funding the Iron Dome, which is a purely defensive system that prevents Israel from being attacked with rockets and other types of missiles.
But we're not just funding that, we're of course funding all their offensive weapons.
Most of the bombs being dropped on civilians in Gaza have Made in the USA on them, and the whole world knows that.
I guess what I'm wondering is the advocates of U.S.
financing of the war in Ukraine will say, we're not helping Ukraine conquer territory.
We're not helping Ukraine invade other countries.
We're just, it's basically like an Iron Dome.
We're just giving them money to defend their country against aggression and invasion by the Russians.
What is the difference between Ukraine on the one hand and Israel on the other, in your view, when it comes to the question of whether we should be financing their wars?
I think the primary difference is what is being asked for in these conflicts.
If you look at Russia's history with Ukraine, what is being asked for is normalization of trade relationship between Ukrainian leadership and Russia.
And there's this There's tons of historical records that show that Russia has been attempting to create a trade route, an access point to the Black Sea.
And there's a reasonableness there that I think that most people can objectively say this war could have been avoided.
I think when you look at what's been going on in Israel and Gaza, and you talk to Israelis, they've been fired at by Hamas for so many years.
And you talk to the average Israeli who's in their 40s, and they've been now drafted into so many different wars.
And October 7th is very different than, and I'm just speaking morally, October 2nd had a very different effect on the consciousness of humanity.
And I think that there was certainly, most people would agree that a response was necessary based on the October 7th attack.
There was reprehensible behavior.
But I think where the majority of people are in their consciousness at this moment as well is very much wishing for greater restraint from Israel, which has an incredibly sophisticated army compared to Hamas's.
And I think that given the complexity of the region, and again, the US has contributed a lot to exacerbating this complexity, That there is fundamental differences between these two wars.
But that being said, neither one needs to continue as it has been currently, and there are paths to de-escalation available that this administration is fully incapable of executing on right now.
Let me just switch gears a little bit.
When your selection as Vice President's candidate was announced, there was a lot of discourse suggesting or claiming that one of the reasons, if not the main reason, for your selection was that you have a great ability to finance
Self-finance a independent campaign, and I'm somebody who has long said that the way in which the two parties have constructed this kind of duopoly means that the only way you could succeed as an independent candidate is if you have kind of a billionaire on the ticket who can fund the campaign.
But nonetheless, I just want to understand Do you acknowledge, I mean, was that part of the conversation when, as part of the selection process, was whether or not you were willing to donate money?
And how much money do you intend to donate to this campaign, do you know?
I can't give you an exact dollar amount.
We're in June right now.
June historically for independent candidates has been very challenging.
That's usually when the other two parties really ramp up their PR and media spend and most of that media spend typically goes towards taking out the independent candidate first and then, you know, their opposing party candidate.
I am You know, of the belief that this is an election unlike any other.
We have a standing president running for reelection who is clearly showing signs of rapid decline.
We have another president who was just recently convicted of a felony.
And, you know, we've got now an independent candidate who is the only Um, outspoken public figure during a pandemic that was calling out origins of a virus and calling out government officials, and it's proving true in this moment that he was entirely correct.
So, my involvement, and I feel like my responsibility right now being on this ticket, is to first and foremost make sure he's on every single ballot, and I will contribute as much as it takes to make that a reality.
I totally respect that.
I understand that argument.
And like I said, I'm somebody who in the past has said, if you want to be an independent candidate, if you want to challenge the two parties, unfortunately the only way to do that is if you have somebody in one or the other slots who basically is a billionaire and can self-finance the campaign to compete with the two parties because that's how they've constructed the system.
I'm just wondering though, when people look at your selection and Our political system in general, which you had no role in creating, but the idea that very wealthy people obviously have a much bigger say than ordinary Americans in exerting power in Washington and how laws are passed.
Do you regard the role of big money in politics?
And you've been a big donor for political candidates for quite some time.
Do you regard the role of big money in politics as a major problem for democracy?
And if so, what kind of reforms would you support?
I think it's a huge problem.
I think Citizens United turned this country into a kleptocracy overnight.
And I believe that individual donors should certainly have limits and that independents should be free to run without having to spend this kind of money.
The ballot requirements that we've seen are arbitrary and ludicrous.
Each state is different.
Their requirements are crushing.
We have an enormous legal team just to deal with that piece.
And, you know, the thing that has made me really excited is I recently met with somebody at an organization called American Promise, and they are going state by state to try to pass a constitutional amendment that would set contribution limits for both individuals and corporations.
22 states have endorsed it, and it seems to be something that Americans want, and by a large margin of the population—I mean, the grand, grand majority of Americans want there to be limits, and I am one of them.
You referenced earlier the recent conviction in the Manhattan courtroom of the former President Donald Trump.
Today, as we, I don't know if you heard, but before we spoke, we were speaking to you, I was talking about the order compelling Steve Bannon, the President's former top White House official, to appear and surrender to a federal prison on July 1st for contempt of Congress charges, a charge for which people are very rarely
In prison, do you see the prosecution of Trump on these specific charges, the one about the accounting irregularities for hush fund payments and the other prosecutions of so many people around the Trump orbit as a vindication of the rule of law?
Or do you think it's an example of Democrats and others in the establishment weaponizing the justice system to attack their political enemies?
There's been evidence from both the Republican Party and the Democratic Party using the judicial system and the Department of Justice against political opponents.
We have become so divided and polarized in this country that there is no branch of government that hasn't somehow been corrupted by these party lines.
You know, I think that they've both been guilty.
You can point at many areas where, you know, Republicans have done similar things and Democrats have done similar.
You know, I mean, no greater example is what happened to President Trump.
But the case itself, if you are just objectively looking at how the case was conducted, this is a hush money trial that didn't have the correct jury instructions in the hands of the jury, and there were just so many things about it that make you really call into question the objectivity of the Justice Department in this moment.
And that is, you know, the Justice Department has always been the last resort.
It's been that last layer of defense in protecting our civil liberties in this country, normalcy in this country, objectivity, the rule of law.
And to have it be toyed with in this way, to have it be manipulated and distorted, I think is the number one thing.
It's kind of the last straw for many people in this country that Raise that flag, that alarm that we've slipped into an autocratic environment where rule of law is really no longer the rule of law, but rule of the parties.
It's incredibly concerning on so many levels, and I think it has a ripple effect as well.
So I referenced earlier the history that you've had as a big dollar donor in politics.
From what I can tell, maybe I'm wrong, but the overwhelming majority of your big dollar donations, if not all of them, have gone to Democratic Party candidates, including both kind of mainstream centrist types like Hillary Clinton's presidential campaign, Joe Biden's 2020 presidential campaign, Pete Buttigieg's presidential campaign.
Marianne Williamson, I just want to throw in, in 2020.
I was about to say her, that even causes and people associated with the left, and I was going to say exactly, Marianne Williamson, you supported, as well as kind of the reform-minded prosecutors, including in San Francisco, which is kind of a criminal justice reform cause often associated with the left, although Donald Trump was the first president to sign a criminal justice reform in a long time.
Nonetheless, you were donating to Democrats, kind of classic Democrats.
You were a registered member of the Democratic Party until this year when you were going to run as an independent.
You alluded earlier to President Biden's obvious rapid decline in cognitive function and ability, but is that all that concerns you about Biden and the Democrats, or is there anything else or other things that have caused you to change your mind about the Democratic Party?
To be completely honest with you, Biden's health is secondary to the enormous and secondary by a long margin from the enormity of the corruption I've seen in the party.
So in 2020, I didn't support Biden.
I, you know, supported Hillary kind of not with enthusiasm, but I'm sorry.
I'm sorry.
I'm sorry.
Just interrupt in 2020.
Hillary ran against Bernie in 2016 and then it was Bernie and Biden in 2020 when Hillary didn't run.
So I'm sure you just misspoke.
Correct.
No, sorry, I was referencing 2016 when I supported Hillary Clinton.
And in 2020, I supported Marianne Williamson, but it was 2020 that I realized that the Democratic primary had been completely broken.
I knew that Bernie was likely to win the primary in 2016.
In fact, I think he won and, you know, that was the first real Big crack in the DNC that I saw.
And in 2020, it was truly very obvious that there was no more Democratic primary.
No one could run a fair shot at beating the central Democratic dynastic line.
And it was very clear that Biden was the only one who was going to get a shot at getting on the ticket.
My experience, I mean, this would take hours and hours to unpack, but I've had such excruciatingly disappointing experiences with the leadership of The Democrats, I've heard things said to me, I've seen things done that are incredibly contradictory.
They're really pathetic in terms of what the party cares about and prioritizes.
There's been almost no interest in addressing the root causes of many of this country's biggest issues, including chronic disease, including Budgetary adjustments that need to be made.
They throw around money.
They want to win at all costs.
Once they win, they're not focused on the American people.
They are focused on these auxiliary functions of government.
And it's very clear that they have built up this enormous in our agencies.
And I, there was no, there was no way for me to be able to continue to take any of it seriously.
I couldn't support it anymore.
And you know, you said I've previously supported many progressive DAs.
I've also recalled DAs as well that didn't do their jobs.
The first DA I supported was actually a former police chief and he did a pretty good job in San Francisco.
That was George Gerskon, right?
That was George Gerskon.
George Gascogne, he was a police chief, a very much liked police officer.
He ran on bringing balance to the system and communication and partnership between the DA's office and the police department.
But he also wanted to create trust and make sure that there was no bias that could be called into question.
And he wanted to make sure that the police department had a lot of integrity and trust.
Yeah, I did think it was interesting, the donation to Marianne Williamson, in part because her major critique is aimed at least as much at the Democratic Party as the Republican Party.
She often sounds like more of an independent candidate, criticizing both parties than she did a Democrat, so I thought that was one of the more interesting donations.
A lot of times when people who kind of come from the Democratic Party become very disappointed in the Democratic Party, come to kind of see them as pathetic, as you said, I empathize a lot with that trajectory.
A lot of people who kind of come down that path to the point where they don't even want to support Democrats anymore, still kind of in the back of their mind believe that at the end of the day, Democrats are still a little bit better than the Republicans, in this case, I guess, especially under Donald Trump.
Is that a view that you share?
If there were no independent candidate, if there were only Democrats and Republicans, that people should vote for the Democratic Party?
Are you not even prepared to say that one is better than the other at this point?
I think that there is a clear uniparty and nothing makes that more obvious than the way Congress Came together in this last session.
There is no way that I could swing over and support Donald Trump.
I know too much about his record.
He had a Raytheon lobbyist running the Secretary of Defense.
He had his loyalists, which represented all kinds of corporate interests, fill his cabinet.
He hasn't blinked twice about the fact that he was responsible for Operation Warp Speed had enabled Fauci very blindly to go ahead and conduct the pandemic response.
He intentionally pulled the investigation on Pfizer.
He's done so many things that are just as pitiful as the Democratic Party has done.
I like Liberty Republicans.
I I think that if there's some future where the two-party system returns to any sense of sanity, I could see myself becoming a Liberty Republican alongside individuals like, you know, I think Thomas Massey has done great things for this country.
I think that Ron Paul's done incredible things for this country.
I think Rand Paul has been really fighting the good fight for this country.
And then I also see some good progressive, you know, I think Dean Phillips has done some very good and interesting things as well.
So there's still signs that the two parties can be salvaged.
I don't know that we get there, though, if we just keep doing these huge swings and My theory right now is that Trump is peaking in large part due to the help of the Democrats and the general understanding in America that the judicial system has been corrupted to support Democrats in this election by prosecuting Trump, but that backfired on them.
He's raised over $100 million since the conviction.
I just have a couple more questions and a little bit of time that we have left.
I want to respect your time.
So I have a lot of questions that I'd love for you to come back on.
But for now, I want to ask you about this.
Since 2016, when there was this sort of trauma to the system of the establishment, Donald Trump's victory over Hillary Clinton, but also Brexit.
There's been this kind of systematic attempt to gain control over the kind of information and speech that is permitted to flow on the internet.
There have been governments around the world, including our own government and our intelligence agencies, who have created excuses to either censor the internet directly or to coerce big tech platforms to do it for them.
Usually the justifications are things like, well, we have to combat disinformation as if the government can decree truth and falsity.
Or we have to combat hate speech or things that are some kind of a threat to our national security.
Where do you fall in that debate?
Do you believe that there are any reasons that government or big tech should be censoring political speech on the internet other than in obvious cases where crimes are being committed like fraud or things like that?
But when it comes to political speech, do you support the censorship or suppression of any of those views?
You can't love this country and also support the censorship.
I love this country very deeply.
I love this country because of the Constitution.
I, in part, went to law school because of the fact that I believe so deeply in the power of the Constitution to protect Individual liberties.
And I believe these basic liberties, such as freedom of speech, are what make this country the country that it is.
A country of hope, a country of honor, a country of innovation, a country of living out one's dream.
The censorship that has occurred since 2016, especially with the use of AI to censor speech automatically, and these large language models which are programmed specifically to demarcate categories of speech that will be automatically banned, it has been one of the reasons why Sitting here, I'm sitting here in Silicon Valley right now.
I have decided to rebel against Silicon Valley.
Part of me joining Bobby Kennedy's ticket is this rebellion.
Bobby Kennedy has been censored more than any political candidate in my lifetime that I'm aware of.
And I have joined this ticket in part because I am an insider.
I know how this happened.
I saw it happen.
I know why it's happened, and I know exactly how to unwind it.
And if given the opportunity, I will, on, you know, my first opportunity, go into these agencies and take out and disable all of these AI sensors, I will also understand the exact points of You know, government capture of the corporations and the big tech platforms.
They have, you know, it's not easy to use the word coerce.
It's a combination of coercion and knowing and willful partnership.
And I've seen it.
Yeah, that is interesting that you kind of come from it with that perspective and so much of the censorship is done by AI.
All right, last question.
When I had Bobby Kennedy on my show, he said that one of the things he would support almost immediately is pardoning both Julian Assange and Edward Snowden, both of whom are essentially have been turned into dissidents for the crime of exposing the crimes of the secret part of our government, the U.S.
security state.
Do you agree with that position?
And more importantly, how do you see the dangers posed by that part of our government that has no democratic accountability, that works in complete secrecy, that's independent of any party change that we might vote for, the CIA, the NSA?
How do you see that part of the government?
It's, you know, Ron Paul said it in his Libertarian Convention speech that there was a coup when JFK was assassinated.
And I don't think there's any candidate in history that is going to be able to unravel the shadow government more than Bobby Kennedy.
I am fully supportive of the need for that.
I think that it is critical to reclaim this nation as a free and stable republic.
Assange is a hero, and I think that what he has done through this broader cypherpunk movement is to protect the internet, which is where most Americans, and especially young Americans, are living out their lives today.
It is a forum of engagement.
Of exchanging information, of building companies and building coalitions.
And if the Internet is not a free place for people to be able to expose and have conversations about what is going on with their governments, Then we've lost the most dominant speech we have, which is the speech that we have over digital platforms.
So I believe Assange is 100% a hero, and it is so necessary.
Trump had a chance to do it, and he didn't.
And I don't understand why he didn't, because to me, it's one of the most obvious and easy decisions he could have made, was to pardon Assange.
Snowden is a whistleblower.
We are a country that has historically protected overseas whistleblowers.
Why do we prosecute our own?
It's incredibly hypocritical.
Well, Ms.
Shanahan, you gave us a lot of your time.
I found the conversation very interesting.
We'd love to have you back on at some point in the future, and I really appreciate your taking the time to talk to us tonight.
Thanks for having me.
It was nice to meet you as well.
You too.
- You too, have a good evening.
So that concludes our show for this evening.
As a reminder, System Update is also available in podcast form.
You can listen to every episode 12 hours after their first broadcast live here on Rumble on Spotify, Apple, and all other major podcasting platforms.
If you rate, review, and follow the show there, it really helps spread the visibility of System Update.
Finally, every Tuesday and Thursday night, once we're done with our live show here on Rumble, we move to Locals, which is part of the Rumble community and platform, where we have our live interactive aftershow, tonight being Thursday.
We're about to go do that in just a few minutes.
That after show is available solely for members of our Locals community, where we take your questions, respond to your feedback and critiques, and hear your suggestions for future shows.
And if you want to join that community, which gives you access not only to that after show, but also to multiple interactive features we have on the platform.
It is the place where we publish written transcripts of every show that we do here.
It's where we first publish our original written reporting, and we expect to have an article tomorrow morning that is exactly that there on the Locals platform.
And it is the community on which we most rely to support the independent journalism that we are doing here every night.
Simply click the Join button right below the video player on the Rumble page and it will take you directly to that community.
For those of you watching this show, we are, as always, very appreciative and we hope to see you back tomorrow night and every night at 7 o'clock p.m.
