Scott Horton Show - Just the Interviews - 1/18/24 Glenn Greenwald on the Legacy of the Edward Snowden Leaks

Episode Date: January 21, 2024

Glenn Greenwald joins Scott to discuss the Edward Snowden leaks and the broader fight to protect civil liberties. They start with a discussion of Greenwald’s remarkable consistency amid the dramatic evolution of America’s political dynamics. They then talk about the Snowden leaks, and Greenwald fills in some details about what happened with the documents after the initial bombshell stories had been published. At the end, the talk about the situation facing Julian Assange. Discussed on the show: “Confessions of a Right-Wing Liberal” (Mises.org) NSA Primary Sources at EFF Glenn Greenwald is an American journalist, author, and former lawyer. He hosts the show System Update every weeknight on Rumble. Follow him on Twitter @ggreenwald This episode of the Scott Horton Show is sponsored by: Moon Does Artisan Coffee; Roberts and Robers Brokerage Incorporated; Tom Woods’ Liberty Classroom; Libertas Bella; ExpandDesigns.com/Scott. Get Scott’s interviews before anyone else! Subscribe to the Substack. Shop Libertarian Institute merch or donate to the show through Patreon, PayPal or Bitcoin: 1DZBZNJrxUhQhEzgDh7k8JXHXRjY Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

All right, y'all, welcome to the Scott Horton Show. I'm the director of the Libertarian Institute, editorial director of anti-war.com, author of the book, Fool's Aaron, Time to End the War in Afghanistan, and The Brand New, Enough Already, Time to End the War on Terrorism. And I've recorded more than 5,500 interviews since 2004. almost all on foreign policy and all available for you at scothorton.4 you can sign up the podcast feed there and the full interview archive is also available at youtube.com slash scott horton's show all right well welcoming back to the show glen greenwald hi glen how you doing hey scott it's really great to see you again good talk to you thanks for having me on yeah man happy to have you on uh i checked

I interviewed you 38 times, but if anyone double checks, they'll only see 37 because one of those was lost. So we're actually, if you count it right, that was in 2008. It's funny. Now they were saying that, it's like, of course, that's the one I want to go see because it's not available, but that's just how human beings are. Yeah, I remember that computer just crashed on me. It was in 2008, and there was an Ivan Eland that got lost.

But anyway, we're hitting 6,000 today. You're going to be, you know, number 5,900. 98 or 9 here, I guess. Well, congratulations. That's a lot of people. Yeah, man. Well, that's the same people over and over again. It's all Gareth Porter.

But no, he's next after you, of course. He's number 6,000 like always. But not like always. Like every time I hit 1,000-something, it's Gareth. But listen, it's great to talk to you again. It's been more than a decade since. That's amazing. I mean, I don't know why that happened.

I mean, people are busy. People go in different directions. but obviously I'm a big follower of your work and anti-war.com and always have been and so yeah, that's why I'm happy to talk to, but it definitely doesn't seem like a decade since the last time. Yeah, well, and a lot has happened since then. But, you know, so there's so many different things to talk about,

but I want to talk about you. So you remind me in an indirect way. I'm not saying it's a perfect analogy, but there's this great article by Murray Rothbard, the great libertarian theorist guy from I think 65 or maybe 62 or something. No, it would have been 65. And it's

called Confessions of a Right Wing Liberal. And he says what a crazy, topsy-turvy world here. I used to be a far right-wing extremist. Me and all my buddies, we all hated FDR and the Central Bank and the war and all of these things and we were right-wingers. Now I'm paling around with a bunch of Maoists

and whatever opposing the war in Vietnam and I'm some kind of leftist. Only the funny thing is, I haven't changed my beliefs about anything at all. It's only the entire world has gone screwy around me. So that reminds me of you, I think, mostly, this is what I'm curious about. From here, as a great admirer and watcher of your work, it seems to me like you haven't really changed, certainly a lot of opinions and things have been flipped and clarified. around over all the partisan shifts over the last decade and more since the W. Bush times

when you were basically considered, I guess, a good progressive one-click to the left of the liberals and really doctrinaire on that bill of rights, especially with your lawyer background and all of that. But the way I remember you, I don't think we ever, I don't think I ever tried to put you on the spot back in the old days when we used to talk. It was always kind of a little bit nebulous, where on the left you considered yourself on that spectrum. I always considered you to be essentially a liberal, only not in that worst sense where there are horrible hypocrites on every terrible thing, but that you're not really a Marxist type about property rights and guns and, you know, that kind of deal either. So you're, there's something centrist about you,

although obviously, again, very committed to liberty in what used to be called the new left sense right um the the the the 70s and 80s liberals commitment to individual autonomy and freedom and that kind of thing and of course you've obviously made your career fighting for civil liberties um and protections from government surveillance and all those kinds of things um but of course again the parties have shifted in power and of course with the advent of Trump and all these kinds of things um you've been accused of being everywhere on the spectrum and of holding all different kinds of loyalties and beliefs. So I just want to hear from you about where you consider yourself on the political spectrum, whether left, and then if left, where on the left? And for what

reasons and that kind of stuff? The reason I think it's a hard question to answer. And to be honest, I almost never devote attention or time to trying to ascertain where I'm most accurately situated on that ideological spectrum is precisely because, as your question implied, these terms are so malleable and they can really change radically from one moment to the next. And it's interesting, you know, when I started writing about politics in 2005, I had worked for a decade as a constitutional lawyer. I didn't go to journalism school. I had never intended to be a journalist. And the reason why I started writing about politics was because there was a, I would say, fairly limited number of issues about which I had become very passionate, largely due to the

war on terror and the subsequent events done in the name of the war on terror and the 9-11 attack that were genuinely alarming and shocking to me, that things were happening that I never thought that I would see as an American, and maybe it was a little naive, but things like American citizens being arrested on U.S. soil and being put into military breaks with no trials simply because the president decreed they were an enemy combatant. And they were put there with, you know, for years, there were two cases in particular with no access. to outside lawyers or to any lawyers to no contact with the outside world, obviously things like torture regimes and kidnapping programs, kidnapping people off the streets of Europe and

sending them to Syria or Egypt to be tortured, putting people in prison with no due process that happened at Bagram in Afghanistan and Guantanamo, this kind of series of radical new changes that were perpetrated in the name of fighting terrorism that offended me not as a partisan or as an ideologue, but really is somebody, and again, it was maybe a little bit naive who believes in, who believed and still does believe in the wisdom of the Constitution, of the principles that were supposed to govern our relationship to government and the nature of our rights, things I really understood were protected in the United States and was seeing aggressively eroded. And it surprised me when I started writing, because at the time it was George Bush and Dick Cheney

and the band of neocons surrounding them, most responsible for those attacks on course of liberties that I began being called by others a liberal or a leftist or a far leftist, a liberal in the bad sense, meaning like just kind of a Nancy Pelosi or, you know, Hillary Clinton, Bill Clinton, kind of Democrat because I was, I certainly didn't identify that way. And I was confounded about why it was that my defense of these. principles, which always seemed to me to be more American than political or ideological or partisan, would end up subjecting me to that label. And of course, I quickly realized, as I understood better, the way political discourse works, it was because I was attacking George Bush and Dick Cheney

and I was getting support largely from Democrats and liberals and leftists who perceived me as being on their side. And then very quickly, in 2009, when Barack Obama was inaugurated after running on a platform of undoing and uprooting and destroying most of those changes to how our government and system of government works in the wake of 9-11 and instead ended up strengthening a lot of them, extending them, bringing them to all new places. And my criticism of Obama was every bit as harsh as my criticisms of George Bush when they were doing similar things to what Obama was doing. And a lot of Democrats who had been fans of mine and supporters of mine suddenly said, wait a minute, why is he now criticizing Obama so harshly? He just got

into office a few months ago. And they started saying, oh, he seems now like he's on the right wing because now I was criticizing Democrats. And so I early on realize that these labels, even though in an academic sense, you can sit down and read books that from smart people, then you can kind of try and understand what these ideological terms mean in an academic sense. Functionally, in our political discourse, they're really just indicia of which side you're on, whose side you take. And, you know, I think there's something that a lot of people aspire to. It sounds a little bit pompous to say, but I really try and have my allegiance feed

in the principles in which I believe sometimes those are going to benefit the American rights, sometimes they're going to benefit the American left, sometimes are going to benefit neither or both. And I do think that ends up being confusing for a lot of people because most of the people who do punditriot for a living or who write about politics for a living or who do journalism for a living, especially now, especially in the Trump era, but even a before, their motivation professionally in terms of how they succeed is to plant their flag on one side or the other and stay there and service the people who are part of that group

and become reliable spokespeople and allies for that group. That's the easiest way to build an audience, to advance in politics. And if you're somebody who doesn't do that and who really just isn't inclined to do it, it ends up confusing a lot of people, but then a lot of people also wield these labels as attacks. So, for example, if you're criticizing the Democrats, Party than Democrats who can't claim that you're being right-wing in the values you're expressing. I mean, if I'm criticizing the CIA or the FBI, how can someone say it's a right-wing value to attack the U.S. security state, which has long been a bugaboo of the American left. So instead, they just try and say he's on the right, and therefore you can ignore the things

he's saying. Or back then in 2005 and 2006, oh, he's a leftist. So you should ignore the critique he's making the government. And so I just, I find these labels very obfuscating, oftentimes imprisoning. And so I just don't, I try not to see the world that way or figure out where I am. I just prefer to say what I'm seeing and let others try and figure out what that means about my ideological label. Sure. And yeah, I mean, down with partisanship for sure. But so, and Lord knows, you're the target of dishonest kind of labeling by people.

from morning to night. But so for, like, just a decent respect for the opinions of regular folk who really maybe don't know you that well or haven't followed you for that long or would try to figure you out, it is, I am basically right that you're, like, somewhere sort of in the middle of the left or maybe even leaning toward the right, like, from what I understand, not that this is your big issue, but, like, you seem to be very comfortable with the welfare state and the regulatory state and civil rights legislation kind of uh that sort of thing right like you're not like me i'm against all that stuff i'm a libertarian i just want to abolish every last bit of that

but i i think you're like essentially comfortable with the the lbj civil rights regime and the and the welfare state and the regulatory uh state over over corporate power and that kind of deal right which is essentially like well it makes some sort of progressive or something Yeah, I mean, it's interesting because, you know, I was saying just now that at the beginning in the first few years, you know, I was called a leftist or a liberal or Democrat for the reasons I explained. But I always did have a very strong libertarian contingent who followed my work, and I still do. I mean, it's always been that way because obviously I align a lot with libertarians on the issues about which I speak most, free speech and censorship and government surveillance and the U.S. security state and war and intervention. You know, I've written very positive articles about Ron Paul's candidacy before. That was one of the big breaches I had with the American left, why I was writing so favorably about Ron Paul and his candidacy.

And obviously, I found a lot to like in the Trump movement and in the Trump ethos as well on a lot of issues, including foreign policy and the like. So I've not, you know, at all a stranger to the argument. that look, the concerns that you have and on which you focus about the abuse of government power when it comes to things like surveillance or detention policies or the police state or all these different ways that political power is abused, exactly the same thing happens when you give the state control over economics and over our healthcare policy and over you know, regulating industry. That's why there's so much corporateist abuse in power, why there's so much corruption in Washington, because the more control and power you give to

people in government, the more of that power will be abused, not only in the issue of the area of intelligence or military or censorship, but also when it comes to economic power. And I completely understand and even find a lot of validity to that view. I think, you know, when you look at things like the way in which both political parties are behold into the same big donors and the same corporatist interest. It's obviously the case that if you give the government power over every aspect of our economy and over our lives, that then they're going to have the kind of power that they're human beings abused that I oppose all the time. The problem for me comes from the fact that I think that inequality in the United States, economic inequality, and the founders actually

talked about this as well. They were obviously not communist or socialist. They were capitalist. But you can find writings in people like Thomas Payne and even some in Thomas Jefferson that if economic power becomes too disparate, the differences become too extreme, that it will automatically spill over into the question of political liberty and people who are so able to dominate national life through extreme economic wealth, while most people are suffering with extreme poverty, will make these kind of ideals really illusory. And so I can imagine, and I understand the libertarian argument as well, that the reason for that inequality is the government intervention. And I'm very well versed in these arguments.

I just have never been convinced. And I guess we're probably going to see maybe a kind of real test case in Argentina where you actually have now not just a right wing figure, but a hardcore, doctorinary libertarian when it comes to economic, to libertarian economics in President Belay, who wants to abol. government programs and rent control and all these things, I've never been convinced that that kind of, kind of just abstract, harsh, laissez-faire approach would really end up generating economic prosperity of the kind that would eliminate these extreme differences in economic power that spill over into the political realm. But I'm not closed to that either. And honestly, I just don't consider myself having a level of expertise about macroeconomics or microeconomic or those kind of policies where I feel competent to write a lot about it or to speak a lot about it.

It's a reason why I don't speak that often about it. You're right. I'm not on a crusade to eliminate the social welfare state, but I'm also not a aggressive advocate either because I have doubts about both worldviews, but I also have doubts about my own ability to posture as some sort of an expert who should tell people, oh, take time out of your day to listen to me on those issues because they really don't feel like my knowledge is sufficiently deep to warrant that. Yeah.

Okay. But now what about the part about you standing still and the whole world moving around you? Have you changed your views from, say, the Bush years on very much? No, no, I have not. I mean, my core values, I mean, I think of any criticism could be voiced about me is that I am very rigid in the views on which I'm most passionate. You know, I just gave you an answer on economic policy where I mean, I just gave you an answer

or on economic policy where I confess to ambivalence. But, and for that reason, I don't spend much time on it. On the, on the issues where I spent most of my time, I'm very firmly implanted in the set of, the set of values that I advocate. And I've changed very, very little in the last 20 years since I began writing about politics because the more I've looked and the more I've read

and the more I've done, the more convinced I became about the dangers of the kinds of policies I often oppose. And all you have to do is look at, let's just say, polling data, and you compare what the Democratic Party and what self-identified Democrats thought about the CIA 10 years ago or the FBI 10 years ago or the issue of state and corporate censorship 10 years ago or the faction that we called neocons. And now you compare that to what they think about it 10 years later. And you see these very dramatic shifts. And the reason for that is is because Trump transformed for most people, not for me, but for most people, how they think about politics. So for a lot of people, Trump was the singular evil and the only metric for understanding the world, the litmus test for everything.

And so whoever was opposed to Trump in the eyes of most American liberals became their allies. So that definitely was the U.S. security state. It definitely was American neocons. And as a result of all that, they began adopting these wide range of views, that are associated with those agencies, with the view of the corporate media, these are all their allies, and it radically transformed the American left,

or the part of the American left that remains loyal to the Democratic Party, which is most of it, and American liberals, so that now if you stand up and say, you believe in free speech and are opposed to censorship that always coded as a left-wing view, by and large, I mean, there's some exceptions, but generally, would certainly not be inconsistent.

Now if you waive that banner, it codes as a right-wing view. Same with talking about the so-called, state or the idea that we should be intervening in places like Ukraine, all these things completely changed in terms of how they're perceived ideologically. So if you are just standing in one place, how your perceived gets change as well, even though the changes are taking place around you exactly like that excerpt that you referred to at the start of our discussion. Yeah. Hey, y'all, Scott here. Let me tell you about Roberts and Roberts Brokerage, Inc.

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substack.com. Hey, y'all, libertosbella.com is where you get Scott Horton's show and Libertarian Institute shirts, sweatshirts, mugs, and stickers and things, including the great top lobstas designs as well. See, that way it says on your shirt, why you're so smart. Libertas Bella, from the same great folks who bring you ammo.com for all your ammunition needs, too. That's Libertasbella.com. Searchlight Pictures presents The Roses, only in theaters, August 29th.

the director of Meet the Parents and the writer of Poor Things. Comes The Roses, starring Academy Award winner Olivia Coleman, Academy Award nominee, Benedict Cumberbatch, Andy Sandberg, Kate McKinnon, and Allison Janney. A hilarious new comedy filled with drama, excitement, and a little bit of hatred, proving that marriage isn't always a bed of roses. See The Roses, only in theaters, August 29th. Get tickets now. You know, a very wise friend of mine said that, I don't know if he said this is the worst thing

Trump, but one of the terrible things about Trump is what he did to the left. And he said, the way he said it was funny, he said, it used to be that the best thing about the left was that they weren't the liberals. And the best thing about the liberals was that they weren't the left. And so like if you took the whole package doctrine of either, you'd be completely screwed. But the left, they're good on cops and they're good on wars and they're good on doing good journalism. You know, a lot of times they got a good chip on their shoulder. So they do, you know, a lot of the distrusting authority. distrusting authority and institutions of authority. Sticking up for free speech. But now where is that? Well, and then the liberals, I guess, and it was the liberals were actually good on property rights and business. They've made their peace with capitalism. They're not communists.

And they sort of had made their peace with guns. And, you know, they're liberals not leftists. And they are the ones who stood for free speech by and large, right? And then what happened was they got merged together during the Trump years. And during that merger, they all. adopted each other's worst positions and abandoned their own. So where the liberals used to be good on free speech, they compromise with the leftist on abandoning their commitment to free speech.

And where the leftist used to be good on anti-imperialism, they compromised with the liberals. No, let's rally around the FBI as long as we're sicken them on Trump and this kind of thing. And so that's really the danger of him winning again, is what the hell is it going to do to the left and the liberals in this country again? And it just made them so crazy. Yeah, it's such an interesting point. You know, back in 2016, in the Democratic Party primary, there was a war between, let's just for

shorthand call it the American left, which rallied behind Bernie Sanders and more establishment liberals to rally behind Hillary Clinton. And it wasn't the kind of war that also raged within the Democratic Party in 2008 between Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, which was much more personality driven, but not very ideologically driven. You'd be hard-pressed to say who was more to the left, Obama or Hillary. I mean, they were kind of both, but neither. It was much more of a personality and how you looked at a whole bunch of issues that weren't really about ideology. But the 2016 race was really about ideology. Should the Democratic Party be more in the left, as you said, or more along the lines

of the liberalism represented by Hillary Clinton? And because of Trump's victory, and then everything to be calling about Trump. As you said, liberals on the left united, based on the idea that Trump was so far in a way the greatest menace, the United States has ever seen that none of those differences matter anymore. But I think the other part of it, Scott, that is important as well, maybe even more important, but probably at least as important, is the emergence of the culture war as the number one issue around which people rallied, beginning with things like the Me Too movement, but then for sure the 2020 response to the killing of George. George Floyd and the Black Lives Matter protest movement that swept the country and all the changes that were demanded in its name.

In those instances as well, the differences between the left and liberals disappeared. I mean, there's still a hard kind of hard left that refuses to have anything to do with the Democratic Party. And I respect them from being consistent. But there's such a small group in the scheme of things that they're barely worth mentioning. But I don't want to overstate it. But by and large, you're absolutely right. there's been this merger between the left and liberals in a way that I think you're very on point. It's, I never really thought about it before that they kind of adopted the worst parts of each other's

worldview. Yeah, man. All right. So, but that doesn't, you know, again, it confirms my view of you as where I've sort of in my own mind, where I placed you on the spectrum of not being a far left as it's certainly not a far right winger as they say, but you're a moderate and not in that, not even a moderate. but a centrist of some type, and not in the horrible Biden-McCain way, but just in some sort of liberal, but not too far to the left. And obviously, to your most important credit, which is this absolute devotion to your issues, which ought to be good left-wing, right-wing, and libertarian issues for everyone.

And that's the Bill of Rights and, you know, the natural rights that they're supposed to protect of the people of this country. which have been under such assault this whole time, which brings us to Edward Snowden and X KeyScore and all these great articles. I never got a chance to interview you back when they were first coming out. And I swear every interview of you during that time is the same thing.

So you like this Snowden guy? And then you go, yeah. And then they go, well, is he a traitor for China? And then you go, no. And they go, well, is he a traitor for Russia? And you go, no. And they go, well, so why do you think he'd did this. Well, he did this because he cares

about the people knowing the truth about the thing that's happening. Okay, bye. And there's the same interview over and over and over again. And no one ever said to you, hey, Greenwald, would you explain the X-Keescore thing for us that you're writing about here? And I don't know exactly what the total of

articles that you did. I know there must have been, because they kept a great catalog of them all at EFF there for a while and it may still be there. But there are, I'm going to say, what, three, four, five, does maybe articles from around the world that were based on that yeah because we like we we partnered with media outlets all over the world whenever there were documents pertaining to the surveillance

activities in their countries which obviously we had a lot of access to from that archive we would report in France and Spain and India and Brazil and all over the world essentially so there are I think more like hundreds of articles that came from the Snowden archive oh great great yeah um and and it's something else and there's a hell of a lot to it and I know that in the end, Congress passed a little something and a few of the appeals courts ruled this and that. But we didn't get much of a rollback of those abuses at all, did we? We didn't get a rollback legislatively of these abuses.

But I think, I mean, we got a little, but very little. But I think the biggest change from the Snowden reporting and all of the controversy that ensued in the kind of consciousness that it changed was precisely that it altered, I think, permanently the perception that people have of the government, the United States government in particular, the nature of privacy, and how the Internet has been weaponized into one of the most coercive tools ever created first for surveillance and now for thought control through the censorship regime that is being implemented. And as a result of that, it has done things like for a while,

it really, there was a lot of real consumer pressure on big tech companies to prove that they were acting to protect the privacy of their users. And it did things like lead to end-to-end encryption where you don't, you know, back then in 2013, you had to actually opt to use encryption. It was very difficult and complex to figure out. Most people didn't have the time or the ability to do it. And they just kind of threw up their hands. And they said, well, I'm not really somebody that the government would have an interest in.

So I'm going to go ahead and leave it B. But now if you use popular communication apps like WhatsApp, which is owned by Facebook, automatically there's end-to-end encryption that genuinely makes it more difficult by no means impossible, but more difficult for governments to just casually spy on or listen in on or monitor what is being said on those chat devices. is there is a much greater desire and market for encryption technology and for the idea that you need to take steps to protect your privacy, especially if you're engaged in sensitive work, if you're journalists or human rights activists, most people involved in sensitive work

are now conscious and aware of that. There were diplomatic relationships that were subverted or disrupted, and then treaties were implemented or measures were undertaken by governments to protect themselves from surveillance against the United States and against their Western partners. And so these changes may not be as glamorous, they may not be as visible, but on some level,

they might actually be more important than statutory changes, because if you know the history of the US security state, which I know you do, there have been quote unquote reforms that were imposed on the US security state, such as those in the wake of the Church Commission in the mid-1970s with the Watergate scandal and the FBI and CIA scandals. and they were far more illusory than they were anything else,

the establishment of the FISA Corps and intelligence committees. This is all just theater. Whereas changes in human perception and human behavior and the pervasiveness of encryption, I think these have put meaningful impediments in the path of governments. And again, it didn't destroy the surveillance state. At the end of the day, maybe it didn't even meaningfully weaken it. But I think it at least made it so that people are,

aware of what is being done to the internet and the need to, people are much more open to the idea that this isn't some just bizarre conspiracy prior to Snowden. If you tried to convince people that the U.S. government was spying on people en masse through the internet, you would be locked at. You would be called a conspiracy theorist and it proved that those things are in fact happening to a much greater extent that people knew. With the passage of time, the ability to invent new enemies, scaring people about Russia or ISIS or Hamas. whatever, whatever the new enemy of the day is, it does start eroding a lot of those concerns, putting more faith in the Pentagon and the, you know, CIA and the like, those agents are very

good at manipulating public opinion. But now at least it's a constant war. It's a constant back and forth, whereas prior to the Snowden reporting, it just wasn't on anyone's radar. No one even believed it was happening. Yeah. And for those of us who had been paying close attention to James Bamford and so forth. It was the ultimate confirmation of all of our kind of worst nightmare about how it could be. So now one of the things about that, though, is if you compare to say Manning's leak to Julian Assange, which is the Iraq and Afghan war logs from, you know, all military logs. And then there's the Guantanamo files and then State Department cables there. There's essentially nobody in there who deserves any privacy at all other than, as Assange acknowledged,

informants of the American military in the country's under occupation, and they took care to black out those names. But essentially, it was okay for him to just post all that stuff. Meanwhile, the impression I think we're all under, we've been told, is that what Snowden gave you and gave the Washington Post included all kinds of stuff that you could know. never published because it was the NSA, it was some of the results of the NSA absolutely violating people's privacy in a way where you can't post that because you're going to be doxing totally innocent people as far as you know. So this is why he gave it to you and not Assange, I guess, was he wanted it to be all very thoroughly reported. And as you said, there are hundreds

of stories that came out of the thing you'll partnered with all these people. And yet, it seems to kind of come to a weird end and the question was open like did you guys report every last story that was in there you really went through and made sure to disregard the stuff that's nobody's business but to really report everything and the one thing that really made this stick out to me and never mind like your worst critics who say that pierre omidyar bought the archive from you i know you've said outright that's not true and i believe you about that but um i remember kind of years going by and then all of a sudden Mertaza al-Qaeda over

at the Intercept Abu Muhammad Al-Jalani's PR agent he put out this story about Saudi Arabia giving explicit instructions to jihadi terrorists in Syria to attack an airport and that story didn't come out until I'm making this up

but 2018 or something like that way later and everybody thought including me hey where's that story been this whole time that Obama may have been earlier than that, but not too much earlier in that. And everybody thought, well, geez, we could have used this back in 13 when Snowden first forked it over. This was a huge one. And it would have shown a lot about the foreign intervention going on on the jihadi side in the Syrian war.

And so all the red herrings and bogus accusations against you, aside, which I don't put any stock in, can you explain to us exactly, like how thoroughly you went through all of that, how sure you are that you reported every last worthwhile story in there and tell us who has this stuff now and is it really all over and so forth like that yeah so just just to be clear about one of the things said sure the washington post uh only got a very small portion of the archive the only two people who ever got the full archive was myself and laura poitrous okay and there was a UK part of the archive that I shared with the Guardian because Snowden wanted British journalists working on the UK part. And we had a British journalist with us in Hong Kong, Ewan McCaskill.

And Snowden personally gave you in the part of the archive that pertained to GCHQ, which is the NSA counterpart in the UK. So he had a part of it and the Guardian ended up giving that to the New York Times when the Guardian was under so much pressure by the British government being threatened with prosecution if they didn't give away their archive. The British authorities marched into the newsroom of the Guardian to try and just physically destroyed the computers. They had detained my husband in 2013 on terrorism charges and only because of a heavy Brazilian diplomatic pressure who let him go. They were threatening to prosecute him. So there's a ton of pressure on the Guardian. And so they gave that archive to the New York Times, that part of it, which, so the New York Times had a part of the archive, the Washington Post had a small part.

The only ones who ever had the whole archive was myself and Laura Poitras. We're talking here about an archive, but I've never specified the amount of pages, but it's by far the biggest league in the history of the national security state, many hundreds of thousands of documents, if not more. And obviously, the task of going through it, you know, it's not, I think sometimes people think that the way that, the way that, archive works is that like whatever big story there is there's kind of like a big neon light saying like hey look here there's a big story here and that's not the way it works you have to spend enormous amounts of time you know we spent three years or four years you know as the primary journalistic activity working with that archive and some of the stories you know you would have a little bit of a snippet in one document and a little bit of a snippet in another document but even if you put them

together it didn't necessarily tell you a story you had to go do outside reporting you had to go and find sources that would help you, you know, supplement what it was that was being said. So a lot of this reporting took, you know, years to do just by the sheer volume of it. One of the reasons why I left the Guardian and we started the intercept and was because we needed immense funding that Pierre Midear could provide. He'd never had any role at all in the archive or anything else like that. But we needed immense funding. And one of the things we did was, you know, we also were responsible for the security of the archive.

Because when Snowden gave us this archive, he was a very kind of conservative whistleblower in the sense that, as you said, he didn't want the archive in its entirety being published. If he wanted that, he didn't need us. He could have just uploaded it the internet. He could have sent us to Julian Assange and asked Assange to publish the whole thing. He wanted this kind of very careful scrutiny, journalistic scrutiny, putting stories together, reporting them in a responsible way, protecting the innocent, people who might have been exposed or harmed, not just, you know, they're kind of classic, like, secret agents in the field whose identity gets exposed and now suddenly they're in danger. But as you said, you know, there's tons of material in there, like, oh, we're spying on this person

and this is what we think of that person. And if you were to publish that, you would destroy the reputation of people forever. So not only we had the responsibility to report on it carefully, but we also had the responsibility to safeguard the archive. Obviously, there were a lot of other countries, a lot of groups, a lot of different powerful factions that would have loved to gotten their hands on that archive. So one of the things we did at the Intercept was we built a room that was modeled after the room that the U.S. government uses to protect the security of the most sensitive secrets called a SCIF. And the reason we did that

is because we wanted to invite journalists from all over the world to be able to work with the archive so that it wasn't just myself and Laura who were acting as the guardians or the, you know, kind of gatekeepers of this archive. But we wanted to open it up to as many different journalists as we can to do everything possible to ensure that every single story that was in that archive that should be reported ended up being reported. So if you were to say to me, look, after, you know, five years of doing this reporting, after spending, you know, millions and millions of dollars on maintaining this archive, on paying journalists to do the work, we had researchers, special researchers, we had, you know, experts in the field. Is it possible that there was a story

here or a story there that you ended up not properly putting together? I mean, I can't say give you the, I can't prove the negative and say like, no, every last story in there was a story we ended up reporting. But what I can tell you is, is that we did everything we possibly could have done to ensure that so many people went through that archive, that so many people with different perspectives from different countries, from different fields of discipline, have been in that archive, have had free reign over that archive, have been able to, you know, spent as much time as they wanted,

piecing it all together so that by the end of it, I think I can very confidently say that close to all, if not all of the stories that should have been published from that archive have been. I wanted to make one other point, which is that, as I said, you know, the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Guardian, and then also Derr-Spiegel,

the German newspaper, had part of these archives in their possession. And on top of that, I made the archive available too. I worked with the biggest media outlets in Brazil, like Globo and Folia. In France, we worked with Vermont. In Spain, we worked with El Mundo. In every country, essentially, we opened up the archive to those journalists as well. The New York Times, the Washington Post, and The Guardian, obviously, media outlets with the most amount of resources, announced after basically a year or a year and a half at the most that they were closing their archive. They were no longer working

on the archive because the amount of money that it took to maintain it in a responsible way, to pay journalists to be able to take the time to hours and hours and hours you need to be able to go through it, to research it, to understand it. They just didn't think it was worth the money anymore, that there was no real more meat on the bones. After a year when we were publishing Stone Articles, people weren't really reading the articles. They felt like they got the story. And so the reason, you know, that we created The Intercept and used P.R. Midiart was because we we wanted to have the luxury that even if people aren't interested anymore for the historical record, we want to make sure as journalists, we're putting out every story that should be out there.

And so for two or three years, after those major media corporations said, we can't afford this anymore. We won't do this reporting anymore. No one's reading it. We're not getting benefits from it. It's too expensive. The Intercept continued to pour enormous amounts of resources. I think it was only 2018 or 2019 when the Intercept finally said, we just don't have the resources anymore to keep doing this. But, you know, I think we were at it for five full years. And I think one, it's the same thing. I had a big story in Brazil after that in 2019 and 2020. That was a gigantic archive as well. And one of the ways we ensured that people in Brazil could be confident that all, nothing was hidden was we called media, the other media outlets into work in the archive. We called experts in.

We called journalists. And we said, have at it. See what you can find. And that's the same thing we did in the Stodian reporting, all sorts of people had access to that. And if there was some big story in there that should have seen the light of the day, somebody would have found it. So again, you know, the fact that it took a few years sometimes for a major story to get out, I think that happened in maybe two or three cases, was just more a byproduct of the complexity of the archive, the difficulty of figuring out how to piece some together. And some, just the story didn't stand alone in the archive. You needed outside reporting, and it takes a while

to get that, and sometimes we couldn't get that. So, yeah, I'm very confident at the end of the day that all the things within Snowden's guidelines that we agree to when he gave us the archive about what shouldn't be published, that all of that got out or close to all of it. Okay. Hey, guys, I've had a lot of great webmasters over the years, but the team at Expanddesigns.com

have by far been the most competent and reliable. Harley Abbott and his team have made great sites for the show and the institute, and they keep them running well, suggesting and making improvements all along. Make a deal with Expanddesigns.com for your new business or news site. They will take care of you. Use the promo code Scott and save $500. That's expanddesigns.com. Man, I wish I was in school so I could drop out and sign up for Tom Woods' Liberty Classroom instead. Tom has done such a great job on putting together a classical curriculum for everyone from junior high schoolers on up through the postgraduate level, and it's all very reasonably

priced. Just make sure you click through from the link in the right margin at Scott Horton.org. Tom Woodses' Liberty Classroom, Real History, Real Economics, Real Education. Hey, y'all, I got a new coffee sponsor, Moondose Artisan Coffee at Moondoseartisan Coffee.com. When I wake up in the morning, I feel like my brain is all dried out. I need to pour a hot mug of rich, tasty coffee all over it to get it back working again, like 10W30 for the noggin. Though not necessary, it helps if the coffee tastes good.

Well, Moondos Artisan Coffee does taste good. They get the best beans from all around the world, and they don't burn them. Support the show and support your brain at moondoseartisan coffee.com. Just click the link at the right margin at Scott Horton. And I guess if you had

made a statement that definitive before I had not seen it, it had sort of felt like the kind of, it had sort of petered out and you had never said, well, that's about all I got there or anything, you know, so people kind of wondered or whatever. It just felt a little funny there. But I'm glad you were able to clarify that. And of course, it's incredible reporting and it's all still out there and people can look at it. And geez, I think we're both probably running short on time here. But I want to give you a chance to- Yeah, but let me just that quickly add to just in case

when it hasn't dealt. You know, there's been, I mean, obviously Snowden faces to this very day, you know, 30 felony counts. If he steps foot outside of Russia, he'll be immediately arrested and put into prison. There's been a lot of reporting, including from Mike Isikoff, that the Obama administration at the time was trying very hard to create theories about how to prosecute myself and Laura Poitris. I couldn't leave Brazil safely for a year because of those legal threats. My husband ended up, you know, in a serious criminal investigation in the UK because of his role in helping bring these materials to us and enabling us to work with them. So if you want to understand how the U.S. government sees the reporting, there's all kinds of

evidence about the way they viewed this as one of the greatest threats ever to their interests. And so that's just some additional information to consider. Yeah. Well, and they put all these ridiculous stories by Jay Epstein in the Wall Street Journal about how Snowden was a spy for China or was it Russia and back and forth again and that you were the limited hangout. Oh, sure. it's a civil liberties whistleblower when what he's really doing and of course i know the story

in fact tell the story real quick would you about how snowdon got stranded in russia in the first place glenn yeah i mean what's so infuriating is that to this very day people use the fact that he's in russia to try and claim he's a russian spy and you're right at the time before he went to russia the attack on him was oh he's a chinese spy because he chose hong kong as the city where we would meet and that's where we did our work. And he did that because Hong Kong's a safe city in terms of, you know, the big fear was the CIA was going to try and do everything it could to prevent us from doing that work if it knew what we were doing. And he felt like Hong Kong was both a city that symbolized the quest for freedom and democracy from mainland China. But at the same time, it was a secure place and that the U.S. government just can't run wild in Hong Kong because of the role of China.

So at the time, he was a he's a Chinese spy. Now he's a Russian spy. Right. But the reality is that, and there was a kind of big drama when Snowden finally left Hong Kong, and he was trying to get to South America, to Bolivia, to Ecuador, where Julian Assange had asylum, to one of those countries in the northern part of South America, where we believed he could get asylum. And in order to fly to get there from Hong Kong, he had to fly Hong Kong, Moscow, Moscow, Havana, either to Venezuela or Ecuador or Bolivia. The Cuban government had given Snowden a guarantee of safe passage. When the Obama administration learned of that fact that Snowden was going to transit through Havana in order to get to South America, it was at a time when the Cubans were trying to reach a deal with the Obama administration to lift the embargo on Cuba, or at least to severely weaken it. And the Obama administration called up Cuba, and Ben Rhodes, a senior Obama national security official, boasted about this in his book. they called up to the Cubans and they said, look, if you allow Snowden to pass through Havana, then there will be no possibility that we will do a deal with you to lift this embargo.

In fact, we will impose even harsher sanctions to suffocate your country. And as a result, they bullied and coerced the Cubans into withdrawing their guarantee of safe passage, meaning if you try to transit through Cuba, we won't turn you over to the United States. So when Stoney got to Moscow, the Cubans had said he no longer has the, this guarantee. And on the way to Moscow, they had invalidated his passport, which means he couldn't get on a plane internationally to travel. And so he got trapped in Russia. The Obama administration prevented him from leaving, which he was desperately trying to do, exactly so that they could then turn around and say, well, obviously he must be a Russian spy because he's in Russia. Now, if you think

about it, it was an incredibly reckless thing to do because if you really believe that Snowden's in possession of very sensitive secrets, why would you want to trap him in Russia? Now, I believe with every fiber of my being, and I can, you know, argue this for so many ways that I don't believe he ever gave a single piece of information to the Russians for so many reasons. But the Obama administration will admit, if you look carefully at what they're saying in other contexts, that the reason he got trapped in Russia is because he was trying to get out and they trapped him there. And now they used the fact that he got trapped in Russia to impugn his motive, or to destroy his reputation by saying he's an agent of the Kremlin.

Yeah, it's just amazing. They put him in a position to be completely debriefed on everything he ever learned, working for the CIA and the NSA and all this. I agree with you. There's no reason to believe that he spilled his guts to them. But still, they put him in that position just for the public relations of being able to say, well, look at him, he's in Russia. When, as you say, anybody who actually knows the story,

knows that they're the ones who stranded him there. It's just completely crazy to think that they would do that. And it's funny, too, that the hard feelings in the national security state really are directed that much towards Snowden in that case and not toward our current president, Joe Biden, who was instrumental in stripping him of his passport and threatening all those countries that they better not allow air passage and all these things, forcing that plane down. Wouldn't Biden involved in forcing the, was the Austrian ambassadors plane down? No, it was, what happened was the president of Bolivia, Eva Morales, traveled to Moscow for a very, you know, ordinary, routine diplomatic visit from one head of a state to another. And for whatever reason, when even Morales was returning to Bolivia on his presidential plane, the U.S. government was petrified that he had Snowden with him and was taking him back to Bolivia. And so when he was flying over Western European airspace in Spain, they forced his plane down. They said you could not pass through Spain.

They forced his plane down in Vienna. He landed in Vienna. The Austrian authorities entered the plane of this sovereign country, searched it, thinking Snowden was on there. Of course, Snowden wasn't on there. And then even more than Alice was allowed to go on his merry way. But that was how desperate they were to get their hands on Snowden, that they were willing to go to such lengths to get him.

And, you know, the one thing I would say is like, I think people have to remember as well that one of the things that made what Snowden did so courageous is that when we were in Hong Kong working with him, we were operating on the assumption that it was basically inevitable that he was going to end up in the hands of the American government and spend the rest of his life in prison because when the American government wants you about enough, they can get you. They can give enough to Hong Kong that Hong Kong will feel or to China, you know, will trade you this person that you want for this person. And what happened was Snowden worked with a Hong Kong newspaper, it was the South China Sea Post, to describe how one of the things that had been compromised was the communication system that ordinary Chinese people used to communicate with one another. And Snowden became a national hero overnight in China. And it made it impossible for the Chinese government or for the Hong Kong government to hand them over to the Americans, which is why they let him leave. They just wanted the problem. They didn't want that problem at all. So Snowden proved he was willing to go to prison for the rest of his life to bring this story to the public light. I mean, that was the assumption that he was going to prison.

It was almost, it was by a huge stretch of luck that he didn't end up in the hands of the Americans. And why would he then, having already said him, willing to go to prison for the story, then turn around and help Russia understand how better to spy on their citizens just in order to avoid prison? He just got done proving. He'd rather go to prison than enable a state to surveil their citizens. And that's why I'm so sure that he would never have given any secrets to Russia. Yeah. Well, and I'm sure he would have been able to tell them with a straight face. They know what I gave Greenwald.

And they've already changed all the codes and all the keywords and whatever in ways that it's not going to help you anyway if I told you. They've already done their damage assessment and are cleaning up. So what differences it make, as Hillary Clinton might say, at that point anyway? Yeah, he just didn't take with him any of those documents because he knew he was traveling on a very risky flight. He didn't want to be tortured into having to give a password to an archive that he was carrying with him. He just didn't take an archive with him. He no longer had access to. He left it all with you.

He purposely wanted not to. Yeah, he left it with myself and Laura. And we put it safely in digital spaces around the world to make sure that it would always be safe, no matter if anything ever to us, that that archive would be available. So, you know, you can never prove the negative. You can never convince people that something didn't happen. You can't prove it. But if you look at everything Stodin did, the idea that he started working with the Russian government makes no sense on any level. Yeah.

And by the way, I think I messed up the Wall Street Journal Hacks name earlier. It's Edward J. Epstein is what I meant to say there, who writes that garbage. Anyway, listen, we're almost out of time here, Glenn, but let me get a few words from you about Julian Assange and WikiLeaks and what he's done and what kind of jeopardy he's in and what difference it makes? I think Julian Assange is the most consequential and pioneering journalist of our generation because he was really the one who foresaw before anybody else did that the future of real journalism, not the kind that, you know, the New York Times of CNN do, but like the kind where you confront real institutions of power and are able to expose their secrets,

deceit and crimes that they do the most to keep hidden was the fact that these institutions now store all of their secrets digitally, which makes it much easier in one way to transfer their secrets and to take them. You know, when Daniel Ellsberg leaked the Pentagon Papers to the New York Times, one of his big challenges, and I've heard Ellsberg tell the story, is at the time, you didn't have anything stored digitally. So for him to copy the Pentagon Papers, which was thousands of top secret documents, He literally had to go to a pharmacy with a bag of nickels or dimes and photocopy on a Xerox machine one page after the next.

And obviously doing that is a very risky thing to do where it's easy to be detected. When Chelsea Manning transferred the Iraq and Afghanistan war logs to WikiLeaks and the diplomatic cables, turned about hundreds of thousands of top secret documents, she downloaded it all in about 30 minutes onto a thumb drive while she listened to a late. Igga album. And so it really changed everything in terms of the ability for these corporations or for these major institutions of state the power to have a huge vulnerability in how they keep their secrets. And the idea of WikiLeaks was we're going to create a way for people to submit information to us who work inside these agencies and maintain their anonymity. They're going to send it to us anonymously. No one can never trace it. That was Julian's vision. That was something he understood

before anybody else. It was something that he had the technical capacity as a former hacker to be able to create. And that was why WikiLeaks was so revolutionary and why it led to some of the most important stories of our time. I mean, Julian Assange has broken more major stories that every person who works with the media corporation combined. And of course, that's precisely why he's in prison. I mean, the charges against Julian Assange have nothing to do with anything he did in 2016 in terms of how he got the emails from the DNC server or the emails of John Podesta, Hillary Clinton's campaign chair. It's only about the work he did in really acting as a journalist.

He got a source, Chelsea Manning, who worked inside the military. She got access to these secrets, sent it to Julian Assange into WikiLeaks, and they actually reported it. People have forgotten that when they first began publishing those documents, they didn't just indiscriminately upload everything. They partnered with the New York Times and the Guardian, and they redacted heavily, all kinds of names, all kinds of information, and only then did they publish it. And for years, the Obama administration wanted to prosecute Julian Assange. They impan handled the grand jury, but they knew that there was no way to prosecute, how do you prosecute

Julian Assange for receiving information that's classified in nature and then publishing it, without also prosecuting the New York Times and the Guardian, which worked with you. with him to do that and which does that every day, everyday media outlets get classified information and publish it. You would basically be criminalizing journalism. And so the Obama administration looked for some argument to be able to say that somehow Julian Assange actually helped Chelsea Manning steal that information,

did not just possibly receive it the way a journalist did, could not find anything, and decided not to prosecute him. When Trump got elected and appointed Mike Pompeo as the head of the CIA, Mike Pompeo gave a speech early on vowing to destroy Julian Assange and WikiLeaks. And they basically concocted a theory that said that by encouraging Chelsea Manning to get more documents, by trying to help her evade detection,

that made Julian Assange a co-conspirator. And the reason that's so dangerous is because every investigative journalist works with their source in that way. Oh, can you get me some more of this? Can you get me some more of that? Instead of just calling me on an open line, you should use encrypted chat technologies

so that you don't get caught. If you start calling that criminal, you're criminalizing investigative journalism. And I actually wrote an article in The Washington Post an op-ed warning of that, that this will criminalize it all investigative journalism. Two months later, I got my own source in Brazil who provided me with that big archive I talked about,

that kind of became the biggest story in Brazil for about two years. And at the end of it, the prosecutors in Brazil, who were enraged, I would have able to report, use that theory to criminally indict me to charge me with various crimes by saying that the minute I encourage my source to get more documents or the minute that I encouraged them to use more secure means of communication, I became part of the conspiracy. Now, in that case, the Brazilian Supreme Court intervened, ruled in my favor, said that the free

press guarantee in the Constitution doesn't permit my prosecution. But it kind of proved the point that I was making before I even knew it would be me, who would be the first death case, that they're trying to criminalize journalism. Julian Assange has been in prison since 2018, ever since Mike Pompeo, bullied Ecuador into withdrawing their asylum protection. That was when the London police went in. They put him into a prison that is known as the British Guantanamo. It's where the highest security prisoners and terrorist suspects are held.

His health was already suffering. He had been in that embassy for six years, no daylight, nothing else. and now he's in a harsh prison for four years while he waits extradition to the United States and obviously his mental health, his physical health have been crippled. It's an incredibly tragic case. He's not been convicted of any crime

other than bail jumping for the day that he didn't show up at his hearing because he got asylum instead in the effort or an embassy, got an 11-month prison term, served that long ago. The only reason he's in prison is because the Biden administration

is demanding his extradition to the United States even though every press freedom group, every civil liberties group unanimously in the West, says it's a great threat to press freedom to try and prosecute him. Finally, the Australian government, he's a citizen of Australia, is saying we demand his release. I don't think the Biden administration even wants to bring Julian Assange to the United States for trial. Imagine the circus that's going to create. The Mar on Biden's record is the first ever president to prosecute a publisher of information under the Espionage Act, not just a source.

But as of now, he's still in prison, and Assange's extradition has been ratified by every level of the British judiciary and is really just a question of time now when it will happen. Yeah, it looks like they have, they're on their very last appeal now before it goes to the European Court of Justice or something, which is essentially toothless anyway. So we keep up with Kevin Gustav on that. Yeah. So, yeah. And it's funny just because they're not. willing to back down they're willing to paint themselves into this corner and when you say every press freedom group that now finally i believe as of only last year right or was it 22 that even finally the new york times and their peers came out and said you should drop this

after not sticking up for him for a lot of newspapers know newspapers know you know they constantly talk about trump being this authoritarian threat the settler figure they know that these theories can be used against media outlets as well. If you can imprison Julian Assange, you can imprison any media outlet that publishes classified information. And so finally, these journalists, at least in their self-interest, are now standing up for Assange, not very vocally, not very aggressively, but at least more than they were. Yeah. And you know what's funny there is they got no reason to hate him other than being jealous that he just makes them look like such dinosaurs. He never did anything. I mean, if you're a real partisan Democrat, then he screwed Hillary Clinton. But

They also ratted on George W. Bush to the nth degree more and better than anybody ever at least helped tell the truth, him and Manning working together to leak the Iraq and Afghan war logs, which are insane the detail in there about Iraq War II and Afghanistan during that time. So, you know, I understand that both sides have a reason to hate him, but both sides have a reason to really like him and appreciate what he's done as well. I mean, sparing mankind, President Hillary Clinton is something that's going to go down in the history books forever, you know? I appreciate it. Yeah, the more stories you break that are truly threatening to the U.S. security state, the more journalists hate you. And that's one of the reasons why most of them are happy that Assange is in prison. Yep. Yeah, it's nuts.

All right, well, listen, man, it's good to catch up with you, Glenn. Thanks very much for the great interview today. Appreciate it. Absolutely. Keep up the great work. Thanks for having me on. The Scott Horton Show, Anti-War Radio, can be heard on KPFK, 90.7 FM in L.A. APSRadio.com, anti-war.com, Scotthorton.org, and Libertarian Institute.org.