All right, y'all, welcome to the Scott Horton Show.
I'm 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 the brand new Enough Already, Time to End the War on Terrorism, and I've recorded more than 5,500 interviews since 2003, almost all on foreign policy, and all available for you at scotthorton.org.
You can sign up for the podcast feed there, and the full interview archive is also available at youtube.com slash scotthortonshow.
All right, you guys, check this out.
It's Max Blumenthal having a lot of fun writing this one at the Gray Zone.
Judge tosses frivolous lawsuit by heiress Salome Anderson seeking to destroy the Gray Zone.
Welcome back.
How you doing, Max?
Good to be back.
So what happened was a journalist got something wrong, and you called her on it and got yourself in some big trouble, huh?
It wasn't even me who called her on it.
It was Ben Norton, who works with me at the Gray Zone, and he wrote a pretty short article about one of the biggest aspiring hacks in the Middle East at the time, Salome Anderson, tweeting about how Iran was firing missiles into Israel, and she was producing video claiming that World War III was basically taking place.
And then she produced another video saying that her Hezbollah source sent her these of Israel attack, of Iran attacking Israeli-controlled Golan Heights.
And everyone called her out, and she retracted the tweets and said that her Hezbollah source was unreliable.
By the way, I'm sorry, just on this, was she claiming that Iranian forces in Syria were doing this or Iran was shooting missiles over Iraq and over Jordan in order to hit the Golan Heights?
Yeah, I mean, the first tweet was just Iran firing missiles into Israel.
So you have no idea.
And then the second one was implying that it was from Syria, you know, IRGC, and basically kind of like a realization of the fantasies of Netanyahu.
And what was so significant about this is this journalist has been traipsing around the Middle East claiming to have high-level Hezbollah sources, when she is in fact the daughter of Terry Anderson, who was supposedly taken hostage by Shia militants in Beirut for something like seven years, and who successfully sued Iran, the sponsor of Hezbollah, for $325 million, which went straight to a trust fund for Salome.
So the idea that she had Hezbollah sources was ridiculous from the beginning.
And she was, they would always provide her with damaging information about this organization, and she'd publish it in mainstream outlets.
So here we had pretty clear evidence that what we always knew to be the case was that she had phony sources.
She was basically making them up.
So Ben writes this short piece, just saying Salome Anderson says her sources are unreliable.
And then the next thing we know, she turns around and starts issuing these threats about a lawsuit and threatening a friend who's a lawyer who had defended me in the past against bogus smears.
And her in this little, you know, operation, basically the regime change online lobby, had worked up this lawsuit, which came down something like six months later in December of 2018.
And it was for no less than a million dollars.
They accused me and Ben Norton and 10 John Doe's, who were Twitter accounts belonging to people we, for the most part, didn't even know.
One of them was called Russian, time traveling Russian hacker.
And she was accusing us of engaging in a tortious conspiracy, in other words, a conspiracy to destroy her, her career with these accounts that we didn't know, holding us responsible for them as if we controlled some kind of troll farm.
And she took it to DC Superior Court.
We actually had to go to a series of hearings before a judge.
And she enlisted the services of the lawyer, Stuart Neuberger, who scored the big victory for her dad and her family in federal court against Iran, getting them tens of millions of dollars in a payout against a government that didn't even bother to defend itself.
So she got her daddy's lawyer to show up in court in a bid to bankrupt me and everyone around me and destroy the gray zone.
And it was pretty clear to us that everything she said about us was what she was doing because she seemed to be engaged in a conspiracy with these neoconservative operatives who wanted to destroy us simply for our political views and because we were disrupting the Russiagate narrative, the whole narrative on the Syria dirty war with our investigative journalism on the white helmets and the OPCW and so on.
And they had helped craft this insane lawsuit, which ultimately was thrown out.
But for the last two and a half years, we've been forbidden from talking about it while we were just relentlessly smeared by her in this operation.
And you know, if you go to thegrayzone.com, you can get the full story, including all of the corporate media hacks and neocon operatives who cheerlead this demented McCarthyite lawsuit, including Jake Tapper from CNN, Jonathan Chait from New York Magazine and Natasha Bertrand, the Russiagate hound from CNN who produced so many false stories.
I mean, these people were cheering her on and she thought she was going to win.
A judge threw out the decision, I mean, threw out her complaint in very contemptuous fashion.
This was a local DC superior court judge, someone who was just shocked that this case was brought before him, expressed shock in court that a journal, in his words, he'd never seen a journalist sue another journalist in a local court over a libel.
And he basically concluded that she was a terrible journalist.
In one passage he wrote, the defendants are accused of calling Salome Anderson sloppy and irresponsible.
However, in one article, her editors issued five corrections and a 168 word correction.
This is what the judge said.
So he basically found her to be a terrible journalist.
I mean, it was such an amazing decision.
So we can now talk about it and it's very therapeutic to finally be able to speak up and talk about this injustice and the consequences that the case would have had for free speech, for online media, for independent media, for press freedom, if it had been validated by a judge.over the years about the truth behind the Israel-Palestine conflict.
You'll learn so much and highly value this definitive libertarian take on the dispossession of the Palestinians and the reality of their brutal occupation.
And last but not least is the great Ron Paul, the Scott Horton Show interviews, 2004 through 2019.
Interview transcripts of all of my interviews of the good doctor over the years on all the wars, money, taxes, the police state and more.
So how do you like that?
Pretty good, right?
Find them all at libertarianinstitute.org slash books.
Hey guys, here's how to support this show.
You can donate in various amounts at scotthorton.org slash donate.
We've got some great kickbacks for you there.
Shop amazon.com by way of my link at scotthorton.org.
Leave a good review for the show at iTunes and Stitcher.
Tell a friend.
I don't know.
Oh yeah.
And buy my books.
Fool's Errand.
The war in Afghanistan and the great Ron Paul, the Scott Horton Show interviews, 2004 through 2019.
And thanks.
Well, and look here, I mean, if she had written an article with no corrections, uh, you know, no official ones and one that, I don't know, you know, say for example, you guys didn't really have anything on her as far as her being factually incorrect, but you called her sloppy and a bad journalist anyway.
Well, yeah, this is the USA.
She wouldn't have the right to sue you even over that.
Right.
It's protected opinion.
And she, she actually aimed to change speech laws so that protected opinion, if it offended someone could be considered defamation.
The precedent they were trying to use, I mean, if anyone out there is a lawyer or follows legal issues, you probably understand this better than me, but the precedent they tried to use in court, which was absurd, was man versus competitive enterprise.
And this was about a, um, corporate backed, uh, think tank that was taking on a, you know, that backed by like the Koch brothers or someone like that.
I think it was a Koch backed think tank.
They called a climate scientist.
They, they basically compared him to Jerry Sittendusky in the national review and accused him of molesting the data.
And then he, uh, claimed that he was besieged by other people smearing him and calling him a molester.
And so he held them responsible for all the others that smeared him as a molester.
And he won a significant payout from competitive enterprise Institute, which of course has a lot of money.
So that was their precedent when the judge just was exasperated.
When they tried to invoke man V competitive enterprise, he said, this is about someone accusing someone else of being like Jerry Sandusky because we never accused her of child molestation or anything like that.
What she was really upset about was that other people on Twitter had called her a Mossad agent or a CIA agent.
And we never said that.
We didn't know those people who made those jokes, obviously jokes about her, but it wasn't a good look.
And if you're mad about being accused of being a Mossad agent, it's not a good look to bring Stuart Neuberger into court to defend you because this is a guy who is essentially an Israel lobbyist.
He is a hardcore pro Israel lawyer who's a member of the Israel practices division at Crowell and mooring, one of the largest corporate law firms in the country.
And his career has been basically based on winning these humongous judgments from official enemy states like Libya, Sudan, uh, Iran.
I think there was a lawsuit against Al Qaeda in which the defendants can never defend themselves.
They can't show up in court because they're sanctioned and blacklisted in the United States.
So he basically wages these lawfare campaigns and he ultimately bears the responsibility for this insane McCarthyite lawsuit because it's a lawyer's job to tell their client, this is not going to work.
This is crazy.
We shouldn't do this.
But apparently Neuberger was just so ideologically committed to this case that he wanted to destroy me too because of course I'm the self hating Jew, Max Blumenthal.
So he wanted a crack at me.
It was amazing.
In a preliminary hearing, he brought a bunch of young Jewish law students to observe him and you know, just to take inspiration from him working to destroy me or at least waste your time.
Right?
Waste your time.
Yeah.
He must've known this wasn't going to work, but at least he can jerk you around.
But doesn't he have to pay all your lawyer bills now?
Well they should.
I mean, Salome Anderson went on Twitter and it was almost like she consulted some reputation management firm and she issued this thread of tweets that was just as offensive as it was absurd about how she's proof that healing from mental illness and addiction is possible and to everyone trying to drag her down, she's not paying attention to them.
This is someone who initiated this million dollar lawsuit against us and who clearly is not healed from all of the mental illness, all the mental issues and drug fueled antics that she wrote about in her unintentionally revealing memoir called The Hostage's Daughter, which we analyzed in detail at the Gray Zone.
She's not healed.
She still possesses this imperial pathology where she thinks she's the victim when she's literally preying on people using her massive trust funds stolen from Iran and she's trying to start a war with Iran and Hezbollah, the very entities and people that she got wealthy off of.
Their assets were seized by the US government and given to her family and in her own words, because of all the lawsuits my family filed against Iran, I had a lot of money to spend on drugs and I made a lot of drug dealers very rich or I made them a lot of money.
That's what she said in her own book.
So the pathology is still there and it goes well beyond like mental illness or addiction.
It's about imperialism and it's about entitlement.
It's about the US media, which tolerates characters like her and builds them up.
And it's about her lawyer who agreed to do this insane lawsuit and is now, he should be humiliated.
Honestly, he should face consequences for what he did because they abused a local city court for the petty vendetta of an entitled heiress.
Yeah.
It sounds like the kind of thing that could get you disbarred if there was such a thing as a rule of law around here or anything silly like that.
I mean, yeah.
Yeah.
Or if there were, if there was a media that had ethics, Salome Anderson would be disbarred from it for what she did, which was to invent sources again and again.
And we exposed the racket that was responsible for these sources at the gray zone when all her fake claims of interviewing Hezbollah sources you're referring to.
Yeah.
I mean, I've been to Hezbollah's media office in Dahiya in Beirut, and I spoke to their media coordinator.
He's a Rhodes scholar from Oxford, speaks perfect English.
He's always, he's out in public all the time in Lebanon.
Everyone knows him.
And even this guy at the end of our interview, he said, this interview never happened.
It's off the record.
You can't publish anything that we, that I told you.
And that's the way they roll.
And they have files on every journalist on who they're willing to talk to and not.
They would never speak to her.
And they never would allow commanders and high level officials to meet with journalists and talk about weapons systems.
I mean, that's, that's absurd.
So basically she has this guy who she wrote about in her memoir named Dergham Dergham, who she called a semi gangster.
I spoke to some journalists in Lebanon who said that he's been deported from the U.S. for drug dealing and just set up a new hustle in Lebanon where he lives in the Shia area.
And he basically gets young Shia guys to pose as Hezbollah fighters or commanders, put masks on and meet with journalists and they get a little payout and the journalists pay him up to $10,000 for these meetings.
And then U.S. editors have no idea they're just being hustled because they're just stupid.
I mean, you talk about this all day on your show.
And that's how Salome got all of her Hezbollah sources.
They were just like the young Shia guys looking for a quick buck, hustling a parachute journalist dupe.
So all of her stories are completely false.
They're journalistically worthless.
They're false.
They should be retracted.
They've been published at the Atlantic foreign policy, um, news week and they're still there.
And she said she stands by her journalism that, that, that, that's not, I mean, there's, that's not something you can say.
You have to actually take responsibility if you are healed and she's not.
So this is not just about Salome Anderson.
It's about our, the whole Western media and the way it functions.
Yeah.
We'll talk more about Jake Tapper, of course, is, you know, a powerful anchor at, uh, CNN and, um, Natasha Bertrand, you mentioned was the biggest, I think out of all of them, according to, uh, Eric Wemple at the Washington post and his autopsy of what, of Russia gate.
She was the worst basically at pushing the Steele dossier and claiming that it had all been verified and all that for years and years and years.
Um, and Jonathan Chait of course killed a million Iraqis in Iraq war two.
Okay.
He didn't do it all, but he was a big part of solidifying liberal support for Iraq war two back in 2002 and three.
Yeah.
Uh, who else was cheering in, in the American media was cheering on this lady whose articles had been at least substantially retracted in her lawsuit against you and your organization for writing that her articles were sloppy and had been at least partially retracted.
Well, it's, it's worth mentioning Jonathan Chait called me and Ben Norton domestic extremists.
Oh good.
And that's, that's what you, you know, you guys are just moderate rebels.
We know that.
Yeah.
We're the moderate rebels deserve support, but the domestic extremists deserve federal investigation and prison for their views.
Ben Norton just released a new report on domestic extremism that includes not just, you know, your ordinary January 6th right wing extremists, but it's got your anti-capitalist leftist on there too.
So Chait really wanted us to be investigated by the FBI for our views.
And this was an operation.
I mean, you look at these journalists cheering it on in coordinated fashion.
It was part of a push to destroy us that went well beyond her.
You had John Schindler, um, prolific sender of unsolicited dick pics.
I don't know if I can say that on Pacifica, but he's a former NSA spook who was, yeah, sending pictures of his phallus to women unsolicited major, uh, you know, Hillary Clintonite and a Russia gate promoter, uh, who somehow still gets taken seriously in national security circles pushing her lawsuit.
You had Christian Benedict who is the head of UK, uh, campaigns for amnesty international.
He's a big regime changer.
He was pushing it.
You had a bunch of characters who had previously threatened me against publishing articles on the white helmets before the articles came out.
They'd obtained my phone number, Idris Ahmad, who's a lecturer at Sterling university and a major kind of social media stalker.
If you've ever encountered him on Twitter.
Oh yeah.
I, I used to tangle with that guy bad at the start of the, uh, war in Syria where he was all in CIA there.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
He's, he's a big, you know, UK foreign office, CIA promoter who actually got my number and called me to threaten me before I published an article in 2016 similarly as Katterji, very strange character, um, unable to kind of hold a job in media, but still maintains this presence because he gets used as this kind of hit man against anyone who is an anti imperialist.
And he actually threatened me by phone as well through WhatsApp before I published my white helmets investigations, he boasted about his role in actually crafting Salome Anderson's complaint against me and you know, talked about how, you know, he was hoping that they would seize my home and that he would see us all in court.
This is, this is a guy who's not even based in the United States.
So it's a major, this is a major transatlantic kind of neocon regime change operation to destroy an outlet that was disrupting their narrative.
And I can go on and on with those who promoted it, but you get the point.
I mean, you understand the milieu.
Yeah.
Well, and now here's the thing about it, and this is my fault too, cause I'm kind of sick today and I didn't do a good enough job constructing the setup for this thing.
But audience, you should know that this article is hilarious and it might be 5,000 or 10,000 words or whatever the hell it is, but I promise that you'll have a lot of fun reading it.
It's actually really funny.
It's called Judge Toss's Frivolous Lawsuit by Eris Salome, however you say it, Anderson seeking to destroy the gray zone by Max Blumenthal and Ben Norton there.
And it goes through it all and it has all the screenshots of all the ridiculous threats and just tells the whole story.
Shames the hell out of Jonathan Shate and all his colleagues there and everything.
And I know you guys will get a kick out of it.
So I'm sorry we started late and we're out of time now, Max, but really appreciate it.
Yeah.
Thanks for having me as always.
And thanks for all the support.
Yeah, absolutely.
And great job here, man.
I can tell you guys must have had a lot of fun on this.
I mean, it was a catharsis.
So I've been waiting for years to say all this.
I'm glad everyone appreciated it.
And funny how nobody picked up that this was going through the courts there in D.C.
It seems like someone would have noticed.
Well, I mean, just there.
We noted in the end that she made an effort to kind of conceal the lawsuit after realizing at some point she was going to lose.
Yeah.
All right.
Well, and everybody should go and look at her Twitter feed, too.
You don't have to harass her, but you can go and laugh at all the ridiculous things she's tweeting about how she's Donna Summer and she will survive.
That was you saying that?
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
