All right, y'all, welcome to the Scott Horton Show.
I am the Director of the Libertarian Institute, Editorial Director of Antiwar.com, author of the book Fool's Errand, Time to End the War in Afghanistan, and I've recorded more than 5,000 interviews going back to 2003, all of which are available at scotthorton.org.
You can also sign up for the podcast fee.
The full archive is also available at youtube.com slash scotthorton show.
All right, you guys, on the line, I've got Matt Taibbi, formerly with the Rolling Stone now, full-time writing for himself over at Substack.
And boy, has he got a lot of interesting stuff lately on Glenn Greenwald's resignation from The Intercept, which is, of course, related more importantly to this entire saga of the Hunter Biden laptop and the coverage and lack of coverage of it and all of that stuff.
Welcome back to the show, Matt.
How you doing?
I'm good.
How are you doing?
I'm doing real good.
So one of the things I like about you is you speak Russian and you're interested in actually doing journalism instead of just sitting back retweeting, you know, other journalists all day and stuff like that.
So you have drilled right down on the important question that everybody else seems to just take for granted to dismiss, and that is the story of what was really going on when Biden intervened to get this prosecutor in Ukraine fired.
And the story itself, I guess, has been dormant for a while, but you've picked it back up here and made some real phone calls and made some real headway, I think, in explaining what was really going on there.
So I was wondering if it's OK with you, if that's what we start with here today.
Sure.
Absolutely.
Yeah.
I mean, I didn't make a ton of headway, but I mean, to the extent I think I've got a pretty good handle on what's publicly available about that.
So, yeah, there's there's been some reporting on that that I think was not entirely right or misleading, you know, specifically this idea that all the cases against Hunter Biden's company were dormant when Joe Biden came over in 2015.
Not sure that that's accurate.
And now.
So in fact, let me bring this up, man.
I read a thing in The Washington Post, I'm not sure if you're familiar with this, but they did a fact check on Biden himself telling the story of getting this guy fired and said that that wasn't really right, that this whole kind of anecdote that he told is a typical sort of a Bidenism and that he's really conflating all kinds of different actions that he took going back even further, you know, and and maybe taking place over a period of a year or so, something like that.
Well, that's certainly not true.
There's considerable documentary evidence that that's exactly what happened, that he showed up on, I think it was December 15th, 2015, that he he gave a pretty fiery speech to the Rada, the Ukrainian parliament.
He met afterwards with the president, Petro Poroshenko.
And this is borne out in the recordings of phone calls that between Biden and Poroshenko that were subsequently released.
It's it's pretty clear that Poroshenko is saying to him, you know, we have upon your request dismissed the general prosecutor Shokin, even though we don't have any evidence of corruption or any evidence that he did anything wrong.
And Biden's like, good, I agree.
So there's not really any doubt that that's what happened.
And lots of other players who are kind of peripheral to this whole situation have spoken about this pretty, pretty frankly, including the prosecutor himself.
So, yeah, I don't know why they would bother to try to contest that.
It's not it's not really contestable.
OK, well now, but then the narrative is, you know, you talked about I like the way you write in your piece about one of these, about how they have bolted this term dormant onto all references to the prosecutor's investigations into Burisma at that time in Ukraine and how, you know, that's really worth revisiting.
But that's kind of the core of their argument that, look, Biden was pushing for the firing of this prosecutor in spite of the fact that he was actually jeopardizing this company Burisma by getting rid of this prosecutor who was so corrupt and had only dormant investigations of them and opening up the opening up room for a real crusader rule of law type to come in and do who knows what.
So that's how public spirited he was.
Not only was he not protecting Hunter.
He was actually putting Hunter at risk because that's how important civics are to him and stuff like that.
Yeah, that narrative never quite made a whole lot of sense to me, and to be honest, I'm still a little bit in the dark about why exactly he he had such a he was so intent on getting rid of Shoken versus who is the prosecutor in question, Victor Shoken versus some of the others, the predecessor, Yarima, the successor, Yuri Lutsenko.
They were they all basically had the same record of not ineffectiveness.
The only thing about Shoken one can say is that there there were allegations from the company that that he was reaching out for, you know, he was basically trying to shake them down.
There was a little bit of reporting to that effect, too, in The New York Times actually last summer by Ken Vogel, who was saying, you know, it was unclear where the pressure was coming from and whether he was doing it for real or to, you know, or for some other reason.
But they haven't satisfactorily explained to anybody's satisfaction why this particular prosecutor had to go versus any of the others, and nor have they explained why they didn't seem to mind when the guy who came afterwards, Yuri Lutsenko, did even less than Shoken did with regard to this company.
In fact, within a year, basically every case against that company, Burisma, was closed.
So there's some inconsistencies there.
It doesn't quite make sense.
And yeah, it was unfair.
I mean, you're not leaping to a conclusion here about what it must have been or anything like that.
But so the thing is that you made some phone calls and you found out that it's not so simple that these cases were dormant.
In fact, can we rewind a second?
Do I have it right, Matt, that the reason that these guys were so interested in hiring Hunter Biden in the first place was because they were in tight with the government that Joe Biden had just overthrown in the Yanukovych government in the coup of February of 2014.
So now the guys that ran Burisma really wanted to get in good with the new guys or figure out a way to buy themselves some immunity so that they don't end up, you know, getting the bad part of revenge against the former regime support or something like that.
Is that right?
Yeah, that's exactly right.
And this is what people don't get about what is so particularly bad about what Hunter Biden did, because the timeline here is important.
So in February of 2014, the Yanukovych government is overthrown in the Euromaidan revolution, which is an American-backed revolution.
So they toss out the kind of Russian-aligned president.
And with him, you know, there are these oligarchs who are close to Yanukovych who now suddenly have a problem.
They're exposed and there's going to be a new regime that's going to come after them.
And Burisma was a big company that was run by this guy, Mykola Zlochevsky, who was close to Yanukovych.
And Zlochevsky was looking at a situation where internationally, countries like England and Switzerland, international banking authorities, they were going to start thinking about seizing the assets of this company because the argument was going to be made that essentially this money had been, that its assets had been gained illegally through graft during the Yanukovych regime.
So what did Burisma do?
Within a month and a half of the revolution, they brought in a whole bunch of sort of high-profile Western figures to put on their board of directors, including Devin Archer, who is the college roommate of Christopher Hines, who is John Kerry's son.
Remember, John Kerry is the, stepson, I'm sorry.
Kerry was the acting secretary of state at the time.
They brought in the former president of Poland and then they brought in Hunter Biden, who was obviously the son of the vice president.
And look, it's manifestly obvious what Burisma was doing.
They were buying the appearance of American protection at a time when they were facing all sorts of inquiries and seizure efforts all around the world, really in an effort to kind of keep the wolves at bay and to try to protect their assets.
So that's what Hunter Biden was getting paid for.
He was being paid to look like there was American protection for this company.
Right.
And so now back to Shokin then.
When Shokin comes in under the coup government, does he go after these guys or doesn't he?
What's the deal here?
So we know for certain that there were, at one time or another, I think the final count that was given to me was 14 cases against Burisma or Zlochevsky.
We know that Shokin inherited a few from his predecessor, Jarama.
We know a couple started under his watch, including a tax evasion case that continued for some time.
There was another case that the Russian media reported on that involved a character named Sergei Kurchenko that actually mentions Hunter Biden's company in the investigative documents.
And that case was, from what I understand, active at the time Shokin was the general prosecutor.
And then we know for a fact that after Joe Biden's visit and after everybody was saying that these cases were dormant, that Shokin did sign a seizure order for a property belonging to Nikola Zlochevsky, the CEO of that company.
So there were at least, looks like at least three cases that were active at the time that Shokin was dismissed.
And I think the number actually turns out to be higher than that when you finally look at all of them.
But there were three for sure that I know of.
OK, now, so I guess I'm ready to move on to the media thing, unless there's something specific, you know, more about the case here in particular that I'm missing to ask you about here, Matt.
Or maybe we can get back to it if it comes back up.
But I mean, I think the only thing to say about this is, is that, look, if any of the stuff on on the new emails is true, and let's just say theoretically there was a meeting with Burisma executives and Joe Biden, like that's that's a legit, like, bad story.
You know, the optics are.
Now, back up a second.
You're talking about the New York Post story now.
So this is the this is the new development.
It's a fishy kind of story.
Maybe it sounds on the face of it kind of fishy of the the chain of custody for this information.
But at the same time, it's not been disputed at all.
And in fact, a Biden spokeswoman said on Fox News that she essentially she said it's not being disputed.
I don't think anyone is disputing the authenticity of it, she said.
So that's where that stands.
And then these there's two different stories in here, one on Ukraine and one on China.
I don't know if you want to talk about the China thing later, but on the Ukraine part, what exactly was in there that is now such a controversy that as you were just referring to, you know, may have, you know, obvious connections back to this previous corruption story.
So so basically there are emails in there where a Burisma executive is writing to Hunter Biden and he's he's basically saying, look, we've got you on the board.
We need you to kind of step up and do something and use your influence because we're having problems and we're being leaned on by by the government, which is basically asking us for a handout in order to make these some some cases go away.
And we need you to use your influence, I think, was the term they used in the in the emails.
And then secondarily, there was a suggestion that that the Hunter affected a meeting with this Burisma executive or Burisma executive and and Joe Biden.
And, you know, I kind of purposely didn't write about any of those things because I kind of wanted to see what happened in terms of how much verification there was for these emails or not.
But let's just hypothetically say that that this is true, that there was such a meeting, then that's really not good for Biden.
That's that's a very bad look because the optics of the situation are what they are.
He intervened to get rid of a prosecutor that it looks like the Burisma executives were anxious to to, you know, get rid of or to stop.
So it would be a very bad, bad look for Biden if that were actually true.
Right.
And now so for the rest of the media, and this is a whole other huge scandal, which, as you say in the title of one of these, the media scandal here is bigger than the Biden scandal, as big as it even may be.
But they are relying on the idea that no, no, no.
We already know, it says in The Washington Post, Five Pinocchios and whatever, that this is just not true, that Biden did anything untoward in Ukraine and we've already moved past that now.
And you're going back and revising what to them is a major premise of why this whole thing is some kind of disinformation, because we already know that all of the Biden's actions in the Ukraine thing were on the up and up.
Right.
And yeah, that's what they're trying to do.
They're trying to say a couple of things at the same time.
Number one, there's no there there.
So therefore, this is not a story and it doesn't need to be looked at.
And we don't have to report on it because there's nothing to report.
NPR's put out a message basically saying we don't feel like we need to circulate stories that are just rumors and aren't important.
And then secondarily, they're saying a couple of other things, which is that we believe that this is Russian disinformation.
And then also, they're using a lot of terms like debunked and dubious to try to suggest that the material is fake.
And all of this has set the precondition for the thing that I think is the most shocking, which is that the Internet platform stepped in and prevented this story from being circulated, which is unprecedented.
And I think that to me is by far the scariest part of this, because if that becomes a pattern, I mean, it's already bad.
But if that becomes a pattern, which I think it very well could be, it's you know, we're going to have a non-functioning media system, basically.
Yeah.
Which is something you've been warning about for a long time.
You know, I noticed a piece on the Free Thought Project yesterday about Mother Jones is now getting throttled, just like what was already happening to Antiwar.com and the World Socialist website and a bunch of other different libertarian and further left type groups.
And Mother Jones, of course, had laughed and celebrated when Alex Jones got kicked off.
Exactly.
You had warned that there but for the grace of Zuckerberg goes all the rest of us.
That's exactly right.
And this is what this is.
What's so frustrating to me is that, you know, I started writing about this two years ago after after the Alex Jones thing happened, I did a really long feature in Rolling Stone where I kind of looked at the whole history of how they came to the decision.
Yeah, I was in there, too, because me and Adam Adams and Peter Van Buren all got kicked off Van Buren permanently at the same time there.
Right.
Yeah, I remember that.
I remember that.
And and as you probably remember, the reaction of the mainstream press to this story was, well, who cares?
Right.
It's it's Alex Jones.
And then it's a whole bunch of little, you know, actors that we don't care about, like, you know, whatever the World Socialist website and Truthdig and you and, you know, like, so it's never going to happen to us.
So why should we worry?
And, you know, I think it was clear even at the time, first of all, it's already bad when you're doing it to independent actors and not doing it to mainstream media.
But the the issue is that there was no process by which we were really adjudicating any of this stuff.
It was just, you know, somebody working at Facebook or Twitter or YouTube just decides arbitrarily to derank or remove certain actors.
And that's it.
Like, that's our new system of media regulation.
And we're seeing what this leads to.
And I predicted years ago, like it's going to start with Alex Jones.
And then, you know, in pretty short order, it's going to be something that's, you know, that's just Republican or just just a little bit too far left or something like that.
And that's exactly where we are.
And so here's Mother Jones saying, no, we're not too leftist.
We're centrist and liberal and mainstream enough.
Don't, right.
For say, I'll tell you what, you guys have Assange.
You can have Assange.
Leave the rest of us, please.
Right.
I mean, isn't that the most cowardly attitude that all these people have?
It's like, you know, they don't they don't object to the general problem.
So so long as it doesn't impact them personally.
And this is what's been also bothersome about the Assange thing is the total inability for people in the media to recognize what the import is of the government saying essentially we're going to jail somebody for life for running the collateral murder video.
You know, that has consequences for for basically everybody in this business.
And they were all like, yeah, whatever, because they think it's just not them.
And that's what's so frustrating.
Yep.
You know, I wonder about what David Finkel thinks.
You know, The Washington Post reporter that wrote The Good Soldiers, who in that book, he describes that video perfectly and on this show actually refused to come clean exactly about how he knew what he knew.
But Manning had said reading The Washington Post and knowing that they had at least seen the video and refused to publish it was one of the things that motivated her to do the leak.
But I wonder about if Finkel thinks back and thinks, well, that's why you're in a cage and I'm not.
And is proud of himself or what, you know?
Well, yeah, exactly.
And this is a.
This is a fundamental difference between the way the media looks at itself versus the way it should look at itself.
And I think it's a little bit of a generational thing.
You know, when I came up in the business in the early 90s, late 80s, there was like a transformation going on in the business where journalists used to be, you know, it was likely if you were in the business, you were like the son or daughter of an electrician or a plumber.
Right.
It was more like a trade than a profession.
But then, you know, after all the president's men, it was more kids like me, like who came from upscale backgrounds and went to very fancy colleges.
Those are the people who went into media starting in the 90s.
And what ended up happening was you got a whole class of people whose natural sympathies kind of lay with the people behind the rope line.
They see themselves as courtiers who are there to kind of protect people in power much more than challenge it.
And that's why you have that attitude that you're talking about with The Washington Post.
Like, you know, it's our job to kind of arbitrate what's what's allowable for the public to see.
And, you know, and they look down at somebody like Wikileaks or Chelsea Manning for for having the audacity to bypass them.
Yeah.
Well, and there's this whole phenomenon going on now, which I'm sure you're well aware of, where people are trying to reframe you and your colleagues like Glenn Greenwald and a couple of others as somehow having.
Well, they're never really specific because I don't think they could really sell it that you're pro Trump.
You wrote a whole book calling him the insane clown president.
So maybe.
But they can kind of imply it and and use innuendo.
And I think it's hilarious.
You mute everybody on Twitter who asked the same question, whatever happened to you and that kind of thing.
But so let me let you address.
I mean, have you moved right in any way here or to you?
The whole world's gone crazy and you're standing still.
No, I think my politics are exactly the same as they've always been.
I think what's happened and Glenn's talked about this, too, is that the people who used to be kind of nominally liberal.
Right.
And I grew up very much in the liberal tradition, civil liberties, you know, the ACLU, you know, that was an organization we we lionized because they defended the Nazis right to march in Skokie.
Right.
We do know, obviously, we weren't pro Nazi, but we believed in the law.
Right.
And that was the tradition that I was raised in.
Well, all those in the Trump years, what's happened is that kind of liberalism has just disappeared and it's become infamous.
And I think a lot of people who are nominally on the left now think of free speech as something that is right wing.
It's a stalking horse for white supremacy, right supremacy or Trumpism.
And so, yeah, that's what ends up happening is that people like Glenn and myself who are, you know, what we're really fighting for is to prevent censorship and to retain some kind of integrity for the free news media.
They're trying to label that as right wing.
And that's not what's going on at all.
Yeah.
Well, look, my best understanding from reading you and Glenn both over the years is you're both about a click, maybe a click and a half left of the Democratic Party.
Right.
Kind of Bernie-ites.
But.
Yeah, exactly.
Yeah.
Progressives or you call yourself a progressive or a socialist or what exactly?
Or do you want to say you don't have to say you're a journalist.
So I know you have like, I don't know how you parse that.
I'm not a socialist.
You know, I like I do like Bernie.
I mean, I know him and I think he's an honest person, which is really the thing I like best about him.
But no, I'm you know, my politics are kind of pretty middle of the road, although I would say, again, on all those issues like civil liberties, being antiwar also is another thing that's kind of central to the way I view my own politics.
But I'm also just not terribly not as political as a lot of other reporters.
I'm much more into the job than I am into the politics.
Right.
So I'm a little different probably than somebody like Glenn in that respect.
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All right now.
So back to the politics of the people on the TV and running all these papers.
And I don't know how it's been in all the middle ranked papers around the country, but I saw some statistic about there's just a total blackout on this story where I don't know how exactly how it is now.
This information is two or three days old, but where ABC and NBC wouldn't cover it at all on the nightly news.
CBS had touched on it slightly.
The Biden laptop I'm talking about here, CNN, MSNBC, they just won't even touch it at all.
And they act like again, as you mentioned, oh, it's just Russian disinformation, which just like all of the rest of Russiagate is just a bunch of made up crap based on nothing.
And then they get away with that.
And hey, it might even make the difference in this election, which is running on a pretty close margin right now.
Yeah, and then again, that's the lens that they view this whole thing through is, you know, what's going to help or hurt Trump or, you know, and or Biden in the election coming up.
And so they're choosing sides and they're and they're proud of it.
I mean, you saw Brian Stelter the other day was just bragging about how, you know, this story, I guess it occupied something like 25 seconds on CNN or something like that.
And they were they were proud of that.
You know, I don't know necessarily that, you know, it's the biggest story in the history of the world, but a traditional news organization certainly would cover it.
Right.
And making the decision to not do it because there's an election happening or because you think that Trump is worse, those are calculations that like a political organization makes, not that a news organization makes.
And and I think my, you know, when people hear that, they say, well, Fox would never cover something about a Republican.
And my point to that reply to that is always that's why people always hated Fox.
That's why they don't respect them.
And, you know, that's basically what's happening to all of these other kind of traditionally blue leaning media organizations.
They're making that same decision to just not cover a whole universe of stuff.
Well, yeah.
I mean, as you outline the case at the beginning there, it's not iron clad, but there's a circumstantial thing.
I think we could get an objective, reasonable belief or maybe even probable cause for magistrate to think that there's something to investigate here.
Or if we had a journalistic grand jury, this is enough to go to trial.
You know, let's go ahead and assign some reporters to figure out exactly what happened here.
Apparently, the case is not closed, but instead, no, they don't want to talk about it at all.
Absolutely.
And you would it's certainly you would at least feel an obligation to ask the Biden campaign about it.
But look what happened to the reporter who did that.
Right.
I mean, I don't know if you saw the video where, you know, Biden gets off an airplane and Bo Erickson from CBS very politely asks him, what's your reaction to the New York Post story, sir?
And, you know, irascible Joe Biden goes off on him and says, it's a smear.
I knew you would ask a question like that.
And then what was even worse is a whole bunch of Erickson's colleagues in the media immediately accused him of spreading disinformation or being in league with Russia.
And what happens after that is that everybody in the business sees that and no one wants to be the next person that happens to.
So nobody's going to ask the question, which is it's just a terrible atmosphere to work in the media right now.
I really I mean, I get it, but I kind of even don't get it about how anybody can, you know, blab this Russia nonsense with a straight face or why anybody would be intimidated by that rather than just laughing back in the face of anybody who said that.
What is this got to do with Russia?
The Russians compile the secret laptop of Compromat on Hunter Biden, and then they laundered it into the intelligence stream by dropping it off at a repair shop in Delaware or something.
And they don't even pretend for a minute.
It's like Saddam Hussein's giant human shredder.
They're just making up garbage here.
How could anyone think that's true?
Yeah.
And, you know, I think you bring up a good point, too, which is journalists are supposed to be like this intrepid class of, you know, swashbuckling, you know, tough characters who, you know, they don't mind going behind enemy lines in a war zone.
And they'll do a stand up on top of a burning tank or they'll sit in with a bunch of mobsters and or terrorists or whatever it is.
But in fact, what we're seeing is like, you know, most of these people are so afraid of just their colleagues that they can't even stand up and like laugh openly at stuff that's that stupid, you know, which I think is a pretty poor reflection on the business.
Like reporters, first of all, they shouldn't really if you're in this business and you really care about what other people think about you, you're probably in the wrong business.
And there's just a lot of people who are like that now.
Yeah.
And, you know, I understand the dynamic of people wanting to keep access to their sources and stuff, but just wanting to be able to drink with the same people with the same job in the same town as them.
That shouldn't matter so much that it completely overrides the story.
You know, call me names.
Who cares?
Here's the journalism I did.
You know, if you got some.
Right.
And if you've ever, you know, gone on like the campaign trail and you've seen the way all these folks interact with each other, you know that that's mostly what it's about.
Like it's it's very high school, the whole thing.
Like, you know, nobody wants to be the person who's caught where wearing the uncool thing or or be or talked about at recess.
So everybody kind of hangs out with each other and they all, you know, they're all friends with each other back in D.C. or New York.
And the social aspect of this is it's extremely powerful.
And I really I really don't think it should be.
I mean, I think if you look back at the people who are the who are the great journalists like Cy Hirsch, like, you know, that there are people who aren't afraid to get like in anybody's face, including their colleagues.
And those tend to be the people who are the who are the best at this job.
Yeah.
Well, yeah, I mean, he's a he's a great example because he's such an ornery old bastard.
I don't know if he really wants to be friends with anybody.
Right.
He's just extremely negative and keeps his very safe distance from everyone with that kind of a character.
I'm sure he has his friends, but you know what I mean?
No, I mean, look, I think he's I think he's a great guy.
But but, you know, if you get on, he's not going to be worried about what anybody else thinks.
Let's put it that way.
Right.
Like, you know, that's that's and that used to be a pretty important quality in this job.
And it's, you know, in fact, individualism used to be a very big thing in the media.
That was one of the reasons people went into this job is because you wanted to be your own person and, you know, have your own point of view.
But conformity is now much more about, you know, where this job is at.
And you see that with Twitter, with, you know, everybody kind of piling on together.
And, you know, where and where somebody like Glenn Greenwald, who's clearly a free thinker, is reviled precisely for for that quality.
Yeah.
You know, this is one of the reasons back when that I chose to do this instead, starting with just pirate radio and doing my own kind of little thing, working with antiwar dot com, because I thought if I tried to be a real journalist that I would be completely under the thumb of some evil corporate chieftain who would have me covering things I don't care about and whatever kind of it'd be some job rather than what I want to do, getting to the truth of things.
And I guess I could have had a broader imagination that there is a type style path out there to do both, you know, to have it your own way.
But that I kind of that was one of the reasons I stayed away from it was like, you know, it's like being in the army.
I got to say yes, sir, to somebody else all day and about what we're covering.
Yeah, that just doesn't seem right.
Anyway, I'm glad you brought up Greenwald, because this is a really big deal that he's quit The Intercept, which he founded now because of their refusal to publish an article on this very topic where he didn't just complain about the media refusal to cover and the Silicon Valley censorship and so forth.
But he actually spent a few paragraphs going into the story and they said that that was unacceptable.
And he is now like you writing at Substack, which they didn't run you out of Rolling Stone, right?
You still had a good place there, didn't you?
Oh, yeah.
No, I've always gotten along fine with Rolling Stone.
I just wanted to make the move.
But he was in a different situation.
Right.
OK, so, I mean, you don't have to tell the whole story and all that.
I mean, people can go and look.
It's a spotlight today on Antiwar.com if people want to go and check it out.
And it's all Substack and Greenwald.
Just Google that up.
But can you give us, you know, basically your take on what happened there?
Do you think he was justified in calling it quits the way he did?
Look, there's a long developing situation going on at The Intercept where basically they've been exerting a lot of pressure, not just on Glenn, but really on the whole staff to stay within certain parameters in terms of what you can and cannot say, you know, in The Intercept.
And they've become much more like a traditional, like MSNBC style news organization where they, you know, basically it's pro-democratic propaganda.
Most of the time they lean probably a little bit more to the left than others.
But the original mission of The Intercept that Greenwald himself founded was based on the idea of total editorial freedom for the people who work there.
And what they've done is they've essentially told him that he couldn't run an opinion piece because they didn't agree with his conclusions, which is, you know, a total violation of what the spirit of the enterprise was supposed to be.
So it's turned into a place where basically instead of having editorial freedom, they call it a collaborative process, which basically means everybody else in the newsroom has to agree that what you say is OK before it can be published.
And I think that's that's pretty messed up.
Yeah, man.
And especially when in some of the back and forth there, I forget if it was explicit or imply that it would be James Risen who gets to fact check whether Greenwald is right about whether something is Russian disinformation or not, which is the most laughable thing in the world.
Might as well have Marcy Wheeler fact check him on that.
Exactly.
Yeah.
And, you know, you know how editor speak works.
You know what what what his editor, Betsy Reid, said is we have some unique, you know, in-house knowledge that we can, quote, tap into to to help with this piece.
And that's that it's going to include Jim and there's another reporter.
I can't remember.
Robert Mackey.
Robert Mackey.
Yeah, exactly.
So it's the two people that he disagrees with most on the Russia stuff.
And and they're and she's basically telling him, yeah, you know, you're going to have to get this past Jim and Rob in order to get get through.
And this is, you know, you're you're talking to I mean, I think Risen has a Pulitzer also.
But Glenn has a Pulitzer Prize and he's the founder of the company.
And they're telling him that he's got to go through all these hoops just to get his opinions passed.
You know, it's the hubris of it is amazing.
And of course, they've turned it around and tried to say that he's throwing a tantrum.
But it's it's pretty it was it's a pretty messed up scene, really.
Yeah.
I mean, if there's an argument for their side at all that I saw in all the back and forth so far is that he might have given them one more chance to back off.
But he didn't.
But I don't think they were going to anyway.
But that's the only criticism I could say for his side is that he comes at them hard as hell.
But then again, they deserved it.
So, you know, yeah, but to push back on that just a little bit.
Sure.
One of the things that I think people don't understand about about the way the media works is that once there's even a gentle suggestion that's made to you, just to take an example, if you've ever seen the movie The Insider, where that's about Brown and Williamson and the tobacco whistleblower, Jeffrey Weigand, like once they go to Lowell Bergman and they say, yeah, you know, we really want to like run this through another legal check.
Right.
You know, there's kind of a code word, a code that's being transmitted there, which is which is basically saying, you know, we're we're not sure about this.
We we we need you to adhere to a different standard in order to get this thing through.
And so once they say even once that we're not going to run this thing unless you do X and Y, it completely changes the nature of the relationship.
And that's what happened with Glenn.
Like, basically, he had this arrangement since he founded that this would never he would never have to deal with this.
And so once they did it, you know, it doesn't doesn't seem like much in the in an email, but given the context of that long relationship, it was actually a pretty drastic step.
Yeah.
Well, I wonder about the future of the intercept now.
I mean, I mean, who's going to read it?
I mean, you know, they have people on staff there who are collecting enormous salaries.
They write once a month and they get like zero traffic.
And so I don't know.
I mean, I don't mean to be negative about it, but it's sometimes we're going to need to tune in to Murtaza Hussein to find out Al-Qaeda's point of view in Syria.
You know, that's important.
Right.
Exactly.
And there's value in that.
And look, you know, Jordan Smith is a great reporter.
And I hope that when the intercept folds, that she'll be welcome back at the Austin Chronicle or wherever she wants to go.
You know, I really respect her journalism.
And there may be a couple of people I'm forgetting there.
I'm not sure.
But Lee Fong, I mean, is another one who I like.
I mean, you know, I mean, there are some good reporters there.
I'm just saying that, you know, the site itself.
Yeah.
He is certainly the anchor of it.
No doubt about that.
Or was.
Yeah.
Yeah.
But they've you know, they've created a kind of a monoculture, basically.
And, you know, that which is always unreadable, I think.
So, you know, it's tough.
You know what?
I guess I should have James Risen on the show because he's a guy who's written some stuff in the past that was really important, like Saddam Hussein's utter and total surrender and capitulation before the war ever started that they ignored.
And despite this NSA stories and stuff, but he has just been so horrible.
This is a guy who, you know, they prosecuted supposedly his source, Jeffrey Sterling, and put him through the wringer in that trial to try to get him to rat on Sterling and all this for him to side so severely with the FBI and CIA these last years on this obvious, ridiculous Russiagate hoax that, you know, as we joked about before, that the Russian government's about to hand 20 percent, a fifth of the ownership of Rosneft over to this nobody Carter Page, if only he'll seize control of American sanctions policy from the Congress or whatever nonsense from John McCain.
Yeah, I'm sure he'll just hand it right over to this page guy once they get in there for him to pretend to believe in that and run with that all these years.
It's just crazy.
I just.
Or is it crazy or he's just a damn liar or what is it?
I don't get it.
He's got to know.
You know, I don't know, Jim, at all.
But but I know a lot of reporters, you know, like I think it's a combination of Trump has had an amazing effect on the brains of a lot of people in this business.
Like they they've they become a very emotional about things they might not have previously.
Very nice of you to say it that way.
I think you're right.
Yeah, no, that's right.
Yeah.
But but, you know, the Russia thing, I I'm like you, I I just really struggle to understand the the people who who you can't see the obvious absurdities like there are things that you could you could maybe see your way to to maybe asking some questions about that.
Hey, does this guy, you know, like policy wise, is he going to, you know, side with the Russians about this or that?
Like he expressed an affinity for Putin while he was on the campaign.
But this stuff about like, you know, the P tape and, you know, the the secret network of pensioners that are getting paid through the non-existent consulate in Miami and stuff like that, like serious people actually wrote this stuff.
And I can't explain it.
I really can't.
There's nothing that makes will make it make sense.
Well, it's fun, especially funny about it.
Right.
Is that this man is just the most transparent person in the world.
And I don't mean like willingly, but I just mean, you know, any of us could just see right through him.
Like, you know, you just look at him, you know everything about the guy.
You've known everything about the guy your whole life.
Of course.
Yes.
He's a series of bankruptcies and big talk.
You know, he's a he's a New Yorker TV personality in in all the ways that we under already all understand him to be.
So you don't need Russian spy to help explain any of this.
You know, how could you?
We already know exactly who the guy is.
And look at who he's proven to be this whole time.
Exactly who we already knew he was.
And not a guilty traitor, but just Donald Trump.
That's exactly right.
And then, you know, try to think of it from the perspective of the FSB, like, you know, the claim, the serious claim made by, you know, people in all these networks was that the FSB and Putin had been cultivating Donald Trump for five years before the, you know, the election.
Can you imagine a serious spy agency that would look out on the horizon and say, this is the guy that we're going to enter into a top secret conspiracy with and be absolutely sure it's going to stay on lockdown?
You know, right.
I mean, makes perfect sense.
The last person on earth that you would be would enter into that kind of conspiracy with.
It's absurd.
That's so funny.
So, well, can I ask you for your prediction about the election?
I mean, I do think Biden is going to win, although, you know, I said that last time.
So, you know, that the Democrats are going to win.
But the thing that really swung it for me was the data about the older voters.
Because they were such an important part of why he won last time.
And they're typically ignored by the press.
But the pandemic, I think, has caused a pretty serious change of attitudes among those voters.
And those are the people who turn out.
They do vote.
So, yeah, my prediction is that's going to be an issue and that he's not going to win.
But nothing would surprise me.
Why?
What do you think?
Well, I mean, I'm really biased toward the formula that the incumbent virtually always wins.
I mean, unless the CIA arranges to have the hostages held longer or, you know, some like real important intervention like that, which and you know what?
I mean, they keep saying this week that all the Russians are intervening in the election for Trump.
I mean, that to me is a continuation of the very same push we're talking about here with the FBI and the CIA pretend to believe this stuff so that they can delegitimize this presidency.
I think, you know, you and I talked probably a while back and we would have talked about, yeah, they put us through this for almost three years.
You know, well, now here it is for I mean, they brought it all back up again.
Now we're right back up in the thick of it again.
I mean, they're not accusing Trump of collusion this time, but they're still trying to cast doubt on, you know, his victory as still it doesn't count as the repudiation of them.
Even if he does win, it still is only the Russians again or whatever it is.
Well, I mean, you have to interpret some of that as either, you know, preemptive excuse making for a potential democratic loss or even even worse, you know, the foundation for a case that the election result is illegitimate, which, you know, they essentially did last time, but I think would be more overt and quicker this time if that happens.
I don't think Biden's got the courage for all that.
I bet you there'd be a lot of people egging him on.
But, you know, I guess I look at it, my basic, you know, sketch for and you're right.
Covid is a huge thing.
In fact, even Trump and his whole family and staff getting it in October is itself a huge development.
You know, anything can happen in politics kind of a thing.
So that might be a couple of points right there.
But overall, my framework for it essentially is Obama versus Romney.
And a lot of people hated Obama, but a lot of people really loved him.
And nobody loves Mitt Romney.
And that's the same thing with Joe Biden.
Now, it's true.
People don't hate Joe Biden and they don't distrust Joe Biden the way that they felt about Hillary Clinton.
So and Trump just barely beat her.
But then again, Trump's already in the chair and that counts for a lot.
Americans love presidents.
So I don't know.
I'm still betting on him.
And, you know, it's funny on I covered the primary in Virginia this year where Biden won by a lot.
Right.
Like and but I on his victory party, like he couldn't even they couldn't even pack a restaurant for his events.
And you see these and I'm hearing this from people who are out in the road because and I'm not, which I normally would be at this time because of the covid.
But Trump is is still attracting these massive crowds everywhere he goes.
And you're not seeing that on the other side.
So is that all the covid stuff?
I have no idea.
It's it's so there's a lot of variables for sure.
I mean, you know what it is, too, that gets me is it's not just the Obama sized crowds, which you're right, he's still turning out.
But it's that when he comes to town, all the people turn out on the side of the road like that day they shot Jack Kennedy, where they come out just to see him drive into town from the airport to the event.
And it's and they come out with their banners and their flags and they're screaming and hollering like, man, you know what?
Again, like you're talking about with all these journalists live in Brooklyn, they might not know anyone who feels that way, but they feel that way in Pensacola big time.
Apparently, you know, absolutely.
Yeah, no, I remember last summer, I guess it was.
I went to a Trump event in Cincinnati and, you know, the line to get to the I think it was the I forget what field it was or it was the indoor stadium there.
But they there was a footbridge and there was like a line of MAGA hats coming from the Kentucky side, like a mile long.
I mean, it was like something out of the movie Spartacus, like, you know, the sheer quantity of people that were trying to get into this this event is just like mind boggling, you know, and you do not see that in in politics and the other side.
So, yeah, Trump does win the liberal side.
The Democrats have absolutely nobody to blame except themselves and the CIA and the FBI for falsely accusing this guy of treason for four years when he's actually guilty of treason, you know, back in Al-Qaeda's side in Yemen.
So it's not even the exact same charge.
You just need better details and you could have gone after this guy.
But of course, Obama started that war.
Oh, sorry.
Obama, Biden started that war.
So they can't do a thing with that.
But they could have found something.
He's pretty bad on some things.
But no, instead, it was this make believe stuff.
And so nobody at the end of the day, nobody on the right was impressed at all by that, you know?
No, and they they completely ignored all of the kind of pocketbook issues, day to day frustrations, like the fatigue with the overseas wars, all that stuff.
They blew it all off.
And they invested heavily in this Russia narrative that took up three of their at least three of the years.
And now they mostly are running against the covid management, you know, and his personality.
You know, that's that's what they really run against.
And, you know, if they win, OK, Mazel Tov.
But if they lose, it's because they didn't talk about anything important.
Yeah.
Well, and if the Republicans lose, it's because they're running against Biden and Kamala Harris, these two right wing centrist Democrats and calling them radical leftists, which I guess people who were already hardcore in the tank for Trump might believe.
But it's probably not very convincing to the swing voter types.
In fact, might help them when it comes to motivating people further on the left who, you know, might stay home.
But a much better angle would have been that.
And they do this some of the time, I guess, with Biden's been there this whole time.
But they really shouldn't be attacking him as a radical, but as a centrist, the guy who really dug this entire pit that we're all in right now.
The reason, as Trump said in the debate, he goes, you're the reason I ran.
But what he should have said was, you're the reason I won, right, is Hillary was running on your legacy.
And that's why I defeated her.
And that's why I'm going to defeat you.
But they don't have their own kind of narrative together at all.
And so that might be the difference right there is that's the spirit of the whole thing is Biden represents that Bush Clinton consensus we've been stuck with for 30 years that we want free of.
I think you're right.
Trump forgot what got him elected.
He ran as an outsider, as a traitor to the elite class.
He cast Hillary Clinton as the ultimate representative of kind of the entrenched political elite.
And that was an extremely successful formula.
And here he had two characters who maybe they don't have quite the off-putting personalities that Hillary has, but certainly they represent the same thing.
And rather than saying like, look, these people are typical Washington hacks who are going to do the same stuff that you've hated for decades.
He tried to present them as Che Guevara or something like that, which is totally inaccurate in addition to being ineffective.
So yeah, I think you're right on that.
Yeah.
Well, you know what, man?
I really like reading your stuff and talking with you, Matt.
Thanks, Scott.
Likewise.
All right, you guys.
That is the great Matt Taibbi.
He is at Taibbi.substack.com.
Subscribe to all his writings there.
10 ways to call something Russian disinformation without evidence.
And Facebook and Twitter's intervention highlights dangerous new double standard.
And he's got one explicitly on the Hunter Biden stuff and Burisma that we talked about.
He's got one on Greenwald and his resignation from The Intercept.
And you'll love all of it.
So yeah.
Thanks again, Matt.
Appreciate it.
All right.
Thanks a lot.
Take care now.
The Scott Horton Show, anti-war radio can be heard on KPFK 90.7 FM in LA.
APSradio.com, Antiwar.com, ScottHorton.org, and LibertarianInstitute.org.
