Will Cain Country - Revisit Will's Eye-opening Interview with Matt Taibbi

Episode Date: March 13, 2024

Will is off this week, but he wanted to share some of his favorite conversations from the launch of The Will Cain Show. Investigative journalist Matt Taibbi joined Will to discuss the lengths the Left will go to use lawfare in their attempt to stop former President Trump. Tell Will what you thought by emailing [e-mail] Follow Will on Twitter: @WillCain Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

For a limited time at McDonald's, enjoy the tasty breakfast trio. Your choice of chicken or sausage McMuffin or McGrittles with a hash brown and a small iced coffee for $5.5 plus tax. Available until 11 a.m. at participating McDonald's restaurants. Price excludes flavored iced coffee and delivery. Hey, it's Will Kane. I'm off this week, but I thought, we should revisit one of our most successful, most trafficked, most viral interviews so far with the launch of the Will Kane Show, which streams live every day at 12 o'clock Eastern Time at Fox News.com, the Fox News YouTube channel on the Fox News Facebook page. You can always catch

the Will Kane Show whenever you like by subscribing on YouTube to Will Kane Show. Matt Taibi is an investigative journalist. He's branched out on his own with Rackett, and he has reported extensively on the links at which the left has gone to use lawfare and censorship to stop free speech and in particular stop former president Donald Trump. You have to hear as so many already have about what's going on deep under the surface, under the covers, and behind the scenes to control what you think, what you see, what you read, what you hear. But not today. You get it all free with Matt Taibi right here on the the Will Cain show.

I'm Janice Dean. Join me every Sunday as I focus on stories of hope and people who are truly rays of sunshine in their community and across the world. Listen and follow now at Fox Newspodcast.com. This is Jimmy Phala, inviting you to join me for Fox Across America, where we'll discuss every single one of the Democrats' dumb ideas. Just kidding. It's only a three-hour show. Listen live at noon Eastern or get the podcast at Fox Across America.com. Listen to the all-new Brett Bear podcast featuring Common Ground, in-depth talks with lawmakers from opposite sides of the aisle, along with all your Brett Bear favorites like his All-Star panel and much more. Available now at foxnewspodcasts.com or wherever you get your podcasts.

Do you think we've arrived at sort of this inevitable evolution of a polarized and divided society that we're at this moment where, you know, you've got to ruin democracy, you've got to destroy democracy. to save democracy. Like we're headed towards this zero-sum game of politics, and we always were. Or do you think there was something unique about Donald Trump that forced this moment where, as we've mentioned, it's left, it's right, it's neocon, it's far left, whatever. The bedfellows are all mixed at this point, but it all seems to be unified against one man, Donald Trump. I think we have to conclude that there's something unique about Trump. We did see after 9-11 that there was a concerted effort to knock down a lot of liberal traditions and rule of law traditions with respect to America's behavior overseas. Even domestically, you know, Bush did things like there were incidents at least one involving an arrest without a warrant, which is something we hadn't seen since the Lincoln years.

But we also saw the elimination of habeas corpus, you know, drone assassinations. all these things were revived after 9-11, but it was all overseas. When Trump came along is when we started to see a change in thinking domestically. And this is why for me all of this is so shocking. You know, I grew up sort of a political, classic ACLU political liberal. And all of a sudden, all the people who I used to think of as my friends and colleagues, they're, for instance, against free speech. They think we must have censorship or else the, you know, we're headed towards peril in order to

save democracy. We have to kind of curtail the First Amendment. And then you start talking about other amendments they want to they want to cut back on the Fifth Amendment, the 14th Amendment. I mean, it's right on the line. And I think this is something that goes back to 2016. Before that, we just didn't see this. Okay, well, then that forces us into this. Then what is it about Donald Trump? And I don't want to give you the answer. And you're independent-minded enough that you won't let me ask you a leading question, but I think about this, and I think I've already offered up an opinion today that I think any listener could follow, where I think he did, for whatever reason, did represent a threat to the way things had been done for a long time, probably since

post-World War II, the way things had been done in Washington, D.C. I mean, he's the first true outsider, and when we say outsider sometimes, I think we almost think of that almost too stylistically, you know, but like he just didn't think about things the way. that anyone steeped in politics thought about things. And so therefore, he did represent a true threat to the way business was done in Washington, D.C. That's option A. And then I'm just trying to be real with myself, Matt, like, let's consider option B. Option B, red team this.

Like, let me, I often think even the craziest person, you have to listen to it for a minute because maybe there's a kernel of truth. You know, so I sit there and ask myself, well, do they have any current? of truth, that Donald Trump represents everything that they say, a true threat to democracy. And I do try to ask myself that. And I think I obviously, I come back to option A. That's the answer I think is true, but not without asking myself B, but I ask you, then why? What is it about Donald Trump? Yeah, I've come around to option A. And this started with my experience as a campaign reporter. I mean, I covered the campaign for years. And as actually, as an investigative

journalism story, it's kind of boring. And the reason it was always boring is because the answers are pretty much decided in advance. There's a triumvirate of interests, the press, the two political parties, and the donors. They're basically impenetrable. They always had been, going back decades. If they did not agree on a candidate, that candidate did not. get a major party nomination. It just was impossible. It couldn't happen. The closest that we'd ever come was 1992 when Ross Perot spent $18 million and got himself on the ballot, but he didn't really sniff the presidency. In this case, in 2016, Donald Trump overcame all of those influences. And I covered that campaign. I disliked Donald Trump enough to write a book called

and saying con president about that campaign but when people said well this is a failure of democracy i i thought well that's crazy this is this is a huge vindication of democracy because he defeated all these oligarchical elements that were trying to prevent him from getting elected he had half the money that hillary clinton had so he didn't have the donors his own party was manifestly against his nomination and then the press was absurdly against them i mean i think the the um you know the endorsements it was some ridiculous number like 97 to two of the of the major newspapers so he beat all that it was a it was a crack in the system i think that's what that's the norm that they were really concerned about him um you know breaking now after 2020 and january

6th and stop the steal i think the argument becomes more serious but you have to remember that that they were making all these arguments way before January 6th, way before any of that episode, any of those episodes. So I think it's option A, almost entirely. Maybe, you know, you get a little bit more on the other side now after 2020, but, you know, yeah. Yeah, but even after 2020, to your point, and this is not, what I'm about to say isn't reporting.

It's more like follow the logical. if whatever this if it's an oligarchy that then is capable of kind of perpetuating a siop on the American public of high it's it's siop in that some stuff is manufactured some stuff is like

giving increased or outsized importance to inconsequential things in the end his personality whatever it may be you convince a great amount of the public that the oligarchy is you know right about Donald Trump um

if they believe this stuff, I don't know if they really truly believe that he is a threat to democracy, the way they talk, they would do anything. And I'm not even talking about the election results. I mean, we do know what they did do. We do know about the censorship regime. Honestly, man, the way that they speak, I mean, comparisons to Hitler and Nazism and these kind of things like, if you really believe that America was on the verge of losing its constitutional republic, its democracy, that it was on. the verge of falling away into Hitlerism, then I don't know what you wouldn't do to stop the man that you think is responsible. Well, right, and they've been pretty unequivocal about that, almost unembarrassed about it. I mean, Robert Kagan, who's a very influential neoconservative thinker, his wife, Victoria Newland is also a very influential diplomat and security official with a lot of influence.

on the prosecution of the war in Ukraine. He wrote an incredible 6,000-word piece in Washington Post comparing Trump to Caesar and saying, you know, that our democracy is in great peril and no other ordinary avenue of resistance is going to work. I mean, it's almost, it's as close as you can come to calling for an assassination without doing it. They had this ridiculous picture of a bust of Caesar on the front of the article.

But they're all basically saying, you know, we have to do whatever it takes to prevent this person from getting into office. And this is also reflected in the view of journalists. I mean, infamously, Sam Harris, who's, you know, a very influential podcaster, was saying, yeah, we have to do whatever it takes to get rid of Trump. And this was for a little while anyway, at least the debate. within the journalism community. There were a few of us who were saying, we can't just lie about the guy. Like, you know, that's not done.

That will destroy our professional. It will ruin us as an institution. But I would say 90, 95% of the people in the business were on the other side of that debate from the beginning. They just something about Trump is so triggering to this group of people that, you know, it's still kind of a mystery to me, actually. I don't really fully understand it.

it's shocking honestly matt that there hasn't i mean i hate to say this it sounds so inflammatory when you talk about this like you just step back from it and you go it is kind of shocking there hasn't been an attempt on his life i mean you've got you know it's you could argue by the way it undercuts all the conspiracies of assassination because all of the powers that be behind the scenes are marshaled against trump and it hasn't manifested in that you know and on the on the front end, you've also ginned up a great amount of, like, you know, populist or anti-populist hatred of Trump that could inspire a mass lone wolf, right? You just kind of look at this from a distance and you go, it's shocking that this hasn't been the final step in stopping Donald Trump.

Yeah, I mean, I think they've already been very successful in getting people to go way beyond the confines of what their normal behaviors would be. You know, it starts with stuff as simple, was, you know, the censorship issue. There are people who would never have considered, you know, interfering on a mass scale with speech, who suddenly became very ardent converts to that idea after 2016. This sort of lawfare conversion of the left liberal advocacy space.

I mean, I came up again, I did a lot of stories with groups like the ACLU, crew, you know, back in the day, the League of Women Voters, all these groups that were pursuing sort of issue-driven initiatives to try to do things like integrate the workplace or prevent housing discrimination or whatever it is, all that's gone. It's all partisan warfare now that you have this huge flowering of these little bureaucracies that do nothing but stuff like generate nuisance lawsuits against Republican politicians or Trump-related politicians or try to generate bar complaints against Trump.

connected lawyers, they're doing the same thing to some of the third party groups now. This is warfare. This is not advocacy anymore. And who knows where it will lead? It's kind of scary. You brought up, yeah, it's very scary. You brought up this letter, I think it was obtained by semaphore. Was this sent to the no labels party people talking about third party?

No. In a Zoom meeting where they were talking about this is what we need to. This is the message we need to put out. To third party candidates or third party. Like one of the lines is, basically, if you have one fingernail clipping of a skeleton in your closet, we will find it. We're going to come at you with every gun we can possibly find. That's a threat to the Jill Steins of the world, to the RFK juniors of the world, to the no labels of the world. Yeah, it's incredible.

I mean, the no labels, for people who don't know, it's this new kind of third party group. It's interesting. It's got the former NAACP director in it, Joe Lieberman's in it, the former Republican governor of North Carolina's in it. So it's sort of a hodgepodge of both left and right ideas, but it just wants something different. They had, there was a former Democratic Party lawyer named Holly Page. They ended up sending a letter to the Department of Justice complaining about the Harrisman. they'd received she was visited by another former democratic party lawyer who basically said you'll never work in this town again uh you know you have to get you have to stop being involved with this

group and then then mentions you know i wonder what your your biggest client connie thinks about all this and mentions that you know one of this woman's uh firm's biggest clients within weeks she gets a call from the client saying sorry we're we're not going to be using your services anymore because you're persona non grata at the White House. So this is how they're operating. This is like, you know, bottom line politics. If you don't go along with the program, we're going to hit you in the wallet. We're going to hit you and, you know, your ability to use the internet.

I mean, it's a million different things. This is, this is all new. This is stuff we did overseas, not domestically. It's just, it's incredible. So I want to, I've teased it several times that in that transition integrity project, they laid out four threats that they worried about Donald Trump committing, right, that predicated, I don't know, predicated every response necessary to save democracy. I want to go through them really quickly with you. Because again, remember, this was done, this project was put together in the

summer of 2020. So the Hunter Biden laptop story had begun to percolate, but hadn't yet made its way into the full censorship mode, meaning John Paul Mack Isaac had already reached out to the FBI. that had happened. But summer of 2020, so a lot of, as I read this, you're going to realize nothing had yet happened. So one thing they worried about Donald Trump doing is restricting internet access in the name of national security. They worried about him embarking on a censorship regime. Yeah, I mean, and I wrote there, all I could, all my side can do is laugh at that. I spent the last year, you know, doing with the Twitter file stuff, going through how, you know, how Democratic Party officials and their associated advocacy groups spend eight years doing this

stuff. So, yeah, it's laughable that they would think that. And then obviously afterwards, they used it heavy-handedly in the years after 2020. Number two, they were worried that Donald Trump would allege foreign interference in an election in order to cast doubt on its outcome, which is exactly, well, that was what was done after 2016? 2016, 2018, 2020.

I mean, I actually got to a point where I couldn't count anymore the number of news articles that came out where unnamed or even in many cases

named officials came out and warned that the Russians were going to interfere in the election. After 2016, of course, there was an

intelligence community assessment. There's going to be some reporting. It's going to come out about that soon. you know, concluding that Russians interfered to help Trump, then there were years, there was years and years of reporting about that, that ended up collapsing mostly. Then in 2018, they said

the Russians are going to interfere until the elections went a certain way, after which they said they didn't succeed. Then in 2020, the same pattern happened again. So there's so much of this, it's just laughable that they would talk about it that way. Number three, they said they're worried about a classified intelligence release. Now, I'm not, this is where your reporting comes in. I see you already shaking your head. Is that something, is that a sin they've already committed in the past three years since this, three, four years since this was released? Passively. Yeah. They're, you know, the use of classified leaks and leaking those to reporters was a constant feature of the of the Trump era. It started really before he was even elected. There was the

intelligence community assessment. There was language from the intelligence community assessment about Russian interference, which got published on January 6th, 2017. There was language from that that was in news reports in the month before that. So they were already leaking news of a classified intelligence assessment long before it came out. Then there was the... To oppose Trump. Right, yes. Then the incident involving Michael Flynn talking to the Russian ambassador, that was classified

signals intelligence that you're not allowed to leak to reporters. Actually, that's one of the few areas where reporters aren't even allowed to publish the stuff, technically. Then there was a series of leaks. There was one for the New York Times about... about Trump having repeated access to contacts with Russian intelligence. There were others involving, you know, the Eric Prince and the Seychelles having contacts with Russians. It just went on and on and on over and over again. It was a massively

underreported story throughout the Trump years. And then finally, number four of the things they were concerned Trump would do is that he would launch investigations into his political opponents. That's, again, laughable considering what's happened to him, all these investigations launched against him. But again, I think the point, Matt, is like, this is what they were talking about in 2020. Then we know what happened afterwards. So all the sins and all the big concerns and handring they had about Donald Trump are things that they actually did. It's not unlike what we talk about. I actually, I think people that accuse other people of being racist, often harbor the most racist thoughts internally or whatever

it may be. It's like, accuse your opponent of the sins you are committing. And here we have have it. They war-gowned at the worst of Trump and then did the worst of Trump. Right. And on one hand, as he was a candidate, I can see being concerned about that in 2016. Because I remember being at his rallies where he would start it off by saying, lock her up, lock her up, right? Which suggests that he's going to get into office and launch a criminal investigation against Hillary Clinton. But that never happened. I mean, he never did that stuff. Donald Trump, people have to go penetrate. the talk with Donald Trump and get down to the reality of what he is. Some of the things that he says are outrageous and outrageously offensive, but when you get

down to what he actually did, it turns out to be a much smaller story in many cases. And you're absolutely right. The history of politicized investigations, there just aren't a lot of them. You could argue maybe the first impeachment case was an instance of them trying to gin up an investigation against Hunter Biden, but that's pretty much. compared to the stuff that can that concretely demonstrably happened in the other direction so the purpose of looking back to this thing in 2020 is to a point out the ways in which this was all done you know in order to say everything they worried about they were willing to commit in order to quote unquote save democracy but also to look forward to 2024 in the next couple of months the next year essentially

because i think it's it's probably going to bleed over post election as well as what will be done I mean, what will be done this year? I think we can count on censorship, but what else will be done to stop Donald Trump? I mean, there will certainly be legal actions. I mean, we've already seen we've got 120 criminal accounts, however, many of them. They're already out there. The argument that he's an insurrectionist needs to be kept off the ballot. Those cases are still ongoing.

But there's also the ongoing issue of who's going to be on the ballot in what states. Remember, this could very easily be a decisive factor in the election. If no labels gets a Canada on there, if Robert F. Kennedy Jr. gets on the ballot. Both of those parties have enough money to do the job of actually getting collecting the signatures. So there's going to be an awesome effort to try to prevent that from happening because there's a strong belief in Washington that that would swing the election to Trump if they were to do that. I hope you enjoyed that conversation with Matt Taibi. Check him out at Rackett. And make sure you subscribe to the Will Cain Show at Spotify, Apple, or here on YouTube,

and you can catch all of our big interviews whenever you like. I'll see you next time on The Will Cain Show. Listen to ad-free with a Fox News podcast plus subscription on Apple Podcast, and Amazon Prime members, you can listen to this show, ad-free on the Amazon Music app. This is Jason Chaffetz from the Jason in the House podcast. Join me every Monday to dive deeper into the latest political headlines and chat with remarkable guests. Listen and follow now at Fox Newspodcast.com or wherever you download podcasts.