Scott Horton Show - Just the Interviews - 9/28/23 Matt Taibbi on the Origins of Russiagate and Government Censorship’s Legal Challenge

Episode Date: October 1, 2023

Matt Taibbi was back on Antiwar Radio this week to discuss the origins of Russiagate and the major First Amendment case in front of the Supreme Court. They start with Russiagate and talk about what we know and don’t know about the DNC hack that the corporate press said was undoubtedly perpetrated by the Russian Government. Taibbi then draws on his experience reporting on the extensive government involvement in bringing about censorship on social media to analyze the corresponding case in front of the Supreme Court. Discussed on the show: Insane Clown President by Matt Taibbi Hate Inc. by Matt Taibbi “The Supreme Court Will Rule on Censorship” (Racket News) “Forget Collusion. Was "Interference" Also Fake News?” (Racket News) Matt Taibbi is a journalist, author and political commentator. Subscribe to his Substack publication: Racket News and follow him on Twitter @mtaibbi. This episode of the Scott Horton Show is sponsored by: Tom Woods’ Liberty Classroom; 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

For Pacifica Radio, September 28th, 2003, I'm Scott Horton. This is Anti-War Radio. All right, y'all, welcome. Show at his anti-war radio. I'm your host, Scott Horton. I am editorial director of anti-war.com, and I'm the author of Enough Already, Time to End. war on terrorism. You can find my full interview archive, almost 6,000 of them, now going back to 2003 at Scott Horton.org and at YouTube.com slash Scott Horton's show. And you can follow me on Twitter, if you dare, at Scott Horton's show. All right, introducing once again the great Matt Taiibi. He is at racket.com. And he and his guys do some great work over there. I'll tell

you what, welcome back to the show. Matt, how are you, sir? Great. How's it going, Scott? Thanks for having me on. kind of words. Yeah, absolutely. I'm doing good and happy to have you here. And so a few different things to talk about. But first, let's start with, I guess, sort of kind of the basis of all of this censorship in the first place. I know you've told the story. It really kind of started as trying to deprogram people who had signed up for Obama's caliphate in Syria. And then, but their second job basically was controlling the narrative on Russia again. And you have this great new piece at racket.news about how the very core, the very basis of the Russiagate hoax, just like all of the rest of it.

But this is the one that's the least criticized and I think still the most accepted of the Russiagate era is the Russian hacking of the DNC and their responsibility for the leaks to WikiLeaks at all. And whether there's any evidence of that at all. and you have found more reason now to cast doubt on that than ever before. Please do tell. Yeah, I mean, I should cop right at the start to the fact that this is really not a story that I spent a lot of time on. In fact, I was kind of intimidated by the Russian interference story and probably to some degree even fell for some of the propaganda about the sort of unassailability of that narrative. But there was a group of researchers online who spent a lot of time filing Freedom of Information requests, open records requests, who have found a number of really interesting things over

the years. And the most recent of these revelations has finally convinced me that it's time to start looking at the whole question of what actually happened with the hack, because if you remember, there was that crazy episode involving an accusation that Donald Trump. Trump was communicating secretly with Russia through a server at the Alpha Bank in Russia. And we subsequently found out this was kind of a concocted media hoax that was ginned up, among other things, by some researchers at Georgia Tech. Now, people who were chasing that story filed open records requests.

And as a consequence of that, we've now found out that those same researchers did work on the attribution of the DNC hack. So people who are responsible for kind of a known media hoax also did for the Department of Justice through DARPA at the Pentagon work on the attribution for the hack. And there's just a lot of stuff that's weird about that, but that right away is a huge red flag for me. I'm not sure about you, but...

Yeah, absolutely. Okay. All right. Now, Matt, the average radio listener probably remembers about, I don't know, a third of the 10,000 Rushagate lies that they were told here. But it seems like, as far as I understand, the heart of the plot, it all comes back to you. The Clinton campaign hired this law firm, and then that law firm hired this, that, and the other group to put out the kind of core accusations at the heart of the Rushagate plot. And everything else was sort of embellished from there. Is that essentially right?

Yeah. I mean, the Perkins Coe law firm, they were responsible for engaging Fusion GPS, which is like an APO research firm, who in turn hired the former British spy Christopher Steele, who produced the infamous Steele dossier. These same people shopped a lot of the conclusions of the dossier to both officials in the government and to the media. They also shopped this Alpha Server story. which came out before the election. And so it's one of a handful of clearly fake stories that came out before the 2016 election. And the significance of this new thing is that the same researchers who were involved in the Yodafone thing, the Alpha Service story, they're now also tied to the much more serious question

of whether Russians are responsible for hacking the DNC and the D-T-T-Truple-C. Right. And so now to go back to 2016, people can check the archives. I interviewed this computer security expert named Jeffrey Carr. And I'm almost certain it was April Glasby Day, July 25th of 2016. And Jeffrey Carr said, I can tell you this. I can tell you that no one can examine a server and tell you with certainty who hacked it.

Because it's too easy to leave fake fingerprints behind. And you won't be able to tell the difference. And I can tell you another thing, which is there's one organization on the planet that can tell you with 100% certainty who did it. And that's the National Security Agency, because they have a godlike omniscient view of every packet on every fiber optic cable on this planet. They can rewind the whole internet if they want to and watch whatever happened and who did what. And so then remember the reality winner leak to the intercept that they put out. the NSA would only vouch for these conclusions with the yellow line, moderate intelligence. In other words, the CIA and the FBI are claiming this, we're staying out of it.

We're not contradicting you, but this is not coming from them. And they would have been the ones who can tell you like a light switch on or off. This is either true or it's false, period. But again, Jeffrey Carr said, no one in the world else could tell you. And remember what CrowdStrakes said. Oh, there were all these Cyrillic letters in there. And they had references to Iron Felix from the old. than KV.V. Felix Edmundovich. Yeah. They left his name there. That seems a little odd,

a little convenient. Funny. But yeah, and for a lot of us at the time, not many of us are experts in computer security, but we were told by authoritative figures that this is how it happened. And, you know, it was definitely true that material was leaking out, that WikiLeaks was putting out there. It appeared to, you know, have been published without any, without their permission. It didn't seem to come from a source, although they didn't say it didn't. So, you know, why not believe it? But that, you know, that's at the root of this assumption that we've been making for seven years, which is that Russia did this. And how did we come to that conclusion? Well, we never really got a good answer to that question. Well, look, in the Mueller report, he doesn't even

pretend to have a chain of custody there at all. He just goes, well, I don't know. I mean, it seems like that's where they must have got it. And by the way, I interviewed Craig Murray, the former Russian ambassador to Uzbekistan, who's a friend of Julian Assange's, and he told me that the source for the DNC leak and for the pedestrian emails was different, and that he knew who both of them were, and that he had met with one of them in Washington. And he said that this person has no conceivable relationship with Russia whatsoever. It had nothing to do with that. And he heavily implied that the leaker of the Podesta emails was at NSA. And it was the regime itself, the institutional regime itself, or one faction of it,

taking revenge against Hillary Clinton for all of her leaks and all of her lousy computer security that they would go to prison for if they did what she did. And so they were the ones who had fished Podesta. Now, I'm not saying that's certain, but I'm saying, hey, the fact that Craig Murray says so means there's more reason to believe that than there is to believe that Russia had anything to do with this at all, which has never been demonstrated or even indicated in any way,

other than in claims by liars. Yeah, and we forget that it took quite a long time. There was testimony that came out years later, from Sean Henry, who was the president of CrowdStrike, to the effect that they had no direct evidence of exfiltration, that they only had indications of that, which was a very surprising piece of testimony. So there's a lot of things about this that are very strange.

There's also the very, very weak language that was used in the initial government conclusion that this was done by Russia. They just said it was consistent with sort of Russian methods. They didn't say they had any evidence of. that and so yeah and now and now we find out basically because of the response by DARPA which is the defensive defense advance research projects agency which you know once upon a time was like a liberal bug bear which you know cooked up crazy fantasies like total information awareness which are now reality but they answered a letter from Iowa Senator Chuck Grassley that was sent out last spring

And in the answer to Grassley, they had language in there that said that these Georgia Tech researchers, and I'm going to quote this directly, the enclosed August 7th, 2016 document titled Fancy Bear slash APT28 attribution analysis may correspond to the, quote, white paper on DNC attack attribution referenced in a previous letter. So they're talking about the work of these DARPA subcontracted researchers at Georgia Tech. And they're saying that they did in August of 2016 attribution analysis on the supposed intruder into the DNC. And these are the same people, again, who were involved in a pretty egregious fake news scam. So that makes you wonder. I mean, it makes me wonder for sure.

And I had never touched this side of it. I always thought collusion was the worst lie, and it was the more obvious issue that where reporters could easily penetrate, you know, the messaging issues. But, you know, maybe this is something that has to be examined, too. Well, look, I mean, the fact that the Clinton campaign through their law firm were the ones that hired CrowdStrike is all you need to know, that it couldn't possibly be right. And, you know, you mentioned how the fact that these guys from the Georgia Tech team were the same ones behind the Alpha servers hoax, which really cast their credibility into doubt.

Well, remember CrowdStrike, right after they had come out with this stuff and the summer is 16, they had also accused the Russians of hacking the Ukrainians' cell phone apps that they were using to try to target Russian artillery with counterstrikes. And then the entire computer security community on the planet, or in Western Europe and America said that's not true. You're so wrong and that's completely fake. And you could see the agenda behind it that they were trying to clean that at the time. There were retractions if I remember correctly on that one. That's right. They climbed down from that. Yeah. Yeah. So, you know, the more you look at the stuff, the Russia Gate is such an odd story because it's primarily a media

story. Most of what happened in Russia Gate had to do with stuff that came out in the media. It was There were stories that were designed to influence the way Americans thought about a variety of things, from, you know, Donald Trump's relationship to Russia, to whether or not the election was fair, you know, to his criminal, bringing a potential criminal culpability and having a back channel to, you know, election fixing. But these were all news stories. And a lot of the sleuthing that had to be done was really just retracing the sourcing. of a lot of these stories, which initially was hard to do because so many of these things were sourced to sort of unnamed intelligence sources. Now we're finding out, you know, years after the fact, what a lot of this stuff was based on. And, you know, it's vapor. You know, it's either vapor or it's just highly malotorous. Yeah. It's the same thing they did

to Saddam Hussein, right? It's a, it's a hundred accusations. All of them are false. And a hundred times zero is still zero. But if you like to believe in it, then you, you, can believe in it. And it is the classic conspiracy theory, only they always say a right-wing conspiracy theory or a left-wing conspiracy theory. This is the mainstream centrist conspiracy theory that they promoted to try to, I mean, and really it's outrageous. No matter what anyone thinks of Donald Trump. And I mean, Lord knows what people think of the guy. You can't just frame the president for treason. No. And election fraud and espionage. I mean, these are, you know, some of those offenses are, you know, gravely serious accusations or the kind of things

you certainly can't do lightly. The thing that didn't scan for me at the beginning of this is I was willing to believe all kinds of things about Donald Trump. I mean, if you want to tell me that he inflated the value of his properties and scammed, you know, the people who, you know, were customers of his or scammed people at Trump University and broke laws there, you know, I wasn't going be like that that's impossible or you know he laundered money for for various people by you know allowing them to to buy overpriced properties here and there whatever i mean those things are they're at least in the realm of possibility this idea that there's a secret back channel to vladimir putin who's going to fix the election in favor of donald trump by let me get

this straight, selectively putting out Facebook ads, like a tiny handful of them in a few states, you know, after getting poll information from Paul Manafort, it doesn't make any sense. The basic theory of the case never made any sense. Why not just give the guy some money in a bag so you can buy more ads in whatever states he needed? It was just stupid. And the stupidity of it just kept come in more baroque and more ridiculous as time went on and nobody seemed interesting unwinding it which which also made it suspicious yeah hey guys scott here for leohamel fine jewelers out of san diego at jewelry store s d.com they do business nationwide they sell jewelry and watches specializing in engagement rings you know in case you're in love with somebody they also

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Well, and it is a tragedy the way, and this is, hey, you're the man. Matt Taibi wrote the book, first of all, insane clown president. We know what you think of the guy. But secondly, Hey, Inc., which a major part of that, or I guess a chapter, but also sort of a theme throughout, is all these silos of information where people, don't get to hear the opposing point of view. So when the Mueller report came

out and said, well, we don't really have anything about all that stuff that we told you, people didn't really on the left side, mostly didn't really have to deal with that. They just weren't confronted with it. And by the way, for people listening who don't know this, I mean, Taibi, of course, or

maybe you don't know, Taibi has long been known as at least left of center. And then that goes the same for some of the greatest journalists on the Russia Gate story, starting with Robert Perry at Consortium News and, of course, Aaron Matae and Greenwald and Michael Tracy, and all the way down. None of these people were invested in Donald Trump. All of them just saw the fraud where it was obvious, that this is crazy trying to frame this guy for treason with the Kremlin and all of this stuff. Yeah, there's a problem when, when

in media, when there becomes pressure to endorse conclusions that don't make sense to you, I think we have a healthy media environment when journalists are suspicious of each other and aren't afraid to say so in print. This was the opposite situation. It was a new phenomenon of media where suddenly if you came out and said, yeah, I don't know. That doesn't really make sense. You would lose friends. Like there would be trolls that would come out of nowhere on social media. You would lose speaking opportunities.

You might even lose your job. And that was new. I mean, that was something that Kenneth started with Russiagate. Now it's institutionalized, but I think I think this story started it. Yeah, I remember someone on Twitter casting Real Doubt. I forgot what the new fact was that came out, but casting Real Doubt on the P-Tape story. And a prominent liberal journalist said, counterpoint, don't take this away from me. Yeah, yeah.

Sorry, pal, but like, come on, it wasn't true. that's all you know i don't know you make up whatever you want if you want right yeah i mean it's not like i i can understand wanting to believe it um but you know and see you can see the the joy on stephen colbert's face he actually rented that hotel room and there was video of him jumping up and down on the bed and everything um but you know if it's not true it's not true and it's not me saying that this is the inspector general michael horowitz who looked at this There's nothing there to this story This story is just not sourced, it's not real

So, you know And why not admit it at this point? That's what I don't get. Yeah, seriously. Well, I mean, we're in the middle of a proxia war with Russia right now. Right. I can't go muddying up that narrative. Now, all right, it's anti-war radio.

I'm talking with Matt Taiibi like I like to do. And we're talking about, well, Russia Gate and then here's the segue to our next subject here. When Elon Musk bought Twitter, he brought Matt and a few other colleagues on board to go digging through the Twitter files to figure out what was behind the censorship regime. And boy, did they find a censorship regime far beyond what was going on at Twitter. It's an entire censorship industrial complex, including you can read a piece that they did where it's just the top 50 NGOs involved with getting your opinion kicked off the Internet. just incredible what they found there. Anybody told you that there's nothing there?

They're in on it. You better look out for them. Look at racket. News. And the good news of it, as we've covered on the show, is there's been some progress in the courts too, because there is a First Amendment still, and that's one of them that they like to still pretend as

the law some of the time. You know, I don't know. So there's progress and setbacks in the courts. It's all very complicated, but you have news for us there. The Supreme Court will rule on censorship, and you seem to be mostly striking an optimistic note here. Matt Taibi, please to explain. Yeah, so this is a case that predated the Twitter files. It's from the state attorneys general of Missouri and Louisiana. Oh, and that was before they even brought you guys in on the Twitter files at all?

Yeah, so this case, there was already a complaint in this case before the Twitter file started. And there were a number of plaintiffs. The key plaintiffs in the case were a trio of very respected academics. There was J. Badacharya from Stanford. There's Harvard's Martin Koldorf. And then there's Aaron Kariati, who is in the University of California system and actually did COVID policy for the state. They were all suppressed in various ways. Caldorf actually became one of the most censored people in the world in 2020 and 21, really not even, not for factual reasons, but because he disagreed with lockdown policy.

And this is something we didn't figure out for a while until after we started looking at the Twitter files is that in addition to zapping things for being, you know, quote unquote misinformation or disinformation or being not true, there was a whole separate category of information that they called math. information which is just stuff that's true but it's narratively inconvenient and they may dial that down right or just de-amplify it or they may actually fully remove it or take somebody's account away and so these three doctors who weren't wrong in fact in retrospect they were right about everything they were they were right about mortality rates they were they were right about the efficacy of vaccines They were right about, you know, the damage that would be done by lockdowns. They were censored and became the plaintiffs in this suit, Missouri v. Biden. As the Twitter polls progressed and they started to get more evidence of what was going on,

they added more and more defendants that they were accusing of censorship. And then there was a huge event in July 4th of this summer when the judge in the case was looking at the evidence not only from the Twitter files, but from discovery in the case, and was so horrified by what he saw that he issued an emergency injunction basically barring every agency in the government from contacting Facebook, Google, Twitter, and a whole legion of other companies. And this would have effectively ended any kind of censorship program that is now on hold, but it's now going before the Supreme Court and there's going to be a decision, hopefully, at the Supreme Court level, over whether that injunction will stand, you know, will be changed or, you know, or whether there will be some other kind of ruling.

But the victory, both through that ruling, and then there was a. appellate ruling that upheld it even though it reduced it you know that it's now in black and white that the white house and the FBI were in violation of the first amendment and four different judges have looked at this and have come to the same conclusion and um this is a big case this is like it may be the most consequential first amendment case we've had in a long long time and it's it's incredibly interesting to watch uh and for me as having been part of the twitter files when you know we went to that nobody even believed it was going on uh it's amazing that it's come this far yeah absolutely it's great and again it's a racket dot news this is a very

interesting piece on it too the supreme court will rule on censorship and i know it's complicated but you talk in here about how the government seems have overreached in their appeal saying that they reserve the right to censor anybody for anything not just for something that the courts have already ruled is not protected speech, like hiring a hitman or inciting someone to riot and burn down somebody else's house or something like that. Yeah, so this is fascinating. You know, I went, I went down to Louisiana when this was being argued in the appellate court. And first of all, it's interesting because this is a huge case. And the plaintiffs had a whole table full of high powered lawyers who were arguing this thing. The federal government, the Biden administration sent one

lonely lawyer to argue this thing. And he seemed not to have done his homework. Like he immediately started arguing stuff to the judge that was like factually incorrect. He was saying that the government is going to be prevented from, you know, acting on terrorist threats. And that was actually one of the primary exceptions to the injunction. Now, after the appellate court ruled on the only thing that was really left in the appellate ruling was the government is not allowed to go to these companies and tell them to mess with protected free speech. That was the language that they used. And the government, in filing a motion to oppose this ruling, is essentially saying, no, we want the right to even go after protected free speech. So that was something that had not been

asserted before. And like, rather than saying, we don't think that there was actually any damages into these particular plaintiffs, you haven't proved that, you know, there's a million ways they could have defended this. Instead, they went through the front door and said, we need the right to do this. We need the right to go after protected free speech because that's what presidents do and it's a right of ours. And they're going to lose on that. I mean, I think unless there's some kind of fix in, most judges are going to look at this and say, like, I can't can't endorse that, you know. And so it's a remarkable argument, especially given the Supreme Court above them, like the likelihood that that's going to prevail seems very small to me.

Yeah. And you know what? Everybody in America of any political persuasion, or even if you have none, like we have to all agree on freedom of speech. First Amendment or not, let's say that the overlords claim that they suspended the First Amendment, now there's no First Amendment. Well, so we're still all born screaming. We got the right to speak. Of course we do on our own property or on the public commons, obviously not trespassing on somebody else's property, but, you know, out in the public space, they have no right to intervene in this way at all. We all know that, regardless of whether they can come up with some technicality. This is no different than if they tell you, no, you can't be Catholic, you have to be Protestant or vice versa. Are you kidding me? That's

not how we do business here. We just don't. No. And, and, and, And you're absolutely right. Not only do they not have the right to do that, the Constitution is very clear. This is the first thing in the Constitution. It's the first thing in the Bill of Rights. The Declaration of Independence talks about how all men are created equal and endowed with certain and inalienable rights when they start to enumerate what those are. The first thing is the freedom of speech, freedom of the press, freedom of religion, freedom

to petition the government for redress and grievances, we don't get that right from government. We are born with that right. That is something that we have as people. The government is just an entity that is limited in its ability to mess with that, right? Like that's how our law works. They don't have an inherent right to go in and, you know, prevent us from saying X, Y, or Z. As you say, we're born screaming, and, you know, our Constitution says that's the natural state of things. You have to show cause for what allows you to limit that. And they, rather than saying, they're making some kind of pragmatic argument, like we need to do X, Y, and Z, and this is not protected speech because of this or that, they instead are arguing this much larger con. that, no, we need to rethink the whole concept of free speech and the rights need to

read down to us, not to the speaker. If that succeed, that's just revolutionary, I don't think it can succeed. Yeah. I agree with you. I think, well, we got to cross our fingers and hope when it comes down to it. It does come down to nine overlords in dresses deciding. So we'll see what their whims amount to here, but there we go, that's the system. All right, listen, of course, we're

over time and out of time, but thank you so much for coming back on the show, Matt. You're great, and you do great work. Thanks, Scott. I really appreciate it. Thanks for having me on. All right you guys. That's Matt Taibi. He is at racket.com. Check out the Supreme Court will rule on censorship. And forget collusion.

Was interference? Also fake news. And that's it for anti-war radio for today. I'm Scott Horton. Go to Scott Horton.org Just sign it for the podcast feed and check out the archives and stuff. I'm on Twitter at Scott Horton's show. and I'm here every Thursday, day, from 2.30 to 3 on KPFK, 90.7 FM in L.A. See you next week.