For Pacifica Radio, September 28, 2023, I'm Scott Horton. This is Anti-War Radio. [Music] Alright, Ciao. Welcome to Show It Is Anti-War Radio. I'm your host, Scott Horton. I am editorial director of antiwar.com, and I'm the author of Enough Already Time to End the War on Terrorism. You can find my full interview archive, almost 6,000 of them. Now, going back to 2003 at ScottHorton.org and at youtube.com/ScottHortonShow. And you can follow me on Twitter if you dare at Scott Horton Show. Alright, introducing once again the great Matt Taiby. He is at racket.news, 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 out. Thanks for the kind 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 Gate. And you have this great new piece at racket.news about how the very core, the very basis of the Russia Gate 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 Russia Gate 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 out 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 unassailable 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 is 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 was communicating secret leave with Russia through a server at the Alpha Bank in Russia. And we subsequently find 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 hacks. 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 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. All right. Now, Matt, the average radio listener probably remembers about, I don't know, a third of the 10,000 Russia gate 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 Russia gate 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 op-oh 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 and the government and to the media. They also shopped this alpha service 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 DCCC. Right. And so now to go back to 2016, people can check the archives. I interviewed this computer security expert named Jeffrey Carr and it was a mumal certain it was April glass B 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 or on or off. This is either true or it's false period. And but again, Jeffrey Carr said, no one in the world else could tell you. And remember what crowd strikes said? Oh, there were all these Cyrillic letters in there and they had references to iron Felix from the whole then KVL. Felix said Mundovich. 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. What 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 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's at the root of this assumption that we've been making for seven years, which is that Russia did this and had to become to that conclusion. Well, we never really got a good answer to that question. Well, look at the Mueller report, he doesn't even pretend to have a chain of custody there at all. He just goes, whoa, 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 Podesta 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. So he just 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 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 Russian methods. They didn't say they had any evidence of that. And so, yeah, and now we find out basically because of the response by DARPA, which is the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, which once upon a time was a liberal bugbear, which 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/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 the messaging issues. But maybe this is something that has to be examined too. Well, 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 in the summer of 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 counter strikes. 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. Yeah, and that was right. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So, you know, the more you look at this stuff, the, the, the, the, "Ruchengate" is such an odd story because it's primarily a media story. Most of what happened in "Ruchengate" 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, to Russia, to whether or not the election was fair, you know, to his criminal, to bring 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 much, so many of these things were sourced to sort of unnamed, intelligent 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, it's either vapor or it's just highly malodorous. 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 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. You know, and, and, 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, 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, I, you know, I wasn't going to be like that. That's impossible. Or, you know, he, 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, are there 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, in a, 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? Like it was just stupid. And the stupidity of it just kept him in more Baroque and more ridiculous as time went on. And nobody seemed interested in unwinding it, which, which, which also made it suspicious. Yeah. Hey guys, Scott here for Leo Hammel, find jewelers out of San Diego at jewelry store SD.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 specialize in one of a kind vintage and anti jewelry, fully serviced pre-owned find watches such as Rolex, Patek, Philippe, Cartier and any high end brand. Leo's also services high end watches faster and cheaper than going to a factory service center. Leo's takes all the stress out of shopping for jewelry and engagement rings and always at the right price. They deal nationwide over the phone at 619-299-1500. It's Leo Hammel, find jewelers out of San Diego. Go to jewelry store SD.com to check out their fine selection and to find out more. Hey, y'all. You should sign up for my sub stack. It's Scott Horton show dot sub stack dot com. And if you do that, you'll get the interviews a day before everybody else, but not only that, they'll be free of commercials. How do you like that? Pretty good, huh? Scott Horton show dot sub stack dot com. Hey y'all, Libertosbella dot com is where you get Scott Horton show and Libertarian Institute shirts, sweatshirts, mugs and stickers and things, including the great top lobsters designs as well. See, that way it says on your shirt why you're so smart. Libertosbella from the same great folks who bring you ammo dot com for all your ammunition needs to. Well, and it is a tragedy the way and this is hey, you're the man. Matt, I Eby wrote the book. First of all, insane clown present. We know what you think of the guy, but secondly, hey, ink, 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, you know, on the left side mostly didn't really have to deal with that. Because they just weren't confronted with it. And by the way, for people listening who don't know this, I mean, Tiberi, of course, this is, or maybe you don't know, Tiberi has long been known as at least left of center. And then that goes the same for some of the greatest journalists on the Russiagate story, starting with Robert Perry and consortium news and of course, Aaron Matte and Greenwall 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 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 in media where suddenly if you came out and said, yeah, I don't know that doesn't really make sense. They 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 cannot start 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 at 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 can understand wanting to believe it. But, you know, and you can see the joy on Stephen Colbert's face. He actually rented that hotel room and there's video of him jumping up and down in the bed and everything. 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 admitted at this point? That's what I don't get. Yeah, seriously. Well, I mean, we're in the middle of a Proxivore with Russia right now. We can't go muddying up that narrative. Now, all right, it's anti-war radio. I'm talking with Matt Teiby 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 who, 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. It's 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 racquet.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 is 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 Teiby. Please do 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, this case had, there was already a complaint in this case before the Twitter files started. And there were a number of plaintiffs. The key plaintiffs in the case were a trio of very respected academics. There was Jay Bottacharia from Stanford. There's Harvard's Martin Kaldorf. And then there's Aaron Kariati, who is a, at the, in the University of California system and actually did COVID policy for the state. They were all suppressed in various ways. Taldorf actually became one of the most censored people in the world in 2020 and 2021. 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 working 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 mal-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 right about mortality rates. 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 it became the plaintiffs in this suit, Missouri v. Biden. As the Twitter files 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 an appellate ruling that upheld it, even though it reduced it, you know, it's now in black and white at 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 this is a big case. This is like maybe the most consequential First Amendment case we've had in a long, long time. And it's incredibly interesting to watch. And for me, it's been having been part of the Twitter files when, you know, we went to nobody even believed it was going on. It's amazing that it's come this far. Yeah, absolutely. It's great. And again, it's a racket.news. This is a very interesting piece on it to the Supreme Court will rule on censorship. And I know it's complicated, but you talk in here about how the government seems to 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 whole 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. You know, 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 this, 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 use. 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. Rather than saying, we don't think that there was actually any damage 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 those and say, like, I can't endorse that. 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, our 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 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, people and endowed with certain 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 of the 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. That's how our law works. They don't have an inherent right to go in and prevent us from saying X, Y or Z. As you say, we're born screaming. Our constitution says that's the natural state of things. You have to show cause for what allows you to limit that. Rather than making some kind of pragmatic argument, like we need to do X, Y and Z. This is not protected speech because of this or that. They instead are arguing this much larger concept that 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 succeeds, that's just revolutionary. I don't think it can succeed. I agree with you. I think, well, we've got to cross our fingers and hope when it comes down. You never know. It does come down to nine overlords and dresses deciding. 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 Teibihi. He is at racket.news. 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 scottworton.org to sign up for the podcast feed and check out the archives and stuff. I'm on Twitter @ScottHortonShow and I'm here every Thursday from 2.30 to 3 on KPMK, 90.7 FM in LA. See you next week. [music] (guitar)
