Sorry, I'm late.
I had to stop by the Wax Museum again and give the finger to FDR.
We know Al-Qaeda, Zawahiri, is supporting the opposition in Syria.
Are we supporting Al-Qaeda in Syria?
It's a proud day for America.
And by God, we've kicked Vietnam syndrome once and for all.
Thank you very, very much.
I say it, I say it again.
You've been hacked.
You've been took.
You've been hoodwinked.
These witnesses are trying to simply deny things that just about everybody else accepts as fact.
He came, he saw us, he died.
We ain't killing they army, but we killing them.
We be on CNN like Say Our Name been saying, say it three times.
The meeting of the largest armies in the history of the world.
Then there's going to be an invasion.
All right, you guys, on the line is Brian McGlinchey from 28pages.org.
And of course, he helped get the 28 pages of the Congressional Committee report on September 11th declassified.
And he also does other great journalism, too, including this series about the Saudi lobby in the United States, lying to and basically defrauding American soldiers and using them as pawns in their public relations campaigns.
And all kinds of great stuff.
And we're going to talk about the latest developments of that.
So welcome to the show.
How are you doing, Brian?
Great to be back with you, Scott.
Excellent.
Very happy to have you here.
And I'm such a heel because I gave this speech at the Ron Paul thingamajig, Ron Paul Institute and Mises Institute thing about the media these days.
And I planned at one point when I didn't have my pen and my piece of paper handy, that I was going to mention the work that you've done on this story as an example of just one of many great examples of independent media really doing the work that we absolutely cannot rely on, you know, the majors to do.
It's not just you need a lot of great bloggers to explain this stuff.
We're talking about original work and extremely important work like this.
And then, of course, I completely spaced it out.
And I think I thought of it as soon as the moment I saw you after the talk, I went, Oh, the Brian McGlinchey part that I forgot.
So this is the part I was going to talk about, but I'm going to let you tell it because what do I know?
But you did such a great job on this.
And the story basically starts with a Saudi PR firm decides to trick some American Army and Marines into going to Capitol Hill to state a case that they do not understand.
Absolutely.
And really to back it up one notch, in 2016, the fall of 2016, Congress passed the Justice Against Sponsors of Terrorism Act, which cleared the way for 9-11 families and survivors and insurers to sue Saudi Arabia for the alleged role.
It's various government officials of the Saudi government played in facilitating, giving logistical and financial support to the 9-11 hijackers who were plotting that attack.
So this law, which the shorthand is JASTA for the acronym of that law, it was passed over the veto of President Obama.
It's his only veto of his term was JASTA.
And once that override happened, the Saudi lobby went into overdrive.
They've unleashed a sprawling multi, multimillion dollar campaign to amend it, which we could all read as weaken it.
With a goal of basically putting that hurdle right back, raising the hurdle for plaintiffs to prevail in their case against the kingdom.
And part of this huge campaign hinged on a key message.
And that message was a dishonest one, but it was an effective one to some extent.
That message was that if JASTA stays on the books, and other countries pass laws similar to JASTA in reciprocation, that U.S. military service members, veterans going back to the Korean War, Vietnam War, would themselves be exposed to being sued in foreign courts.
Now, that's absolutely false, because JASTA is all about sovereign immunity.
It enables people to sue foreign governments, not individual people in other countries.
So the whole premise is completely false.
And by the way, that was a premise embraced by President Obama.
So many people, and McCain and Lindsey Graham, John McCain and Lindsey Graham.
So wait, let's reiterate that a little bit.
In fact, one thing I can add to that is that this has long been a concern on the right about all international courts.
And it's certainly a concern of mine, and it should be one of every American's, that any American would be subjected to law and order of any kind without our Bill of Rights.
Hell, we already are deprived of it enough as it is.
But the idea that Americans who obeyed their political master's decisions in these wars would be hauled in front of The Hague or something like that is something that is probably, I think you and I know, pretty far outside the realm of possibility that some bureaucrats would dare to try to really do that to Americans in any context.
The ICC is for sub-Saharan African dictators, not people from the West.
They're the ones who do the prosecutions and hold the trials.
That's been the history of it and is obviously the form of it.
But, and I'm not saying that that's fair, really, that they're hauled out of their jurisdictions.
I think part of this should go without saying that Americans should hold their own war criminals accountable, and they should get fair trials with the Bill of Rights, and then they should go to prison with their war criminals.
And that's something where we're really falling down on the job, and if anything, that's what opens Americans up to foreign prosecution, is when the American system of law becomes a farce and a, you know, a pretended representation of what one would look like without real accountability.
But, so anyway, I'm sorry, my point is that right-wingers have heard of this before, that at some point American soldiers could be hauled off to some kind of foreign court.
The Saudis, I don't know if they already knew that, but it sounds to me like they kind of already knew that and decided that they were going to play on that, and they were going to say that that's what Obama is doing to you.
Obama is trying to set this up so that American soldiers can be hauled off in front of foreign courts, which if you're a right-winger enough and you're afraid of Obama enough and how much he hates you enough that you think he might do that, then that's something that's really alarming.
So that was the narrative they were pushing here.
It was a pretty tough pill they were pushing, you know?
Except that Obama actually vetoed JASTA.
So he's on the same side of the Saudi government.
Yeah, but what does that have to do with the narrative, you know?
But you're right, and you know, the Saudis didn't necessarily have to know about that dynamic, because they've got John McCain, Lindsey Graham, and Corvus Communications, one of their flagship lobbying firms, to know about this dynamic.
I gotcha.
Exactly.
So you're right.
Really what you had, when you look at JASTA, and again, past an override of Obama's veto, what you had here is on one side a very sympathetic group of people, the 9-11 families, right?
I mean, who in our society, you know, do people have more sympathy for?
Well, so the Saudi lobby responded by selecting their own group of sympathetic people to be on the opposite side of JASTA, because as you know all too well, American veterans are highly, highly revered in our country now, and people go out of their way to make sure that nothing ill would happen to them like this.
So yeah, it was a very savvy angle to play, and one that had some traction there for a little while.
Yeah.
So, as these campaigns launched, we first saw op-ed pieces popping up all around the country with identical paragraphs, but different writers, ostensibly.
You know, different veterans, a retired general, a retired JAG officer in the Denver Post, you know, all these different articles and op-eds around the country opposing JASTA, warning about how it exposes veterans and so forth.
And then we became aware that they were bringing veterans to Capitol Hill.
And that's kind of when I started diving in, is after someone else kind of broke that news that they were—Daily Caller broke that, that they were bringing veterans to Capitol Hill.
And there was a strong suspicion at that point that, do these veterans know what's going on or who's paying their way?
So that's when I dove deep for quite a many hour into Facebook, because a name came out in one of the early pieces of reporting of somebody who had stayed in the Trump International Hotel on the Saudi dime.
And that person was on Facebook posting selfies and all this kind of stuff, pictures from their trip, and tagging other people who were on the trip.
And so I was off and running in terms of looking at this universe of people who had attended.
And then I picked out four or five people to try to reach out to, to ask, and kind of hit the jackpot with a former Marine named David Kassler, who'd been on one of these trips.
And really what was happening is these people were being approached by people all across the country.
It's a grassroots type of approach, friend-to-friends networking type of thing, to get veterans who would go on these trips.
And they were offered all expenses paid.
And the proposition to them was, again, that premise that veterans are being endangered by this lull jasta.
And then they were told, hey, there's a group of grassroots veterans organization that's getting together, going to Washington, D.C., would you like to come and help protect your fellow veterans?
We'll put you up in the Trump International Hotel for four or five nights.
All expenses paid on airfare as well and meals.
And so a lot of people obviously took that because not knowing any better, they were told that their fellow veterans were in jeopardy and that they could go have the great experience of a week in Washington and being on Capitol Hill.
Obviously, that was very appealing to them because these were well-intentioned people who were brought up there to do that.
And there are a lot of oddball things about this campaign.
Again, multimillion dollar, you can imagine the expense of taking, in the case of one of these organizers, probably seven or eight groups of 50 people at a time for a week in the Trump International Hotel, airfare and everything, and bring them up there.
So they're spending big money, but they were missing something that would be associated with any kind of lobbying campaign.
And that was leave behind material.
When you go lobbying on a topic, it's very standard.
You're going to leave behind a one-page flyer or something, kind of restating your position so they'll have something.
And the veterans were asking, hey, don't we have anything to give these people when we're lobbying these senators and members of Congress?
And in one case, they told them, oh, we don't really have the budget for that.
But then the more telling comment, they told another veteran, well, there's some legal requirements.
Well, the legal requirements, if you hand over a piece of paper to a member of Congress or any informational type material in a lobbying campaign for a foreign government, you're going to get a disclosure paragraph on the bottom.
So basically, they were not only fooling the veterans.
They're also fooling the members of Congress and their staff that were on the receiving end of these lobbying visits because they weren't told that this was a Saudi operation knocking on their door.
And they were actually encouraged to conceal it.
They said, if anyone asks, just tell them that you're concerned veterans up here about if anyone asks how you got here.
Well, I wonder, did they tell you any stories about maybe staffers pulling them aside and this is BS, dude.
I don't know who told you this, but that's not what this law does.
And so you should go home or something like that, you know?
Yes, they did.
I'm trying to, it might come to me.
One of the members of Congress, it was really pushed back hard.
And it actually started to get into a kind of a vigorous discussion, they say, with this member of Congress, because they were not buying it.
There was somebody who was a little closer to the issue.
It was, oh, Jim Sensenbrenner.
Yeah.
Okay.
I could see him being like sort of combative.
So then, so he told them, no, you're wrong.
That's not what the legislation says.
And then they said, well, yeah, huh, because that's what we've been told.
And so then that turned into a big fight.
And then only after they talked to you, they realized that, oh, wow, he was right, that this really, we were really deceived here.
Yeah.
I mean, these veterans, the ones I talked to, they found out there.
So they'd been on the Capitol Hill for two days or so, thinking they're doing a good thing.
And then one of the ones I interviewed at night, after a night of hard, these veterans are all having a good time in D.C.
And after a night of hard partying, this one of the guys who had been organizing the lobbying, who was in on it, he knew what was going on, that the Saudi Arabia government was paying for everything, kind of spilled the beans to me.
He's like, who's paying for all this?
And the guy said, dude, it's the kingdom.
Right, yeah, I think I remember you telling me that.
And our veteran was just stunned and sickened.
And he and his brother are former Marines.
They both enlisted after 9-11, because of 9-11.
So imagine you were motivated to join the military and endure all they'd endured over Iraq to counter 9-11.
And then you find out you were tricked into lobbying on behalf of the government that has been credibly linked to the attacks, and generally linked to supporting extremism and Al-Qaeda and so on.
So they were pretty outraged, as you can imagine.
And now, so have there been any consequences from this?
Any, you know, Senator Sensenbrenner, for example, take this up as an issue that like, hey, you can't lie to soldiers and they're coming to try to lie to me, pal, kind of thing like that, maybe?
It's been hardly any response at all.
The only person really who has spoken on it is Senator John Cornyn.
I mean, they at least had to call the operation off after you exposed them, right?
Or after they exposed themselves, I guess.
Yeah, it's hard to say whether it was causation or correlation.
But a few weeks later, there were no more lobbying visits on this.
I don't know how long they planned to run that program.
Did you ever talk to anybody from the Corvis communications thing to explain themselves?
I've attempted to.
They don't even acknowledge inquiries.
I mean, that goes even to larger...
But they have communications right in the name of their company.
Oh, I'm sorry.
And, you know, and it goes beyond even just tricking these veterans.
This is, I would have to imagine, is the most sprawling, multifaceted set of violations of the Foreign Agents Registration Act that has ever occurred in this country.
Because you have not only these veterans being deceived...
Oh, I should introduce you to Grant Smith.
I'm sorry, go ahead.
He does good work over there at...
What's the organization?
Institute for Research of Middle East Peace?
Middle East Policy, yeah.
Policy, excuse me.
Where did they go with that?
Sorry for interrupting.
I was just making a joke.
I just talked to him a minute ago.
You had materials that are, again, supposed to have the disclosure.
You know, they didn't give any material to members of Congress, but they gave it to the veterans as they were trying to recruit them to go on these trips.
And I documented that they, not only did they not include the disclosure, what happened was a form that was filed with the Department of Justice had the disclosure on it, but then a version was given to the soldiers, the veterans, that did not have the disclosure.
So by all appearances, it looked like it was actually removed from the version given to them.
And also had just scores of unregistered agents.
You know, famously, we saw Paul Manafort being charged under the Foreign Agents Registration Act, which is very rare.
But you could tell, obviously, that was just a means to an end.
We've got probably dozens, because you have people all across the country recruiting these veterans who were not registered.
People helping to run the lobbying campaign who were not registered.
And all this was, or much of it, was presented to the Department of Justice in a very detailed 17-page names, dates, places, examples complaint filed with the Department of Justice by a group of 9-11 families.
The veterans I interviewed recently for this article, listeners go to 20pages.org.
It's DOJ fails to pursue allegations of Saudi lobbying misconduct.
They've never even been contacted.
I mean, this is all laid out for them in my series.
You have dozens of articles that I've written on exposing this whole campaign.
What a great example of where the rule of law comes up against power and politics.
And in this case, in favor of not just a foreign power, but a foreign power breaking the law.
And a foreign power breaking the law exploiting American veterans.
Lying to them to get them to lobby on their behalf.
And then the Justice Department says, Oh yeah, no, I don't see anything to see here.
And what could we possibly...
Yeah, that's a whole dimension.
We're used to Foreign Agents Registration Act or FARA violations being like a metaphor.
A Washington heavy hitter who everybody knows is a Washington heavy hitter who's doing things for foreign governments.
Just totally bizarre now that you've got a FARA violation that basically defrauded a bunch of individual U.S. citizens, in this case veterans, and tricked them into doing the work for a foreign government.
Just a whole different type of sensational violation right there.
I think that would be of high interest to the mainstream media.
Maybe there's a new opportunity for you here with the recent savage torture and murder of this Khashoggi guy, Prince Turkey's man, at the Washington Post.
And so, it's a little bit more fashionable now for people to be honest about Saudi Arabia and America's relationship with them.
Maybe you can bring this up, because after all, as you said, for good and for ill, American soldiers are sacred cows.
And they have the right to be really pissed off about this.
So, it seems like those who constantly champion the prerogatives of the soldiers ought to be willing to take this up on their behalf.
Yeah, you would think.
As that whole Khashoggi thing broke, I did re-send out to various media outlets drawing their attention to this, because it became sort of a feeding frenzy there for about 10 days on the Saudi government and its influence operations.
And actually, right before this call, I did get an email from David Farenthold at the Washington Post, who's been kind of pursuing the angle of Trump expenditures.
I'm sorry, Trump, I guess, the receipt of conflict of interest questions, spending in his hotels and that kind of stuff.
And so, you had the Saudis there.
And about 10 days ago, you did have the Washington Post for the first time actually acknowledge that this scandal happened.
When I first broke this story, it kind of gets back to what you were saying at the beginning about kind of going beyond blogging to journalism.
When 28page.org started, it was to help bring about the declassification of those 28 pages on Saudi government links to the 9-11 attacks.
And so, for a long time, it was more like blog-oriented and commentary.
And increasingly, I just became more of a journalist.
And this was kind of like the real breakthrough.
Again, I started to research this.
I found all these guys on Facebook talking about what they were doing.
All the leads were out there.
I drew that to the attention of people in the media.
They didn't act, so I kind of stepped in there and said, well, I'll document it myself and do the reporting myself.
I thought, though, once I lit the initial fuse of exposing that this had happened, that the major media would take it from there.
But they hardly ever did.
Yeah.
You know what?
I have no idea what the solution is, but here and there, we see that there are avenues to advance our stories and our points of view into the higher level narrative that's passed down from power and to get that stuff out of the mix.
But we really need a new algorithm or something for figuring out on some of these where it's just intolerable that this is going to go away without ever even having its chance in the news cycle at all.
You know, this is a big one, man.
This belongs as part of the American public discussion.
Right.
In the consciousness of knowing this kind of stuff can happen.
Now, I did in one case get follow-on coverage that was impactful.
One of these veterans was tricked by, not just anybody, but a lady who was working for the Saudi government who was also a state official in Iowa.
And the Associated Press did pick up on that.
And that did actually lead to her public humiliation and to laws being passed in Iowa prohibiting state officials from working for foreign government.
So that was one case where there actually was something.
As part of the role I'm trying to do is— Obviously, 28pages.org is not a money-making operation.
I try to break these stories and serve them up on a platter with documentation and hyperlinks so that journalists behind me can just kind of come from behind and pick up and run with the story.
But it doesn't always happen.
Yeah, well, you know, I've learned in the past few weeks traveling around and giving some more speeches.
I guess in the last year or so, traveling around and giving speeches.
There are strangers out there, people I've never met or heard of who listen to this show and take it to heart.
Who knows?
Maybe one of them will do something about this in a way that will make that difference.
And after all, you've got these guys who are willing to go on the record talking to you about what happened.
So apparently they're semi-available, possibly, for other journalists who want to develop the story further, assuming they give credit to my man here.
Yeah, they're definitely available and eager.
They're frustrated.
More than a year has gone by now after being fully exposed and documented and their government hasn't lifted a finger to look at it.
Isn't that funny, man, to think about someone who's a congressman asking their staffer, like, wait, what do we think about this?
Oh, we're not allowed to touch it?
Oh, okay.
You know what I mean?
What kind of human beings are these anyway?
Yeah, another story at 20pages.org, I think it was in August, getting to that whole we can't touch this, was the former FBI agent who was told not to cooperate with attorneys for 9-11 families because the Trump White House was trying to have a good relationship with the Saudi government.
I mean, this is the Department of Justice, the FBI's office of general counsel telling an FBI agent that for reasons that have nothing to do with justice in this Department of Justice, you should tell the 9-11 families to take a hike.
Now, he obviously, after wrestling with his conscience, he decided to defy that guidance, but it gets back to the systemic bias in favor of preserving that Saudi relationship at all costs.
Even at the expense of U.S. citizens.
Yeah.
And at the expense of 9-11 widows and stuff.
Exactly.
And veterans.
All these sympathetic people.
And I like your picture of Kenneth Williams in your story here.
People might remember Kenneth Williams famously was that FBI agent in Arizona who was trying to warn about suspicious Arabs in flight schools and trying to get authority to follow up further on his and this and that.
And you can just see the look on this guy's face that he is just still not over it because of what all could have been done that wasn't done.
And then all of the deception and backhanded dealing all this time at his expense and so many other people's expense.
It's all written all over his face, too, in this picture.
It's great.
It's terrible.
And then in that interview, he was learning things from me about 9-11 investigation subjects that were in his portfolio.
Because nobody told him.
I mean, that's your government at work.
Thousands of people dead on their watch.
Alright, listen, man.
Great work.
And thanks again for coming on the show to talk about it.
Appreciate it.
Always great to be with you, Scott.
Keep up the great work.
Alright, you guys.
That is Brian McGlinchey.
28pages.org And this one is called DOJ Fails to Pursue Allegations of Saudi Lobbying Misconduct Which is just a polite headline way to say it.
But go and read this thing.
It's really worth your time.
Check it out.
28pages.org Alright, y'all.
Thanks.
Find me at libertarianinstitute.org at scotthorton.org antiwar.com and reddit.com slash scotthortonshow Oh yeah, and read my book, Fools Errand.
Timed and the War in Afghanistan at foolserrand.us
