Today on the PBD Podcast, Glenn Greenwald joins the show. Glenn Edward Greenwald is an American journalist, author, and former lawyer. Glenn is most well known for his role in breaking the Edward Snowden story.
Watch Glenn's podcast - "System Update" on Rumble: https://bit.ly/3OP9tZq
Listen to Glenn's podcast - "System Update" on Spotify, iTunes and Google: https://bit.ly/3KYhRER
Get Your Tickets for The Vault 2023 NOW ⬇️⬇️ The BIGGEST EVENT in VT History!
*TOM BRADY, MIKE TYSON & PATRICK BET-DAVID on one stage!*
https://www.thevault2023.com/vault-conference-2023?el=YTPODHTEP
Subscribe to:
Adam Sosnick - @vtsoscast
Vincent Oshana - @ValuetainmentComedy
Tom Ellsworth - @bizdocpodcast
Want to get clear on your next 5 business moves? https://valuetainment.com/academy/
Join the channel to get exclusive access to perks: https://bit.ly/3Q9rSQL
Download the podcasts on all your favorite platforms https://bit.ly/3sFAW4N
Text: PODCAST to 310.340.1132 to get the latest updates in real-time!
Patrick Bet-David is the founder and CEO of Valuetainment Media. He is the author of the #1 Wall Street Journal Bestseller Your Next Five Moves (Simon & Schuster) and a father of 2 boys and 2 girls. He currently resides in Ft. Lauderdale, Florida.
life meant for me yeah why would you bet on joliath when we got bet david valutainment giving values contagious this world of entrepreneurs we get no value to haters how they run homie look what i become i'm the i'm the one No, I like the guy.
Vincent O'Shaughness for choice words.
What by Trump?
It was, I think, the highest rated program for that show, which show in Brazil was the highest rated program.
What was the fight all about?
I saw it.
I'm like, what are they fighting him?
Obviously, you guys are not, you're speaking in Portugal.
What had happened, it was right at the height of this reporting I was doing in Brazil that was extremely tumultuous.
It was really kind of shaking the country to its foundations.
So it was very polarizing.
And the person with whom I had had this fight had gone on his own show, I think maybe like six weeks earlier.
And it said something like, you know, my husband, he recently passed away, but at the time he was a member of Congress.
And I was in the middle of this, this, doing this journalism.
And he said something like, what I want to know is they have, they adopted two kids.
They're raising two kids.
Who's taking care of these kids?
He's a congressman.
He's doing all this bullshit in Brasilia.
The other one's dealing with stolen documents.
Who's raising the kids?
As though it's uncommon these days for kids to have two parents who are working.
I think we need a judge, a minor judge to go and investigate whether these kids should be taken out of the home.
So if there's anything that, you know, as a father, someone can say that is going to make you kind of angry, it's maybe you should have your kids taken away from you.
And then when I got to this interview, he wasn't supposed to be there.
They told me at the last minute he would be.
I said, fine, I'm happy to talk to anybody.
They sat him down.
I don't know if you saw the video.
Go to 417.
Trust me, I saw it.
Look at how close we were.
Oh, my God.
But it's like we were almost like sitting on top of each other.
Glenn, you're ready to throw down at this point.
You guys see my spot like that.
You're sizing up his jaw.
I mean, I was, you know, they wanted, they started off by, hey, let's talk about the news.
And I said, yeah, before we do that, I'm going to need an apology first.
There we go.
Glenn Greenwald.
You'll see I did not initiate the physical confrontation.
But you did finish it, though.
Oh, Glenn, Glenn.
Whoa, Glenn.
Oh, Glenn, you got to block your face.
No, no, no, no.
Glenn's about to come.
Wait, wait for it.
Five seconds.
Hold on.
Five seconds.
He has Ray John Rondo.
Because my rage is going to be a little bit more.
Glenn.
That's a way to start a show, PBD.
Now you can see why.
So, yeah, that's the kind of thing I'm ready for.
Did you bitch slap him?
Yeah, I mean, it was hard.
You see this gigantic guy that was like the Jerry Springer security team holding me back.
So there was only so much I could do.
I had never been in a physical confrontation on a news program before.
It's not like I go around engaging in fisticulture.
Is this a big show?
No, yeah, it's a gigantic.
It's like one of the biggest shows in Brazil.
Glenn, let's do our best to get along today.
You know, you're very close to Benny.
He's an agitator.
We're going to be cool.
I meditated this morning.
I also did some workouts.
Benny, just slap him one time.
We're just talking about this.
For those who don't know, let me actually properly introduce who is here because, you know, for those who know you're here, you know exactly why you're here.
You want to know what's going on.
This man's got a lot to say.
And it's, you know, he broke the news worldwide a few years ago.
So Glenn Greenwald is an American journalist, author, and former lawyer.
In 1996, he founded a law from concentrating on First Amendment litigation.
He began blogging on national security issues on October of 2005 when he was becoming increasingly concerned with what he viewed as attacks on civil liberties by the George Bush administration in the aftermath of the 9-11.
He started contributing to Salon in 2007, then to Guardian in 2012.
In June 2013, while at The Guardian, he began publishing a series of reports detailing previously unknown information about American and British global surveillance programs based on classified documents provided by Edward Snowden.
If you've seen the movie Snowden and there's a man interviewing Snowden, it's Glenn Greenwald.
Okay, if you've seen the documentary, is it Citizen 4?
Citizen 4.
Which is, by the way, incredible.
Which I really, I think, I think the film that was done about Snowden was by Oliver Stone.
I think he did a good job.
The documentary was filmed in real time.
It won the Oscar.
I think it's a better film for those who want to know.
Fantastic.
Yeah, night and day.
I agree.
And then his work contributed to Guardian's 2014 Pulitzer Prize win, and he was among a group of three reporters who won the 2013 George Polk Award through his Intercept Brazil in June in 2019.
Glenn Greenwal published leaked conversations between senior officials involved in Operation Car Wash, a corrupt case in Brazil regarding Lula, and a bunch of different things happened there.
Four-time New York Times bestseller.
But by far the best title you wrote of all your books is the one, I think it's the one in 2006, How Would a Patriot Act?
What a great title, right?
I can't take credit for that, but when I heard that title, I knew that was a winning title.
I had, you know, I was at the time writing for six months.
No one knew who I was.
And that title really captured a lot of attention, especially given the era.
So credit to whoever came up with that title.
I forget who that was now.
So from the time of you doing Citizen IV, sitting down with him, you know, to now, how much progress have we made?
Or how much progress has CIA, FBI, NSA made on being able to control what we're doing?
You know, one of the things we saw, you know, at the time we did this reporting, and, you know, it's kind of assumed now that the CIA and the FBI and the NSA spy on everybody at the time, some people had suspicions of it, but there was no evidence to prove it.
A lot of those of us who were saying that it was happening were called conspiracy theorists, precisely because it was all done in the dark with no evidence.
That's what made Edward Snowden heroic is he came forward with the evidence to prove it.
So there was a huge movement in the year, 18 months following these revelations for bipartisan reigning in of the NSA, the idea that the U.S. security state was never supposed to be turned inward onto the United States, onto American citizens.
It was supposed to be directed outward.
There was legislation that was co-introduced by Justin Amash, who at the time was considered this far-right Tea Party conservative from Michigan, who co-sponsored it with John Conyers, who was like the liberal lion of the House.
So it was very bipartisan.
It was on its way to passing.
It would have been the first ever piece of legislation to rein in the powers of the security state after 9-11 as opposed to expand them.
The White House, the Obama White House, was adamantly opposed, got Nancy Pelosi to whip enough votes just at the last second to defeat it narrowly.
There's a foreign affairs article that says how Nancy Pelosi saved the NSA, which is exactly what happened.
And then ever since then, the U.S. security state, which is very adept at inventing new enemies, started, you know, kind of al-Qaeda at that point was sort of tired.
People weren't that scared anymore by al-Qaeda.
It had been 12 years since the 9-11 attack.
Suddenly, it was ISIS for a year and a half or two that got people scared enough to want more security.
And then into 2016, Russia arrived and has become the preeniment enemy now that makes all American liberals practically, by polling data, love the NSA, love the SCIA.
And so a lot of this has gone backward, actually, because they're very good at propaganda, keeping Americans afraid enough to wanting those sorts of authorities to grow in the name of keeping them safe.
And it's funny you say that because what's the last thing he says?
One of the last things he says in the interview.
Snowden says in the months ahead, the years ahead, it's only going to get worse until eventually there will be a time where politics, policies will change because the only thing that resists the activities of the surveillance state are policy.
Even our agreements with other sovereign governments, we consider that to be a stipulation of policy rather than a stipulation of law.
And because of that, a new leader will be elected.
Last part of this short clip.
They will find the switch, say that because of the crisis, because of the dangers we face in the world, some new and unpredictable threat, we need more authority, we need more power, and there will be nothing the people can do at that point to oppose it, and it will be turnkey tyranny.
Do you think that's already happened with COVID and Biden?
I think we're very close to that point.
This is, I think the quick history, if I can just give it to you, because it's so fascinating and relevant, which was in the 1970s after Watergate, that was the first time Congress ever began investigating, like, hey, what did these agencies actually do?
These agencies created after World War II with the National Security Act in 1947.
There was no CIA in the 1920s.
It was all created in the 1940s and 50s.
And it was all so secret.
The joke was the NSA stood for no such agency.
So they had this church committee that was a group of bipartisan members of the Senate that investigated what these agencies were doing and uncovered things that shocked them.
The idea that we now have the capacity to spy on every American citizen.
And the head of the committee was this guy named Frank Church.
He was like this liberal Democrat from Idaho, but he was one of those, you know, because he was from Idaho, he was a civil libertarian.
And what he said was, this system is so ubiquitous and so omnipotent that if it's ever turned inward on the American people, because at the time the idea was still, it was a taboo to turn it inward domestically, the American people will have no place to hide.
There will be no possibility left of resisting the government because there will be nowhere to go to be monitored.
He obviously didn't envision the internet, the surveillance capabilities that produces, which is in a whole different universe.
Every whistleblower after 9-11 became a whistleblower precisely because these instruments now are turned inward.
We know that Homeland Security and the CIA considers not ISIS or al-Qaeda or Russia, but the American people, what they call domestic extremists, to be the number one political threat and the number one threat to our national.
So the whole thing is now directed inward, directed internally.
That's where censorship comes from.
That's where surveillance comes from.
We're absolutely very close to the point where we have a system in place where you cannot cross certain lines in terms of opinions you expressed or dissidents that you want to organize without being called extremist and being criminalized.
And that kind of turned tyranny that really came from the 1970s that Snowden warned about us being closer and closer to, I do think we're now rapidly approximating.
And it's the reason why the only cause I really care about at this point is doing anything possible to preserve independent media, to preserve spaces on the internet where independence and true dissent can actually thrive.
For you who's in it, do you see that as the biggest threat?
Like, you know, how somebody goes to sleep, they're like, well, I think the biggest threat is, you know, whatever.
Climate change.
Climate change.
Or your biggest threat is the economy collapsing with the debt that we have and what's going to happen if deflation, stackflation, hyperinflation, all these things.
You put surveillance as number one for you, or is that just your cause?
Surveillance combined with censorship.
Because the internet obviously is the most powerful and innovative evolution of our lifetime, without question.
And if you go back and read like the triumphalist literature of the 1990s about why the internet was going to be so revolutionary, it was supposed to be a tool of liberation.
We can communicate with each other.
We can organize without the mediation of state, centralized state and corporate authority.
What it can also be, though, is the most potent tool ever invented for monitoring and surveilling and then also controlling the thoughts of the domestic population.
And that is the turn that it has taken.
Look, I spent two and a half years of my life reading through hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of the most sensitive documents produced by the most secretive agency of the world's most powerful government.
That's what I did when I got that archive by Edward Snowden.
I know what their aspirations are.
I know the things they say when they thought nobody would be ever listening and watching.
And then I went about publishing them.
And their goal is that kind of total and complete control.
That is not a sort of dystopian fantasy.
It's not a conspiracy that requires.
I published the documents demonstrating that that's the thing for which they're aiming.
And so it's not just my cause.
If we lose the ability to dissent from establishment pieties, which we know are false, we just sat through COVID for two and a half years where the pronouncements that came down one after the next we now know are false.
The same is true about the war in Ukraine.
The same is true about the financial collapse of 2008, obviously about the war on terror.
It's true about every one of our important debates.
If we lose the ability to dissent from that meaningfully, meaning not just standing on a street corner on a box, but with the ability to reach people and to organize without being criminalized and monitored, what other political cause is even possible?
What's an appropriate middle ground?
Like what's an appropriate happy medium?
So for example, like you have national security, pretty, you know, especially during 9-11.
This whole thing, I appreciate what you're saying during Watergate in the 70s, but there's a lot of people that are Gen Z that basically don't remember anything, not even millennials.
This all kind of catapulted right after 9-11, George W. Bush, everything with the Patriot Act, government overreach, executive powers, everything with that.
So how do you grapple with national security, genuinely like trying to save the country from any terrorist attacks or any homegrown terrorists, whatever that is, versus the surveillance state and the intelligence community?
There needs to be a happy medium, I would assume, right?
Yeah, these agencies have a function and there's a legitimate function in surveillance.
Of course, we want our government surveilling people who mean harm to this country.
That's one of their top priorities is keeping people physically safe.
There was a balance reached during the Cold War.
The Cold War was infinitely more dangerous than the war on terror.
And it's obviously infinitely more dangerous than whatever fears are being cooked up all the time about Russia or even China.
You had the United States and the Soviet Union going around the world in multiple proxy wars with tens of thousands of intercontinental ballistic missiles that are nuclear-tipped, aimed at one another's cities.
You can't get more dangerous than that.
And during Ronald Reagan's presidency, when Dwight Eisenhower was overseeing the Cold War, the kind of two bookends, they managed to have a system that preserved that balance, which was if we want to spy on somebody, we go to a court, we get a warrant, not as high of a warrant as you need for a criminal court because you're spying on foreign nationals, where you essentially say there's a legitimate reason to be spying on these particular groups.
You do it in secret if necessary, and the spying is directed.
What Snowden's archive revealed is that there's nothing directed about it.
It's mass, indiscriminate, suspicionless surveillance on entire populations.
Yeah, and just to add on to that, it's kind of almost like validate your case, like part of the surveillance, state, Patriot Act, there was something called Section 215.
This is where they said the sneak and peek provision.
How familiar with that?
Yeah, well, so look at the Patriot Act.
That is the perfect example.
In the weeks and months after 9-11, it was probably like the most traumatizing time for the country in its history, with the exception of, say, the Civil War and the attack on Pearl Harbor.
But it was certainly one of the top three.
And people were pretty much willing to give the government anything it wanted in the name of keeping people safe.
3,000 people had just died.
The Pentagon was attacked.
The World Trade Center.
It's amazing what fear will do to allow you to basically get infringed on your rights.
Yeah.
And that fear was.
I lived in Manhattan.
I found that traumatizing, like watching those two buildings collapse on top of 3,000 of my fellow citizens.
But even in that climate, the Patriot Act was considered so radical that there was a lot of voices in dissent saying, wait a minute, this seems pretty un-American, this legislation.
And in order to justify it, there was a provision that was put into it that said, with all of these powers, don't worry.
It's only temporary.
It will expire after four years.
In order for it to be renewed, Congress has to come back and declare a sufficient emergency in order to renew it.
People said, okay, we'll accept it only because it's sort of this byproduct of an emergency.
Okay, here we are 22 years later.
No one ever talks about the Patriot Act anymore.
Every four years, it gets renewed without debate.
It just falls into the woodwork because it's become normalized.
No one thinks the Patriot Act is radical anymore because exactly what you said, every year, more and more Americans don't know a world prior to 9-11, don't know a world in which those liberties existed.
They just accept and assume that the way things are are the way they've always been in the way that they have to be.
And that's the same now with the censorship regime over the internet.
More and more people are being born into a world in which it's natural that a tiny number of corporations work in conjunction with the government, the U.S. security state, to determine what can and can't be said on the internet.
And polls show that a lot of people want that.
In fact, want more of it.
And that's what's really alarming is to see how effective that propaganda is.
You said earlier, they, they want surveillance, they want control, they want this.
They is a lot of different things.
But who is they?
Who's at the head of the day?
I think what if you look at every society, it's not a conspiratorial theory that there's always a power center, there's an establishment, there's a whatever you want to call it, the people for whom the society functions most profitably, the people who want most to preserve the status quo.
And I think what has happened is if you look in the past, you know, we're a capitalist society.
That means there's going to be a lot of wealth inequality.
And when there's wealth inequality, there's always the chance that lots of people on the bottom end of that wealth inequality are going to be angry.
They're going to start to get agitated.
They're going to be rebellious.
There's lots of ways to deal with that.
You can appease them.
You can introduce social programs.
You can, you know, keep them just placated enough not to rebel on the street.
I think what the choice that our current elite has made instead is let them be as angry as they want.
We'll just paramilitarize the society enough with surveillance, with paramilitarizing our police force so that any kind of protest effort will be instantly crushed.
And the they is nothing more than the people who wield the greatest amount of power in society, the people who are in control of the mechanisms of surveillance, of the security state, of the financial industry, the people who wield power in Washington.
So you're like, you're not putting it, the they is the director of CIA, the director of FBI, you know, you're putting all of those guys as part of they.
Is that kind of what you're saying?
There's not an individual at the top that every all those days call.
Yeah, it's a confluence of power centers that work in conjunction with one another.
You know, when I was interviewing Vivek, as I did yesterday, right after that debate, the morning after the debate, one of the things he said, and he didn't have time to elaborate on the debate, but he was saying the only war I want to wage is on the fourth branch of government.
We're only supposed to have three.
And I asked him, what is the fourth branch of government?
And he said the fourth branch of government is the permanent power faction in Washington that exists completely outside Democratic accountability, the three-letter agencies, the administrative state.
Those people are not there because they've consolidated control.
They're serving a part of a broader elite, you know, the people who have an interest in ensuring that the population is kind of tamped down, that the country is sort of controlled, that stability is maintained, that it's impossible to organize in a meaningful way if you're a dissident.
And so it's not, that's what I mean.
It's not some, you don't need to imagine a conspiratorial council that meets in some underground lair somewhere.
It's not out of a science fiction film.
It's just based on how societies function.
And that that is it, that there is an elite in society, especially one that's unequal.
And in those unequal societies, you can have power that starts to get more and more centralized and then more and more abused.
Yeah, but the way I'm thinking about it, like for example, you watch the other day, Drake did a concert and he came out of the concert with LeBron and his son, Bronnie.
There is alliances being built there, right?
Because one of Drake's first songs was about, you know, last name ever, first name, you know, was it last name, greatest, first name ever, something like that, right?
And okay, so he made that song about LeBron.
So there's an alliance there.
No problem.
You watch it in movies and you'll see, you know, Mel Gibson talking to whoever.
You'll see Brad Pitt talking to whoever.
There's alliances there, right?
Do these guys kind of just watch and say, ooh, that guy's becoming powerful?
Let me get a hold of him.
Can we go out to dinner together?
Hey, what do you think about us doing this?
You think that's what it is?
Or do you think it's more the money guys like a Larry Fink or a Soros or the ESG crowd or the State Street or the BlackRock and the Vanguards?
Or is it more the big media guys?
Well, all of this is controlled by Rupert Murdoch and all these, or now it's more the powerful people of the Zuckerbergs and the Sergei and the Bezos.
And who is the people at the top that truly are able to move it?
Is it more political power?
Is it more spying power?
Is it more money?
Which one of those is the most powerful in your eyes?
I think the U.S. government is a government that exists in servitude to economic power.
Servitude towards economic power.
To economic power.
So you go and talk to any member of Congress who's honest and they will tell you that most of their time is spent either raising money from big donors or having the lobbyists for big donors write the bills.
That is the reality of how bills, most bills in Congress simply come from well-paid lobbyists who work for corporations.
Now, again, it's not a totalitarian society where you can identify this one single power center.
Right now, look at China, for example.
You have different power centers that want different things with regard to China.
Wall Street's in bed with China.
They don't want antagonism with China.
They love having a relationship with China where they put their low-paid workers in China producing their sneakers and producing their computers and producing their cars.
Whereas parts of the military-industrial complex seek a Cold War with China and more antagonism toward China.
It's an example where there's a kind of conflicting agenda.
So you get those often.
But in reality, the government itself is a government that is run by the people with the most amount of money, which is essentially oligarchy.
And everyone who works inside the government who's honest will tell you that.
Okay.
But does it at all interest you to want to know who the guy at the top is?
Like, maybe this is just because something that I'm curious about.
You know, the movie, again, American Gangster.
I'll never forget the scene where they keep thinking the main drug dealer selling blue magic is this Italian guy.
And then all of a sudden they're like, no, it's Frank Lucas.
And it changes the game, right?
With this whole blue magic.
Do you have any interest as one of the greatest investigative journalists of our time?
Some would put you on the top five.
Some would say the best during guard time for what you broke and what you had to tell the story.
That guy felt he trusted you more than anybody else to go out there and sit with them.
And that came with a lot of risk for you, what you did at a time like that.
Does it interest you to find out who is the Frank Lucas of power?
Yeah, absolutely.
I mean, in general, I think the people who are the most powerful are the people who are not very visible.
So, in the cheapest, most anti-intellectual, crudest form of punditry, they'll refer to Joe Biden as the most powerful person on earth, right?
Which is a gigantic joke.
And not just because he doesn't know his name or where he is, but because a president is answerable to an enormous number of actual power centers out in whose lines he has to remain.
He's not the one setting those lines.
He's the one observing those lines.
He's a servant to that power.
So, yeah, of course, it interests me.
I don't, though, think there's a kind of, I don't think it's like a pyramid where one person is sitting at the top.
You don't think?
I think that there's a set of power centers, a set of power centers.
You know, I was, you know, with this Republican debate, I'm sure we'll talk about it.
But one of the things that fascinated me was: so you have, you know, pretty much everybody on that stage, with the exception of Ron DeSantis, sort of, and Vivek completely, but every single other person who's saying we want to keep, we want to support Joe Biden's policy of sending billions and billions and billions and billions of dollars to Ukraine indefinitely to keep that war going.
They're saying this, notwithstanding the fact that they see the same polling data that I see and that you see, which is that not just Americans as a whole, but conservatives and Republicans in particular are overwhelmingly opposed to that policy.
They want no more money going to Ukraine.
So the question becomes: why do very competent, smart politicians who rely on public opinion to win nonetheless espouse in public a policy they know most of their voters oppose?
And the reason is, is because the people who are their donors, the people who actually control their candidacy, without which their candidacy cannot exist, favor that policy.
And so that's who they're serving.
And I think in general, that's so then the question becomes, well, who is the top donor?
Who is like the single guy?
I mean, I think there's like a handful of institutions.
It's always BlackRock, Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan.
These are the institutions that are by far the most powerful economic organs.
They need and rely on the government.
They're constantly working with the government.
You have the arms industry, of course, that also wields a lot of that power.
So I think it's a small number of power centers that, in general, have an aligned interest.
So the way you put it, this is how it makes sense to me on how you're perceiving what's going on.
There's kind of like the Italian mafia many years ago when he came out with the commission.
I don't know if you know the whole commission with the file.
Gambino, Colombo, everybody came in and said, hey, guys, let's control the whole thing together.
We're going to have to share some of it.
And so one of the families, maybe the BlackRock, State Street, you know, those family is going to be more the CIA, NSA, FBI, one of the families going to be more to political power, all those guys.
That's kind of how you see that happening.
Because we all benefit more when we're kind of working in confluence as opposed to in conflict.
Then my question for you becomes with that.
And my question, then my question with that becomes, you were.
I'm going to say it's not a definition of an oligarchy.
It's a handful of people at the very top running the whole thing.
If you asked me to describe the United States in terms of how it functions with one word, I would pick oligarchy.
So yeah, that's sorry, Pat.
But here's where I'm going with that.
So as good as they may be at protecting how they communicate with each other, I'm convinced the best hackers are the ones that don't work for the government.
How are the best hackers in the world not hacking into seeing how they communicate with each other to release it to the rest of the world to know what they're saying to each other?
The technology exists for them to realize these days when they communicate to decide what's going to happen to the world in the next 10, 20, 40, 50 years, shouldn't we know about it?
Why don't hackers target that?
Because once, you know, how the WikiLeaks and Formational League were like, wait, what?
Wow.
I'm glad I know.
Holy shit.
So Hillary paid 35 million.
So this is this.
So that happened over here.
That's crazy.
Why isn't a certain group of individuals who are hackers come together and say, look, let's kind of find out what these guys are doing.
Let's get to the truth of it.
We can figure it out.
Why don't they do that?
Well, first of all, there has been an amazing recruitment effort, especially in the wake of Snowden, to recruit the top scientific hacking talent into the government with all, and I mean, when we talk about the government, so much of what the government is is actually the private sector.
You know, Snowden worked at the NSA, but his employer was Booz Allen Hamilton.
So these companies recruit on behalf of the government with massive private sector pay.
So a lot of them have been recruited successfully onto their side.
And they also have an unlimited budget because they have the American taxpayer budget.
And we spend, you know, $75 billion.
At least that's what it was the last secret budget that I saw.
It's probably $110, $120 billion a year now.
And a huge amount goes into defensive hacking skills as well.
But you have had hacking into power centers when you've had the Pandora papers and the Panama papers showing how the extremely wealthy keep their money and evade taxes.
You've had, obviously, you know, hacks into the Democratic National Committee and Hillary Clinton's campaign.
So I'm not, I don't think there's some secret council where the head of JP Morgan and the head of BlackRock and the head of Raytheon meet at some sort of table sitting around like this and have minutes to the meetings and then keep them secret.
And the question is, why don't they leak?
It is a good question to ask.
Why do we not know more about those kinds of power centers?
And I think the reason is because the people whose responsibility would be to do that kind of digging is not the U.S. government who's working for those institutions.
It would be media corporations.
People like me, investigative journalists, are supposed to be aimed at those power centers.
And what we have instead is a media that is not aimed at power centers, but is aimed at working for those power centers as well.
So who is it that's going to kind of do that sort of digging?
We do know enough.
We have gotten enough of a glimpse into how a lot of this works.
But we have a media that's designed to obscure it, to distract from it, that's not interested in it, to minimize it, to disparage it.
Look at what they did with the Twitter files.
You know, we got this, because of Elon Musk opening up the corporate files of Twitter, we got this extraordinary insight into this channel between the CIA, FBI, DHS on the one hand, and big tech on the other.
And immediately, the employees of the largest media corporations swooped in like they were programmed and reading from the same script.
And they all said, this is a nothing burger.
Ignore this.
There's nothing here of any interest.
And when you have the media that corralled and that controlled, even when you do get those glimpses, you can minimize and neutralize them quickly.
So go with that.
Go with Twitter files.
I do want to come back to ESG, but since you said Twitter files, I think that's a perfect transition to one of the questions at for you.
Do you think there's a concern with guys like a Vivek or a Trump getting back in there?
I'm not quite sure about DeSantis, whether he would do this or not, because I think DeSantis would still play within the rules.
Do you think a Vivek or a Trump getting in there, there's a possibility, just like there's Twitter files, for there to be CIA files, for there to be FBI files, for there to be, you know, where they're sharing, here's what the FBI did, here's what the CIA did.
Holy shit, drop the bomb.
Or do you think these guys are going to get in and they're going to say, I'm going to do this and I'm going to do that?
And then they get in, they say, listen, man, look, you can do CIA files if you want.
No problem.
You do FBI files.
For the rest of history, U.S. will not have credibility with the world.
You will be known as the president that destroyed America.
Do you want that as a legacy?
So, one, do you think there is that fear?
Two, do you think even if that happens, the people of power are like, listen, we know exactly what to tell that guy.
We know the script to make sure he doesn't continue and pursue the CI and FBI files.
You know what I'm asking?
Yeah, absolutely.
Like, here's for me the biggest dilemma, which is if you have a career politician, people have been around Washington forever.
It's almost certain they're corrupted.
Like, you cannot trust anything that they say.
They're going to go in and they're going to serve the establishment.
They've been doing that for decades to the point they've internalized the ideology no matter what it is they're saying.
Then, so then you have, okay, well, let's get outsiders.
So, that was the appeal of Trump, right?
That was Trump's appeal was: I've never worked inside of this, this, this, inside of government before.
They cannot control me.
It was even part of Obama's appeal.
He had been Washington for like six seconds.
You know, he'd been a senator for two years when he announced that he was running for president.
I watched Obama, who I genuinely believe had convictions in the things he was saying about uprooting the more extreme elements of the war on terror, the parts that were actually infringing the civil liberties of Americans.
And then, the minute he gets into office, he starts extending and protecting and even expanding a lot of those very same powers he promised to uproot.
Because these guys in the security state, they're around.
You vote for whoever you want.
Those politicians come and leave.
They leave the White House.
They're there.
They're always there.
They know how to control presidents.
They know how to control the political process.
And so the same thing happened with Trump.
So often, the things that Trump was saying, the things he really meant, had no translation into Trump administration policy.
Trump was saying it's idiotic to have troops in Syria.
Trump never got troops out of Syria, even though he often ordered them out.
There were articles celebrating this in the Wall Street Journal that people in the military would find ways to thwart his orders.
Same thing.
I'm not going to arm Ukraine and risk provocations with Russia.
I want to work with Russia.
I'm not going to arm Ukraine.
2017, the Washington Post headline, Trump administration starts sending lethal arms to Russia.
They knew how to run circles around Trump in part because he didn't have a good sense of how Washington works.
And I think the same thing would be with VEC.
The other thing is they come in, you know, the guys with the medals on their chest and they say, okay, look, I know these are the things you were thinking and saying before you got here, but now I'm going to show you the blood that you're going to have on your hands if you actually start doing these things.
That's right.
So go be an advisor for Trump or Vivek.
You're an advisor for Trump or Vivek, okay?
And it's a real advisor, not just like, hey, let's go find a way to win the election.
And then listen, I'm a president.
Now, who cares?
You know, we're going to do what we're going to do.
You're an advisor and you say, hey, President Trump, look what they did behind your back in 2017.
Look what they did behind your back with Ukraine.
You look what they did behind your back with this.
They don't respect you.
They did whatever.
They just kind of looked at you and said, this guy's nobody.
He's going to be gone in four years anyway.
So now, if you truly, President Trump, if you truly, Vivek, if you truly, whoever it is, RFK, if you truly want to do this, here's the five things you need to do.
What would be those five things you would say they need to do for that not to happen where they're not undermining and overlapping their leadership?
I mean, I think the reason why what I mentioned earlier that Vivek said that appealed to me so much when he said, like, look, the only war I'm interested in waging is a war on that fourth branch of government is precisely because he's not saying, I'm not going to listen to them.
He's not saying, I think they need to be neutralized.
He's saying a war needs to be waged on them.
And the question becomes: you know, my clip that I think is, if I had to show one clip of a television interview to, say, a civic student to teach them about how the United States actually works, it was that time when Chuck Schumer went on with Rachel Maddow shortly before Trump was inaugurated when he was having that Twitter war with the CIA and accidentally spilled the truth, which was, you know, Schumer said Trump's being incredibly stupid.
Everyone in Washington knows that if you mess with the CIA, they have six different ways to sunday to get back at you.
How is that not an instant scandal that the CIA has the power to destroy an elected president?
That is the reality, though.
And so it isn't enough just to rhetorically say the CIA is a bad organization.
The CIA is something that you need an actual plan to neutralize them.
John Kennedy had his head blown off by who knows who, but it certainly came at the time that he was saying things like, I'm withdrawing all advisors from Vietnam after he fired the most powerful person in all of Washington, which was Dulles, who had run the CIA after the failed Bay of Pigs invasion.
He never forgot that.
And that became a lesson to a lot of people that if you want to challenge the CIA, if you want to start resisting even minimally, that's the lesson that you should learn.
I have a Trump question for you.
Are we going to the Trump topic?
No, no, I want to stay on topic right here with this.
So I think we can all agree if Joe Biden gets re-elected.
It's a status quo.
Nothing changes.
It's just everything that we talked about.
Even Vivek, who you said you just interviewed and Pat recently did a town hall with, who I think is an absolute beast.
He's called for a revolution.
He's going after the Ford State.
I think the likelihood of Vivek being the candidate is very slim.
I think he's great.
He's a beast.
I just don't see it happening, especially while Trump is the guy.
So let's go to Trump for a second.
In 2016, Trump would always say things, I hire the best.
I know the best.
I have the best words.
I have the best ideas.
He's the best and best of best.
I'm going to drain the swamp.
I'm going to drain the swamp, everything with that.
But what we realized was that there's all these people in power that were basically essentially what you said, not so fast, President Trump.
Now, if you do this, you do this.
Now that he knows exactly how the swamp works and all these agencies work, and now that's a different, there's a different Trump coming in.
He's coming in with actual experience and basically like, you guys screwed me the first time.
Well, and like we're trying to put him in prison, right?
So presumably he's like, yes.
Let's say he gets re-elected.
Let's say he's the guy now and people are like, well, you know, Mr. President, here's what you need to do.
He's going to be like, not so fast.
What do you think Trump will do differently this time?
That's the $10 million question for me that I have because what actually happened was, I mean, Trump came in spitting scorn for neoconservatism and for the Bush Cheeny operatives who, you know, ran the country into the ground with these wars, even with, you know, Steve Bannon's vision of what the Trump presidency was going to look like at the beginning.
And imagine if it had happened was, you know, he wanted him to come in, do a bipartisan infrastructure deal with the Democrats where you renew and rejuvenate America's infrastructure, create jobs, do that as a bipartisan president, shoot up your popularity, even raise taxes on the wealthy symbolically.
And then you could say you're using that money to build the wall.
So you combine this sort of, you know, putting America back to work, domestic priorities combined with the security at the border that people wanted.
Instead, Jared Kushner won out of that power battle.
Steve Bannon was gone in six months.
Jared Kushner had a much different ideology than Steve Bannon did.
And that ended up governing the Trump presidency.
Trump now says he understands the mistakes he made.
The problem I have, the question that I have is the reason those mistakes happened, and that was by far Trump's worst flaw, was, you know, he put Mike Pompeo, who is a classic neocon, first in charge of the CIA and then letting him run the State Department.
So many other, Nikki Haley, we just heard Nikki Haley espousing, you know, Mitt Romney foreign policy from 2010.
He had her as UN Bolton.
Hello.
Yeah, at least jump with John Bolton.
You know, Trump's excuses, I wanted a maniac at my side as a credible threat to people.
But okay.
The problem is, is that everyone knows that Trump has a very fragile ego and that he's easily manipulated by flattering him.
And whoever flatters him is somebody he believes is on their side.
So you get smart people like Mark Pompeo is very smart.
And he comes and says, Mr. President, you've convinced me this ideology has gone wrong.
I'm now more of an America firster.
I think you're the one to be the leader.
And suddenly he's running the CIA.
The question I have is, is Trump still vulnerable to that kind of manipulation?
What I saw in Brazil, you know, where the reporting that I did that you guys started off with, that fun little clip of the right hook.
My restrained right hook, which would have been much better had I not been restrained, was, you know, we did reporting that had originally put, you know, the corruption probe had originally put the two-term president Lua Da Silva in prison.
One of the most popular political figures, you know, a giant on the international stage, they put him in prison for 18 months and our reporting proved that the process was filled with corruption.
And he got out of prison, was able to run again, and now he's the president.
And he's filled with vengeance and anger.
I mean, he wants to destroy the people.
Imagine you're actually in a prison cell.
When someone's trying to put you in prison, that makes a big difference in terms of how you're starting to think about your political enemies.
So they're trying to put Trump in prison.
My hope is that that really makes him understand that you cannot have enemies inside of your government, that that character flaw that they so successfully manipulated has to be overwhelmed by the anger that he has to feel over this kind of persecution.
Whether he really learned that lesson, whether he's capable of it, whether he's going to be surrounded by people who help him, I have a lot of doubts about it.
All I can have is hope because I do think that chances that anyone besides Trump will be the GOP nominee is small.
How are you going to wrench those people away from Trump, especially with this persecution that they continue to impose and drive Republican voters closer to Trump?
So if he's the only chance to remove Biden, the question really becomes, can Trump this time not just talk about that vision, but implement it?
And that question you're asking is the only one that matters.
And I don't know the answer to that.
And Glenn, so you're literally fearless reporting 2013 with Snowden and everything.
You risked everything, your name, your career.
You know, people in your life were getting detained for terrorism, all that stuff.
You knew it.
You risked it.
You took the challenge and you did it to wake everybody up to what the system was doing to us, right?
And I thank you for it.
In regards to Trump, do you feel his motives to be the president are rooted in the same ideology that you had?
Like meaning he said, which he says all the time, he's been saying it since the 90s.
I love America.
I love the people.
I'm trying to help us.
Do you think that's like, did he know that he was going to get into this?
Or was it like a surprise to him, like how really bad it was and how they were going to come after him?
I mean, it's never happened before in history that a president has gotten out of office and then been prosecuted for anything.
I don't think he could possibly have anticipated the level of persecution to which he would be subjected.
I think it's come as a surprise.
But I also think that, and I know from my own experience, having gone through it, you know, I couldn't leave Brazil for a year.
Eric Holder's Justice Department was telling my lawyers and we got, you know, the Guardian got the best possible lawyers, the kind who can pick up the phone and get Eric Holder on the phone.
If he leaves Brazil, there's a good chance he's going to be arrested.
We're not giving him any guarantees.
As you say, my husband got detained in the United Kingdom with threats of a terrorism prosecution simply because of his association with me.
They were doing a lot of stuff.
And when you see the willingness, their willingness to just cross every line the minute they get a little bit threatened, your resolve increases.
You understand they need even more confrontation than you originally began by believing they did.
If you listen to Trump's rhetoric, it's escalating in terms of its tone, in terms of its aggression against globalists, against neocons, against the people he understands are his enemies.
And I know, again, I hope that that is going to have the kind of effect that I see it having on, for example, President Lula, who is now taking vengeance one after the next, kind of like that character in the Game of Thrones who had her list of the small one.
Yeah, the small daughter who had her list of, you know, I hope Trump has that kind of a list because that would do the country a lot of good if he did.
Those are the people that need to be destroyed.
There needs to be this very, I want to say violent in a metaphorical sense, conflict between these power centers on the one hand and the, and Trump, who actually threatened them for the first time in decades on the other.
And it was IR Stark, the little one.
Iron Stark.
And then I thought about it, and this is, it's just a, it's not even a question.
It's, no, I could see how these Trump supporters, these MAGAs that they like how pissed off and now, because they see it and they know what he's doing to actually help.
And he's just vilifying.
He's getting mugshots in the history of our life.
You never would have thought you turn on the news and you see a president of the United States getting a mugshot.
Yeah, look, I actually wrote a book in 2011 arguing that this idea that former presidents or high-ranking political officials are exempt from the rule of law is a huge mistake.
I thought the pardon of President Nixon by Gerald Ford is the thing that set this framework in place that the country can't handle prosecuting former presidents.
I think, and so if this were the case where we're finally abandoning this idea as a principle, I'd be cheering it.
That's not what's going on.
It's a one-time only exemption for Trump, whose real crime is that he wandered way outside of the boundaries of what has been set for political leaders.
He questioned the most taboo subjects of the U.S. security state from why do we still need NATO to why are we doing regime change wars to why do we have to treat Russia as an enemy?
And when you start doing that, really messing with their core pieties, they're showing now what they're willing to do.
Big time.
Glenn, so let's let while we're on this topic before we go into the mugshot, there's a lot of people, you know, New York Times 2017, I don't know when it was, 2017, New York Times came out and did an article saying, or no, 2020 that came out.
USA Today was 2017 about Obama's surveillance on Trump and they were kind of monitoring what he was doing.
And Obama administration secretly launched a surveillance operation on Trump campaign.
This is New York Times and they say, well, it's misleading, not necessarily happened.
They're kind of trying to protect Obama.
But then USA Today in 2017, if you type in the same thing, Rob, you'll see an article about USA Today in 2017, way before New York Times did it.
The article for USA Today says, was Obama administration illegal spying worse than Watergate?
Okay, so this is 2017, May 30th.
From your investigation into stuff like this, I mean, this is right up your alley.
What was the biggest difference between what Nixon did versus what Obama did?
They're not comparable in the sense that the so, and it's just such an example of the extent to which we're talking about what establishment power centers are doing to Trump.
What the media has been willing to do in the name of stopping Trump is the thing that sickens and offends me the most.
Maybe because I actually, it's a profession I thought I was joining and, you know, really still do believe in the virtues of it when it's done correctly.
But the idea that the Obama administration was first spying on the Trump campaign and people associated with him, and then secondly, abusing the powers of the FBI and the Justice Department in order to help Hillary Clinton win was widely mocked and vilified by almost the entire media as some sort of obvious lie and conspiracy.
It turns out all you have to do is look at the facts.
The FBI got caught spying on Carter Page, who was a foreign policy advisor to the Trump campaign in 2016.
And they didn't just get caught spying on him.
In order to spy on him, they went to the Pfizer court and they filled out affidavits filled with lies to justify the spying to the point where the FBI lawyer who did it pled guilty to crimes because lying to the Pfizer court is a crime.
That alone, the fact that the FBI under Obama got caught spying on an American citizen who was an advisor to the Trump campaign based on the lies that the FBI told to justify that spying ought to have been one of the biggest political scandals in our nation's history.
But then you add on to that the fact that we absolutely now know that the entire Russiagate scandal, obviously using scare quotes for it, we just got a report from the Durham report that lays it out in 350 pages.
They never had anywhere near a sufficient predicate even to open that investigation.
The investigation that dominated our politics from the mid-2016 when Hillary Clinton first did a McCarthy nefarious campaign ad, who is what is this secret dark relationship between Trump and Moscow,
all the way through 2018 when the Mueller investigation closed while arresting and convicting not a single American on the core crime of colluding with the Trump campaign and with the Russians and explicitly saying there's no evidence to support the conspiracy theory that the media pushed as the top political story for three years.
There was never any legal predicate for the FBI even to open that investigation, said one of the most respected prosecutors, federal prosecutors in the country.
Again, this is what I was saying earlier with their ability to just minimize and dismiss stories away.
Of course that's bigger than Watergate.
Watergate was a low-level break-in of the Democratic Party headquarters that produced very little of value.
We're talking here about the abuse at the highest levels of FBI with agents who are saying in text to one another, we have to do everything to stop Donald Trump.
And then having those exact same agents open an investigation for which there was never any legal basis.
And it didn't just have, it wasn't just an investigation that went nowhere.
It dominated our politics for three years.
RussiaGate was the number one story used to sabotage first the Trump campaign and then the Trump presidency.
That came from the U.S. security state that saw Donald Trump as an enemy and decided to abuse its core powers in order to sabotage a candidate that they overtly disliked.
Why is that not a scandal of the highest proportion?
Why isn't it?
Because we have a media.
The media, first of all, was an active participant in it.
The way that it happened was the CIA and the FBI every day would call the New York Times and the Washington Post and feed them the leaks, the anonymous evidence-free leaks that became the foundational assertions of RussiaGate.
So the media participated, they gave themselves Pulitzers for it.
There are New York Times and Washington Post reporters with shelves like these with Pulitzers sitting on them for a story that turned out to be a complete fraud.
It came from the bowels of the U.S. security state.
And so the media, it's the same thing as right before the 2020 election, the entire media united to say that the documents from which the reporting was done based on the Hunter Biden laptop was Russian disinformation.
Everyone in the world knows now that this is a lie.
Every media outlet with Biden safely elected was able to verify the authenticity of those documents.
There's no question about the provenance of those documents.
Those came from Hunter Biden's laptop.
Russia had nothing to do with it.
And not a single media outlet, not one, that spread those lies.
This is Russian disinformation over and over in the days and weeks before people went to vote.
Went back and retracted it, apologized for it, let alone acknowledge the scope of that scandal.
So how can the media, active participants in the Russia gate fraud, possibly do anything other than try and bury and obscure the fact that this happened?
It's like asking bank robbers who planned the bank robbery and then went and implement it to expose it to the world and talk about how threatening it was.
Of course, they're not going to do that.
They're doing the opposite.
And that, to me, is the most dangerous aspect of this is in the minds of American elites, including the ones who work at the largest media corporations, in their minds, and they really do believe this.
The fact that Donald Trump to them is a Hitler-like figure who is an existential threat to all things decent in American democracy means that everything and anything they do is justifiable morally, including lying, including censoring, including abandoning the journalistic cause.
That's an explicit mindset that they have.
I want to stay on this, but I want to say what Rachel Maddow said about you.
This is what Rachel Maddow from MSNBC said about you this time.
Quite a while ago.
Hang on a second.
Describing you during your salon tenure, the American left's most fearless political commentator.
Again, for somebody watching this, they're going to say, well, this guy's a pro-Trump guy.
He's a Republican.
He's a conservative.
He's probably hardcore this.
Again, let me say this, folks.
Rachel Maddow, if you know who she is, MSNBC, the American left's most fearless political commentator.
So you're saying what Obama did to go after Trump is way worse than Obama gave what they did, right?
Don Watergate.
Here's a question for you.
For the audience, maybe that doesn't closely follow everything and opinions that you have.
What do you think about President Donald Trump?
I think if you look at, I think Donald Trump is probably the most transformational political figure in the last, let's say, six or seven decades of American political life.
Maybe you can compare it to Toronto Reagan in terms of the transformational effect and to FDR.
I just mean that neutrally.
Transformational can be good or for bad.
Sure.
And it was so, that's what fascinated me so much about that presidential debate without Trump is you kind of got a glimpse, a reminder of what the Republican Party was prior to Donald Trump.
Just kind of tired, stale, elite serving orthodoxy.
That's why all these people are three.
They're all very smart people.
They all have on paper the perfect record to run for president.
And in their own party, nobody likes them.
They have three because they espouse an ideology that the Republican Party in 2009 believed in and in 2013 believed in.
And now in 2023, don't believe in at all.
And that's because Donald Trump gave them that space to start to understand why that ideology was so misguided and against their interest.
Unpack that, please.
I don't want to, first of all, I want to say that if you go back and look, what Trump did is not go into a party and completely change a party on his own.
The signs were there.
The signs to me first started appearing with the ability of Ron Paul to run a presidential campaign in 2008 and 2012.
Ron Paul probably, to me, is the single most honest politician in a long time, someone of that stature, meaning just he says what he believes and won't change a word of it for political gain.
He went into places like Iowa and South Carolina, the reddest districts within those states, with a message that was heretical for Republican Party politics, which was the war in Iraq was a moral mistake, that we shouldn't have military bases all over the world.
Dominating the world through military force is something that is not in your interest.
It's serving the interest of a tiny elite.
These are people who were, you know, kind of bred on the idea that the war on terror and the war in Iraq were the most patriotic things possible.
And he found this huge part of the Republican electorate for which those sorts of things resonated.
And it wasn't only that.
He had a lot of other kind of, you know, anti-Orthodox views on economic policy as well.
That obviously there was a sense that he was tapping into, which made his presidential campaign infinitely more successful than people thought.
I think he came in second in the Iowa caucus, if I remember correctly, in 2008 or 2012.
And so the stirrings were already there, that there was this kind of pop and neocons as well before Trump started seeing it as well.
They were already planning to back Hillary Clinton, knowing that the best vessel for neoconservative foreign policy was Hillary Clinton and not whoever the Republican Party was about to nominate, well before Trump ever happened.
Trump saw that.
He understood that.
He gave voice to it.
And he did two things.
One is because he's such a talented, just kind of communicator, right?
Like a communicator to the ordinary person.
It's what he's been doing his whole life.
He was a TV star.
I remember, you know, when I lived in New York in the 90s, he prided himself on the fact that his fame came not from the Manhattan Elite, but from sort of the construction workers who built his buildings.
That was always something he prided himself on.
He had that kind of outer borough resentment.
So he's always been a great communicator.
He's been able, he was able to take that message that Ron Paul, who was not a great communicator, had already proven there was a base for and expand it.
But then what happened as well is once Trump started attacking the CIA and attacking the FBI and laying bare how politics actually works, he went to those debates.
And I saw this.
I'm sure you saw it.
That entire middle section behind which the right behind the Fox microphones are reserved for the Republican National Committee and their big donors.
That's what that section is for.
That's the reaction you're hearing.
Trump would get booed attacking Jeb Bush.
And Trump would say, these are all the lobbyists.
This is the swamp.
Right?
He gave, he shined a light on the things you're not supposed to shine a light on in terms of how politics actually works.
And so once Republican voters started seeing, wow, the CIA is really corrupt, the FBI is willing to abuse their power, these agencies that Republican voters have long been taught to revere, they began seeing them in a different light.
And now, if you want to go into Republican politics like Nikki Haley does or Chris Kersey does or Tim Scott or whomever or Mike Pence and say, we need to back the Pentagon and its arming of Ukraine, we need to go and give the CIA greater authorities or the FBI greater authorities.
You're going to provoke a revulsion among Republican voters.
And that's because Trump took what had been kind of the percolating seeds of this sentiment and turned it into the dominant governing orthodoxy of the Republican Party, which is why I haven't changed a single view of mine since Rachel Maddow said that.
What has changed is the nature of the two political parties.
There's a reason Bill Crystal is a Democrat and other neoconservatives are Democrats and why Democrats overwhelmingly now revere those security state agencies.
It's because the Democratic Party has transformed into the party of militarism and imperialism and corporatism.
And the only resistance that you get to any of this is in the populist wing, the populist right wing of the Republican Party.
That's not my fault.
I didn't cause that.
I'm just observing it.
That's pretty wild.
So to think, you know, by the way, this happens politically when sometimes they shift.
And you're seeing that now, more people where they say, you know, I didn't change how I view things.
You change, right?
Bill Morris talked about a lot of other people are talking about it.
But let's go into the mugshot, Rob, if you want to put the picture up.
So yesterday, 7:30 gets rained.
You know, he goes through and he gets this picture of the mugshot, which I'm sure he thought about this on how he was going to pose for the picture.
Yeah.
He probably in front of mirror poses.
How do I want the mugshot to be?
Because this, by the way, you have to think about it.
This is going to last hundreds of years.
This is permanent, right?
When you think about Adam send the list of the greatest mugshots of all time, Rob, if you want to pull this up.
Yeah, this is at the top now.
This is, there's a lot of them if you go through these.
I think they have Bill Gates as number one.
If you go on this one, keep going down, keep going down, keep going down.
There's some right there.
You got Bill Gates.
You got Frank Sinatra.
Keep going.
You got Jay-Z.
You got MNM.
You got Nick Nolte to the left.
You got Jeremy Meeks, who women went crazy over.
You got David Bowie.
You got Keanu Reeves.
Keep going, keep going, keep going.
Anybody else?
Yeah, James Brown.
Oh, James Brown does not look good.
Robert Downey Jr. looks good.
He looks like Nick Nolte.
Elvis is going to be on this list, no doubt.
Yeah.
So when you look at this, when you look at Bieber, Pacino, Elvis, there's MLK.
Yeah.
He's got to be at the top of the list.
I mean, this is, listen, this is marketing at its highest level.
Remember when we went to Rogan's set?
Yeah.
And he had all the pictures of famous mugshots.
Just insert Trump's mugshot right into the top three top five.
And Glenn, do you see?
And Pat, for all you guys, look at like, okay, yeah, his hair.
He probably had a stylus there.
Look at that face of, look at who, yo, who do you think he's thinking?
Like, you know what's going on in that head?
I'm going to kill everybody.
I'm going to go after, like, now, Pat, that face and the way he spoke after.
It's his first tweet.
His first tweet since getting suspended.
Yeah.
Go on Twitter and post the picture.
His first, it's almost as if he wanted, he wanted that mugshot.
Oh, my God.
Give me the mugshot.
This is going to help me get elected.
And the left is thinking we're going to destroy him with his mugshot.
I wouldn't be surprised if his next book's going to be that mugshot.
Oh, no doubt.
And didn't Elon retweet this?
What did he say?
What did Elon say?
Go to Elon real quick when he retweeted.
Glenn, while he's looking, do you so Glenn, do you think the left is always up to something?
And just going back really fast, there's no accountability.
Everything that you said was spot on about the spying and Obama and Hillary, no accountability.
So that makes one think that the left runs all of the DOJ and everything, which I feel like there's one or two Republicans in there.
Is this their ploy to get him?
It's obviously not working.
Is this it?
Or do they have something else up their sleeves for 2024?
Well, I think, well, first of all, it is interesting the choice he made because there have been now people who have been taking mugshots where they're famous and they know it's going to be public and they smile.
They try to make it like any other.
He had that option.
I think he very purposely wanted to convey this is not something to laugh at.
This is not something that's cute.
This is not something that's fun.
This is something that is a grave attack, not just on me, but on all of you.
And this requires defiance and anger and rage, which I think it does.
This is an extraordinary attempt to take the oppositional leader in the United States.
Imagine we looked at any other country doing this.
And we said, oh, here's the person leading all public opinion polls, by far the most likely person to challenge the current government, leading in poll in many polls to become the next president.
And now that same government is prosecuting that person and not for traditional crimes of murder or kidnapping or extortion or bribery, but for crimes that require this kind of very dubious interpretation, this pioneering use of the law.
So I think that anger that he's conveying there was the right choice because it isn't something to be frivolous about.
And I think that that was something that he wants his supporters to understand.
But yeah, I think, you know, you look at the way in which these legal processes are being abused, and even just the cynicism of it.
So the first case was brought by a liberal district attorney where they want to put him on trial in Manhattan, a place that 90 to 10 voted for Joe Biden.
This one will be in Atlanta, presumably, unless he moves it to federal court.
And then there's just the Fulton County, but it's still a very Democratic place.
And then obviously the one in Washington as well with the January 6th indictment under Jack Smith, which is filled with Democrats as well.
The only exception is the Mar-a-Laga one that's a little bit more balanced.
But they're not even pretending that they want this to be a fair process.
You know, there is this theory, and I think it's very conspiratorial and I don't think it's true, that Democrats want to run against Trump.
They know that these kinds of indictments will solidify his ability to get the nomination more easily, driving Republican voters into his arms.
That's certainly the effect of it.
I'm not sure that's the intent.
I don't think it's the intent.
I think the intent is they want blood.
And the reason they want blood is because basically Donald Trump vandalized everything they regard as sacred about American politics.
And every power center views it that way.
Liberal Democrats view it that way.
It's a bloodthirsty movement.
Do you know how often liberal politics now is about very little other than demanding the censorship of your political enemies or the imprisonment of your political enemies?
There's no positive policy constructive aspect to it.
They want everybody silenced and deplatformed or imprisoned.
Yeah, and they label you.
And you're racist.
Once they say you're racist, that's it.
Well, it's all you're racist.
It's all emotion at this point.
Like logic is out the window.
Being stoic is out the window.
Any sort of like, hey, this is how things go.
It's people on the right are freaking pissed because they see what the hell's going on here.
And in many cases, rightfully so, especially what you highlighted with the Russia collusion and all that and everything that you've done with the reporting.
People are pissed.
This is why they're coalescing around Trump and they're basically just anointing him as that.
But on the left, they just, as you said, they want blood.
It's just an emotional Trump derangement syndrome.
Everything is going to be a good thing.
I think what began as a cynical political script turned into a true belief on the part of most of American liberalism, which is the idea that Trump really is a Hitler-like figure, that his movement is this fascist white nationalist dictatorship he's seeking to impose.
And if you begin with that premise, a lot of what follows then makes sense.
But the way it's so dangerous is if you look even now with the war in Ukraine, the last poll is 55 to 45 Americans want no more money going to Ukraine.
The only reason it's that close is because 75%, 75%, by far the biggest demographic group of self-identified liberal Democrats want there to be endless and infinite support for the Ukrainian cause by the United States.
Why?
Are they suddenly so pro-war?
No, it's because even there, they've been feeding on this anti-Russian hatred.
The idea, the most cataclysmic event in the life of American liberals was the 2016 election where Donald Trump won and Hillary Clinton lost.
It was psychologically cataclysmic.
There were all sorts of reports by psychologists about mental health episodes and neuroses and anxiety disorders that came from it.
And the reason they want that war is because they want to destroy Russia.
That's the level of kind of visceral hatred politically on which they're feeding that they want a war to continue for no reason other than they want to destroy a country for no reason other than the fact that they blame that country for Donald Trump's election.
Isn't it all just come down to vindication and vindictiveness?
Whether it's people on the left being like, we got to get back for the Russia thing or even this.
You talked about the Lula Jair Bolsonaro about you're concerned about him being vindictive, which he sort of is.
You know, that's not the face of someone who's ready to go lightly.
Yeah.
Can you blame him?
It's a pretty dangerous political climate where people are operating on their most primal, tribal, and visceral impulses.
And those have been deliberately stoked and cultivated primarily by the media for a lot of self-interested reasons.
And when you put that kind of cauldron of just human intensity and emotion pitted one another against the other, only bad things can happen from that.
So let's talk about the debate.
Let's go through the debate.
If you don't mind, just take the leading.
Run us through what you thought the debate was.
How was it?
Who performed?
You know, I know you kind of commented on Nikki Haley and Vivek and all this stuff.
You had Vivek on your show right after the debate.
How did you think the debate went?
The numbers, just to kind of give the numbers for people that are watching this, the numbers came in on how many views it got.
Debate ratings, only 12.8 million people watched it, 13 million less than Donald Trump's debut in 2015.
Many will say a big part of that is because Trump and Tucker took a lot of views away when they did that Twitter X show together, Tucker X show together.
But what was your feeling about the debate?
We were right next to each other, so we saw the same thing.
Yeah, so if you look at all the punditry heading into that debate, the conventional assertion was that everybody was going to attack Governor DeSantis for the obvious reason that he's been depicted and held up forever as the only alternative to Trump.
So if you're looking to move up in the polls and you believe the notion that DeSantis is the real viable alternative to Trump, you obviously want to take DeSantis down in order to replace him.
None of that happened.
I don't think DeSantis got attacked a single time.
Not one person attacked.
He was essentially ignored.
He did a perfectly fine job.
He's very, I think he's a very skilled speaker.
He has a good message, all of that.
Somehow, when you put it all together, the sum is less than its parts.
But I found it so notable that all of the attention instead got devoted to Vivek.
Oh, yeah.
Why?
Why did they all go up there and decide to attack Vivek?
Part of it, I think, is a genuine resentment.
So imagine, you know, you spent your career.
You're like the governor.
You've got elected to the Senate.
You're the ambassador to the UN.
You're the vice president of the United States.
And some guy comes along that four months ago, no Americans heard of.
No one knew who he was.
He's incredibly self-confident.
Let's just use the positive sense of that term.
You can call him kind of arrogant.
He probably comes off that way to people who dislike him.
He has an enormous amount of self-belief, and he's ahead of them all in the polls.
That's why he was in that center position right next to DeSantis.
Well, Nikki Haley and Tim Scott and Chris Christie are all.
The fence is off.
Yeah.
So a lot of it is obviously just like genuine personal resentment and anger, like there was toward Trump.
And they also have no relationship with him whatsoever.
Exactly, which is like he's new on the scene.
And for that reason, he has no interest in currying any kind of personal favor.
He loved the fact that they were attacking him.
But I don't think it's just that.
These are very professional politicians.
They spend a lot of money on consultants.
They're looking to go up onto that stage and perform strategically.
They're not just there to vent whoever, you know, whatever negative emotions they have.
Obviously, there are things going on inside the polls.
We see them a little bit publicly, but internally, and I've definitely heard this from lots of different people connected to various different campaigns, is that he is rising in the ways that matter much more precipitously than even is evident and visible in these polls.
In the sense that people who are more politically engaged are starting to like him, which is one of the key metrics because that then filters down to the people who are less engaged.
They see him, obviously, as a greater threat to be the alternative to Trump than they even see Governor DeSantis as being.
And that is amazing.
And I think that what that shows is the transformational aspect we were talking about with Donald Trump.
By far, the person most closely aligned with Donald Trump ideologically is Vivek.
And DeSantis is trying.
I mean, DeSantis understands that there's no way to get that nomination if he's going to alienate the ideology that Trump has made the predominant ideology in the Republican Party.
But Vivek is not even diluting it at all.
So the fact that the only people who Republican voters seem to be willing to consider are the ones standing up and saying, I am an American first, America first, populist, nationalist.
And all of that comes with that.
I'm going to wage a war on the CIA and the FBI.
I want to defund the FBI.
I want to deconstruct the permanent administratives in Republican politics 10 years ago.
That would have gotten you destroyed if you had uttered that unintentionally.
Now the only way to succeed is by making it a centerpiece of your campaign, which he has done.
And the fact that kind of the one that even is most closely aligned with Trump ideologically is clearly starting to become the alternative to Trump shows how dominant that Trump ideology is within Republican Party politics.
Doesn't it come down to essentially what Pat's been talking about for months and months and months now is that the establishment versus the anti-establishment.
Like just to give a metaphor, I just thought of this.
Let's say there was a debate, but it was all the legacy media guys, right?
You got Anderson Cooper there.
You got Brett Baer there.
You've got David Muir.
You've just got Lester Holt.
Typical legacy media.
But all of a sudden, center stage is Patrick Ben David, host of the top-rated PBD podcast.
And they're like, who the hell is this guy?
They're going after some tall, skinny brown guy, whatever, with a weird last name.
Not exactly.
David.
But they're all like, who the fuck?
And he's winning because he's telling it like it is.
He's not exactly establishment and he's just giving it to you raw and real.
And that's essentially what Vivek is doing.
But that is the key.
I've heard you say this before.
I completely agree with you.
Even like that Rachel Maddow quote about, you know, my being the left's whatever.
Left and right, I'm not saying it doesn't matter.
It does matter.
There's still issues where it's a reliable indicator of where somebody falls.
But by far the more important metric is: do you regard American establishment institutions of authority as fundamentally trustworthy, reliable, and benevolent?
Or do you see them as deceitful, malignant, and entities that need to be destroyed?
That anti-pro-establishment dichotomy is by far the most important political framework for understanding where someone's politics is.
And both Vivek and Trump are clearly on the anti-establishment side of that.
And I don't think any of the other candidates on that stage, including Governor DeSantis, even though he makes gestures toward it because he has to, is not really a credible anti-establishment figure.
And I think the Republican polling is starting to reflect that.
The same reason why Bernie was a fan favorite of even people on the right in 2016, because he was not establishment.
Because the public distrust and the state of the world.
And why millions and millions of Americans twice voted for President Obama and then voted for Donald Trump, which makes no sense if you see the world through a left-right prism, obviously, but makes complete sense if you see it through an anti-establishment versus, because Obama's appeal, fraudulent though it was, was I'm this skinny guy with this weird last name who hasn't been in Washington and has no anti-Bush.
I'm not a Clinton.
And that was his appeal.
Right.
No, he was.
It was fraudulent.
Of course, that was, but at least he had a credible claim to present himself as that.
And you go back to Obama's 2008 campaign, and it was all about we're going to radically change Washington.
So, Glenn, break it all down.
If it's the Obama change narrative, it's the Bernie, all the millionaires and billionaires.
If it's the Trump, it's the Vivek.
All that put together, where is America at?
Where is the American populist movement at?
Because there's stuff on the left, there's stuff on the right.
People are just angry at what the hell's going on with the establishment.
What's the common denominator?
Well, there was a Time magazine article that I'm sure you guys have seen that was very long and unintentionally revealing that essentially said that there was the most extraordinary unified campaign on the part of establishment power centers to unite and coalesce in every single way imaginable to ensure that Biden beat Trump in 2020.
And obviously, the entire media was against Donald Trump.
He had every anti-incumbent obstacle, starting with COVID and the way that it destroyed businesses and shut down the United States.
And he still came extremely close to winning, even by the certified results, right?
Like even if you take the certified results at its face value, he was 44,000 votes away from changing three states.
And that shows you two things.
One, establishment power centers still do have a lot of power.
There are still a lot of people who trust the media, even though it's far less than it was even 10 years ago.
But when you add on to that, the financial power of Wall Street that backed Biden overwhelmingly, Silicon Valley that did the same, they still wield a lot of power, which is why they're the establishment.
And that's how they kind of pushed an adult Joe Biden over the finish line, barely, though.
And I think the reason why all these prosecutions are happening is because nobody is confident that Joe Biden is going to beat Donald Trump.
How can you?
So let's look at this here because I wanted to see what everybody was going to say, who the winner was.
Trump said Vivek was the winner of the debate for obvious reasons.
The Hill said Glenn Young, which is kind of interesting for them to say Glenn Young was, you know, the, hey, let's go get Glenn and Murdoch wants to go fund him.
From the no labels situation?
The Guardian said Trump, WAPO said DeSantis was the winner.
WAPO chose DeSantis as the winner.
If we're looking at, you know, with everything that's going on today, you think he's going to show up to the next debate, September 27th, and at the Ronald Reagan library, you think Trump's going to show up to that one?
Or you think he still doesn't have a reason to show up?
I think it's going to depend on how the poll, you know, to see if anyone actually gets a real boost from this debate, if DeSantis start.
I think there was a 538 poll that quickly polled who was the winner.
29% said DeSantis.
28% said Vivek.
There was that focus group assembled when CNN gets those like regular people.
It's like, you know, kind of people going on like some sort of excursion to go on a field trip to look at how the ordinary people live and they talk to them.
Vivek was the winner of that focus group.
I think 11 votes got for Vivek and I think seven or something for Haley.
So I think it's going to depend.
I mean, if Trump continues to maintain a 45 to 50 point lead, notwithstanding the fact that he's not showing up, my guess is he'll continue to not show up.
Why would he show up?
On the other hand, Trump likes that kind of debate.
He's extremely good at it.
And it's possible he'll do one or two just to do them.
But I just don't see anything happening at that debate that changes the fundamentals of the race.
I think all it's going to do is give Vivek a much bigger boost than probably anybody else.
If you look at the polling, Republicans like DeSantis.
It's not like they hate DeSantis.
They like DeSantis primarily because of the credit they give him for COVID and opening up Florida, but they're just not going to abandon Trump for anybody.
Can I show you this poll real quick?
Since you brought up DeSantis, I mean, look, Trump has only risen in the last six months, right?
He went from 50 to essentially 60.
Look at where DeSantis was.
This is in earlier this year, February, neck and neck with Trump.
Dude, he's about to go below Ramaswamy.
He's at 14%.
Vivek's at 10%.
To say that it's a disaster, what's going on in the DeSantis campaign would be an understatement.
He was neck and neck with Trump.
Trump and now he's happening.
That's why you're the expert.
Clearly, it's been a failed marketing experience.
I think one of them is that the MAGA, the fan base, the Trump supporters, they're literally pissed off like the majority of us are.
And they're like, you know what?
It's vengeance time and it's payback and he deserves it.
Because at the end of the day, Glenn, I was thinking about you because I was talking with Tom Ellsworth, who's under the weather.
We were talking about sometimes God picks people to step up and sometimes people answer the call, some people don't.
You were called upon to wake up the world and you risk everything, as I mentioned earlier.
Trump did as well.
He risked it all.
He didn't need to.
He's a billionaire.
He could sit in the middle.
He could be on a yacht for the rest of his life.
He picked it.
The real supporters, the real people behind Trump are like, you know what?
Look at all this shit that came out.
He was cheated like to the entire time.
Nobody's going to be held accountable.
We want him back in and we want him to serve these four years and go after everybody.
That's why I think, and like you said, I like DeSantis.
He's cool.
He's on the Pat, Pat, the whole team moved here.
I moved here because obviously Pat and him.
Great guy.
I would like to hang out with that.
That's fine.
I'll have a beer with him.
But that's just showing you that decline is the people, especially with all the indictments and all this garbage.
They're like, no, no, no.
I want the guy that was supposed to be in there, Glenn, and I want him back and I want him to go after everybody.
Yeah, I think people are seeing that if they don't vote for Trump, if they abandon Trump, what they're essentially doing is rewarding the maneuvering and the scheming of the people they most hate.
Yes.
And on top of that, I do think, and it's hard for me to get a sense of this because honestly, it has never mattered to me, but I know it does matter in like some sort of political sense is the reality is DeSantis is just not comfortable in those sort of settings where you're supposed to go and meet regular people.
And Trump is the best at that.
And I think also that Trump, DeSantis is just kind of awkward in those situations.
Big time.
And I think once people kind of took a look at that, they either lost confidence in his ability to win or they themselves got a little bit uncomfortable with him.
You know, Trump's ability to just seem like this kind of regular guy, which again comes from the fact that he has this outer borough resentment.
Um, despite growing up with a lot of wealth and obviously living his whole life as a billionaire, he just always maintained this that same.
I mean, Richard Nixon had that too, actually.
He hated the Eastern elite, he always felt like they were looking down their nose at him.
Trump very much has that.
DeSantis doesn't.
He spent his career at his, he started off his life at Harvard and Yale.
He was in the House.
He had a very kind of pro-establishment voting record while in the House.
And so I think people, the more they kind of get a sense for him, they do like him, but they're just like I said, the sum is somehow less than the parts.
It just doesn't all add up into something that is exciting anybody.
And I think that's a big part of that drop.
Exactly.
Can you go to that poll real quick?
Yeah.
And the fact that Glenn, that Trump, his personality, that type of stage presence, now that's why people are resonating with Vivek, because you saw DeSantis, it was the same thing.
It was that everything was written.
Vivek is out there talking trash and that energy.
Trump opened up the roof to now.
People are like, we want that.
We don't want that.
Vivek wrapped, you know, and he, and he, and he looked like reasonably uncringy doing that.
Exactly.
And, you know, I sat next to him, like, you know, as much as close as we're sitting.
He looks you in the eye.
He like has this.
Also, I don't know if you've seen, but like, he has a wife and kids.
Those kids are insanely adorable.
All of them.
His wife is very charming.
Like the whole thing just comes together.
And the way he speaks to you, he looks you right in the eye.
He's very comfortable in his own skin.
People really sense that.
That's like an authenticity that can't really be trained or taught.
He's got that skill, but it's just unfortunately he's a skinny brown kid with a weird last name, and it's just not going to happen.
Well, not this year.
No, not this year.
Not this year.
But his future looks like, yeah.
How much do you put into these national polls, especially from 538?
So if you just look at the popularity or unpopularity or favorable ratings for Biden and Trump, pretty similar.
So the disapprove is what Rob punched in on that?
53%.
Yep.
And approve is 41.
So the net disapproval rating is 12%, right?
So, and if you go to Trump, I think it's bad too.
It's even, I mean, it's worse.
Go to that.
So it's 53%.
So it's 12%.
Rob, if you scroll down, you can probably find the Trump or just go to the top.
I'm not a big poll liker.
Anyway, it's very similar to Trump.
I think Trump is actually even worse.
Rob, if you just go to the top, buddy, you'll find the there it is.
There it is to the right.
Trump.
So, all right.
So just go to the very end.
Yeah.
All right.
So it's what 17?
I don't believe that poll.
So 56.
Point is this.
There's about a 60.
It's like an aggregation of polls.
Yeah.
Exactly.
How much stock do you put into this?
Because ultimately, what this is telling me is, just like I've said before, October of 2024, it's going to be like breaking news, neck and neck.
Biden Trump.
It's going to be anybody's race.
You know, it's going to come down to 50,000 votes in, you know, Fulton County and in Pennsylvania and in certain parts of Detroit, what have you.
Where does this break?
And how much do you put in stock into these polls?
Well, I mean, the 20, it was very similar in 2016.
I mean, Trump and Hillary in this kind of question were two of the most unpopular political figures to run for the presidency in the modern era.
And yet Trump ended up winning by a pretty comfortable margin in terms of the Electoral College and the way that the states broke down, obviously not in the popular vote.
So a lot of this matters in a very kind of limited sense.
Who cares if 90% of people in California and New York hate Trump?
He's going to lose those states and it doesn't matter by what margin.
Also, if you have two unpopular candidates, at the end of the day, people are going to want to know when did that, how did my life, what was my life better under one or the other?
And it is just the case that prior to COVID, the Trump economy was doing extremely well.
The other issue is Trump was the first American president in decades not to involve the U.S. in a new war.
I know people don't want to hear that.
I know people, but that is an amazing fact to me that there has, you have to go back.
I mean, not even Jimmy Carter.
You have to like have a very broad definition in order to find one.
No new wars under Donald Trump.
And the economy was doing very well.
And I think at the end of the day, that's what people care about the most.
And that's what they should care about the most is their own self-interest and which of these presidents are going to make their lives better.
And I think, you know, they don't have to like Trump.
They have to like how the country was and how their lives were under a Trump.
Let me ask you a very specific question.
As since you're Rachel Maddow's most fearless political commentator from the left, why wouldn't you vote for Trump in 2024?
I mean, I just don't vote because I don't like attaching myself to a particular candidate because I feel like it clouds my ability to do my job as being a journalist.
I think it's important.
It's a kind of old traditional way of looking at things, but I think for me, it matters.
Like, I think once you vote for a candidate, you feel a responsibility to vindicate that even subconsciously.
You know, I live in Brazil as well.
That distance that I can maintain, you know, not just geographic, but just kind of like emotional and psychological.
I think it's a very important one to maintain my independence.
When's the last time you voted?
I haven't voted since I became a journalist for exactly that reason.
Do you think most journalists should just not vote and sit these things out and just be a journalist?
I mean, I think what most journalists should do is maintain a spirit of independence.
And like whether these people vote or not, because of that old, they're obviously Democrats.
And what amazes me is that there used to be a requirement that they pretend more.
Now they don't pretend anymore.
I don't mean the op-ed page people.
I mean like the actual reporters sit on Twitter all day explicitly endorsing Democratic National Committee talking points in a way that surprises me because it seems like these media outlets have an interest in maintaining that fraudulent appearance of neutrality.
They've given up on that.
That doesn't even exist anymore.
So I think more important than whether you vote is whether you work in all ways to maintain that kind of sense of independence.
Let's transition.
Let's transition into a couple other topics.
So both Vivek and RFK have said they'll pardon Julian Assange or pardon Snowden, and that's resonating with an audience.
Even Elon Musk, I think, did a poll, should Assange and Snowden be pardoned?
I think he did that last year.
I don't know the exact results on how many people, what the numbers were.
Rob, if you've seen the poll that Musk did, there you go.
80.5%, 3.3 million votes.
80.5% said yes.
19.5% said no.
Do you think they should pardon them?
And two, do you think that's really a big deal if one of those candidates does that?
I think it would have been.
I think it was incredibly disappointing to me personally that Trump didn't.
He got way closer to pardoning Snowden than Assange.
I thought it was a huge failure on the part of Trump not to do it.
The reason he didn't do it, and this is what the second impeachment was about without question, like why were they impeaching a president days away from leaving the White House?
The reason was because Republican senators were hanging over Trump's head.
There were several things they were fearful that he would do.
One was declassify a bunch of old CIA files, including the JFK assassination.
The other was pardoning Snowden Assange and Mitch McConnell and Marco Rubio and a bunch of them made very clear that if Trump did any of that, they were going to vote to impeach him, which would have rendered him ineligible or rather to convict him.
And that second impeachment trial was about keeping Trump under control on his way out.
I was extremely involved in the effort to try and get a pardon for both.
I knew how close he was to Snowden.
I knew he wanted to do it.
And I believe that's the reason he didn't.
That doesn't. exonerate Trump for me, but it I think explains it.
But I don't think there's a huge, this is not a huge issue for the majority of voters.
What symbolically that would do, though, is to say, we are not going to allow the secret part of the government to continue to commit crimes and to continue to hide the most important things they're doing from the public.
We're not supposed to have a part of the government that operates in secret where the only people who get punished are the ones who reveal the crimes and the people who commit the crimes are the ones who get shielded.
These two cases are different.
Snowden was somebody who actually worked inside the government.
He had an oath to maintain the secrecy of the documents he ended up revealing.
Julian Assange is not even an American citizen.
He has no obligations to the U.S. government of any kind.
He didn't take any secrets.
He was in the role of journalists.
He did something the New York Times and the Washington Post do every day, which is he got secrets from someone who worked inside the government, which is Chelsea Manning, and he published them.
And the fear of the Obama administration, they wanted to prosecute Assange, was that how do we justify prosecuting Assange while we don't prosecute the editors of the New York Times and The Guardian that worked with him to publish exactly the same documents?
The case, and the problem with the Assange prosecution, aside from the fact that it's a huge travesty in terms of press freedom, is that the United States has no ability to go around the world and give its lectures about press freedom in Russia, in Iran, in North Korea, in anywhere.
You go to any of those countries, an American journalist, and you say, why is it that you're imprisoning journalists who are dissidents in your country who criticize your government?
They will immediately say, are you kidding?
Who are you to give us that lecture?
You have arguably the most innovative and important journalist of his generation sitting in a prison cell going on a decade now, if you count the asylum he needed from Ecuador, who has done nothing wrong other than reveal war crimes on the part of the United States government.
So more important than the personal outcome of these two people, and Snowden has an okay life in Russia.
He's doing well.
He has an American wife who was his girlfriend from way before he became Edward Snowden.
They have two small children.
They have a beautiful family.
He's doing well economically.
He can't leave Russia, but he's free within Russia.
Assange is in a prison cell, in a high-security prison cell.
So beyond the kind of personal stake, which I care about a lot because they're both my friends and people I admire a lot, is the symbolic importance of saying the U.S. security state is not going to continue to have the power to destroy the lives of people who reveal their crimes.
That really is ultimately what it's about.
It would be an act of incredible courage for a president to stand up to the U.S. security state and say, we know you want these people destroyed and we're going to pardon them.
And that's going to show that transparency is now the new rule of how you're going to function.
So do you think Progozin was killed by Putin?
I don't know for sure.
Give me a split.
80, 20, 70, 30, yes.
70, 30.
Yes.
70, 30, yes.
Perfect.
So 70, 30, yes.
If the number with Putin is 12, you know, I think he's at 11 or 12 kill list, whatever he's got, that people he's taken out and a couple of them jumped off buildings.
Pretty intense.
65.
Billionaires just killing themselves, you know?
So one of them had a party in India or something like that, right?
So when you think about some of these things with him, and for The average skeptical person who's paranoid would, I think it'd be a fair question to ask, knowing how Putin is, and for Snowden to live in Russia feeling safe, why would he be safe?
Does Putin follow the guidance of whistleblower protection, whatever, whatever?
Or is he keeping him safe because Snowden is giving him information?
You know, these are very honest questions that some people are wondering.
Why is Snowden safe in Russia, led by a guy like Putin?
So let me explain this.
So, first of all, the idea that Snowden would give information that would help another country surveil on its citizens in order to be kept out of prison, or worse, is inconsistent with everything that Snowden did in his life.
When we were working with Snowden in Hong Kong, I would say the percentage chance that we assigned to the fact that at the end of that process, he was going to end up in American custody in an orange jumpsuit, and we were never going to hear from him again because he would be disappeared to a supermax prison for the next 40 years.
We had a probability of 90 to 95 percent.
That was it, it was a miracle that he escaped the clutches of the American government.
That happened through a series of very improbable acts.
So, Snowden already proved he would be willing to go to prison, give up his liberty for the rest of his life in order to make it much more difficult for states to surveil.
Having shown that he's willing to go to prison to prevent surveillance, why would he then turn around weeks later and make the exact opposite calculation that I'm willing to help the Russians surveil in order to stay out of prison?
That makes no sense.
But that's the first thing.
The second thing is when there was a time, you know, and I know this is this is a long ago history, but when Snowden, Snowden picked Hong Kong because it was kind of a city of resistance to him, of resistance to Chinese tyranny, but it was also a place he knew that the U.S. government would have a hard time getting us.
So it was kind of a, he put a lot of thought into the place that he wanted us to work with him.
And at the time, people were saying he was a Chinese spy because he had gone to Hong Kong.
When he ended up leaving Hong Kong, his intention was to go to South America where he was getting asylum either in Bolivia or in Ecuador.
He was going to fly through Moscow on his way to Havana and then onto South Latin America.
And the Biden administration, or rather the Obama administration, and they boast about this, bullied the Cubans and said, if you want a deal to get rid of that embargo, no chance if you allow Snowden safe passage through, which they had already given him.
They withdrew that safe passage, and that's why he got trapped in the Moscow airport.
He spent 48 days trapped in the Moscow airport in this international zone before they would let him into Moscow.
And the whole time, I was certain that the U.S. would be able to offer the Russians whatever they wanted because they were desperate to get their hands on Snowden.
I don't know if you remember, but they thought that he was on the plane of the Bolivian president, Eva Morales.
They had a hunch when he was coming back from Russia.
They forced down the plane of a sovereign president, Eva Morales, on the hunch that he had Snowden on that plane with him when he was coming back.
That's how badly they wanted Snowden.
So I thought, okay, they're going to offer the Russians, we have 12 Russian prisoners that you want back.
We're willing to give them to you.
We're willing to make this concession, that concession.
I thought for sure that was going to happen, and it didn't happen.
I went to Moscow the next year.
I met with Snowden.
I did a panel with some Russian media and Russian government officials.
And I asked that.
I was asking everybody that.
Why couldn't that deal be reached?
Why didn't they make a deal for Snowden?
And what they told me were two things.
Number one, the U.S. and the Russian political class hate each other so much going back for decades that they would rather, you know, avoid deals in their interest than make deals in their interest.
But the real reason is, is that Putin could not give Snowden back to the U.S.
It would be considered a deeply un-Russian thing to do because one of Russia's kind of national attributes is they have always been a refuge for dissidents from the West.
You know, you do something against the West, you get refuge in Russia.
That's something that's crucial politically to Russians, to their sense of their identity.
And there was just no way Putin politically, I know he's considered a totalitarian.
He's not a totalitarian in the sense of, you know, North Korea or Saudi Arabia.
He answers to political classes.
There are dissidents in Russia.
There are oppositional parties.
And it was just too, it's just too contrary to how Russia functions and operates.
Finally, Snowden wasn't traveling with the archive.
He knew not to travel internationally with the archive.
Not only didn't he have the archive, but the passwords that he had were scattered around the world because he wanted to avoid, even if someone tried to torture him, being able to give access to that information because he had already proven he was willing to have the worst possible outcome happen to him rather than give up information.
Why are you skeptical of that?
I don't know.
So for me, okay, so let's just say my daughter is 22 years old.
Okay.
And one of my guys I've known who is 40 years old, okay, who is a full-blown playboy.
Okay.
And my daughter says, Dad, I'm not, he's just a friend, you know?
And I'm like, baby, I trust you.
I don't trust him.
He's going to flirt with you.
And he's very good at getting you to flip and fall in love with them for a night or whatever.
Let's just say that guy's not a friend.
He's a colleague, but I know who his DNA is, right?
Okay.
Even worse, if he's not an ally and he's an enemy and he wants to find a way to do something to you and he's going to figure out any ways to go do that to you.
Okay.
In this situation, okay, let's just say I trust Snowden.
I don't trust Putin.
And if we were to give an asset, if America, Joe Biden, you know, got Britney Griner for Victor, what's his last name?
Bout or Victor, however he says his last name.
Killer.
Right.
You mean to tell me Putin couldn't have said, you give me Victor, I'll give you Snowden?
Yeah, I mean, Victor's pretty powerful to have.
Why didn't that happen?
They had Snowden in their clutches in that international airport.
Why didn't they reach a deal with the Americans?
I'll tell you my opinion.
Give us everything and we'll give you Snowden back.
I'll tell you why I wouldn't do it.
If you're Putin, Snowden is way more powerful to have than Victor Bout.
So in your, it's like saying, hey, let's trade cards.
I'll give you a Mickey Mantle rookie card for a freaking, you know, John Cangelosi rookie card.
You're going to say, who the hell is John Cangelosi?
I'm going to say, well, go look him up.
He was a second baseman who was 230 or whatever he was, right?
Okay.
So, yeah, you're not going to give Mickey for John Cangelosi.
This is Mickey Mantle, Snowden.
You need Snowden.
You need Mantle.
Because of his secrets.
Are you kidding me?
Okay, so let me ask you this.
This is your world.
I want to know your art because you're the right guy to talk to me.
No, absolutely.
I know Snowden extremely well.
So why do we know the name of Edward Snowden?
Why do people around the world consider what Snowden did to be heroic?
The reason is, is because what he did was extremely likely to result in the imprisonment for the rest of his life at the age of 29.
Not very many people, 100%.
Just like you.
The best case scenario, right?
They were threatening to imprison me and Laura Poitras, the reporter with whom I was working.
So imagine what they would have done to Snowden.
The sky was the limit.
Look at what they're doing to Julian Assange.
Snowden knew that.
Snowden took that risk.
When I first talked to Snowden, I said to him, look, I didn't know how much he knew.
I didn't know how sophisticated it was.
I didn't know his age, but I felt like it was my responsibility as a journalist thinking maybe I'm dealing with somebody with mental health issues, with some kind of skewed vision.
I made very clear to him, I said, look, you're committing multiple serious felonies.
This is the greatest national security leak in the history of the United States.
You understand you're almost definitely going to end up in an American prison and not a nice American prison for the rest of your life.
He said, that's the risk I've already decided that I'm willing to take.
So already Snowden is somebody operating with a completely different moral framework than the vast majority of people, including most of us.
I'm not somebody who's saying I'm willing to.
I mean, I did take risks, but my risk wasn't anywhere near the risk that Snowden took.
I was the role of the journalist.
I had First Amendment protections, lots of other different considerations.
So he had just proven he's willing to go to prison for the rest of his life in pursuit of this cause, this cause being preventing the internet from becoming this zone of mass surveillance.
Why a month later Putin comes to him or whoever the FSB comes to him and says, you give us this information or we're removing that asylum and we're going to let the Americans take you to prison.
Why does he then a month later make exactly the opposite moral calculation and say, you know what?
Actually, I don't want to go to prison enough to give you this information.
I'd rather give you this information and avoid prison.
He just proved he was willing to go to prison for the rest of his life in order to not help a state for be able to further surveil.
So this idea that he would have helped, he would have given this information to Putin to stay out of an American prison or a Russian prison is totally, again, the fact that he didn't end up in American prison was the biggest fluke possible.
The government of Hong Kong stuck its middle finger up at the United States when the United States demanded that he not be able to leave for its own reasons.
Snowden had proven that the U.S. was spying on Hong Kong.
His moral framework, the one under which he was operating, the reason it's heroic is because it's so radically different than the one that we rationally.
So why would the United States government's threats not deter Snowden from leaking that information, but the Russian government's threats would make him give up information to help the Russians spy better on their own citizens?
The Russians didn't destroy his life.
American government did, because Russia didn't destroy his life.
America did.
So to me, look, I'm just a naturally curious guy that's asking questions from a guy that's the, you know, you're the expert in this.
You're the one that knows more about this than anybody else because you were the guy that broke the story.
So I'm talking to the story.
Yeah, no, for me, I think it's a healthy level of skepticism to have with that.
By the way, I am thankful for Snow and I'm thankful for what he did.
I'm grateful for what he did.
And levels that words can't even describe.
God knows what he did.
He ruined his life, many would say, at 29 years old.
There's a level of patriotism that goes with that, but it's complicated as well, right?
You always, it's always the whistleblower from the other side you hate.
You know, you always like the whistleblower from your side.
Right, that's right.
So it's easy to be like, well, you know, can't believe what he's doing.
And you saw everybody on the media.
This is not something he should be doing.
If you love America, you should not be supporting what Snowden's.
I don't know if you remember that.
A CNN was saying that everybody was saying that.
I don't know about that.
Of course I don't know.
All I'm saying is, why is he there with a Putin's camp approach and say, for the rest of your life, you're protected as if you're a president?
We're going to give you that kind of protection for the rest of your life.
And if you're not going to give us any intel that's already public, maybe teach us mechanisms on how they were investigating on the people for us to know how to investigate.
And maybe his moral compass doesn't hurt him to say, Well, I'm not really doing anything.
I'm just going to show you how they did it.
And then you do whatever you want to do with it.
But this is how the government was investigating on its people.
Maybe that's something where he's like, I don't feel bad about doing something like this.
I don't know.
I totally get the skepticism.
And from the distance, I'd likely have the same questions.
The issue, of course, is I can't prove the negative, right?
Totally.
So I can't prove to you Snowden didn't do it.
All I can tell you is I have, you know, I spent a lot of time, like very intense, immersive time with Snowden in all of those days.
We were in Hong Kong doing this work.
I've maintained a very close friendship with him since.
I talked to him, you know, with a great amount of regularity.
And, you know, that's not a particularly persuasive thing to say, take my word for it.
I understand Snowden's ethical code.
I think the only thing I can ask people to do is look at the actual evidence of what his conduct has been.
And the other thing is, there is that Russian code that I know that I didn't understand until I went and talked to a bunch of people.
But if you look at the Cold War, whenever there were people who felt persecuted by Western governments or who became spies, they always were given refuge in Russia from the West for as long as they wanted to until the day that they died.
It's a part of the Russian moral code.
I talked to the head of RT on whom I was with a panel, and I asked her that question.
I interrogated her about that because I genuinely didn't understand why the U.S. and Russia didn't reach a deal to turn Snowden over.
And that was what she was trying to get me to understand: it would be a very unrussian thing to do to take a political dissident who wants refuge in Russia and turn them over to the United States.
It's not something that you can understand if that's not part of the code.
You ever been to Crust Stations in Beverly Hills?
The restaurant?
Probably not.
Okay.
Would love to take you.
It's incredible.
Unbelievable food.
They have two kitchens there.
One of them is the kitchen for the on-family.
Okay.
The recipes that they've created, like they're garlic noodles, which when you eat, you age backwards.
It's like Benjamin Button.
The other kitchen is for the average people to go in, people like you and I, if we work there.
You cannot go in the kitchen unless if you're part of the on-family.
Okay.
So what does this mean?
Yeah, I mean, I'm sure Russia is thankful for it, but listen, you ain't Russian, bro.
You know what I'm saying?
You're Snowden.
There's a level of skepticism I think a president or any prime minister would have for anyone that's a whistleblower, because in the back of the mind of that prime minister or president is this guy's a whistleblower.
You know what I'm saying?
I mean, great job for what you did, but shit, you could whistleblow on anybody.
So we got to be also protective of your abilities to whistleblow.
I don't know if you understand, like, like if I'm communicating my thoughts properly or not.
You don't trust him.
Yeah.
I mean, that's an interesting point.
Like, you know how a guy that, like, you know, a guy that says something like this, okay?
He'll say, look, just between us, pa, pop, pop, pop, pa.
Okay.
Just between us.
And then you test him three times and you leak him information, inaccurate information.
And then he tells three other people, guess what he just did?
He just validated to you.
He can't keep information.
And it's not hard to test stuff like this with people.
It's very easy.
If I do it on a small level with a company or a sales organization or family or friends, like anytime I wanted to know which one of my friends that I went to high school with, I just would talk to them.
I would tell him certain private things and I would say, just please keep it between us.
If I got three people that called me, I already knew who that guy was.
Right.
Okay.
So either I intentionally leak information that want to be leaked, or I just realize you can't fully trust that person.
You cannot.
And that's, you know, when, first of all, I think the starting point for all of this discussion should always be: why is it that Edward Snowden having not only leaked information but done so in the most responsible way, right?
Like he could have sold the information to a foreign government and gotten millions and millions of dollars.
That archive was extremely valuable.
He could have dumped it all over the internet.
Instead, he came to us, and when he came to us, he was adamant that we agree to conditions that I even found repressive about how he didn't want any information published that could ever even potentially put a single person in harm's way.
He was a very conservative whistleblower.
He imposed on us a lot of restrictions about things that I thought we should have been able to publish that he didn't want published.
There were things the New York Times ended up publishing from that archive that he was indignant about that he thought should never have been published about how we spy on China.
So he was somebody who did this in the most responsible way possible, didn't dump it on the internet, didn't sell it to a foreign adversary, came to journalists, asked us to curate it in a very responsible way, which we did.
There was no suggestion that anything we ever published harmed anybody, put anybody in harm's way.
The question, the first question, should be: why is somebody like that forced to live their life in exile in Russia?
Because the minute they come back to the United States, they're going to be put in prison for the rest of their life.
Having said that, I understand your question.
Again, I can't prove the negative.
I guess all I can tell you is that even the information that Snowden would have to give, Snowden was not the deputy director of the NSA.
Snowden was a somewhat low-level contractor who worked at Booz Allen.
What he had that was valuable was access to the archive where it was the documents, and not so much what Snowden had to say.
Most of our reporting was based on the document.
If you don't have access to that archive, there's not much that Snowden can even give you that's of value.
And he wasn't carrying with him the archive and thumb drives with a piece of paper that contained the password.
He purposely made it extremely difficult because he didn't want to be put in the position where somebody could force him to turn over that information.
I will tell you on this topic, and we can transition to the next topic, but I appreciate you having this exchange with me on this topic.
This isn't about Snowden.
I'm not putting this on Snowden.
Right, you're on Putin.
I'm putting this on how Putin views an American.
Dude, you're not priority to me.
You're not Russian.
This is not your motherland.
You don't love this place like I love it.
Gorbachev, Yeltsin, you know, this is like the greatest country in the world.
He views that.
I mean, Putin is a true nationalist.
A Russian nationalist.
So for him, he's going to always, and by the way, the best leaders ever are typically more paranoid and skeptical than the average leader.
If I can come and betray you once and kind of do it again and again and again, you're weak.
But if I can come and betray you once and you still are able to entertain a relationship, but you know there's filters that you can't go through certain rails, you know, certain things you can't enter anymore.
I respect that leader.
And I put Putin as a formidable leader.
I don't put Putin as a lightweight.
I don't put Putin as he wants to be complimented and you can win him over with flattery.
He's not weak.
He's a true G who he is.
So, but I trust my enemies way more than I trust my allies.
And here's what I mean by that.
I know my competitors, anytime I built any businesses, whether it was insurance or whatever I did, I knew my enemy woke up every morning wanting to put me out of business.
I respect that.
I knew my enemy woke up every day wanting to make sure I went bankrupt.
I respect that.
I'm not upset at it.
I actually totally get it.
You know, if you play, you know, you're fighting somebody in the streets, guess what the guy is going to do?
You have to assume the guy wants to beat the living crap out of you, right?
So that's not a naive or place coming from where it's like, well, I'm trying to be antagonistic.
No, I just think this is the enemy.
Here's how he views it.
Let me go into another topic with this and transition out from this.
Brazil, you've lived, are you still in Brazil or you're a little bit of a?
So Brazil, I have an affinity with Brazil.
I named my daughter Ayrton Sena.
You know how they view Senna over there, Senna as a race car driver, you know, in 1994, all the stories with him, what he did, beloved with the day he died.
I don't know if you've seen his document or if you haven't.
No, no, I know, I know.
Emotional, right?
I relate to the guy on how he's wired.
I relate how he wanted to, you know, do what he did with the, you know, corners he was taking and how he said, you guys moved the tire.
That's why it crashed.
You guys moved.
And then they went, oh, we never moved the tire.
And he found that they moved the tire two inches.
That's why he hit the tire.
You know what story that is when he went through one of the corners.
He said, no, you guys screwed up.
And they had to apologize to him.
He says, because the tires I was going on practice was not the same.
You moved it two inches.
That kind of a guy on highway was freaking maniacal.
I love how much he loves this country.
So you live in Brazil.
You know, Operation Car Wash has been documented on God knows how much, you know, what he's done.
And, you know, the $600 million, the one guy that was a super billionaire and goes from being a super billionaire to all of a sudden losing everything.
And he goes to jail.
And I've studied this whole thing, you know, in the past.
And then Bolsonaro, who he was, and then Lula, who he was, who's Lula's ties are and who how they viewed Lula.
And you kind of came and did something kind of, you know, you did some kind of an interview with Lula.
He came down, sat down and talked to you for about an hour and 20 minutes or something like that.
What is your impression of Lula and Bolsonaro?
And the reason why, you know, assume Americans like, you know, who is Lula in America?
Is Lula a Bernie Sanders?
Is Bolsonaro a Trump?
Is Lula more of an Obama or a Biden?
Who is Lula?
Because there's a lot.
This guy went to jail.
He did a lot of stuff to steal money from the government based on stuff that's been documented.
In your eyes, is Lula a good guy?
Is he a bad guy?
Bolsonaro, is he a good guy?
Is he a bad guy?
What do you think about these two characters?
So when, first of all, Lula's life story, you just have to acknowledge, no matter what your ideology is, is an inspirational life story.
He was born into the deepest and most extreme form of poverty in a country where poverty means something different than it means in the United States.
He was one of nine children.
He was illiterate until the age of 10.
He got a job in a factory.
He lost one of his fingers in a factory.
He became a union leader.
So he emerged from both poverty, union activism, and then became a hardcore political leftist.
He was never really the kind of political leftist of, say, Castro or Hugo Chavez.
In fact, he always tried to distance himself from that.
He ran for president three times.
Brazil came out of this dictatorship that was the result of the CIA helping right-wing generals in 1964 overthrow a democratically elected government.
They imposed a dictatorship for 21 years that was brutal.
And when it redemopratized in 1985, Lula became a national figure.
He ran for president three times, lost all three times because of the perception that he was too leftist for Brazil.
The elite was aligned against him.
In 2002, he understood that in order for him to win, he needed to become a more moderated figure, not just a kind of pretend moderated figure, but an actually moderated figure.
He chose his vice president, this highly respected entrepreneur and banker who was a billionaire or something close to it.
And when he got into office, he began essentially accommodating the financial elite and the financial sector.
Under Brazil's first two terms from 2002 to 2010, Brazil's economic growth was explosive.
It went from something like the 15th largest economy in the world to the sixth largest economy in the world.
It surpassed the UK.
Everybody got richer.
The rich got richer.
He was able to take a lot of that national wealth, distribute it to programs that gave a guaranteed monthly payment to people who couldn't feed their children that level of poverty.
He created opportunities for poor people to go to college for the first time.
There were good things that his government did.
Brazil, at the same time, never got out of the systemic corruption that was the result of that dictatorship.
So the way that you get votes is you have to pay people off.
The way that you get anything done politically is you move money around.
All the Brazilian politicians have huge amounts of Swiss bank accounts that have been hidden and finally discovered.
And Lula and his party, PT, were very much a part of that because they were running the political system.
So Lula himself will tell you when I asked, I've done several interviews with him, including when he was in prison, and he will tell you that his party has always been one of grave corruption.
What happened was in, by the way, he's probably the most talented politician.
Are you kidding me?
There's no person who can move crowds.
He's talking to talk about him.
He says one of the best politicians out there.
When he walked off in 2010, he had an 86% approval rating.
You know what I'm talking about?
For realistic democracy, because everybody got richer.
And not, you know, obviously a lot of that is luck.
A lot of it has to do with international commodity prices, things the president doesn't control, but the president gets credit when the economy does well.
The economy did very well, and he left office with that kind of popularity.
When his chosen successor, who was Dilma Rousseff, who was actually a communist guerrilla, she picked up arms.
She went to prison to fight the Brazilian, the dictatorship.
When commodity crisis prices collapsed, the economy in Brazil collapsed.
They saw an opportunity to get rid of that party finally.
They impeached her in 2016.
And then in 2017, this anti-corruption probe, Car Wash, the biggest anti-corruption probe in Brazil's history, one of the biggest in the world, started putting into prison billionaires and some of the country's most powerful politicians.
And I was a supporter of it at the start, like a lot of people were.
It started to become clearly politically motivated.
They were aimed at certain figures and certain parties and kind of protecting the center-right parties with which they had an ideology.
They started to become put under suspicion.
In 2019, I had a source who hacked into the phones of the leading judges and prosecutors, including the ones who presided over Lula's conviction.
He was leading all public opinion polls in 2017, 20 points ahead of Bolsonaro, 25 points ahead of Bolsonaro into the 2018 race.
They took him.
They put him into prison.
They convicted him on these corruption charges, rendered him ineligible.
Bolsonaro ran without having to get past Lula, and he got elected.
In 2019, right at the start of the Bolsonaro presidency, I got this gigantic archive that proved the whole time the judge was plotting with political actors, with the prosecutors, essentially using corrupt methods in order to fight corruption.
When we exposed it, it required a nullification of Lula's conviction.
He was able to leave prison as a result of the reporting we were doing.
That's the reason why there was so much anger and hostility toward me from the Bolsonaro movement because they finally got Lula in jail and our reporting forced his release.
Lua runs for president in 2022, defeats Bolsonaro by a tiny margin.
Same issue with Trump.
The whole establishment united against Bolsonaro had all the challenges of COVID.
He still almost won.
They had their own January 6th moment as well.
Their own January 6th moment, exactly because Bolsonaro claimed that his loss was due to fraud.
Bolsonaro, over the years, he was this backbencher.
He's made a lot.
He had made a lot of statements like, I don't really believe in democracy.
I think Pinochet was a great guy.
The only thing Pinochet did wrong was he didn't kill more communists in the country.
He made a lot of statements that were very disturbing.
I viewed Bolsonaro as a real threat.
When he got into the presidency, the entire establishment aligned against him like they did with Trump and began using anti-democratic methods to defeat the Bolsonaro movement, censoring, imprisoning political enemies, just like they were doing with Trump.
And I became an outspoken opponent of the things that were being done against Bolsonaro and against his movement, obviously changed where I stood politically.
Suddenly, the Bolsonaro movement saw me a lot more favorably.
The left began to turn on me and view me as an enemy.
Bolsonaro ended up as a very weak president.
Lula is a very weak president because Brazil is run by this kind of very corrupt, centrist class that's transactional in nature.
There's not a lot that presidents can do.
One of the things I like about Lula is he's a very outspoken defender of Julian Assange.
He is constantly demanding the persecution of Assange Stop.
He refuses to get Brazil involved in the war in Ukraine, saying we don't have a war with Russia.
We have a war with poverty and inequality, and we're going to use our resources not to feed a NATO war, but to try and help Brazil.
If you ask me, is Lula corrupt?
My answer would be I want to see a fair trial, not a trial filled with corruption.
There's certainly evidence to suggest that he was part of the systemic corruption.
Bolsonaro, though, too, by the way, every one of Bolsonaro's sons is a political elected official.
They all ran for Senate and Congress and won on the Bolsonaro name.
And they all have $6 million mansions and huge amounts of personal wealth that is very difficult to account for.
I think Bolsonaro and his family also have a lot of evidence that they too are involved in corruption.
To me, neither Bolsonaro nor Lula is the relevant problem in Brazil.
The problem in Brazil is that you have a court that has seized all power.
The censorship regime in Brazil makes the United States look like this bastion of liberty and freedom.
And at the same time, you have these corrupt factions in Brazil that continue to run Brazil to the detriment of 90% of the population.
And so I've seen Bolsonaro nor Lula neither as villains or heroes.
They're almost ancillary figures more than they are central figures to Brazilian politics.
You know, when I talk to some friends there, the way they describe Lula is like criminal at the highest level, corrupt, politician, you know, stealing money from the people.
He had a meeting with Castro.
Didn't he Castro have a meeting at like 83 years old?
Castro was an emotional meeting with Bolsonaro.
No years ago.
It was like 13 years ago.
Lula maintained positive relations with Hugo Chavez, with Maduro, with Castro, but at the same time.
It's kind of weird, don't you think?
I don't think it's weird to have relations with some of the most important leaders of the most important.
I mean, you're talking about Venezuela is a country with enormous oil reserves.
Totally get it.
Yeah.
You know, I mean, Joe Biden meets with the head of Saudi Arabia, who is as repressive as anything that Hugo Chavez ever did or that Fidel Castro did.
We have a long history of supporting tyrannical governments.
I'm not trying to defend Lula or I'm not trying to defend Bolsonaro.
There's huge political polarization.
The Brazilian right sees Lula the way the American left sees Trump.
And at the same time, the Brazilian left wants Bolsonaro in prison and is well on their way to putting Bolsonaro in prison.
They've already made him ineligible to run without even convicting him.
And I think a lot of those methods are anti-democratic as well.
For me, when I see stuff like that happening and Brazil being the great people that they have there, and you saw a similar thing where now Bolsonaro can't go there, they have a guy at the top who's the one that everybody fears.
Is he the attorney general who looks like a bad?
You know, he just looks like a guy that imprisons everybody.
He's the judge, Alexander DiMaraj.
Yeah, that's right.
Pull up his picture and say, that is a real tyrant.
That guy is a real tyrant.
Well, whose side is he more on Lula than he is?
The funny thing is, is in 2017, when he was nominated for the Supreme Court, the left hated that guy.
Look, he looks like a critical guy.
From a X-Men stuff, this guy's dumb.
This guy is scary.
There are very few people willing to criticize Alexander Di Marais.
I've been using my platform non-stop to warn about the dangers that he poses to Brazilian liberty.
You feel safe with this guy there?
No, no, I don't.
I'm surprised he hasn't come after you yet.
The reason he wants to, believe me, the reason he can't is I have a, I took, I accepted a contract with Brazil's largest newspaper, which is like the New York Times of Brazil, to kind of insulate myself further.
Obviously, I have an international platform when Brazilian prosecutors tried to indict me and prosecute me for the work I did.
You know, there became an international scandal.
No, this guy is a guy.
This guy just kind of wanted to see where you're at.
No, this is the guy who is responsible.
Some say he runs Brazil.
He runs Brazil, even though he's a single member of the court.
No one has elected him.
And he is a despot and a fanatic in the purest sense of what he will do is he issues orders when he wakes up in the morning ordering people banned off the internet.
There's this guy, he's currently in Miami.
Now you should talk to him actually if you haven't met him.
He was like the Joe Rogan of Brazil.
He modeled his show.
Constantino Rafael Monarchy is his name.
He modeled his show after Joe Rogan.
He has four-hour shows.
He drinks.
He smokes weed during the show.
He became the most popular podcaster in Brazil.
Every politician left and right was begging to get on his show.
He went on one show.
He was a little bit drunk.
He was asked when he said he was an absolutist, free speech absolutist, if that means even that the government should allow a Nazi party to exist.
And he said, yeah, of course, even the Nazi party should be able to exist like it does in the United States.
They called him a Nazi.
YouTube kicked him off.
YouTube, his career was destroyed.
He went to Rumble.
He has a show on Rumble.
And now that judge, that fanatic that you just put on the screen, has ordered Monarch off Rumble, has fined him, has opened a criminal investigation.
That's why he's in the United States because he fears being arrested.
The only thing that he has done is question the integrity of the 2022 election, questioned a lot of the orthodoxies of COVID.
Without any trial, that judge has silenced what had been the most popular.
It would be like saying Joe Rogan is not permitted to use the internet.
But to me, this is why I'm very curious because some would say you helped Lula, you know, when you, you know, when you talk to him, so okay, maybe this because the guy that, you know, people trust, they trust you.
So when you're doing something, you say something good about a guy.
But a lot of people in Brazil say this is the guy why Lula got, you know, he was able to drop the charges so Lula could run against Bolsonaro because they felt like he was the guy that was the most formidable guy to beat Bolsonaro.
And he did.
So I'll tell you what actually happened.
And it's an interesting story because it's repeating itself in the United States and in the EU.
When they put Lula in prison in 2017, the reason they did it, the establishment did it, was because they always wanted a center-right, kind of like a Mitch McConnell, Paul Ryan type.
That's their dream to be to run Brazil.
And the only way they thought they could do that was by destroying Lula and his party.
What they got instead was Bolsonaro.
So they kind of got the monster that they feared most.
And when Bolsonaro got into office, they realized they feared Bolsonaro way more than they feared Lula because he was a much bigger enemy of the establishment.
No, exactly.
So this guy here was an enemy of the left.
The left hated him.
They called him a racist and a fascist and all the things the left calls people when they dislike him.
And then what happened was the Supreme Court, the establishment realized there was only one person who had any chance to beat Bolsonaro, and that was Lula.
They used our reporting as the pretext to let Lula out of prison and to render him eligible to run again.
Look, my reporting was truthful.
I can't help the fact that the judge and the prosecutors who oversaw Lula's conviction did corrupt and illegal things.
That's my job to reveal it and not to hide it.
It's not my fault that Lula ended up winning.
They let Lula out of prison because they knew only Lua could defeat Bolsonaro.
Dangerous guy, right?
That guy is, let me tell you something.
He's a very dangerous person.
I've been a journalist for 20 years.
I obviously have done a lot of journalism that has been risky, has been dangerous, whatever.
There's never been a time, not ever in my life, when I thought to myself, I want to criticize this political official, but in the back of my mind, I'm a little bit worried about the dangers of doing so.
Maybe I shouldn't do it.
The only time that thought has entered my mind was when I decided to go on a public crusade against him because he has no limits on what he will do.
He hasn't come after you yet?
Not yet.
But there have been a lot of people.
Are you going to stay in Brazil?
I'm going to stay in Brazil and I'm going to continue to be the leading voice against Alexander DiMarais because I'm the one who has the kicked a bunch of guys out.
He kicked the former president's son out saying you can't come back to Brazil anymore.
Look, my kids are Brazilian.
Yeah, Paula parade that there's but there's a big difference between doing that to Brazilian activists and doing it to me.
And so I feel like I have the obligation with this platform to use it because if I don't, who's going to?
He's safe out there.
Respect.
Pat, what are the chances that you're going to invite our friend Glenn and this guy Marius to crustaceans in LA?
That's funny.
You know what it is when you're saying this?
Like, I would love to go to Russia and sit down with Snowden, have a conversation with him.
And I would love to go have a conversation with Putin as well.
Obviously, I'd love to talk to him.
But we approached Maduro to go to Venezuela to interview him because I wanted to talk to Maduro at the peak.
Maduro and who was the guy that was going up against him that's now in Colombia, Juan Guaido, yeah.
Yeah, just to learn what's the reasons behind this stuff that's going on.
But anyways, you know, it is what it is.
Glenn, it's great to have you on.
I wish we could go a couple more hours here with you.
I'll do the last topic.
I just want to kind of see what your thoughts are on this year with the last topic.
ESG, how concerned are you with ESG?
Does anything with ESG is going on?
Story recently came out about ESG on how these guys were making all this momentum with Fink, State Street, BlackRock, all these guys.
And then next thing you know, BlackRock ditches ESG shareholder proposals as public pressure crowns.
BlackRock, the world's largest asset manager, is reportedly scaling back support for ESG related shareholders proposals, supporting only 7% of nearly 400 such proposals last year.
Significant drop from its historical 25 to 47 percent because so many proposals were overreaching, lacking economic merit, or simply redundant.
They were unlikely to help promote long-term shareholder value and receive less support from shareholders, including BlackRock in the recent years, as his company's annual review revealed.
Despite the shift, BlackRock's commitment to ESG goals and influence in banking and investment persists, the ESG propagand agenda is a $66 trillion weapon aimed directly at corporate America, meaning this battle is far from over.
So is it still around?
is it a concern is it something that i i think the back i mean i think everything that happened in 2020 and the excesses that that produced because the fear that everybody had of speaking out created enormous amounts of backlash and i think what you're now seeing is a kind of um reaction to it
There's, I'm sure you saw that story in the Wall Street Journal about how corporations are getting rid of their diversity managers because they do nothing but create problems and impede the performance of the corporation and produce nothing of actual real value because these kinds of notions of equality and diversity are completely artificial.
They're offensive.
They themselves are often steeped in the various stereotypes that they purport to combat.
And I think there's now a space that has been created for these companies to start to move away from this.
I think there's a public demand for it.
There's a shareholder demand for it.
And I think that at least is headed in the right direction.
Okay.
I'm glad the fact that we, the people, still have power.
You know, and the rowdier we are, the louder we are.
People are paying attention to it.
Glenn, you don't do a lot of face-to-face podcasts.
It's good to have you.
We're honored to have you.
I know when you and I met for the first time two days ago, we were chatting it up and Chris is like, hey guys, can we reschedule that podcast and both of you guys come to the debate and we made your friends?
Exactly.
Which kind of worked out.
So your podcast.
It's great to be here.
We're honored to have you.
Trust me, we are way more honored to have you.
We've been looking forward to this for a moment.
Your podcast, folk, folks, we're going to put the link below System Update.
Okay.
Podcast that he runs, System Update, available on Rumble, Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, and Pocketcast.
Rob, let's put the link below both in chat as well as in the description.
If you enjoyed today's show with him, trust me, you want to go subscribe to his podcast because you get it there regularly.
Once again, thanks for coming on.
Take care, everybody.
Have a great weekend.
Bye-bye.
Bye-bye.
Patrick Bay David here from Value Tammy and PPD Podcast.
Look, once a year, we host a conference called the Vault Conference.
It's our Super Bowl where 3,000 entrepreneurs, CEOs, executives, salespeople from around the world come together to spend three and a half days together from August 30th to September 2nd at the Diplomat Resort in Miami to learn how to scale their business, how to identify their next 5, 10, 15 moves, who to recruit next, who to go raise their money from, how to raise capital, how to properly scale, culture, retention, hire, fire, all of those things and much more.
And we do that over a span of three and a half days.
And the reason why it's a very important season to attend a conference like this, the following reason.
Today, there's three different types of people.
There's scared, there are those that are content, and the obsessed.
The scared, they don't want to do anything because they're worried about what's going to happen in the economy.
They're going to take a big hit.
The content, they're walking around saying, life is pretty okay.
I don't need to do anything else.
And then there's the obsessed because they see a massive opportunity today.
So imagine spending three and a half days with 3,000 obsessed people that want to grow in a season like this.
Imagine how much you can learn from just those relationships and networks.
So on top of the people that are going to be attending at this event, there's probably the best lineup we'll ever have at a Vault conference.
Tom Brady, seven-time champion, I'll be interviewing him.
He'll be at the Vault conference.
Mike Tyson, Will Gudera, the gentleman who ran the restaurant 11 Madison, New York, that went from a regular restaurant to a one Michelin star, two Michelin star, three Michelin star, and eventually the number one restaurant in the world.
He's going to talk about how they treat their customers.
So look, if you've not registered yet, this is my recommendation to you.
I never went to conferences when I was coming out by myself.
I always went with a spouse, with a business partner, or running mate because I only have a lens on what I see.
Every night afterwards, we would sit there and say, what was your biggest takeaway?
So get yourself, your spouse, your partner, your running mate registered to come spend three and a half days with us at the Diplomat Resort in Miami from August 30th to September 2nd.
