Breaking Points with Krystal and Saagar - 3/29/23: Chris Christie Insists He Can Beat Trump, TikTok Ban New Patriot Act, Steven Donzinger Denied By Supreme Court, SBF Bribing China, Serial Podcast Conviction, Stephanie Ruhle's Grifts, Elon Musk Indian Gov Censorship, Ebola Lab Leak

Episode Date: March 29, 2023

Ryan and Emily discuss Chris Christie insisting he can beat Trump in 2024, Jon Stewart denies Trump arrest will make him a martyr, is the Tik Tok ban in congress "The Restrict Act" looking like the new Patriot Act, the Supreme Court declining to hear Steven Donzinger's challenge to his criminal contempt conviction, the U.S. charging FTX's SBF with bribing China 40 million dollars, a Maryland court reinstates Adnan Syed's, the subject of the “Serial” podcast, murder conviction, Emily looks into how mainstream media's Stephanie Ruhle abused her platform for her relations with Under Armour and Plank, how Elon Musk is teaming with the Indian Government Censorship, and we're joined by Chernoh Bah a whistleblower on the potential outbreak of Ebola from a Lab Leak.To become a Breaking Points Premium Member and watch/listen to the show uncut and 1 hour early visit: https://breakingpoints.supercast.com/To listen to Breaking Points as a podcast, check them out on Apple and SpotifyApple: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/breaking-points-with-krystal-and-saagar/id1570045623 Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/4Kbsy61zJSzPxNZZ3PKbXl Merch: https://breaking-points.myshopify.com/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This is an iHeart Podcast. Hey guys, Ready or Not 2024 is here and we here at Breaking Points are already thinking of ways we can up our game for this critical election. We rely on our premium subs to expand coverage, upgrade the studio, add staff, give you guys the best independent coverage that is possible. If you like what we're all about, it just means the absolute world to have your support. But enough with that, let's get to the show. Welcome to CounterPoints. We have a big show for everyone today. We're going to start with 2024, go to a really concerning new bill that a bipartisan coalition of senators is promoting

on TikTok. We're going to talk about Stephen Donziger's case and an interesting Supreme Court decision, an interesting sort of cross-ideological Supreme Court decision. We're going to be talking about Sam Bankman-Fried and China. An update in the serial case of Adnan Syed. Ryan and I both have some interesting stories.

I'll be talking about Stephanie Ruhle. Ryan, you'll be talking about Elon Musk in India and Twitter. And then you have a fascinating interview with Cherno Ba on the LabLeak for everyone to watch. But just as a reminder, by the way, if you are a Spotify subscriber, you can actually get a subscription for Breaking Points Premium in the description of this. Remember, we have video available if you listen to the show, if you watch the show on Spotify now. So that's awesome. I love that.

I do that all the time with Rogan. I'm a huge fan of Spotify's video function. So you can get a Breaking Points Premium subscription from the description here, and you can watch full video on Spotify, which is super cool. And as people have noticed, we're not rolling out all of today's show on YouTube.

It'll still obviously be on the YouTube link. It'll be on the Vimeo link for premium subscribers. But for the freeloaders on YouTube, there'll just be a couple of clips and then some more of them posted kind of throughout the week and over the weekend. Right. But that's Spotify. There's Spotify and there's also the podcast, of course, if you need it. The entire show today for free. Yes. And as a premium subscriber myself, I'm so glad to be able to watch Crystal and Sagar's beautiful faces on my Spotify.

But not while you're scootering, I hope. No, I would never do that. I would never do that. I'm not convinced by that. I do listen to podcasts while I'm scootering, but I don't watch them. I do, you know, sometimes like last night, I wore noise canceling headphones on a bike and I probably shouldn't be doing that. Not a great idea. This is going to come back to bite me. But let's dive right into 2024. Chris Christie, which you just asked me whether or not he was

declared. I don't believe he is declared. I don't think he's declared. Chris Christie, are you serious? So anyway, so Chris Christie is in the news. We can put this up here because he's telling Republican voters that you need somebody that's going to be able to go mano a mano with Donald Trump. And the reason that he says he's going to be able to be that one, even though he was completely humiliated by Jared Kushner. If you have been humiliated and beaten down by Jared Kushner, I don't think you get to call yourself the man of the macho moment. If you've been emasculated by Jared Kushner.

So he is referring back to, as everybody can probably guess by now, that time he owned Marco Rubio. Oh, he loves it. It's like a high school quarterback. But here's the problem. And everybody has to remember that viral debate moment where Marco Rubio kept repeating himself, saying, let's dispel with this notion that whatever something Obama, Obama. Right.

And he said it like three times. Chrissy didn't own him. Everybody watching that across the world was like, why do you keep saying that? It was the most obvious debate gaffe that I've probably ever seen in my life. And, and kudos to Chris Christie for saying, oh, you're doing it again. Right. But he was doing it again. Yeah. If that's all, if that's your whole rationale, he was sort of Trump before Trump in a way, like he, when he won the New Jersey governorship, he was this brash, macho dude who

was telling the liberals where they needed to go. And that was refreshing for a lot of Republican voters. Then he buddies up with Barack Obama in 2012 after Hurricane Sandy. And he's been pretty much persona non grata since then. And Trump is just, you know, he's a 2010 Chris Christie times like a thousand. You can't. I think it's even apples and oranges. Yeah. This is the direct quote from Chris Christie, who was at St. Anselm in New Hampshire on Monday. So he's not declared, but he is roaming the New Hampshire wilderness, which can only mean one thing. He's seriously considering a bid. Quote, you better have somebody on that stage who can

do to Trump what I did to Marco, because that's the only thing that's going to defeat Donald Trump. That is a ridiculous opinion, first and foremost. If you compare what he did to Marco to any of their attempts to take down Donald Trump, not just in the Republican primary in 2016, but since then. Absolutely nothing works because as soon as you try to mud wrestle with Donald Trump, you lose. There is absolutely nobody who can mud wrestle with Donald Trump and beat him. He is the indisputed champion of American political mud wrestling. And if someone can show me another politician that can beat Donald Trump at mud wrestling, I would be shocked. And it's not going to come from you saying that Marco Rubio is repeating himself.

It's just not on par with that at all. Right. And Trump had already almost literally emasculated him with the little Marco. And then, you know, they got into the whole contest about who had bigger hands. And Trump just went right there. Yeah. None of these people are up for what Trump's going to bring. That's a good point because Marco Rubio memorably went after the size of Trump's hands in South Carolina because there were all of these reports saying Donald Trump is really,

really insecure about the size of his hands because that's innuendo and is actually very insecure about the size of you can fill in the blank. And Marco Rubio's team really thought that they got him on that one. They really thought that was the way to go. And you can't not wrestle with Donald Trump. He basically came out and had a hilarious response that endeared more voters to Donald Trump. It completely backfired. It's just impossible. So if Chris Christie, who, by the way, is asked by an audience member, when are you going to take down Trump, replies, I have my timetable. If he seriously thinks that he can mud wrestle with Donald Trump and come out on top, he's more delusional than I even realized. So speaking of delusional, Ron DeSantis.

So let's play. I do not support or endorse that transition. So let's play. So Megyn Kelly has apparently been asking Ron DeSantis to come onto her show for an interview for quite some time. He hasn't said yes yet. She saw him on Piers Morgan recently. That got her upset. And that led to this clip. Let's play Megyn Kelly here. I will say for the record, we asked DeSantis to come on the show. He has not said yes. And I find that very interesting. You know, I love Piers Morgan. He's a pal of mine. But why would you go sit with the British guy and not come on the show? And I do think there's a reason for it. And I will venture to say he's afraid. I'm just going to put out there he's afraid because

he knows the kind of interview that I would give him. He's not going to put it out there. He's afraid because he knows the kind of interview that I would give him. He's not going to get a pass. Same as Trump never got a pass from me. This is into the machismo tough guy who can do, you know, who can handle it better. And so how does this work for DeSantis to have, first of all, to have Megyn Kelly? So who is Megyn Kelly in the Republican ecosystem right now? Because she's kind of transformed her role a little bit. that Ron DeSantis would definitely need. I actually was on a Jeep tour in Sedona a couple of weeks ago and a woman from Florida recognized me from going on Megyn Kelly's show. Whenever I go on her show, I hear from people I went to high school with. It's a huge show.

That's always kind of like my marker of how big the show is. Like if it gets out into kind of your high school friends that you haven't seen 20 years or something. It's huge. It's a huge show. And I do think it's important to the voters that Ron DeSantis would need to win. So I anticipate this actually means Ron DeSantis is going to be on Megyn Kelly's show fairly quickly. End of the week. And I actually think that's probably what she was doing. And I do think it's true. People definitely, especially on the left, I think underestimate Megyn Kelly. She gives good interviews. She's very prosecutorial in her interviews of candidates

and I think it probably makes sense that Ron DeSantis, at this stage, not having formally announced anything, would want to avoid that on his book tour because that's where he's been making all these media appearances with Piers Morgan and everyone else that you wouldn't necessarily want to dive into like a pretty prosecutorial back

and forth in a venue that is important to you because of the people that it reaches. So that would be my read on the situation, but I think this probably does get DeSantis on the show. So Basie is saying that she's right, that tough questions like the kind that Megyn Kelly delivers don't play into the strategy around a book tour. Right. The book tour strategy, Megyn Kelly's not on it for a reason. Interesting. I think that's true. I mean, with Piers Morgan, it's tabloidy, right? It's more, you know, what do you think about Donald Trump saying this and that? And it's not going to be, I think, probably. Like you've said this and you did that. Like you used to support privatizing Social Security. Like, where are

you now? Right. That kind of thing. Right. Piers Morgan's not going to do that. No, he's not going to do that. That's what we would do. So we should put a request out to DeSantis, and then if he's not on here by next week, we can shame him. How's that? We should start doing that more often. Once a week, we should shame someone

into coming on the show and see what happens. We'd love to have DeSantis. It would be a lot of fun. But on that note, Mike Pence is also making the rounds. He, though, even though he's making the rounds, I will also say he is wrapped into the January 6th situation. This is news from yesterday. A federal judge has ordered former Vice President Mike Pence to testify in the federal probe of Donald Trump's bid to subvert the 2020 election, according to a person familiar with the ruling.

So that's a big hurdle. Mike Pence's team has sort of resisted it. So clearly they see it as a big hurdle. I don't know. I don't know that it's... Why does this team against it? Because they've turned kind of state's evidence in public pretty consistently. They've come after him on every platform that they can find. Is it just the fact that they don't want to be seen collaborating with Democrats and coming after him? I think that's probably it. I think that's when I was trying to figure out, you know, what the sticking point might be there is I think it's the optics. First of all, it's the optics of being pulled into a grand jury probe. Not great. And on top of it, yeah, it looks like you can see how it would be framed as like collusion

with the forces that are out to get Donald Trump. Now, this is a quote from Politico. Legal scholars generally agree that Pence has a legitimate case that his role as president of the Senate may warrant immunity from testimony sought by the executive branch. The federal appeals court in Washington is expected to rule imminently on a separate effort that's related to Scott Perry. So it's actually kind of about a powers situation, like separation of powers question, and not as clear cut as maybe it seems. On top of that, did you see what Jon Stewart said about the Trump indictment? This is pretty fun. Yeah. We roll Jon Stewart here.

Oh, the law should always take into account someone's popularity. I think that's, I mean, what's happened to our country? It's as though you can't even commit financial fraud anymore.

You can't inflate the value of your properties when you need a loan and then deflate it with taxes. I mean, the next thing you know, they're going to send you to jail instead of your lawyer and your accountant and your campaign manager and everyone else around you.

It's no. The idea that someone may face accountability who's that rich and powerful is outrageous. And this country shouldn't stand for it. But what if it turns out to be his get out of jail free pass? It's his path to people will see him as a martyr. He gets him. Okay. You're okay with that? He could become president again. He could become president. Anyway, Fareed, we either have the rule of law or we have no rule of law.

The rule of law does not take into account if that might make you a martyr to somebody. I'd much rather have the conversation be, what is the law? Well, that is the conversation now. What is the law? He also goes on to say, this is on Fareed Zakaria's Sunday show, that all prosecution is political, something to that extent. I think Zakaria said that was sort of the issue here. And I think that is fundamentally the issue here. If we're talking about trumping up a campaign finance violation into felony on a legal theory that is not very widely accepted and applying it to a former

president, that's not just saying we either have the rule of law or we don't. So that'd be my pushback on it. He is generally, the point I think is correct, that it's laughable to say we shouldn't have accountability for very powerful people, whether they're on the left or the right, or whether it creates sort of discord in the public or not. I mean, that's how you end up getting in this stupid tit for tat. So I agree with that point. But in the specific case of the campaign finance probe, I think it's ridiculous. Right. Because rule of law doesn't mean you can kind of produce a new law to fit a new rule. And the rule being that you're under a lot of pressure to indict

Donald Trump for something. It's the opposite. Right. I think Donald Trump obviously, I think to me, has committed a bunch of different crimes. And it shouldn't be that difficult for Democrats to find a serious one rather than this thing where they're saying that the bookkeeping wasn't done correctly around the way that they made the payment to Michael Cohen to reimburse him for the payoff to Stormy Daniels and that then campaign finance is involved. So then we're going to ratchet it up to like a low level felony related to that. We don't, you know, there are these types of deals are done all the time. You know, a settlement, a payoff for silence and NDA, it's not necessarily criminal. And so what they have to do is they have to then find some basically paperwork violation around it rather than saying, wait a minute, did this guy sell American foreign policy to Saudi Arabia for a $2 billion check? Let's see if he did that.

If he did that and we can watch and we can see how the money flows, then let's prosecute him for that. But then that's where we don't actually have rule of law. Because once you kind of, if you subpoena the bank records of the Arab Emirates leadership, the Saudi leadership, you're going to see money flowing in all sorts of places. And if you actually did file that money, you'd have to corral a lot more people than just Trump. And so I think that's why he's gotten away with his bigger, more brazen crimes because they're crimes that are obviously way outside the bounds, but so is most of what Washington does. He's just a little bit more kind of reckless and unapologetic about it.

So they have to try to find other things. And the porn star thing is perfect. Because very few politicians, you're going to get caught up in something like that. That's a very Trumpian thing. And so like, all right, there. That seems like outside of what the normal politician does. So let's prosecute him for that. That way we can let the rest of this ecosystem just rest in peace. Even the charges down in Georgia, I think, are more serious. Yes. Go for those. Find me 11,000 votes. Just try that.

And they are trying to try it. We'll see how the grand jury goes. But I would much rather see a jury hear that evidence and weigh that. Did he actually try to illegally flip the election in Georgia? Right. Well, we'll see how it plays out with Pence, DeSantis, potentially Chris Christie, the way they handle this January 6th probe that is ongoing in and of itself, I think is an interesting question. Let's move on to TikTok. Ryan, this is fairly

big news that I haven't seen basically any coverage from the corporate media of. And I looked actually when the Restrict Act, which is being supported, it's sponsored by Mark Warner, has a very bipartisan coalition behind it, 11 Democrats, 11 Republicans. It is aimed at TikTok. It does not say the word TikTok once in the bill, which is always a giant red flag here in Washington. When a bill that is aimed at doing one thing doesn't mention it, that's always a sign that the language is probably wildly overly broad. Some screenshots from the bill started circulating on Twitter. And I think this is where a lot of people in the media, myself included, turned and paid attention to the Restrict Act after Mark Warner was promoting it on Face the

Nation Sunday. If you dig into the text of this bill, it is outrageously broad. And I think it was Greg Price on Twitter who said this is the Patriot Act for the internet. A couple of things. This is Michael Spalik. He says there's a reason the White House supports this legislation. They don't want to ban TikTok. The bill gives them a gigantic loophole to avoid doing so. The Warner Thune Restrict Act is not a TikTok bill. If this thing passes, the chances of a TikTok ban or forced divestment grow incredibly small. Why? The bill slow walks actions against transactions that are under review right now. So if anything, when we saw that bipartisan display of animosity towards TikTok, which by the way,

is like five years overdue in Congress last week. And, you know, people who are maybe on the anti-establishment side started getting nervous, rightfully so. This is why. Right. And we already have CFIUS, which is what they're sort of referring to. So CFIUS is a law that says that if there's some type of infrastructure that is critical to the United States that is being taken over by a foreign government, then that can't just be a normal business transaction. It has to get approved by this CFIUS board. I think one example was like I think the UAE back in 2006 tried to buy a bunch of ports.

And this was right after, you know, a couple years after 9-11. And the country was like, you know what, we don't want to sell our ports to a foreign government. And whether, no offense to UAE, but just in general, we'd like to keep control of that. As what's Donald Trump's line, you don't have a country. If somebody else controls your ports, like that, you can imagine how that could become problematic at some point. And so that's why there has to be these CFIUS reviews. And so if there is a case the government can make that TikTok is encroaching on some type of critical infrastructure, whether social media, the narrative control is basically what this is

coming down to, then put it before the CFIUS review and beat it there. Which is where it is. Right. Which is where it is and frankly should be. You already have the laws in the book. So then why this resist act? Why this overly broad piece of legislation that they're pushing forward? And the people who are circulating these screenshots on Twitter might seem paranoid, but if you read the law, they're right. It is extremely overbroad. It even mentions the Patriot Act. It's using Patriot Act language in its definitions.

Right. It combines powers with Patriot Act. It references parts of the Patriot Act that would apply, in this case, to the entities they're describing. And some of it is just funny, jingoistic American imperialism. I think we have this first part up here where it says, where they define foreign adversary. It means any foreign government or regime determined by the secretary pursuant to Sections 3 and 5 to have engaged in a country fits this definition, and then if that country has any controlling share, any share at all in the company,

that it would then be under the kind of unilateral authority of the secretary. And then they list some, just in case you're curious about who they are. These ones are definitely included. China, Cuba. Get out of here. Cuba? Are you serious? The Cuban apps? Come on. Iran, of course. North Korea, Russia, and Venezuela. But they specify Venezuela under the regime of Nicolás Maduro Moros. So Venezuela, as long as they get rid of Maduro. Because we don't recognize. Yeah, right. So that's why they're saying that Venezuela doesn't really exist as far as we're concerned.

But since it's actually alive now, we're going to put them in this law. And then when I said any amount of stock that they own, they define holding as, quote, an equity interest, a stock, a security, a share, a partnership interest, an interest in a limited liability company, a membership interest, or any participation right or other equivalent, however designated, and of any character. So basically, if anybody that the secretary finds to have done anything negative to any U.S. person has any interest in a company, then that company comes under their purview. It's nuts. Tucker Carlson called attention to what you were saying about foreign adversaries. And he says, what's a foreign adversary and who gets to decide? The Secretary of Commerce and the department and the DNI, not the Congress.

They get to decide what foreign adversaries are. He goes on to point out that the transactions with foreign adversaries covered by the Restrict Act would include, quote, this is from the bill, any acquisition, importation, transfer, installation, dealing in or use of any information and communications technology, product or service, including ongoing activities such as mandated services, data transmission, software updates, repairs, or the provision of data hosting services. And it gives the government basically the ability to tap into all kinds of your different communications, technological communications methods, in order to make these determinations, evaluations, as they're referred to in the bill. It's just incredibly broad. No surprise that you have a

bipartisan coalition of Mark Warner, John Thune, all kinds of establishment Republicans and Democrats are ready to have 21 sponsors. It's a fairly big deal. Josh Hawley has a clean TikTok ban on the table, and he has for a while. It is just a ban of TikTok. Of course, that's not what they want to do when they say they want to ban TikTok. They want to expand the surveillance powers of the federal government, and that is exactly what they put in writing here. And when reading these types of bills, it's always useful to go to the very end of a section, because there'll be specifics, specifics, specifics, specific, and then the very last one will be because there'll be specifics, specifics, specifics, specific, and then the very last one will be like, and anything else we didn't cover.

They have a good example of this one here in, what is this, section 3A, subsection 2 here, that a company that, quote, otherwise poses an undue or unacceptable risk to the national security of the United States or the safety of United States persons. So all of these things, but then also anything that we say is unacceptable. Like literally, if it's unacceptable, well, what's something that's not acceptable? Well, it's something that's unacceptable. So it's right there in the law. My t-shirt is explaining. I don't understand why it's raising so many questions. And I think this goes to the broader point that the debate has been held publicly around

data security and privacy, which as somebody who has covered data security and privacy for 15 years now, it makes a mockery of the way that Congress thinks about data security and privacy for 15 years now, it makes a mockery of the way that Congress thinks about data security and privacy. They have no interest for them. I mean, there is a bipartisan coalition that we've talked about on this show before that does really good work in trying to push back against the national security state when it comes to this. But in general, the majority of Congress does not care about privacy, does not care about that type of thing. They barely understand it. And so to have them now saying that they're so concerned about your data that they're going to ban TikTok just doesn't pass the sniff test. What it really is about, and I think Crystal's talked

about this too, is that they don't like the fact that a China-backed social media company can control the narrative inside the United States. I think they should just have that debate. Yeah. Because I think you can actually make a case like, okay, you know what? Maybe that isn't good. And a lot of other countries would say, you know what? We don't want – if Voice of America, for instance, was like as dominant in China as TikTok is in the United States. It's unthinkable.

China would be like, no, no, no, no, no. What are you doing? In fact, lots of countries did ban Voice of America because we're sending in American propaganda. And then we would try to figure out ways to get it in anyway. The propaganda war between countries has been basically part of kind of geopolitics going back to the middle, medieval ages with like, it was ever since you had a printing press. Yeah. You had people slipping propaganda in behind enemy lines. So have that argument rather than trying to pretend like all of a sudden you care about privacy. Yeah, it's ridiculous. It's ridiculous.

And the House Financial Services Committee put out a tweet where they said, the Restrict Act is using TikTok as a smokescreen for the largest expansion of executive power since the IEPA. The US can't beat China by becoming more like the Chinese Communist Party, which is to say expanding surveillance powers massively over people. I think that's fairly well put. And it signals to me, honestly, that the Restrict Act has become in short time fairly toxic. I expect you'll see people actually revoke their support for the bill. I don't think it'll get much more support since it's gotten this level of public attention, at least on the right. I have, again, really not seen mainstream, so-called mainstream outlets cover this at all. The bill has been out for a while. Some conservatives were on top of it

several weeks ago, but I think that even the House Financial Services tweet is from several weeks ago, but really not getting any coverage in the mainstream press. That said, it's not going to pick up any more Republicans. I'm fairly confident at this point. And I would, if I were going to make an appeal to my fellow lefties, I would say, would you want to give this authority to Donald Trump to pressure YouTube? Let's say he has a falling out with Elon Musk and Elon Musk is like, you know, juicing the algorithm against Trump. Would you want Trump to be able to threaten to shut down Twitter because Saudi Arabia has a gigantic interest in it? Do you want Trump to be able to threaten YouTube or Trump to be able to threaten Facebook or any president to have this

amount of authority? I made those arguments all during the Obama era over the drone war and over other warnings of what a theoretical Republican president who followed Obama might do with this executive authority that Obama was aggregating toward himself and it all fell on deaf ears. So I'm not sure that this argument is going to work well with them either. And of course, it turned out that all of your warnings were just hyperbolic and wrong. Yeah, Trump didn't do anything. Didn't abuse executive authority at all. That was fine. Why would he do that? That was totally fine. You know, yeah. And the other thing that I just add really quickly is the administrative

state or the executive branch is one of the most indirect forms of democracy that we have right now, especially the way it's abused, the way the powers that rest in the administrative state are often abused. And this punts so much power to the Secretary of Commerce. So the bill is specifically just like creates a new universe of powers for the Secretary of Commerce in a way that is very hard to hold to account outside of a presidential election. You'd have to take this out basically on the President of the United States. So another thing to keep an eye on. And the Secretary of Commerce is basically just a big donor. That's the cadet position that goes to like the richest person. Right. Yeah. In this administration and the Secretary of Commerce is basically just a big donor. That's the cadet position that goes to the richest person.

Right, yeah. In this administration and the last one. Speaking of money and politics, let's move on to the Supreme Court case involving, or the Supreme Court's decision actually not to hear a case involving Stephen Donziger, something that this show has certainly covered over the years. Ryan, basically you have on Monday, Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh dissenting from the court's decision not to review a lower court's ruling involving Donziger's case. He was sentenced to six months in prison for contempt of court. You know this case. He ended up serving like three years in the end.

Right, right. And you know this case much better than I do. But the dissent was really interesting. It basically gets over separation. It gets into separation of powers questions, which is where you see Gorsuch and Kavanaugh dissenting and where you see interesting decisions from the ostensibly liberal members of the Supreme Court. What did you make of this? And we were just last segment talking about an administrative state and the right's hostility toward it. And I suspect that that's where some of this is coming from, why the liberals wouldn't side here and why Gorsuch and Kavanaugh fell down the way they did. But I think Gorsuch and Kavanaugh are right on this one. So to recap for people who haven't followed this, the key thing to understand here,

so Donziger represented plaintiffs who were suing Chevron in Ecuador. Chevron requested that the case go down to Ecuador and be handled there, where they thought they had a better chance of prevailing. As Neil Gorsuch writes in his dissent, Chevron would live to regret that decision because there's a nine-plus-billion- dollar verdict against Chevron that Donziger won. Chevron then comes back to New York, back to the United States and starts fighting Donziger there, saying that it was unfair the way that Donziger was able to manipulate and bribe the court, et cetera, in order to give him this, in order to win this verdict, which is just hilarious to hear one of the wealthiest and most powerful organizations on the planet saying that they got beaten by these indigenous plaintiffs down in Ecuador. And it's just completely unfair. Like a hippie lawyer.

Yeah, in the court that they asked to be sent down to. So they get back to the United States. The judge demands Donziger turn over all of his electronic equipment in order to kind of go on a fishing expedition to see if they can prove these Chevron allegations. He says, no, that's a massive violation of attorney-client privilege, etc., etc. The judge holds him in contempt, refers to the Department of Justice for a criminal prosecution. The Department of Justice looks at it and says, no, thank you. We are going to use our prosecutorial discretion, and we are not going to prosecute this contempt case. Go on about your case.

Leave us out of this. The judge then appoints a private prosecutor from a law firm that had done business with Chevron, and the private attorney then prosecutes this contempt charge. Donziger is prevented by the same judge from having a jury. Instead, it's the judge who is prosecuting him. It's bizarre. That finds him guilty and then sentences him to prison. And so Donziger has appealed, and the appeal is narrow on the question of whether or not the judge had the legal or the constitutional right to appoint this prosecutor. And I would encourage people to read Gorsuch's dissent. It's short. It's signed by Kavanaugh. It's very clear. He makes the point, he says, look, nobody thinks that the executive can appoint my law clerks.

I have the quote right here. Yeah, go ahead. He says, the notion that the constitution allows one branch to install non-officer employees in another branch would come as a surprise to many. Who really thinks that the president may choose law clerks for my colleagues, that we can pick White House staff for him, or that either he or we are entitled to select aides for the Speaker of the House? Why do judges on the left not join a dissent like that? If they had, there's three liberals left in the court. If they had and they joined these two, they could have vacated this conviction. Absolutely. So why didn't they? My guess, and they don't have to give a reason when they reject cert, they can just say, we don't want to hear this. My guess goes back to the

administrative state, that they were worried that if this judge's appointment of this prosecutor is ruled invalid, then somehow they're going to peel that back and say, okay, well then OSHA is also unconstitutional, or the EPA is unconstitutional, something like that, which I think is just absurd. First of all, the idea that you can capitulate away and the right is going to stop coming after OSHA or the EPA is absurd. We're not. You're coming for it. Like, it's happening. Dirty water and dirty air and I want it now.

Unsafe conditions in all workplaces. Yes. Damn it. So whether this particular case went that way, I don't think is going to affect that broader war at all. But also, you know, the liberal justices are liberal when it comes to kind of civil rights and cultural issues over the years. But if you look at cases that the Chamber of Commerce has weighed in on, liberal justices often are siding with the Chamber of Commerce. So it's not as if, in other words, they're not going to stick their neck out to Buck Chevron. Yeah. Now, I remember when Katonji Brown Jackson was up for confirmation,

I interviewed Marsha Blackburn about some of her plans for it and asked specifically if her staff was reviewing Jackson's record on sort of corporate powers. And she told me yes. I don't know whether or not that was the case, but that's what she said. And I think it's kind of an interesting question as to whether you see that realignment start hitting the Supreme Court because corporate powers on the right, one of the big things they challenge when it comes to ESG, when it comes to DEI, is in fact the sort of like corporate consolidation of powers and the way that they're used. But at the same time, the right's entire institutional judicial movement is fairly chamber of commerce friendly. So it would take a lot of unwinding. But I think it's a good point too, because you see it on the left as well, that the sort of institutional progressive legal movement is tied up in many ways with the political establishment.

And we'll just wrap with Gorsuch here. He concludes, however much the district court may have thought Mr. Donziger warranted punishment, the prosecution in this case broke a basic constitutional promise essential to our liberty. In this country, judges have no more power to initiate a prosecution of those who come before them than prosecutors have to sit in judgment of those they charge. In the name of the quote United States, two different groups of prosecutors have asked us to turn a blind eye to this promise. Respectfully, I would not. With this court's failure to intervene today, and he goes on to say, I hope that this doesn't become precedent. Because how absurd would that be? Then we're in the Spanish court where the judges become the prosecutors, which, all right, if you want to have that system, have that system. But that's not the one that we have.

No, not at all. Not even close. No. No. Speaking of our system, let's transition to Sam Bankman Freed. This is from Reuters. U.S. prosecutors on Tuesday unveiled a new indictment against SBF, accusing the founder of the now bankrupt FTX cryptocurrency exchange of paying a $40 million bribe to Chinese officials so that they would unfreeze his hedge fund's accounts. This adds to the pressure on the 31-year-old former billionaire who now faces a 13-count indictment over the November collapse of FTX. So says Reuters. He's expected to be arraigned on the new indictment on Thursday before a Manhattan judge in federal court.

He intends to plead not guilty, according to a person familiar with the matter that's cited in the Reuters report, $40 billion or $40 million bribe to Chinese officials to unfreeze hedge fund accounts. Just a drop in the bucket if you're overseeing FTS. It's $40 million in crypto. It's monopoly money. Yes, is that really a crime? What's funny is that this guy in some ways is getting arrested, speaking of Trump doing things that everybody else does, really for doing what everybody else does. So he's getting arrested for campaign contributions and political spending in races in the United

States and bribing Chinese politicians and Chinese government officials. Just another day in the life. He's got to be like, wait, these things are illegal? What are you talking about? They have a billion dollars of our assets frozen because it's caught up in a separate kind of investigation going on in China. And the way to get it out is we bribe people to get our money back. And now all of a sudden that's a crime. And then when it comes to the campaign finance stuff, it's like, wait a minute, we set up dark

money groups. We funnel money to politicians. The politicians sign questionnaires saying that they support all of our issues. That's how we do this. Now, the one law they do actually enforce when it comes to campaign finance is the straw donor thing where you give $2,000 to a candidate and I pay you back. Dinesh D'Souza. Yeah. That's the one thing that they still seem to care about. And he apparently did that. Allegedly did that. Well, yeah. So this is, prosecutors are saying that he ordered this $40 million crypto payment to a private wallet from Alameda's main trading account. And that was to persuade Chinese government authorities to unfreeze Alameda accounts with more than $1 billion of cryptocurrency.

And they were frozen as an investigation, as you mentioned, Ryan, into this unnamed Alameda counterparty. And his... Finance? Just speculating. And so he also apparently, according to prosecutors, they're alleging he authorized a transfer of tens of millions of dollars of additional crypto

to, quote, complete the bribe back in November of 2021. He's apparently expected to plead not guilty from reading this report in Reuters about the indictment. It looks a lot like the case is solid. Then again, when you're charging people with bribery, you really have to have a very clear evidence that their intentions were X. And that's, you know, SBF was fairly shameless, so they may well have that. If there's anybody who will give them that evidence, it's SBF. Didn't he have a signal chat called wire fraud? Don't we all? If there's anybody who is going to be texting his subordinates to say, please send $40 million in bribe money to these Chinese

officials and using the word bribe, it would be SPF. Not saying he did that, but if there's anybody who did it, it would be him. Yeah, and it seems like, again, I mean— The word of the wise. Don't call your signal group wire fraud. Don't call your bribes bribes. Call them contributions. Fraud advice from Reingold. Or philanthropy. Yeah. Set up a foundation. It's so easy. Don't be stupid. Let's move on to breaking news yesterday, as of yesterday,

in the case of Adnan Syed. This is from CNN. Maryland appellate court on Tuesday reinstated the conviction of Syed. You remember his murder case was a little serial case, of course. It was a two-to-one ruling from the appellate court who said that the lower court had violated the rights of the victim's brother, Young Lee, to attend a key hearing. Here's more from CNN. Because the circuit court violated Mr. Lee's right to notice of and his right to attend the hearing on the state's motion to vacate, this court has the power and obligation to remedy those violations as long as we can do so without violating Mr. Saad's right to be free from double jeopardy. That's actually from the court's opinion, not from CNN. Fairly big news. Ryan, I am not at all in the rabbit hole, in the serial rabbit hole.

Obviously, this is a huge decision. What do you make of it? This is a case, I think, where the headlines did a little bit of a disservice to how big of a deal it is because it's kind of a technicality and all of the experts on all sides of this seem to think that there's no reason that it would go any differently the next time that this happens. It has an interesting kind of victim rights question that we could get to in a second, but briefly the facts of the case. Her brother was given apparently 30 minutes notice to come to this hearing, and it's not that he just needed to be there to witness it. He was going to participate in it. He was going to make his case for why the evidence

should not lead to an exoneration of Adnan Syed. He couldn't get there in person. He was at work. He just had to quickly zoom in. He didn't have anything prepared. And that's a foul. The judge could have delayed it a day. It doesn't mean you have to delay it months and months. The judge could have delayed it a day. It doesn't mean you have to delay it months and months. The judge could have given more warning. standing, and victims' families too much standing in the process, which runs up against the party that has the actual standing, which is the people. It's the people versus Adan Sayed. The people are prosecuting Adan Sayed on behalf of the victims. It's not the victims themselves or the victims' families themselves that are doing it. Because when you get into the victims themselves doing it, then it becomes less rule of law and more vigilante-oriented.

And so that's why the kind of defense community was really bothered by this ruling, because it could open up the floodgates for all sorts of other kind of procedural claims made by victims' and victims' families to redo and reinstate entire convictions. But nobody thinks that the evidence has changed much. Basically, the prosecution, it has been proven, had significant exonerating evidence at the time of the prosecution and did not turn it over to Adnan Syed's defense attorney. And there's nothing the prosecution can do to go back in time and undo that. And so the entire thing is toxic and will probably get thrown out as a result. Yeah, that's what it sounds like. I want to ask you about this part

from the opinion. They said the court is the power and obligation to remedy those violations as long as we can do so without violating Mr. Saad's right to be free from double jeopardy. Right, because the question is, does his conviction getting tossed out count as a not guilty verdict? And if it does, then double jeopardy kicks in and you can't come back. So clearly they're saying that it's not close enough to a not guilty to say that you can't come back in. But yeah, you don't want people in a situation where they get found not guilty and then you go through different procedural hoops and be like, oh, you gotta come back again. We're gonna get you this time. Like that would really undermine

one of the bedrock principles that protects people's individual liberty. Where can people expect this to go from here? I think it'll get tossed again. And he's not being brought back in to prison or anything. Like he's free until the next hearing. And at the next hearing, it's very likely that it'll be tossed again.

Such a mess. Yeah. What's your point today? Oh, we're talking about one of my favorite people in all of cable news, Stephanie Ruhle. It's been clear for a while that Stephanie Ruhle abused her journalistic platforms to help her very, very close friend, Kevin Plank, and his company, Under Armour. In addition to Ruhle providing extensive business advice and flying on the company jet, the pair reportedly carried out an extramarital affair as well, which the Wall Street Journal first brought to the public's attention back in 2019

after the Under Armour board discovered, quote, intimate emails between Rule and Plank. The rest of the media largely ignored Rule's misconduct, by the way. If you Google her, you'll be hard-pressed to find any substantive critiques of the journalistic malpractice at hand, not the affair or the ethics, the journalistic malpractice. Today, Rule hosts the 11th hour on MSNBC. She has her own show and is senior business analyst over at NBC News. But her support for Plank and Under Armour may have been even more problematic. Follow me over to Scotland, where the City Council of Aberdeen has been fighting Under Armour in court, accusing the company of artificially boosting its share

price. As Fox News reports, quote, the Scottish town allegedly lost millions from a pension fund for local workers as a result, as it was heavily invested in Under Armour. So where does rule factor in this lawsuit over Scottish pension funds? Well, as Fox notes, in 2016, Morgan Stanley published a report that downgraded under Armour stock to underweight and reduced its price target from $103 to $62 per share which caused the stock to plummet according to the filing. The document alleged that Rule then offered a detailed counterpoint to the Morgan Stanley report on air attacking its underlying data and essentially cheerleading Under Armour in the process. So this is where things get a bit hairy. Aberdeen's lawyers want Bloomberg to

turn over Rule's emails with Plank based on the argument that their personal relationship, which seems to date back to about 2015 when she was working at Bloomberg, is not deserving of First Amendment protections that, quote, an independent journalist-source relationship generally warrants. Bloomberg disagrees with that. But we actually don't have to settle that argument here and now, or even see the emails to recognize what Stephanie Ruhle did was deeply unethical and wrong. It also fits a very clear pattern of behavior, too, one that NBC News would address publicly if it cared more about journalism than ideology

and ratings. The conservative Washington Free Beacon was one of the only outlets to report on Rule's coverage of Under Armour back when the Wall Street Journal story broke. Here's what they wrote. Quote, in June of 2016, the company released Steph Curry branded sneakers that were universally roasted as ugly and boring. Under Armour employees were told not to address criticism because Rule told the company she would step in and discuss the shoes on TV. The Wall Street Journal reported, sure enough, archived video of Rule's appearance

on NBC's Today that weekend shows she defended the shoes without disclosing her and Plank's relationship, business, friendship, or otherwise, or revealing that she coordinated with Under Armour. Okay, let's just watch the segment because with all of that said, it's pretty hilarious. I don't think you're the market, so that may be a bit of a problem. Twitter killed these shoes, calling them the Metamucil 6s, the Shuffleboard 7s, but

they look an awful lot like a classic Nike or a New Balance. That's a mass market shoe. This is the black taxi. When this is what he was wearing during the games. This is what he, so he goes from this to this. So naturally some folks are upset. I think that's why they're the pushback. When you think about a Steph Curry shoe, a basketball shoe, it's hot, it's sexy. Just in time for Father's Day, dad. There you go. Oh my gosh, it's so good. She actually then used her professional Twitter account to post twice about those shoes in particular.

The Beacon went on to note, quote, Rule would continue to hawk Under Armour products and feel-good PR campaigns at least a dozen times throughout the next two years. A dozen. Never disclosing her reported relationship or role as an advisor. Now, none of this is especially surprising from a longtime Deutsche Bank managing director and the former, quote, highest producing credit derivative salesperson in the United States, who, by the way, was apparently unfaithful to her hedge fund CEO husband during her affair with Plank. Rule is basically an archetypical corporate Democrat in the new mold of socially liberal, suburban mom who wants low taxes and smug Sheryl Sandberg feminism.

Her show is basically just for people with Equinox memberships and G-wagons full of shin guards and orange slices. But the lawsuit out of Aberdeen shows why this isn't fun and games at all. Chatting about tennis shoes might be a cute way to help your secret CEO boyfriend, and it may seem like no big deal to read corporate talking points about his company stock on air. To wealthy media talking heads, these conflicts are mere playthings. They don't think twice about Scottish pensioners who may be invested in the stock. They sit around, do each other favors, and assume it'll all work out just fine. It's pretty much how you get Gotham. And it should be a very big deal to rules peers in media and to her co-workers at NBC News, but my best guess is that it won't unless they get wind that it's affecting the bottom line. Without mainstream media criticism, that seems quite unlikely.

All right, Ryan, what is your point today? Well, I'm looking at India and Elon Musk. And so, two months after teaming up with the Indian government to censor a BBC documentary on human rights abuses by Prime Minister Narendra Modi, Twitter is yet again collaborating with the government to impose an extraordinarily broad crackdown on speech. I have a news story up at The Intercept with my colleague Murtaza Hussain looking at the latest successful effort by the Indian prime minister to persuade Twitter to censor its critics. Last week, the Indian government imposed an internet blackout across the northern state of Punjab, home to 30 million people, as it conducted a manhunt for a local Sikh nationalist preacher. The shutdown paralyzed the internet and text communications in Punjab. I asked readers and viewers in India about the crackdown, and some told me that for much of the time,

the shutdown was targeted at mobile devices. All of this is worth reporting on here, because it could easily be a dry run for other countries. Now, while Punjab police detained hundreds of suspected followers of Amrit Paul Singh, Twitter accounts from over 100 prominent politicians, activists, and journalists in India and abroad have been blocked in India at the request of the government. On Monday, the account of the BBC News Punjabi was also blocked, the second time in a few months that the Indian government has used Twitter to throttle BBC services in its country. The Twitter account for Jagmeet Singh, who's a leading progressive

Sikh Canadian politician and a critic of Modi, was also not viewable inside India. Under the leadership of owner and CEO Elon Musk, Twitter has promised to reduce censorship and allow a broader range of voices on the platform. But after The Intercept reported on Musk's censorship of the BBC documentary in January, as well as Twitter's intervention against high-profile accounts who shared the documentary, Musk said that he had been too busy with his other jobs to focus on the issue. First I've heard, Musk wrote on January 25th, he said, it is not possible for me to fix every aspect of Twitter worldwide overnight while still running Tesla and SpaceX, among other things. So in late February, Singh's followers sacked the Punjab police station in an attempt to free allies that were held there.

The Indian media reported that the attack triggered the government's response. In the void left by Twitter blocks and the internet shutdown across much of the region, Indian news outlets, increasingly themselves under the thumb of the ruling government and its allies, have filled the airwaves with speculation on Singh's whereabouts. On Tuesday, Indian news reports claimed that CCTV footage appeared to show Singh walking around Delhi masked and without a turban. While Modi's suppression has focused on Punjab, Twitter's collaboration has been nationwide, restricting public debate about the government's aggressive move. And so basically they're saying that this Sikh preacher, Amrit Paul Singh, is a dangerous and wanted criminal, and that he needs to be captured by any means necessary.

And that's why they're going to kind of shut down the internet for 30 million people. But what Twitter has done is not allowed any public discussion to be held about whether or not the Indian government is actually justified in carrying this out. Anybody who would be critical from either the opposition party or critics outside of the country, like Jagmeet Singh, who's the leader of the kind of leftist Canadian political party. They can't even speak. So you're just left with Modi's narrative that this guy's so dangerous that we have to lock down an entire region of 30 million people to round him up. Musk hasn't responded to this yet, which I find really disturbing because if somebody has his ear and they bring him a problem, he's like, interesting,

looking into it on top of that. Two months ago, he responded because there was so much attention to our first story on this. It's like, I can't deal with everything. Come on, man. I got so many jobs. Leave me alone. It's like, okay, well, it's been two months, and now you've only kind of taken your censorship to a higher level. So why is that okay if it's not okay here? Well, and are you telling me that a request from the Indian government is not being debated at high levels to his awareness? I mean, I just have a hard time believing that. I do think you said something in the monologue I thought was really important,

which was it could be a dry run for other countries. And when you look at Elon Musk, who I think we could have a conversation about some of the good, some of the bad. One of the bad is his relationship with the Chinese government. You've pointed out his relationships with other government.

I mean, in order to do business on the scale that he does and the types of business that he does, it's basically unavoidable. But to take over a speech platform with those pre-existing relationships, I think raises some obviously problematic questions. And to your point, when you already have proven a willingness

to cooperate literally in Xinjiang with the Chinese government, he opened a big Tesla factory in Xinjiang while they were sort of in the middle of conversations about treatment of Uyghur Muslims, you don't get the benefit of the doubt anymore. Yeah, and you and I talked about this a lot when he was debating whether or not he was going to buy Twitter, that he could believe in his heart he could be the most pure free speech absolutist that has ever lived. But if you have all of these financial entanglements across the world, that's going to push on your heart. You're going to say, well, free speech is good, but on the other hand, it's got a factory over here that needs its supplies to keep moving. Or it's just you don't care because it's not here in the United States. And then finally, what a lot of people will say is, well, Musk has said he's going to follow the laws of the country that he's operating in. Two things to that. One, a request from the executive in India is not, quote unquote, following the law.

Like the old Twitter, if they would get a request from the executive in India, and they did all the time to take down this critic or that critic, they would say no. You'll come back with a court order. And when the court order would come, if it came, often it wouldn't, but if it came, then they would challenge that order in court. And they would fight and make it as difficult as possible for a government to censor an account. Rather than a request comes in and you're like, oh, Jagmeet Singh, Canadian politician? Okay, boom, nuked. He's down. He's down. And then the second point would be, I don't even think that's a good policy to say that you're going to follow the laws of every country that you're in. Because if that's the case, you never would have had an Arab Spring.

Because, you know, Mubarak's laws did not allow for Twitter and Facebook to just allow people to communicate freely and publish criticism of the government. But it was that ability and their ability to share actually WikiLeaks revelations that got people out into the street and gave people the sense that they could actually take control of their own destinies. And if you would have had a policy at the time that said, well, we actually only allow speech that is allowed by a government in that country, then you would have no, you know, you'd have no ability to protest against authoritarian governments like a Mubarak regime at the time. And that's where Mark Zuckerberg and Jack Dorsey sort of earned their rebel bonafides. Yeah, they did. They felt really good. They clearly loved it. Like they relished having those rebel bonafides and that very quickly changed. So yeah, I think it's a bad policy. Obviously, it's a bad policy.

We should be exporting positive American values and not bending to the will of authoritarian governments. But to your point, I mean, is it even the policy? That's another completely legitimate question. And the big takeaway, one of my big takeaways from this is just that when you have a platform as important and influential as Twitter, it does make me nervous. Like I love the entrepreneurial startup energy that Elon Musk has brought to it. I genuinely think that's like interesting and exciting. Agree. That's been fun. It's been fun. And I think it can be a recipe for success at other sort of startups and small companies and even companies that have a footprint that's much bigger than the size of their company.

I think that's cool. But man, do I think it also when you have something that is so influential like Twitter is, it's such a recipe for disaster and chaos when you're understaffed, overworked, and unorganized. It's creating problems, I think, with speech here in the United States already, uneven sort of violation decisions. We have already seen that happening. That's inevitable, but it feels like it's happening at a disturbing rate. Things that are promised, like that impact people's businesses, like this verified membership, which would cost like 10 grand a year or something to that extent. It's going to happen

now. No, it's going to happen then. You know, it just, it does feel like a really powerful, influential, and serious space of public discourse is a mess right now. And that could go in some dangerous directions here or abroad. Could indeed. All right, so up next, we're going to have an interview with Sierra Leonean journalist Cherno Ba, who wrote a book on the Ebola outbreak from 2014 to 2016. We recently reported on a new apparent admission by virologist Christian Anderson that a lab run by the U.S.-based

Viral Hemorrhagic Fever Consortium in Kenema, Sierra Leone was in fact performing Ebola research in 2014, contrary to previous denials. The presence of that lab, along with gaping holes in the zoonotic theory, have long led to calls for a deeper investigation into the origin of the 2014 Ebola outbreak and calls for restrictions on dangerous research and tighter lab safety regulations. Now, for background on that question, see our reports from last week and the week before. But today, we're fortunate enough to be joined by a journalist who has been examining this issue for years. Now, Cherno Ba is the editor of the Africanist Press and he's the author of the book, The Ebola Outbreak in West Africa,

Corporate Gangsters, Multinationals, and Rogue Politicians. He's also the ongoing target of death threats from his government back in Sierra Leone. He's in exile here in the United States right now, and we're very fortunate to have him with us in the studio. And so, Cherno, and if we could put up the first hair sheet here, the CNN report. So, Cherno, the kind of mainstream version of the story of the Ebola outbreak is that there was this two-year-old boy who was playing with some bats. Yada, yada, yada, we get an Ebola outbreak. So, you explored this theory by actually going to the village. Did the story hold up? No, that was, when we first read the story, when the report came out in December 2014,

I knew that there must be, or there are obvious inadequacies in the report. In the first place, it was reported that the index case of the outbreak, Emil Wamono was a two-year-old child who they alleged was involved in the hunting and grilling and eating of a bat that transmitted the virus to the child. So that did not hold up. So, in fact, that was what triggered my interest to investigate the narrative, to interrogate the narrative. So I traveled from Sierra Leone to Guinea and then met family members

of Emil the father I spoke to the father who was never at the time mentioned by any of the reports and I That is what I documented in the in the in my book basically part of the book or the main aspect of the book is to challenge that dominant narrative and We found out at the time that the child was not even two years old. He was 18 months old. Yes, he was 18 months old at the time. So since then, there has been a revision of the age of the child

by even journalists who had earlier reported, who had taken on that narrative. So many of the... And there was no clinical evidence to support the fact that the child had actually died of Ebola. In fact, medical practitioners in the village, in the health clinic who had dealt with all of these supposed index cases, earlier cases of the supposed outbreak, believed that the child died of malaria-related conditions. So that was too obvious. And I think more work has now,

increasing work into that or examination of that narrative has rendered it basically baseless. And you found a couple other inaccuracies or omissions around the size of his family and other people who were involved. What were some of those? Yeah, there were also, this is what you might call a larger family. The child had other siblings who were basically in the household, who were never infected.

There was a sister, eight other siblings who were in the house that were never infected. And the report also made no mention of his playmates. And the key thing here is that bat hunting in that area is not done by children. Or 18-month-olds. Yeah, 18-month-olds. So on the surface of it, it was too obvious. And the report, I think, also mentioned the fact that insect-eating bats were responsible for triggering the outbreak.

And in that region, the bats that are obviously present there are food bats. And at the time, food bats were not known to carry Ebola, Ebola virus. So like I said, every aspect of that narrative has been undermined by the fact that there was no clinical evidence to support the argument that Emil was the index case. The father of the child was also not infected, even though he dealt with all of the, suppose in this case, the murder of the child and the other relatives,

other members in the village who were supposedly identified as the primary victims of the outbreak. And the family still believed that the child was not, the child never died of Ebola. Right. And, you know, so. Right, so you get this major outbreak later in March. This is happening in December. This is in December.

What about the rest of the people in the village? Did they believe that, in hindsight, that they were the epicenter of the Ebola outbreak? Or what was their thought as you talked to them? No, they were even surprised with the fact that all of these people were going there and pinpointing the village or highlighting the village as the epicenter of the outbreak. We have to underline the fact that many of the under five deaths in that region are basically associated with malaria. So that is the known epidemic or disease that's responsible for many of the deaths.

It has similar symptoms to Ebola. Yes, similar symptoms to Ebola, fever and all of that. So like I said, recent even writers did a-up interview with the father in which he actually reported exactly what we had documented, what I had documented in the book, that the child was never the index case of the outbreak, was also not a victim of Ebola. So I think that argument has been sufficiently settled. So because we disputed the fact that Amiliandu, the village, could not be

the epicenter of the outbreak, we had raised the question about the lab in Kenema, which we believe there was work going on there. In all of the earlier conversations, nobody had mentioned the presence of researchers in

the neighboring region in Sierra Leone so in my in my book as far as I know that was one of the things that I argued that why was that aspect the presence of Western researchers in Kenema never part of the right seems seems relevant. Yes. So it's finally getting attention now. And so Christian Anderson, who worked in that lab, was recently on a podcast and in trying to knock down what he called the conspiracy theory, ended up making this admission. We want to roll this clip from the podcast. The problem is that people see these coincidences. One of the new ones is the Ebola lab leak, which also is being blamed on us because we have been studying Ebola in Kenema and

Sierra Leone. And lo and behold, Ebola emerged just a few miles from there in 2014, right? Obviously across the border in Guinea, but it's maybe 100 miles or so away. And people then put that together and say, oh, so that Ebola must have been a lab leak too, and it was Robert Gary and Christian Anderson again. And the reason why these names keep coming up and the reason why we get grant money to study infectious diseases is because we study infectious diseases and have done so for many, many decades. And that's why the names keep coming up again, right? It's not because there's some major conspiracy theory here where all of us have been sort of fiddling with the fields well prior to the pandemic.

So hearing Dr. Anderson apparently acknowledge that Ebola research was going on, which seemed to be the conclusion that so many other people had drawn already based on research papers and other evidence, and also the fact that it was called the Hemorrhagic Center. What was it like for you when you first heard that admission from Dr. Anderson? Well, I wasn't surprised because in my book I had called for the disclosure of all of the information relating to the work that was happening in Kenema, which had received a tremendous amount of funding, Western defense funding from the United States and other parts of the world, who were basically concerned about the potential weaponization of certain pathogens that could be used as part of modern day warfare. So I knew from my work as a journalist in the region that Kenema had been the center of a biodefense research

way back in 2004, subsequent to the anthrax incident here that increasing increased funding was going and by 2010 I also knew that a an umbrella organization called the viral hemorrhagic fever consortium VHFC has been formed that coordinated all of these defense funding and research that was going on in the region so my what I was surprised about was that in all of the conversation that happened from 2014 right up to this admission, nobody was willing to admit that we should be looking at the possibility that the outbreak may have or the outbreak likely emerged out of the lab itself or how is the activities of that lab connected to what happened in Sierra Leone

and in the region in 2014 and 2015. So the admission here is, you know, we've been calling for that. We've been calling for the disclosure of information relating to the kind of research, what is happening. And, Kenema, if you look at it, we must underline the fact that that kind of research should not be undertaken in an environment that lacked all of the… And we put that parachute up, actually.

We have a little aerial image of that, that figure here. Yeah, all of the security protocols that are needed to undertake a class A pathogen, a research dealing with a class A pathogen, are absent here. We're talking about a dilapidated hospital environment where medical officers lacked the basic tools of protection. Right. And this was underlined by a Reuters reporter who had interviewed some of these researchers about the site being part of the U.S. war on terror.

And researchers were going on there. And they said they lacked the security protocol, but they are able to carry out, you know, they think it's possible to carry out the kind of work. So we are still calling for the disclosure, complete and full disclosure of information about the kind of research that was happening and the link, the potential link between that research to the outbreak, because we're talking about hundreds of lives, hundreds of thousands of lives, you know, people dying, and up to now, there are families in the region

who have been stigmatized, who have lost family members, who are still dealing with that trauma of the horrific nature of the outbreak, the deaths, and this is a region that has a history of crisis and conflict, wars, tremendous exploitation of environmental and resources, diamonds, gold, bauxite, aluminum, resources that have been mined and transported by leading corporations.

So it is not surprising that Western scientists and researchers will also use the same environment for the production of medical knowledge that will serve defense and other interests outside of the protection of the communities in that region. And there's also a potentially interesting slip that Dr. Anderson makes in that region. And there's also a potentially interesting slip that Dr. Anderson makes in that clip. If you noticed, he said, we're doing Ebola work in this lab, and then there was an outbreak a few miles away. And then he says, well, what I mean is that there was an outbreak 100 miles away in Guinea. But if the original outbreak, as you're saying,

has been rejected by everybody in the community and has fallen apart and doesn't make sense, would it be more accurate, would his original claim have been more accurate that actually the original epicenter could have been within very close proximity to Kinema? Yes, because I even, one of the statements I made in my book is the fact that the Lenders narrative, which located the outbreak. European investment, not investment, investigative operation. Yes, that located the outbreak in Guinea, miles away from Kenema, could be a potential cover up. Because if they had identified Kenema as a site of the outbreak then the defense for an operation that has been going on since 2004 to 2010 and 2014

will have been the subject of the primary interrogation. So by locating the outbreak and the initial index cases miles away from Kenema, it takes people's attention away from what was potentially happening in Kenema and how that is related to the outbreak itself. So I think that is the essence of the Lenders narrative with all these inadequacies. It was just repeated and popularized by mainstream media out here and also the academy itself. So without pausing and and examining the potential of a two-year-old boy to participate in right in the you know others task of hunting and grilling of a bat so that is

the it provided an alibi basically where all of this scientific research that is potentially implicated in in this tragedy that has claimed the lives of people in the region could not be part of the conversation. So it's five years down the line, now we're beginning to get admission that research related to Ebola had been ongoing and happening in the region. Right, and the subtitle of your book

talks about corporate gangsters and rogue politicians, and that gets us a little bit into why you're in exile now. From Sierra Leone, I want to talk a little bit about your own career kind of evolving out of this book, but what the Afrikanist press is up to and what kind of threats you're facing. And I think we have a clip made from one of the journalist protection organizations that has stood up for you and for your organization, that you've been the illegitimate subject of threats from the government for your reporting on government corruption. What was the reporting that really got you in the crosshairs of the government? And what's the status of that now? Well, for the last 20 years, through the African Express,

we've been holding different kind of politicians, especially in Sierra Leone and in the region in West Africa, accountable to minimum standards of good governance and accountability. And for the last four years, we have been perhaps, with all humility, the only press organization in Sierra Leone that is holding the current government accountable. We've reported on high levels of corruption involving the current president,

the wife of the president, and all of the leading officials in government that has led to a tremendous amount of, exposed the government's facade and hypocrisy in its commitment to fight corruption and that has actually resulted into all kinds of threats against my life to the point that I cannot go back home right now. And their threat has and their response has been almost comically aggressive. Yes, they've gone as far as sacking the Auditor General

of the National Audit Service in Sierra Leone. They fired their top auditor thinking he is a source of errors. Yes, it's a woman thinking she's a very credible woman who was known over the years for presenting reports that detail the

misuse of public funds. And the current president sacked, fired her unconstitutionally on the suspicion that the audit service was responsible for providing details of government corruption to the African Express. And not only that, even people in the central bank have also been sacked. Bankers, other public officials. We have counted over 170 people. Trying to figure out where you're getting this information.

Yeah, trying to figure out whistlebl us or the source of our information. How many they fired, did you say? More than 170 people who've counted so far across the government, from the Minister of Finance, the President's Office, the Central Bank of Sierra Leone, to the audit service, and still an ongoing process of harassing people. Nobody could even identify themselves in Sierra Leone as affiliates or associates of the African Express because it's dangerous to do so. So your reporters are writing under pen names

and working underground? Yes, underground. Those of us who put our real names are people who are outside of the country. Right. Yeah, we talk a lot about, in the United States, about so-and-so just produced a courageous report. And I always think about reporters, like the ones who are working for you and yourself who are doing actually courageous journalism that could lead to real consequences rather

than some mean things said about you online. Yes, that's what I've witnessed threats coming from both sides of the political divide, from the opposition parties in parliament and also the ruling party. So you find those who support your work will only do so when they find a political interest in doing that. When you write about their opponents or you reveal things that are supposedly damaging to their opponents, they hail your work. When you present something that affects their own political interest, they also condemn you.

So we are caught between that line in the middle of that crossfire among these corrupt politicians. I call them two factions of the same ruling class who have divided themselves along these parties. But they pursue the same thing, loot public funds, who've divided themselves along these parties that, you know, but they pursue the same thing, loot public funds, disregard the welfare of ordinary people, and they're not committed to uplifting society.

Yeah, we have that here too. We sure do. So everybody here at the Breaking Points Network, certainly deeply supportive of the work you're doing to expose this corruption. Really thank you for joining us here. And I'm glad you could be in studio. We're lucky that you were coming through town. Thank you for having me. All right. So that was Chernobah. We taped that interview earlier this week. Emily wasn't able to join us for that one. Sorry, you couldn't be there.

No, no, no. This topic Also, you know it inside and out because you've been looking at this for a while. What were your big takeaways from this conversation with Cherno? Well, a couple of things. One, just the extraordinary courage that Cherno and his colleagues have shown at the Afrikanist press to be going up against the powers that be in those countries, not just Sierra Leone, but Guinea, Liberia, elsewhere. It's sad that he is in exile. It is a credit to the authenticity and the power of his work that he has been pushed into exile. There are going to be elections in June in Sierra Leone, and there's some hope that there will be enough political change that could allow Chernobyl and some of the other kind of dissident journalists to return back into the country. Before the interview,

he and I were talking about how the way that he was describing their work felt very similar to the way that Intercept's work is received. He's like, whenever we are attacking the government, then the opposition party is sharing our work, is celebrating us as these courageous, independent journalists who are just speaking truth to power. And then the next week, they'll expose corruption within the opposition party and then they're just you know stooges of this and that other thing and you know, you can't this is just character assassination and and but and but the Very clear difference that I want to be 100% clear about it. They they are facing, you and safety risks for the work that they do, whereas we suffer from mean tweets, basically.

Brutal. Yeah, and some mean DMs every now and then. Yeah. But his work on the Ebola outbreak was path-breaking. And he was, for instance, the first one to demonstrate that the patient zero, Emil, was not two years old. He was 18 months. And that was a critical discovery, which later the rest of the kind of conventional narrative had to incorporate. He discovered that the dates were off. He also discovered that Emil was, as he mentioned in the interview, part of a very large family and that his siblings did not end up catching Ebola, nor did his father who treated him the entire time, which is just extraordinarily difficult to imagine, which would make it more likely that the local doctor's diagnosis of what he had of

malaria was actually accurate. And so that if you cannot pinpoint the patient zero to early December or even late December as they changed it to later in this village, then where did it start and how? And the overlap with COVID is obviously fascinating and essential. And direct. Like several of the key figures in the COVID lab leak controversy were literally present at that one. Unbelievable. I look forward to your future reporting on it because I know that you're not giving up on this one. Yes, it's awful to think about how all of these deaths,

all of this suffering may have been preventable by just smarter policy. Smarter policy and more transparency. Yeah. All right, well, that does it for us on this edition of CounterPoints. Thank you so much for watching. We hope you have a great rest of your week

and we will see you back here next Wednesday. This is an iHeart Podcast.