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July 8, 2023 - RFK Jr. The Defender
28:17
Next Level Censorship with Aaron Maté

The FBI aided a Ukrainian intelligence effort to ban Twitter users and collect their data, leaks reveal. Twitter declined to censor journalists targeted by Ukraine, including Aaron Maté. Robert F. Kennedy Jr and Aaron Mate discuss a new level of censorship.

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Hey everybody, I've got another intrepid journalist with us today.
Aaron Maté is a writer who publishes at maté.substack.com.
Also, he's the host of Pushback with Aaron Maté and co-host of the podcast Useful Idiots.
He's a contributor to Real Clear Politics.
In 2019, he was awarded The Izzy Award for Outstanding Achievement in Independent Media for his coverage of Russiagate in The Nation magazine.
He was previously a long-time producer of Democracy Now.
He's done extraordinary reporting, very, very useful reporting on the Ukraine most recently.
And he broke a story that actually where he is one of the stars of this story.
He's not only the writer, but also the subject of a story where the FBI And correct me if I'm wrong, Aaron, the FBI was cooperating with the Ukrainian security agency, the SBU, to censor U.S. journalists and others.
I think there was 163 people on the list that the Ukrainian government wanted censored.
Who were criticizing U.S. policies in the Ukrainian war.
So this is like, this is just a new pioneering new territory of censorship, which is, of course, what we all knew was going to happen once they knew they had the power to censor stuff.
This is kind of the logical conclusion that they get to go to war and nobody gets to criticize it.
So tell us what happened.
Yeah, I mean, I thought if I was listening to the Biden administration that we're fueling this proxy war in Ukraine to defend democracy.
So I guess this means now that their definition of democracy means censoring views that criticize the proxy war, because that's what happened here.
In March of 2022, so just weeks after Russia invaded, the FBI sends Twitter an email and says, we're attaching a list that we've received from the SBU, the Security Service of Ukraine, that's the premier Ukrainian intelligence agency, for your review.
And the FBI says that these accounts are suspected by Ukraine of spreading, quote, fear and disinformation.
And the attached list from the SBU is a bunch of Twitter accounts.
And the SBU says in a note, please block these accounts and also give us their user data, which means that the SBU via the FBI is asking Twitter to hand over the private information of these Twitter users and they're asking Twitter.
And that would mean their date of birth, their phone numbers, and their email addresses.
And on that list are a bunch of accounts, including mine.
And also a number of other, there's journalists who are from Russia.
They work for state media there.
There's Russian politicians.
There's Ukrainians who are being very critical of their government.
A few of them are now in exile.
One of them was a senior official under Yanukovych, the former Ukrainian president who was ousted in 2014.
And Twitter, in response to this, says, okay, we'll take a look, but just so you know, We have to flag the fact that this list includes Canadian and American journalists.
And they mentioned my name as an example.
And they basically say, we're not going to suspend journalists unless you can prove they have some sort of deceptive tie to a foreign government such as Russia.
And the FBI responds and says, yeah, no, sorry, we have no proof of that.
And that's what happened.
And Twitter, you know, I'm thankful they didn't follow through on the request to suspend me.
But the question is, why is the FBI, our domestic law enforcement agency, why are they assisting a foreign government trying to censor people, including journalists?
I didn't realize that that was part of the FBI's mandate, but apparently it is.
Yeah, and actually, you did a great job of tracking down FBI agent Kobanitz, who was in charge of the censorship project.
And how'd you do that?
And what was his response to your queries?
Well, it's interesting.
I mean, his email address is in that email, so that wasn't hard to contact him.
But he is detailed to the U.S. Embassy in Kyiv.
So he's working out of Ukraine.
And apparently, as a part of his job functions now, he's passing on censorship requests.
And so I wrote him a bunch of questions.
And my first question was, did you vet this list of accounts before you passed it on to Twitter?
And after Twitter told you that this list included journalists and, you know, we're supposed to have something called the First Amendment, Did that spark any reflection on your part, any revision of your policy of assisting in these Ukrainian censorship efforts?
He did not respond to me.
The FBI responded to me after a while.
It took a while to formulate a response.
And they said, thank you for your questions.
We don't confirm the veracity of our correspondence.
So they also declined to answer my question as to whether or not this is now normal for them to assist a foreign government.
I know when my father ran the FBI that every FBI agent had to take an oath to uphold the Constitution of the United States.
Do you think that's still part of the regimen over there?
That's a great question.
Last I checked, the First Amendment was a part of the Constitution.
And look, I mean, it'd be fine to me if there was a debate about this, if the FBI would come out and say, hey, this is what we're doing.
It's so important to us to censor people on behalf of Ukraine that we're going to do this.
And at least it was publicly known.
But the fact that we have to find out about this through leaked documents, that's a problem.
And there's no debate about this whatsoever.
And if you look at the media reaction to this story and other stories from the Twitter files, we've so normalized this culture of censorship that nobody cares.
It doesn't matter anymore now that the FBI is helping a foreign government censor people, including journalists.
Let me move on to another shocking story, which is Anthony Blinken's speech in Finland.
Talk about what that means for the future of our forever war.
That was a very scary speech.
I mean, Blinken's job title is supposed to be our top diplomat.
But when it comes to Ukraine, he does no diplomacy.
He spent the first six months of Russia's invasion refusing to even speak to his Russian counterpart, Sergei Lavrov.
You're supposed to be a diplomat, and diplomats do diplomacy, so why wouldn't you want to engage with your Russian counterpart to end this war?
But the answer to that question is because Blinken doesn't want to end the war.
They want to fuel it.
They want to continue it for as long as possible to, in the words of Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin, weaken Russia.
And Blinken, in his speech in Finland, laid out his vision basically for this war, which is perpetual conflict.
He spoke out against the possibility even of a ceasefire.
He said that would basically be unacceptable.
And the blueprint he laid out for Ukraine is just Ukraine becoming increasingly militarized, no peace treaties with Russia.
And even if when this phase of the war ends, which it will have to eventually, because I mean, I could be wrong.
I'm not a military expert, but it doesn't look to me like Ukraine's counteroffensive will yield much in the way of big gains.
I mean, that's exactly what the Pentagon privately assessed as well, as we know from leaked documents.
And so Blinken is basically saying that No matter what happens in this phase of the war, there will never be a peace agreement with Russia.
We'll just have perpetual conflict.
And the best way to deal with Russia is to make sure that Ukraine is armed to the teeth.
So further integrating Ukraine into NATO's military infrastructure and just basically using Ukraine as a military proxy on Russia's border.
Yeah, let me read sort of a section of there.
Blinken's policy is to fight the war to the last Ukrainian in order to weaken Russia, which is a geopolitical ambition of the neocons in the White House for the past two decades.
Would you agree with that assessment?
Oh, I absolutely do.
In the words of Carl Gershman, who's the former head of the National Endowment for Democracy, just a few months before the coup in 2014 in Ukraine, Gershman wrote an article in the Washington Post saying that Ukraine is the biggest prize in the struggle against Russia, and that if Ukraine can be pulled into the U.S. orbit, that might redound to regime change in Russia, overthrowing Putin.
And lo and behold, shortly after that, you had the Maidan revolution break out in Ukraine.
Initially, peaceful protests against corruption and calling for integration with the EU.
But that was basically hijacked by a group of far-right forces in Ukraine who turned that into a violent coup.
And they were backed, as we know, by the U.S. Victoria Nuland was caught on that tape plotting who would be the next Ukrainian leader.
The U.S. was very instrumental in backing that coup.
And because of that neocon policy of trying to basically use Ukraine's divisions as a tool to weaken Russia, now we're in the war we're in now.
And there were so many opportunities to avoid it, but it was that neocon policy that sabotaged it.
There's something called the Minsk Accords, which I know you've talked about.
That was the pact reached in 2015 to end the civil war that began in Ukraine as a result of the 2014 coup.
Because after this coup government took power, their first legislative effort was to ban the Russian language effectively, to basically make it no longer possible for it to be recognized as an official language of the state.
And people living in the ethnic Russian areas of Ukraine and the Donbass and other areas saw that as an affront on their culture.
And meanwhile, you had talk of Ukraine joining NATO, which was unacceptable to Russia.
So they went and seized Crimea because Crimea is the home to their most important naval base.
And then you have this war in the Donbass breakout where people are resisting this new government and they get backing from Russia.
And to end that war, you had the Minsk Accords, which Ukraine never fully implemented because the far right wouldn't allow them because the Minsk Accords were premised on granting the Donbass some limited autonomy, basically recognizing their cultural rights as ethnic Russians.
And that wasn't acceptable to the far right of Ukraine.
Even Zelensky, when he was elected on a peace mandate to implement the Minsk Accords, basically, he couldn't do it because the far right threatened him and they had the backing of the bipartisan establishment in the U.S.
So and plus you have also meanwhile, you have, as you've talked about, NATO expansion and the placement of these missile sites in Poland and Romania that the U.S. says are there to defend Europe from ballistic missiles from Iran, which everyone knows is a joke.
Iran is not going to send missiles into Europe.
Those missile sites are there to threaten Russia.
And a refusal by the Biden administration shortly before Russia invaded in February 2022 is why I think we're in this mess we're in today, because Russia put out these proposals That could have led to some serious negotiations, not the US accepting all of Russia's demands, but at least some constructive talks.
But Blinken and Biden refused to discuss even the core issue of NATO expansion.
They wouldn't even talk about it.
So when you won't even talk about these core issues that are existential to Russia, you're bound to have a conflict.
And that's what we have now.
You talked about Zelensky running on a peace platform and one of his promises, and of course he won 70% of the vote because people in Ukraine wanted peace.
And one of the planks of that platform is that he promised that he would sign the Minsk Accords.
But after he got into office, he pivoted on that promise.
And it seems evident that pivot was the result of pressure from the ultra-right nationalists in the Ukraine.
In collusion with the neocons in the White House, but do we, I mean, we can connect that dots just logically, those dots logically, but is there any other evidence of U.S. intervention to sabotage the Mexican courts?
There is William Taylor, who is the former top US official in Ukraine.
He came to be known during Trump's first impeachment when Trump was impeached for pausing some weapons to Ukraine while Giuliani was pressuring them to investigate Joe Biden.
William Taylor gave an interview to the Washington Post recently on the anniversary of the Russian invasion.
William Taylor recounted meeting with Zelensky in the summer of 2019.
Zelensky was trying very hard to figure out something called the Steinmeier formula, which was named after the German foreign minister who was trying to revive the Minsk Accords that had been stalled for so many years.
And Zelensky was reading some document to try to figure out how he could get on board with this, how he could sell it to the Ukrainian public, and how he could get it past the Ukrainian far right, basically, because that was his biggest obstacle.
And William Taylor recounts how he took Zelensky aside and said, you don't want to do this.
This is a terrible idea.
It doesn't make any sense.
And that was reflecting what the position of the U.S. was.
Vaguely, they would say, yeah, we support Minsk.
But every time there was an effort, To implement the Minsk Accords, the US would block it, as William Taylor's example illustrates.
And Zelensky is a perfect example.
As you said, overwhelming mandate.
People from all parts of the country voted for him because he was going to end the war.
And he talked about it.
He talked about making sacrifices.
But the response from Ukraine's far right was, in the words of one battalion commander who said, Zelensky says he's prepared to lose his popularity or his ratings.
No, he will lose his life.
And he will hang from a tree if he betrays the Maidan revolution.
That was the message.
And the US, as the crime sponsor of Ukraine, could have come in and said, no, we have Zelensky's back.
We're going to support him on his election mandate.
We're going to end that war.
And they didn't.
They, in fact, put pressure on Zelensky to abandon the Minsk Accords.
And that's why, when Trump was impeached the first time, there was so much...
If you would listen to people like Adam Schiff and others during the impeachment trial...
Adam Schiff was saying stuff like, we have to aid Ukraine so that we can fight Russia over there, and we don't have to fight Russia over here.
And that the struggle against Russian proxies in Ukraine, which meant ethnic Russians inside the Donbass who are acting on their own, with Russian support, but still out of their own volition.
They weren't puppets of Moscow.
That for Adam Schiff, this was so important to keep that war going.
That was a message to Zelensky that the US did not have his back when it comes to implementing the Minsk Accords.
And that's why there's all these people that we never hear about in the US, but Zelensky had a close friend and partner in his comedy years who was from the Donbass.
And after Zelensky was appointed, he appointed his friend, his name is Sergei Savoko, to a commission for dialogue with the Donbass, to promote unity, healing with the Donbass, promote peace.
And so his friend Savoko unveiled his platform, and he couldn't finish his speech because members of the Azov Battalion attacked him during his speech.
And shortly after that, Zelensky...
I think we never did.
Back in 2001, we associated the neocons, the Victoria Newlands, etc., and Robert Kagan's, the people who drove the invasion of Iraq, this catastrophic invasion of Iraq with the George W. Bush administration.
They started out, the neocons kind of started out as Democrats because the big new Brzezinski came out of the Carter administration.
He's kind of the father, the godfather of the Neocons, but they were solidly Republicans by 2001, by the Iraq invasion in 2002.
And then they were kind of ejected from the Republican Party and became pariahs and political exiles.
And they reappeared in the Trump administration little by little, and then later on, and a little bit in Obama.
And then in full force, they made their reappearance in the Biden White House.
Which is consistent because Biden was always kind of a warmongering president.
He was one of the few Democrats who really led the charge during the Iraq War.
My uncle was fighting him at that time on that, although he liked Biden personally.
Biden was a warmonger.
But now they're not only in the White House, but you're seeing in the upper ranks of the Republican Party people like Mitch McConnell.
And Lindsey Graham have made these very, very extreme statements recently about what our purpose is, very revealing statements about what our true purpose is, basically admitting that it's a proxy war.
It's our war with Russia, and we're using Ukrainian bodies and U.S. weapons to fight the war.
Yes.
I mean, Lindsey Graham famously said last summer, he said that as long as we give Ukraine support, they will fight to the last person.
So he's openly bragging about using Ukrainian lives to fight Russia.
And Mitch McConnell said something similar recently as well.
well, he said that arming Ukraine, quote, is a far cheaper way in both dollars and American lives to degrade Russia's ability to threaten the U.S.
So he's showing right there in invoking American lives, his contempt for Ukrainian lives, because he's saying that we don't have to use any American lives because it's Ukraine who is dying for us.
And it's so much it's so much cheaper for us.
And that's a reflection of how he views Ukrainian well-being and their lives as cheap.
They're expendable.
And this is out in the open.
And yet we're supposed to believe that these same people care about Ukrainians and are in this to help defend Ukraine when they're openly displaying so much contempt for Ukraine and Ukrainian lives.
And when McConnell says that this will degrade Russia's ability to threaten the U.S., McConnell knows that Russia is not going to invade the U.S. Russia doesn't want to fight the U.S. because everyone knows He knows that when Russia and the US fight, that's the end of humanity that triggers nuclear war.
What he means is that we can use Ukraine to degrade Russia's ability to threaten US hegemony, because Russia is a nuclear power.
It's a huge country.
There's all this derisive talk of it just being an oversized gas station, basically, but it's more than that.
And it can threaten US hegemony in Europe, certainly where Russia is, and also in the Middle East, because in Syria, Russia intervened on the side of the Syrian government after the U.S. was spending billions of dollars to fuel a dirty war aimed at regime change, similar to the regime change operation in Libya.
And that's why people like Lindsey Graham and Senator McConnell want to have a proxy war against Russia.
They don't like people who can deter U.S. hegemony.
And that's why they can speak with so much contempt for the lives they're sacrificing toward their goals.
And you also had these cynical statements during the Finland show that revealed that the Biden administration is mostly concerned with the president's legacy and with his reputation and that they feel,
the White House now feels, this is what they told Politico, that if they don't succeed in regaining the territory that Ukraine has lost to the Russians, which is never, of course, going to happen, That it's going to blacken President Biden's administration.
Yeah, the headline in Politico was, White House anxiously watches Ukraine's counteroffensive, seeing the war and Biden's reputation at stake.
What does this work have to do with Biden's reputation?
Are we supposed to continue filling a proxy war against a nuclear armed power for the sake of preserving Biden's reputation?
It's such a reflection of how this is not about defending Ukraine and Ukraine's well-being.
If this was about defending Ukraine, then the U.S. would have got on board with the Minsk Accords and would have spoken reasonably with...
The Russia about a pack that can respect everybody's security.
But Washington doesn't care about that.
They see Ukraine as an instrument to bleed their adversary.
And that's why they can admit that they're watching this counter offensive, not because they care about Ukraine, because they care about Biden's global reputation.
Here's something for The Washington Post.
This is by Karen DeYoung, veteran correspondent for The Washington Post.
And she writes this, quote, Now notice here how completely absent in Biden's goals and what he needs from this counteroffensive, Is Ukraine and Ukraine's well-being and defending Ukraine.
It's all about showing US strength and leadership, showing that this can be done with bipartisan support.
All this is domestic considerations and it's all premised on the notion that the US should be a global hegemon, a global superpower, leading everyone, showing strength.
And what strength means in reality, it means using other people to die for you, strictly to hold on to your hegemony.
It sounds basically like what a mafia don would be concerned with.
A mafia don is concerned with their reputation.
People have to be scared of you so that they can fall in line and they see you as strong.
And that's pretty much how international affairs works.
And I see this, all this is Biden basically acting as the global mafia don.
And now things are not going so well because as was predicted, Russia has overwhelming military advantage because it's right there.
It's on the border with Ukraine.
It's a huge power.
They have a consistent industrial base that can manufacture the weapons they need.
And by the way, back when Obama was refusing to send weapons to Ukraine, Against the pressure of people like Blinken and Biden, Obama was saying that, you know, this is crazy because Russia always has the advantage here.
So even tactically, it would be nuts to engage in a war with Russia over Ukraine.
But yet that's exactly the policy that his colleagues who served under him are now carrying out under Biden.
I watched with my family, there's a new, these really wonderful new documentaries out.
I don't know if it's on Netflix, but it's colorized documentaries from legacy footage from World War II. And it's all the great battles of World War II. And one of the battles that we watched the other night was Stalingrad.
One of the most brutal battles in history, and there's sacrifices everywhere.
That the Russian people made to save Stalingrad.
You look at that and it is impossible to imagine that the Russians would ever back down in Ukraine.
They were literally sacrificing millions and millions of Russians who essentially happily went to their death in the motherland.
This is, as you point out, an existential It's a battle for the Russians.
For us, nobody in the United States, we have no strategic interest in the Ukraine, zero.
And people in the United States can't even find Ukraine on a map.
You know, we have a strategic interest in Mexico and Canada, parts of Latin America and the Caribbean.
We have no, and then, you know, in ports around the world, we have zero strategic interest in Ukraine.
But for the Russians, the Russians have been invaded three times through the Ukraine.
Yep, that's right.
They are not going to let that country all into the hands of a foreign, hostile army like NATO. Yeah.
Which, you know, to think, to sort of hoodwink the Ukrainians into going into this war, believing that the United States and NATO would win the war for them when they were really just burning up the flower of Ukrainian youth in a slaughterhouse.
The cruelty and the cynicism of this strategy is really breathtaking.
Here's what you write about, Blinken.
You say the U.S., Blinken said, will help, quote, build a Ukrainian military of the future with long-term funding.
The American people signed on to the $113 billion that they sent over there because they thought that was going to be the end of it.
He's now talking about, it looks like $113 billion a year or ever.
Hmm.
We have long-term funding, a strong air force centered on modern combat aircraft, an integrated air and missile defense network, advanced tanks and armored vehicles, national capacity to produce ammunition, and the training and support to keep forces and equipment combat ready.
And meanwhile, NATO leaders are envisioning, quote, an Israeli-style security agreement for the Ukraine that would give priority to arms transfers and advanced technologies.
So this is really kind of a, this is literally a forever war.
This is like what they, what we did, I guess what we did with the Russians in Afghanistan, where you fight a, you know, a 20-year war.
Yeah, that's the model.
I mean, Hillary Clinton invoked that model early on in Russia's invasion.
She spoke of the Afghanistan model as something to emulate.
And it's so sad.
I mean, look, Ukraine's a very divided country.
There are people, there is a strong constituency that certainly hates Russia, wants nothing to do with it, and wants to be fully a part of the West.
And fair enough.
And that's their right.
But the problem is, Ukraine also has people who do identify with Russia.
And even now, you still have polls showing that there's a lot of people that don't want to be a part of NATO. That's even after Russia invaded, which I was very struck by.
But it's always been divided.
So the answer when you have a divided country is not to try to force it into one camp or the other.
Don't try to force it into Russia's camp.
Don't try to force it into the US camp.
And Russia, at least officially, and maybe they were playing some sort of game that I'm not aware of, but their proposal for Ukraine was neutrality.
And that was once even enshrined Ukraine's concept to be neutral.
That was a value that Ukraine followed for a very, very long time.
But it's the far-right nationalists of Ukraine who've never wanted neutrality.
And because they've had the backing of the US, they've been able to, I think, play a really negative role and help bring us to where we are today.
And for Russia, you know, in terms of the historical memory they have of losing tens of millions of people in the Second World War.
I mean, now that's compounded by the fact that it is just true.
There is a neo-Nazi component inside Ukraine's far right.
It doesn't mean that Ukraine's a Nazi government.
It doesn't mean that Ukraine's a Nazi state.
Like numbers wise, they're a pretty small contingent, but they have power.
contingent, but they have power.
However, after the 2014 coup, there were fascist forces empowered by that.
After the 2014 coup, there were fascist forces empowered by that, the Azov Battalion.
The Azov Battalion.
That's a neo-Nazi battalion that's incorporated into Ukraine's armed forces.
That's a neo-Nazi battalion that's incorporated into Ukraine's armed forces.
Congress, a few years ago, passed a bill banning U.S. assistance to the Azov Battalion.
Congress, a few years ago, passed a bill banning US assistance to the Azov Battalion.
We've totally forgot about that.
We've totally forgot about that.
Foreign Policy Magazine, the heart of the U.S. establishment, they published an article shortly after the 2014 coup and said, the uncomfortable truth is that a large part of the people who brought the new Ukrainian government to power and who are now a part of it are fascists.
It's just a reality.
It doesn't mean that that's Ukraine as a whole, but that is a force inside Ukraine that Russia feels that it has to deal with.
And it's a tragedy that Russia went to this step of invading Iraq.
I wish Russia could have found some other way to do this.
And I think the burden, the proof is on Russia to show that they had no other choice but to invade.
And so I don't excuse Russia of culpability or responsibility, but that doesn't mean we can't look at our own role and what we could do to bring peace.
And after spending years now using Ukraine as a proxy for a neocon policy, there has to be, I think, for the sake of the planet, a change, of course, because this is just not sustainable for everybody, for anybody.
Let me ask a last question, just out of curiosity.
The Ukrainian forces have been decimated.
I mean, we hear that 350,000 soldiers have died in the front line.
Is there anything left of the 8th Battalion?
Because that was their, you know, that was their front line shock troops.
They must have suffered terrible, terrible casualties.
Not my area of expertise in terms of military stuff, but I do know that they were on the front lines in the fight for Bakhmut, which Russia, via its mercenary Wagner force, recently conquered.
So I know that they were fighting there, and I assume if they were fighting in Bakhmut, which was a mass casualty event, I have to imagine that they took a lot of losses there.
Aaron Maté, can you tell us where our listeners can find you?
You can find me at thegrayzone, thegrayzone.com, and at my substack, maté.substack.com.
And Robert, thanks so much for having me.
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