Busted! Homeland Security Secretary Lied To Senate About Disinfo Board!
Thanks to the diligent work of Sens. Grassley and Hawley - and a whistleblower from within the Department of Homeland Security - we now know that DHS's work on the "Disinformation Governance Board" began back in September, 2021, not this spring as DHS Secretary Mayorkas testified. Also we know from leaked documents that the focus was not on "foreign adversaries" but was to focus on “conspiracy theories about the validity and security of elections” and “disinformation related to the origins and effects of COVID-19 vaccines or the efficacy of masks.” Also: smoking gun proof that DHS senior officials sought high-level meetings with Twitter to push censorship of Americans! Will more Senators show interest in these lies and attacks on the First Amendment?
Links to related articles: https://www.theepochtimes.com/grassley-hawley-say-mayorkas-misled-congress-on-status-of-dhs-disinformation-board_4522345.html
https://www.grassley.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/grassley_hawley_to_deptofhomelandsecuritydisinformationgovernanceboard.pdf
https://www.antiwar.com/paul/paul54.html
Hello, everybody, and thank you for tuning in to the Liberty Report.
With us today is Daniel McAdams, our co-host.
Daniel, good to have you on the program.
Happy Monday, Dr. Paul.
Good, good.
It's a good Monday, but the markets are a mess.
All I can say, if you're looking for one single thing to explain the whole mess, just blame the government, which includes the Federal Reserve, even though that's a government unto itself.
But it is a messy market and people are figuring out a lot of people lost a lot of money and the people who shorted a lot of things probably made a lot of money.
But I tell you what, it sort of tells you that we're in tough times.
But there's other things going on too.
A while back, Daniel, early on, I think when you first started working with me in Washington, it was right after 9-11.
And of course, they passed the Patriot Act.
We raised a little fuss with that.
They still didn't listen.
They passed it.
And immediately, you know, started to abuse it.
And, you know, Edward Snowden got involved and he got into trouble just trying to, he mentioned the Constitution and that wasn't a good idea.
So he was run out of town.
But now it comes out that they expanded that a few years later, which we objected to, and that was to put the Patriot Act in with a lot of other bureaucrats, make the biggest department in the country.
And that is the Department of Homeland Security.
And just think about it.
Our security from a libertarian viewpoint is protected by our personal liberty.
So we established the Department of Homeland Security and did a tremendous rush to destroy our liberty.
So we're in worse shape than ever with that, but we're not surprised.
But Senator Grassley and Holly found, oh, they were testified.
I think it was by himself.
No, Homeland Home, the Secretary of Homeland Security testified and lied about what they were doing and how they were spying.
And, you know, it's a shame that this occurred.
But the other thing is nobody's probably surprised that they lied.
But everybody seems to think the big deal is, is we've found some more evidence.
But, you know, I thought there was a fair amount of evidence on Russia Gate and somebody confessed that he did it and he got unanimously exonerated.
It was the trial he had, the jury was made up of all of Hillary's supporters.
So it is, you know, it's easy for people to get disgusted with the whole system.
And what we're going to talk about today doesn't help at all for that disgust, but they deserve the disgust.
And that is that for several months, they just said, we're not doing this.
And there was a little clause that they could spy more on foreigners and stop this, you know, terrorism.
But it turns out that they were caught in a big lie and it's been exposed and there's a lot of material to digest.
We haven't digested it all yet, but we will, but it's not good.
They lied through their teeth about what they were getting ready to do.
And yet, I don't think I've heard about it on the major networks.
Don't think we will, but we are hearing about all those horrible things on January 6th.
We don't hear anything about the tragic outcome of the killing and robbing and destruction back in the last two summers during COVID lockdowns and all the breakdown of law and order there.
No, but this is there, and we want to call attention to this.
Daniel, I think this is big stuff, a little complicated, but again, it's the same old stuff, unfortunately.
And it boils down to people lie and they're dishonorable.
And there's a lot of them still in Washington.
And I sure hope they do some cleaning up soon.
Yeah, I think a lot of credit must go to Senator Grassley and Senator Hawley as well.
But Grassley, I think, must have a pretty good staff of investigators.
And what happened, and this was reported by Mac by Mark Tapscott in the Epic Times on the 9th.
And I'll include some links in the end.
I don't usually, but I will in this case, because I think it's worth following the documents.
But essentially, what happened, Dr. Paul, is a whistleblower from the Department of Homeland Security came forward with a batch of documents explaining the real story behind the creation of this disinformation governance board in the Department of Homeland Security.
Because the way Mayorkas, who's the secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, explained it in a hearing last month, early last month, that, oh, we haven't started work with this yet.
It's just a proposal.
You know, we're just looking for input, et cetera, was, as you say, completely false.
The work on getting this disinfo board together began the previous September, and the memos do show that, providing that they're accurate and they do indeed look accurate, showing that the groundwork for this, and indeed the functioning itself, had definitely occurred before Mayorkas claimed before Congress.
Of course, that is lying to Congress, which is not a great idea.
But, you know, Dr. Paul, the interesting thing about this, and it won't be any shock to anyone who follows these things, is that everything they claimed that this information board was going to be doing is actually untrue.
It was supposed to be, quote, focused on disinformation from foreign state adversaries and the cartels.
It would not monitor American citizens.
Well, that is not the case.
In fact, according to this memo, the primary concern from the very beginning was to monitor the domestic speech of U.S. citizens concerning, quote, conspiracy theories about the validity and security of elections and disinformation related to the origins and effects of COVID-19 vaccines or the efficacy of masks.
And it does make you wonder, Dr. Paul, if they were so terrified about people talking about the elections of 2020 and how, were they okay?
Were they not okay?
Or what about the masks?
Do they work?
They didn't want to have a debate.
They wanted to shut everyone up.
And Dr. Paul, these documents are really evidence of what was going on behind the scenes.
You know, and you quoted something I think is very important there on what they wanted to look for and monitor their speech, which means they want to cancel the speech.
And they had the cooperation of, you know, the social media.
It's mentioned, gets reported to the government, and then they crack down.
But the government doesn't crack down on the First Amendment.
The business people do it.
And it continues that way.
They have the leverage.
But I want to restate a couple of points from that quote that you had.
And they want to go after people who have conspiracy theories about the validity and the security of election.
You know, my first election, I've told people this before, way back in the 70s on my introduction, I was pretty naive, but there was a hint that we lost it by 100 votes.
And it was clearly fraudulent.
And we won every case that we took out up to the Supreme Court of Texas.
We won everyone that there were 1,400, 1,400 or so illegal votes.
And I thought, well, it's been going on a long time.
What they're saying is if you're, and I asked for a recount, we were involved in a recount, which is legitimate.
But now, if you hear anything on television, they talk about reversing, taking over the whole, whole government, the insurrection, because you're asking for a recount.
And well, I have evidence.
And of course, they would never have the evidence because, of course, that would be too much information.
So the election issue is a big issue that they wanted, they had that they were concerned about.
And then also about the vaccines, just think of all the times we talked about people saying something about vaccines or natural immunity and people losing their jobs and distorting it and saying, well, you can't be out there disinformation talking about science, which they were, the doctors we followed, were talking about science.
So that to me, they were addressing that so that they could regulate that type of speech or crack down on people and look at how many people suffered the consequences from this.
And then to top it off, of course, you know, they lied about it.
They said, oh, we weren't doing that.
We weren't even in existence at that time.
We weren't talking along those lines.
Daniel, I don't think they were telling us the truth.
I don't even think they were near anything about being truthful.
Well, I think this is one time that the Democrats are probably happy that the economy is in the toilet because otherwise people might be looking at this.
And, you know, shame on other Republican senators, and I'm sure there are a few that are looking at it, but who aren't looking at this.
And if things change in November, that they won't look very carefully at this.
There was a member of Congress who warned back in 2002 that this was going to happen if you create a Department of Homeland Security.
And I'm going to make a couple comments on that later, Dr. Paul.
But the other big smoking gun in these memos that were leaked by this whistleblower was an April 28th, 2022 meeting that had been scheduled between Robert Silvers, who is the Undersecretary for Strategy, Policy, and Plans at the Department of Homeland Security.
That meeting would be held with Nick Pickles, who's the head of policy for Twitter, and Yoel Roth, who was the head of site security for Twitter.
And among the topics discussed was operationalizing public-private partnership between the Department of Homeland Security and Twitter on the topic of misinformation, disinformation, and malinformation.
And I think if you're talking about skirting close to the First Amendment, I think they've gone over that line when they're holding meetings saying, how can we work together in a partnership to stop people from saying things that the government doesn't want them to say?
I think that's the real thing coming out of this.
And it does make you wonder about what else we haven't seen about this, Dr. Paul.
Well, something I think the real thing behind some of this too is having these hearings going on when more materials are coming out about how horrible this administration has been.
And they, you know, talk about it.
But what are they having these hearings?
They're just starting.
I think there are going to be six more of them.
And that is for distraction.
That's 100% designed for distraction, not truth.
There's no desire for truth there.
It's to continue the disinformation.
And yet, yeah, guess what?
Where's the coalition?
Big business to punish people who don't follow government orders, social media, and all the major media.
Just look how well they were organized, how infiltrated they are, the cultural Marxists and this whole movement into the whole society.
And we've talked about the background of this, the education going on and what has happened.
And really, this whole thing right now with these hearings going on, and they probably knew that the Republicans would get hold of this and start talking about it.
So this is just so sad, and they'll continue if the gabbing goes down a little bit on January by January 6th.
You know, they'll have another committee hearing and new information.
And boy, yesterday they said they have the goods on Trump and we're going to put him in jail, you know, that kind of stuff.
So it's so political, so well entrenched with lying and innuendos.
That's why I think if a person is a progressive, if a person is a liberal, if a person has views opposite of ours, if they had one quality, and we have met a couple that disagreed with our views, but they sort of had a soft spot in their heart for telling the truth.
And even under these conditions with disagreement on issues, if the people of this country would discover others and those who were running for office, at least if they told the truth, you know, and then we can deal with it.
But that is not the case because the truth tellers are few and far between.
And people who get up into higher offices, it is done by lies and innuendos and special interests and a lot of money that puts them there.
Well, you know, the real paradox of this whole thing, Dr. Paul, and again, I don't think we should rest on this thing being shut down because I don't think it is shut down.
I think just like surveillance of American citizens after the Patriot Act, after that was exposed, as you say, by Ed Snowden with the help of Julian Assange, it still went on.
And I think this is still going on.
But really, the irony of the whole thing, and Senator Grassley captured it perfectly in his letter to Mayorkas.
And I will link to this letter demanding some answers to these questions and the very good questions.
Dire Predictions Persist00:04:04
But the irony here, as Senator Grassley says, given the significant coordinating role the department envisioned for this disinformation board, the consequences of installing Nina Jankowitz, a known trafficker of foreign disinformation and liberal conspiracy theories, as the first executive director, would have been a disaster.
And Grassley goes on to point out all of the different examples of Jankowitz actually being a purveyor of disinformation.
He talks about how she called the Hunter Biden black laptop a Republican election tool.
She talked about the President Trump's secret server with the Alpha Bank, another lie.
She tweeted that Christopher Steele provided great historical context, and we know his whole report was debunked, etc., etc.
This is the queen of disinformation being put in charge of preventing disinformation in government.
Doesn't that just put the fox in the house with the hens, doesn't it?
Boy, that's for sure.
And yet we have to look for something positive.
And I think that more people will wake up.
But boy, I'll tell you what, there are days when I wake up this morning was one of those days.
Yeah, this is a pretty big deal, and they have a lot of control.
And there are some dire predictions.
And I don't want to dwell on the dire predictions, but it's all once again, you have to be honest with yourself and you have to be honest with the people that if there are some dire things that can happen if we don't change, that we have to have to deal with that.
And one thing that I sensed during my campaigns was that although my message was sort of dire in many ways, there was a sense that we're glad to hear that because you generally will give the answers to what you should do and can do.
And yet I think it was the idea that you hear the dire predictions and what's going on, that you have a much better chance of doing something than if you deny it and say, anybody, I think one of the things that Biden is very involved in is a lot of denial.
But that's the purpose of most politicians.
So he certainly is in that position.
So it's something that eventually that's the only way we can solve our problem.
Truth is the only answer to this.
And that goes back to the basic morality of the people.
And our founders understood that too.
And it was said by Adams and others, if you don't have a moral society, this whole system will go down.
It won't work unless the people are moral about it.
And right now, we haven't changed the Constitution, basically.
There's still a lot of prohibitions in there, but it doesn't matter.
The morality of the society has infiltrated our judicial system, our elective system, our universities, and therefore the battle becomes an intellectual battle rather than a military battle.
Well, you know, if the Republicans had any integrity, and there are a few certainly with integrity, they would use this as an opportunity to really defang the Homeland Security Department or just simply to disband it.
That's what needs to happen.
It never should have existed in the first place.
And I want to read as we close out this segment, Dr. Paul, on something that I hope will be a bigger scandal and more people will pay attention to.
I'm going to read from a statement made by somebody we both know back in 2002, a warning about the creation of a Department of Homeland Security.
Inflationary Risks and Recession00:04:46
Here's what the statement says.
The list of dangerous and unconstitutional powers granted to the new Homeland Security Department is lengthy.
Warrantless searches, forced vaccinations of whole communities, federal neighborhood snitch programs, federal information databases, and a sinister new information awareness office at the Pentagon that uses military intelligence to spy on domestic citizens are just a few of the troubling aspects of this new legislation.
Dr. Paul, you hit it on the nail.
You hit the nail on the head once again.
If only they had listened to you back then and if you would have voted no, we wouldn't be talking about Yankovitz or whatever her name is and all of these people who are just continuing this horrible, horrible government department.
The sort of sad part about this is people back then would ask, aren't you disappointed your bills didn't get passed or you didn't stop this bill?
I said, not really.
I didn't have high expectations, but I did want to set a record straight because I do believe if it's a valuable issue or an idea, it will last and it will look and participate in bringing about changes.
Did you want to mention something about Jerome Powell and the Fed, Dr. Paul, before?
No, I think it's interesting.
The markets are really rocking right now.
And the headline generally on many, many articles today was the Fed chair Powell faces a choice between inflation and recession.
My argument, no, he doesn't have a choice.
You know, they're not going to stop the inflation.
And the recession is already set.
But they're claiming that it's something that he has a choice.
And what they're talking about is if he raises interest rates real high, then he'll crash the economy.
Prices will go down.
It's nothing to do with the economy, but that's their argument.
In depression, prices crash because they can't produce and that sort of thing.
So that is their argument.
But Bernanke, he was on CNN this weekend, and he was explaining this.
And he said, they're always arguing what, how do we have a soft landing, soft landing?
Are we going to have inflation or depression?
All those things are said.
To ask if we're going to get inflation, of course, prices are going up right now.
It is reflecting a massive inflation of the last 10 to 15 years, especially since 2008 and QE.
That's the inflation.
Now the consequences are hitting us hard right now.
Now, Bernanke said Fed softish landing is possible.
We better pay attention.
He used to be the chairman of the Federal Reserve and did such a great job.
We have to listen.
It's possible if supply side improves.
And guess what?
What he means by supply size, if prices will go down, that's why what do we have?
Biden say, we're going to take the taxes away if they don't lower the oil prices.
And that's supposed to solve the problem, which isn't going to happen because the prices, that would just make things that much worse.
Excuse me.
And then there were also other economists on CNN over the weekend.
And they're predicting that there's a problem of that we can't make these decisions.
But Bernanke, they also talked about the economists.
And I imagine he's talking about Federal Reserve economists and government economists.
He said that economists are very bad at predicting recessions.
I'd agree with that.
They're very bad because they don't have the vaguest idea that, well, no, I shouldn't say that.
They don't want to ever admit or hint to the fact that the Federal Reserve causes all this mess.
So they just say that if it improves, if prices go down, so that's why they're going to have to do something if they're going to do it, because they think Volcker, you know, had a method of doing it.
But things aren't like they were with Volcker in the 1970s, early 80s.
Federal Reserve's Hidden Role00:01:29
That's over and done with.
This is much worse.
And the only thing that can solve this problem is a reform of monetary policy and a new understanding about how the markets work and get the people to understand that getting the government out of it, get rid of the Federal Reserve, even just audit the Federal Reserve, because it would require a decrease in spending.
And how many people are going to accept that?
So that is the reason I think what they're going to do, we're going to, before we get to the part where they're ready for the correction, a real correction, is that there's going to be a lot of inflation and a lot of recession and possibly an inflationary depression.
They have to admit that or they can't deal with it and they won't admit that because it would be political suicide.
So we'll keep talking to the people who want to know our spin on what we believe should be done.
A free society is far superior than anything that man can create by managing individual choices.
We need freedom of choices and a voluntary arrangement.
And then you're going to have a healthy economy and you won't have people spying on us all the time to try to blame somebody for all the mistakes they in the government are making.
I want to thank everybody for tuning in today to the Liberty Report.