Matt Taibbi
speaker
209 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Jan 2025
last heard Jan 2025
Matt Taibbi’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
I mean, they're not going to have that on paper anywhere, right? Yes. But- You know, there might be emails back and forth about how we get people to follow instructions, about how we manage the problem of academic freedom, right? There are probably going to be emails back and forth saying we have to change America's thinking about this and get them to –
Start thinking more in the direction of trusting authority, right? There's probably going to be some stuff about that because we've already seen that in FOIA disclosures with some of these anti-disinformation groups and that sort of thing. So I imagine there's going to be some stuff with the White House, the CDC, the NIH. There might be some things like that in there.
But the higher level is sort of broader conspiratorial questions. I don't know what we're going to get, but I'm fascinated to find out.
Okay, Russiagate. Russiagate. And, you know, the sort of related phenomenon of fake news, intelligence leaks designed to destroy careers, which bleeds into kind of lawfare, right? But Russiagate specifically...
that's a big story that that's a place where i think that's going to be the easiest hit for investigators because the doc we know where the documents are in some cases we even have them already we just they're redacted um so we get to look under the redactions now Why did they start the original investigation? What was the impetus for the July 31st opening in 2016 of Crossfire Hurricane?
There's some conflicting stories in the past. Did it really come from Britain? Did John Brennan really advise the CIA to look into it or was it something else? Why did the FBI open an investigation into Trump specifically after he had taken office in May of 2017? It's just an extraordinary thing. Thinking back to that time, we don't remember it.
But the FBI opened a probe into the sitting president of the United States to ask the question of whether he was working for a foreign power at that time. And what evidence could they have possibly had for that, apart from the fact that he fired Jim Comey? I mean, they had no evidence. If there's nothing under those redactions... More than that.
Then that itself, it's an extraordinary scandal just by itself, right?
They hired a private investigator who looked around in that case, I remember, and there were some odd details there. The FBI ended up in possession of his laptop.
Yeah, this was one of the first reasons I started to look at that case because I got a call from somebody about that. And I don't know why that was the case, but it is the case.
No, and, you know, even if it is just an unsolved murder of a type that they normally solve, the whole situation, that whole timeline was very strange. It doesn't really make sense. The, you know, the... hacking of the DNC, the bringing in of CrowdStrike, when the information was released online. They never really proved that case, but they immediately made inferences about it.
And there was an incredibly sophisticated kind of public campaign to create this narrative that, you know, upon closer examination turns out not to be true. So we got to go back and find out what did exactly happen there. Why did they order this crossfire hurricane probe? Why were they sending informants in after Trump or people in his orbit? And we know they did.
And who were all those informants? It'd be interesting. I have some suspicions. Yeah. Well, we know who some of them were, right? But we don't know who all of them were. I mean, I did a story once.
to the effect that the people in the House Intelligence Committee who were looking at this, you know, Kash Patel's initial probe, that they came up with a number that it was 26 different people who were being investigated in Trump's orbit. No matter what happened, it's a huge story because it's a political espionage story. It's not unlike Watergate, really. Exactly.
And we've laughed it off, or the mainstream press has shrugged and snorted at the idea that this is a scandal that needs to be taken seriously. But it does. It absolutely does. Just because it's Donald Trump doesn't mean you can ignore...
The FBI conducting political investigations, willy-nilly and inventing predicates to look into people's campaigns and using FISA and all kinds of other crazy, can I say crazy shit? I mean, that stuff was all nuts. And we need to find out exactly what happened with that.
And that is one of the reasons I think that people are nervous about this weaponization of government probe because it's absolutely going to look in that direction. And, you know, that's one of the first things they're going to look at is who was behind that, you know, who cooked up the Steele dossier, how was that released, you know.
And then there's the whole question of, you know, leading up to impeachment and the leaks that were done. A lot of them were kind of illegal on their face, right? Like you can't leak signals intelligence to newspapers. And it was done repeatedly during that time period. Happened to me. They did it to me. Right. Yeah, exactly.
But it was under FISA, so it was like... Which is, by the way, hilarious because initially they were denying that it even happened, right? And then, of course, later it turns out it was more advantageous to leak the contents. But people had developed very short memories during this time period. They were not able to retain information.
Among other things, because journalists got out of the habit of repeating the story. That was one of the things that we were taught. You know, when I was taught growing up, when you're doing a story about anything, you have to recount all of the facts as if the reader has never encountered the story before. Each story should stand alone. Yes, exactly.
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