 episode two of season five, Twitter files and the death of Russiagate. I'm Joe Laurier, the editor-in-chief of consortium news. In the latest installment of the blockbuster Twitter files reporter Matt has revealed that probably the most important source behind the maniacal media output on Russiagate was based on a lie. Hundreds of articles and television segments in the major US media which kept the Russiagate fiasco front and center in American political life for several years was fueled by a website called Hamilton 68. The name comes from Alexander Hamilton's Federalist Papers number 68 in which he writes about the danger of foreign interference in the US elections. Hamilton's Hamilton 68 was launched in August 2017 less than a year after Hillary Clinton's defeat to Donald Trump and just as Democrats increasingly blamed alleged Russian interference for Clinton's loss. As the hysteria over unproven allegations of Russia's roll-gathered steam Hamilton 68 appeared. It became a go-to source for corporate media by saying it had a list which refused to make public of Twitter accounts it was monitoring. There are conflicting statements from Hamilton about whether these were bots or real people whether they were direct agents of Russia or unwitting dupes. Tayyibi writes quote the two founders of Hamilton 68 the blue and red team of former counselor to Marco Rubio, Jamie Fly and Hillary for America foreign policy advisor Laura Rosenberger told Politico they couldn't reveal the names of the accounts because quote the Russians will simply shut them down. Twitter the files that Tayyibi discovered say did not buy Hamilton's story and privately pushed back. Joel Roth put his trust and safety chief at the time said in one internal email quote I think we just need to call this out on the bullshit it is. He also threatened to give Hamilton an ultimatum. Either they released the list or Twitter would. Twitter only obtained the list by reverse engineering data requests made by Hamilton back in 2017. Tayyibi's report indicated these were real people indeed. Only about 30 Twitter accounts on the list of 644 were Russian. The rest real Americans, Britons and Canadians. Most were Trump supporters with Twitter handles like at Trump dyke but some were not such as myself before I became editor-in-chief of consortium news when I was only a writer for this site publishing several articles debunking Russiagate in 2017. On Hamilton's advisory council sits former senior U.S. officials several with intelligence backgrounds such as Michael Churchill, former Homeland Security director, former acting CIA chief Michael Morrell, Rick Ledgett, a former NSA deputy director, Clint Watts, a former FBI counterintelligence officer, Mike Rogers, another former FBI agent and a member of the U.S. House Intelligence Committee, the former U.S. Ambassador to Russia Michael McFall, even a former Estonian president Tumas Ilves and John Podesta, the chairman of the Clinton campaign and arch-new conservative Bill Crystal were all thrown in for good measure. Hamilton 68 has blamed the media after Tayyibi's story for misinterpreting its data and ignoring its appeals to correct their stories. Hamilton 68 was rebranded Hamilton 2.0 in December and its secret list has now been replaced by a public list that only names government officials and media from Russia, China, and Iran. We asked someone from the Alliance for Securing Democracy which runs Hamilton 2.0 to appear on this show and we received no reply. This troubling story underscores the gross failures of corporate media like CNN, MSNBC, The New York Times, The Washington Post, and even fact-checking sites like PolitFac and Snopes. All of them were failed to be skeptical of intelligent sources, whether active or retired. It also exposes the failure of members of Congress to not let the facts get in the way of a story that serves their political interests. As Senators Diane Feinstein and Mark Warner became reliant on Hamilton 68, academia was also taken in. Tayyibi's revelations add to a litany of facts that have repeatedly debunked the Russia gait tale. Special Counsel Robert Mueller's report that found no connection between Russia and the Trump campaign, the president of CrowdStrike's admission under oath to Congress of finding no evidence of any hack of the DNC service, an NYU study recently showing minimal impact of Russian Facebook posts, and the Clinton campaign paying for both CrowdStrike and the former MI6 agent, Christopher Steele's fabulous opposition research on Trump. The Hamilton Twitter file may at last be the final mail in the Russia gait coffin. Our special guest tonight is independent journalist Matt Tayyibi, a former reporter for Rolling Stone magazine and an author. His latest book is, what is your latest book, Matt? Hey, Dink, I think. This is the last one. Right. Matt also runs Racket, a sub-stack publication where his Hamilton 68 story was published. We're also joined tonight. We're happy to say so by former New York Times correspondent and author Chris Hedges, whose latest book is The Greatest Evil is War, and by John Kiriakou, a former CIA officer, author of The Reluctant Spy, and the man who blew the whistle on the agency's torture program. Thank you, all three of you, for joining us tonight. Matt, I'm going to start with you. Just tell us in your own words what is the essence of this story? What did you learn? Hamilton 68, as you described very ably there, was basically a tool that was designed, I think, primarily to drive narratives with the news media. It really takes a very primitive trending technology and just it was a hand-picked selection of 644 accounts that were represented to reporters as being quote-unquote linked to Russian influence. But actually most of them are just sort of ordinary people. If you go through the list, which Twitter was in a unique position to create by reverse engineering data requests, they engineered the list. They're the only ones apart from the Hamilton 68 that has it. They realized it was full of real people, mostly sort of low-engagement Trump supporters, but also people like you, Joe. Your name was a big surprise in the list. I just went down and started clicking all these different names and basically what they were doing is running a scam. They were taking opinions, organic opinions of real people and representing them as Russian-driven narratives to the news media and this, as you know, birthed, you know, hundreds of news stories. I wonder if you could just clear up one aspect of this, how it worked, because I think a lot of people, myself initially, and I'd even think Glenn Greenwell, when he interviewed you last Friday, said that or thought that Hamilton was going to Twitter to get people suspended. The way the FBI and the EHS did and your earlier incredibly good reporting did, but that was not what happened here because they never gave the names on the list to Twitter. Twitter had to find out on their own, isn't that right? Right, yeah. Basically, and some of this is lost to me because I'm not technically sound enough, but basically the Chief, Trust and Security Chief Yoloroth found what's called the API key for Hamilton 68 and basically it looked at every place the think tank was trying to access data, searchable data from Twitter about all these accounts. So every time Hamilton 68 looked up the tweeting history of anybody on the list, Twitter knew about it and they were basically able to reverse engineer who was on the list by looking at all the different requests which were basically the same every time they were running some kind of search on any hashtag or anything like that. All your previous stars on Twitter files have been extraordinarily important in understanding how government used a private company to try to suppress speech to get actually people silenced on Twitter, but this story is maybe of a special kind. Do you think this is the most important of the Twitter file stories that you've done so far? I think my belief is that actually this is just sort of the beginning of a window into... So there's two aspects of the digital misinformation issue that have to be looked at. One is the digital censorship question which I think most of us sort of instinctively understood and knew what's happening. The larger question however has to do with what they call offensive information operations. John might be able to tell us something about this but that's when somebody is cooking up a fake story and pushing it as opposed to suppressing it and this was not just done by private actors. This is something that in one of Lee Fong's earlier threads people didn't notice it as much but it was a very significant story about how the Pentagon was creating fake Twitter accounts in foreign languages overseas basically to drive down negative chatter about things like drone strikes. So we knew that we're doing that that the Pentagon was doing that in foreign countries but I think we're going to find out that this is happening in the United States. We have a few examples that are pretty ugly already but I think we're going to learn that it was significantly more widespread and Hamilton 68 was not just a think tank. I think we're going to find out that it had some more unnatural origins. That's interesting I'm going to get to that later but when you consider the role Russia get has played in creating tension with Russia starting back in 2016 and 17 and laying the groundwork in many ways for the war in Ukraine right now to get the American people on side to completely accept the U.S. explanation for this and reject any idea that they provoke this war don't you think then Hamilton's role in stirring up that anti-Russian hysteria has a geopolitical impact and in that sense why I thought this is maybe the most important story. Right because I mean you can look at Hamilton 68 and say it's it's a small organization most people never heard of it but the larger the larger meta story here is about the creation of a very big fake story about the Russian meddling in American political affairs now let's be clear they do Russians do have information operations they do do this they do try to insert certain kinds of themes into organic social media chatter but it's nowhere near on the scale that's been represented to Americans and there was this enormous hysteria that was whipped up about an essentially fictional story and that's on I can't think of a parallel in American history where that's happened I mean you can maybe call McCarthyism like that but the difference is that because of social media because of everybody's so online all the time they were able to amplify the story fake stories much more effectively much more broadly than I think ever done previously. Matt what did you think of Hamilton's response they wouldn't talk to you before you publish your piece you gave them ample opportunity to do so but they did right after it come out with this fact sheet and they seem to be blaming the media again we tried to correct them they went too far with what we were saying that's not what we meant that they're pleading and you know I mean it's did they and what do you think of that and did they know that you were working on this story in December and I asked that because that's when they rebranded this thing 2.0 and put out a public list did they know in December that you were gonna you were gonna get it I think they had I think they had to guess in December had you contacted them for comments sorry in December I know I contacted them in January but I would say early early-ish January but they had to know they have ways of finding out don't they yeah they had they had as soon as they saw that we were looking through Twitter's emails they must have known because they this was actually a big deal within the company there were there was a significant argument between Twitter and all the actors involved here I haven't flushed out the full details of this but there was a lot of back and forth there were in-person meetings and so they had to know that if we were looking around and the stuff that we would see the footprint of it pretty soon and that that's what happened we saw it relatively quickly and it it's a big deal because it's essentially a conflict between a big private company in Twitter and really the Democratic Party establishment and the intelligence community and that they had a they had a real fight about this and but it was all suppressed I'm gonna get to that with John the intelligence side of it and Chris the journalistic side of that but we're gonna stick with you for a moment Matt I'm gonna bring in my co-host Elizabeth Ballst Elizabeth take over your questioning of Matt please sure Matt thanks again for you know coming on being with us I just wanted to know are you satisfied with how the Twitter files have been disseminated are you good with it being disseminated on the you know Twitter platform do you think publishing it via an organization like the helix would have made it more accessible to people to look through and find their find the stories themselves what do you think about all that so I was very skeptical about first of all the format of Twitter at first um you know the the two conditions that I agreed to with the story were an attribution right sources at Twitter and the other one was that the story had to all the the breaking stuff had to come out on Twitter first and I think you can imagine what the motives are for that right there are several um and that was very skeptical this at first I mean I'm a long-form writer as I think you know everybody on the panel can understand it's a difficult thing to think through uh in terms of the way the story landed though however I quickly realized that it had to be on Twitter like it it made a lot of sense both from a PR standpoint and there's an irony in it too right because you're using Twitter to flay Twitter um Twitter was originally kind of a an anarchic organization that was essentially destabilizing right and the plot that we're looking at is government's attempt to turn that around and turn Twitter into a tool of control so there's an irony of using Twitter to turn the tables again um I understand the call to release everything but like this this story is an example of why that made me nervous in addition to all the other things about this story that make me nervous like what happens if I release all these 644 names and there are eight of them who have negative consequences because they're now identified somewhere as Russian bots publicly right so that's kind of the same dilemma you have with stuff like WikiLeaks like you want to look through it first and then I think I think at some point something like that will happen but I can't I can't speak to that it's not my company but I understand the the thinking on both sides of that question sure and during Russia Gate we saw Jill Stein Tulsi Gabbard and so many others falsely smeared as Russian agents you know we had them blamed in Tulsi Gabbard's case in part for Hillary Clinton losing on and on will there ever be a real reckoning for this and all of these lies well I think this week uh it's a good time to talk about this the Columbia Journalism Review this week dropped a 26,000 word excoriation of the news media written by as credentialed and down the middle a mainstream reporter as as you can get Jeff Gehrth who was a veteran of New York Times for many years um Chris I don't know if you know knew him well but uh it's just a gigantic companion of errors and the response has been absolutely nothing so if you if you drop something a book length thing on the Columbia Journalism Review and you can't get a 30 second hit on cna out of that I mean I don't I don't think we're getting the reckoning voluntarily let's put that way yeah I mean just looking up the twitter files looking up Hamilton 68 you get so few search results whether it's on YouTube Google wherever there's a couple of you know of stories it's almost nothing uh you know and obviously as that Columbia Journalism Review long long series of articles states basically the US's public's trust in the media has just been completely damaged in this era um I just you know I want your comments on that and whether that will ever be repaired if it can be well I think this is something that uh Chris and I have talked about before um so the obvious solution the the news media businesses in crisis financially and from kind of a psychic meta standpoint like their their relationship to audiences is very confused and very troubled right now and the obvious solution for them is to start doing their jobs and they cannot bring themselves to do it it would be both a financial solution and a moral solution and they they can't do it I don't I don't fully understand that that situation because there have to be some self-interested companies Chris I'd be really curious to hear what you think about this um why there aren't a few organizations who have said you know this isn't working for us we get we gotta step off and start doing the right thing and they won't do it um I think that would be an interesting thing to discuss actually Chris do you want to answer that you're muted still there can you hear me so look at uh Lewis Menand's uh article in the New Yorker when Americans lost faith in the news and it's just uh this diatribe against the right wing in Trump for tarring the news as the enemy of the people there's zero introspection I mean I worked at the New York Times there's that's a classic institution that doesn't have the capacity to engage in any self-criticism it's kind of busy time uh and dismisses everybody outside the walls of the New York Times as kind of uh you know second rate journalists and second rate uh thinkers and second rate citizens I mean there's the air I think a lot of it is hubris a lot of it is because they all talk to each other they're all having dinner with the editors of the intercept in the New Yorker and they you know they kind of it's a mutual admiration society which is of course what's destroyed the intercept Glenn it's completely right I of course know all those people so I think it's it's the I think it's a mixture of hubris and a mixture of uh and a kind of feeling that any kind of critique or outside attack is uh from the very start not valid and I you know I covered I was overseas for many years in the Middle East and in Latin America so I the paper was roundly attacked and often deserved to be attacked but it had in the inner sanctum of the New York Times it had almost no effect unless that attack came from moneyed or interests or powerful interests so but leftist critics independent journalists you know anybody who tried to call them out were just dismissed and so the more anemic these news organizations become and financially of course they're becoming more anemic the more insular I think they become and the more they essentially accelerate their own demise I think that's what's happened I mean also having to confront what Matt exposed it's not just one or two articles we're talking about hundreds if not thousands of articles we're talking about the tenor of reporting day after day week after week and to confront that complete failure I think is so massive that it would just rock the foundations of whatever news industry that had the honesty to go back and be straight with either their viewers or their readers and they're just they're not going to do it I mean that's why the two things they'll do is ignore it and hope it goes away and and anytime they write about Matt Taibi they'll you know they'll have some snide adjective to describe it it's kind of funny because not to interject but but it's like fighting with somebody who won't who won't punch back they seem to be in of this belief that this is going to go away but there's more of this stuff coming I mean it's just going to get worse so I mean and it's not just going to come from me it's going to come from all kinds of people as we're as we're finding out so it seems like if they're going to have to get the message of eventually somebody is going to have to break ranks I think it won't be the New York Times because they have no accountability mechanism left at all at that newspaper I don't think but I would think a smaller organization would at some point. Chris you've spent probably happily most of your time off of that island in New York or out of the newsroom as a foreign correspondent but what's troubling here what Matt's story really points out is on this insular click here of the top editors and the newspaper themselves are government officials, intelligence officials in particular they're included in this little click in a way in terms of the fact that whatever a U.S. former or active intelligence official says is almost instantly believed without any checking without any skepticism it becomes a conduit or laundry a laundering of intelligence that would otherwise probably not be believed by the American people but when it comes under the name of the New York Times it might be more believable what's going on here in the mentality of people in the press that they are so servile to members especially of the intelligence. That's not new I mean that that's that I know that but this story really points it out in a big way. Well sure so did the weapons of mass destruction I mean I was in Paris and I was part of that team and I was working French intelligence opened up everything to me because they did wanted to avoid war in Iraq so had carte blanche I mean I covered Richard Reed the shoe bomber I would go down to the counterterrorism ministry run by this crazy Corsican and it was like snapping your fingers and next thing I'd have a pile of all the French intelligence on Richard Reed including surveillance photos of him coming out of the bricks at Moth everything and it was this desperate attempt it was only because I was with the New York Times not because I was a great reporter but it was this desperate attempt to essentially use the times as a conduit to make it clear that Saddam Hussein had no weapons of mass destruction and no connections to al-Qaeda or anything else and I would periodically fly back to New York in that investigative meeting and and bring hard intelligence and it was just laughed at because they were all going down to Washington and having lunch with Lewis Scooter Libby and Dick Cheney and Richard Pearl and everyone else and it was arrogance it was just all the French you know so that's long been the case I mean that there's long been very incestuous relationship between intelligence agencies in the New York Times that that's nothing new the new wrinkled water okay what's that I would just say the new wrinkle is that they're physically replacing journalists now with with intelligence people I mean the the the roster of X CIA NSA FBI whatever John with all due respect you know everyone from Brennan to Clint Watts to Asher and Gapa to they mean they all have media jobs now and the real reporters are being cycled out and these big contracts are being given to X intelligence officials as if it's the same job and as we all know it's the opposite job intelligence is about deception I mean in some in most circumstances right in journalism you're supposed to do the other thing and they think for some reason that it's it's authoritative but it's not really yeah I mean that but that's electronic media I don't you know the the Times isn't doing that I mean they'll quote these people with reverence of course a few but it I think I don't think that journalism is that's kind of the last thing that MSNBC or CNN is doing it's about ratings it's about entertainment it's about catering to a particular demographic I think you're both hate and kind of you know talked about those silos and what they're doing and you never you never pay for when you're wrong because you're telling your demographic what it is they want to hear so I mean I who come out of the Middle East was appalled at this podcast that was on the New York Times called the Califid which you know the first 10 minutes I realized it was garbage I mean it was just completely ridiculous it was kind of almost pornographic you know I mean it just didn't ring true from anybody who come out of the Middle East well they never paid a price for them even fire the reporter who she was she was it was all based on one character who was you know completely lying about everything but but it's what people wanted to hear about Muslims so they never paid a price for that they don't they you know they as long as they it's when they go against their demographic that they pay a price so I'm I'm a little more skeptical than you are I think you know all of these institutions that slog this russia gate stuff one because it's so massive I think they would look ridiculous if they were honest about the level of deception that they engaged in but secondly their demographic doesn't want to hear it I mean this New Yorker piece talks about Julian Assange as a Russian agent I mean and it calls him a criminal I mean but it's kind of an amazing piece but it's a good window into how distorted the mindset of mainstream journalism has become and I hope you're right but I on second thought I doubted I mean tell if it's the story I'd forgotten about that but I mean what was the story in them in the Washington Post in the 80s where there was like it was a fabulism situation where some columnists invented a fake uh tale of a I think it was a street orphan or something like that yeah yeah yeah it was a young woman reporter right right and it was it was unbelievably notorious right it was reputation shaking for the post it just sort of rippled throughout the entire business that was like a pimple compared to the caliphate thing I mean yeah of course it's not even close to the scale and there's just not no recognition of that you know that was a awesome scale case of fabulism and then they don't even talk about it no I don't think they're going to talk about it I think because I think if they if they actually had to confront it with any honesty it would it would it would just rip the whole foundations out of their enterprise and because we're talking about years of reporting we're talking about hundreds if not thousands of stories that were just based on this fraud uh and it uh it it was the famous we used to run errors oh I can't remember I forgot but I remember being the New York Times there were just some errors were so embarrassing they couldn't run them they just didn't put them in the air box when this is just a gigantic fill up pages of air you know pages of the newspapers with mea culpas so I mean I think what I think why this is so important what you've exposed is that it it really challenges the entire ethic the entire structure of the mainstream media which is why I would be highly surprised if any of them touched it. Let me bring John Kiriako in here John I want your thoughts but I'd start you off with a question and then I want you guys to continue just having a free discussion um as I described a lot of the people on the advisory board are very senior former intelligence officials former CIA acting CIA director head of the Homeland Security deputy director of the NSA now in David Talbot's book The Devil's Chestport he describes how Alan Dulles set up in his Georgetown townhouse kind of rogue intelligence operation after he'd been fired by John Kennedy he was no longer the director of the CIA but he had this operation going out of his house with active agents working for him though my from your experience what do you know about the kinds of relationships that former senior intelligence high level senior intelligence officials have with active members of the intelligence community well I Joe I'll answer that question with uh with a short anecdote all right my last headquarters job at CIA was I was the executive assistant to the deputy director for um sorry the associate deputy director for operations and so I had a fabulous office comfortable furniture and a secretary so I was leaning back in my chair one day in the middle of the afternoon and I had direct line of sight into the hallway and as I was leaning back I saw Bob Woodward walk past the office without a security escort just walking around like he owned the place and I said to the secretary was that Bob Woodward I just saw walk past the office and she said yeah I said without a security escort or escort Bob Woodward just walking around and she said oh didn't you see the director's memo he's writing a book about the Iraq war and we've all been ordered to cooperate with him and that just encapsulated the change in the CIA's attitude toward the media because they came to the to the realization I guess or to the point where they felt that they controlled the media they owned the media why not let Bob Woodward walk around like he owned the place he's going to write exactly what you tell him to write and then when you the director or the deputy director decide to move on and to retire you can call Bob Woodward or his bosses at the Washington Post and arrange your next golden parachute now it's CNN and MSNBC and the college that you got your grad degree uh in they'll put you on the board I mean it's uh it's it's a life now it's a post agency life that was just unthinkable 20 years ago or 25 years ago yeah let me just let me just interject there because there's two types of reporters I mean I was overseas so I was in Iraq I was on the ground in El Salvador you're right Bob Woodward is just a courtier he he he writes you know he's it's like a courtier at Versailles who is given special access because he writes you know the garbage they give him which makes for good narrative and most of which is either highly edited or false I mean the famous story about after the attack of 9-11 somebody in the White House typed up a whole dialogue in the situation room supposedly by George W. Bush that we found out later was completely fictitious but Woodward slapped it into his book so those of us who are overseas were constantly battling not only I mean I had a personal war with Sandy Berger who was head of Clinton's national security uh I mean he loathed me when I was in in and made my life miserable in Yugoslavia but so it's not only a war with figures like that but it's also a war with reporters who are the majority at a paper like the New York Times for the Bob Woodwards all these people who do lunch in Washington all these people who can walk without escorts through the CIA and and that really wears you down I mean if you're an honest reporter so my whole career was was a fight not only against you know mendacious and malicious power structures but also within the own your own institution they always get you in the end and so Dick Holbrook who didn't let this all go to the details as to why but I mean it was after Dayton and the warlords still ran everything and I got a was leaked by the Swiss foreign minister an OSCE report that said you can't have free elections Clinton was running for reelection this was and I published this report which they went berserk but then they went they went after me and so they were Dick Holbrook was tasked with taking the publisher out to lunch and defaming me and and it works it works it worked with Sydney Schanberg it worked with David Halberstam it worked with Ray Bonner works with any any they always get you in the end always and and so I don't want to take away from what John said he's exactly right but there are there were those of us on the ground who tried but in the end we're almost always defeated I'd like to add something to that too Jason Leopold who's now with Bloomberg and does a lot of Freedom of Information Act requests did one several years ago in which he asked very simply for all communications between the CIA's office of public affairs and any journalist from one date to the next date and what he found was was this unseemly cooperation between the CIA and and journalists that are supposed to be reporting on national security here in Washington the worst offender in that tranche of documents was Ken Delanian formerly of the Los Angeles Times now of NBC MSNBC where Delanian was actually sending his pieces to the CIA for their clearance before sending them to his own editor well that's not national security journalism that's essentially doing what uh what Bob Woodward has always done for whomever happens to be sitting in the in the White House there were other but the problem is that if you don't do that in Washington they shut you out exactly and that was that that was the next sentence that was going to come out of my mouth there were actual threats from the CIA to some of these journalists that they wouldn't be invited to the CIA Christmas party seriously that they wouldn't have access to to the leaks that the CIA was so famous for and invariably they back down that's unbelievable that's that's Washington that's how Washington works and Washington or the Washington Bureau of the New York Times was an utter cesspool where they were Delanian did ham 68 stories so oh my god of course he did uh you know I have a question for Matt uh Joe if you don't mind oh go ahead one of the things that has really struck me Matt and I like deep down I know I shouldn't be surprised by this but it's how you're being beaten about the face and head by people who purport to be progressives uh they've accused you they've accused Glenn Greenwald and others of being um closet right wingers because you're not buying into the narrative the discredited narrative of of Russiagate and I'm wondering how you deal with that because you're clearly not a closet right winger you're a journalist who's following the story where the evidence is leading you but how do you respond to that um I respond to that with boundless rage and thirst for revenge which I'm now getting uh and the look my career was uh altered uh definitively by the story there's no question in my mind if Russiagate never happened I would still be Rolling Stone um I would still be writing stories about Wall Street I would uh basically have the same career that I'd had for 15 years leading up to the story my problem I was set at the beginning of the Trump years I was going to do a basically every month catalog of the whole history like a Herodotus-like history of the Trump years and I did if you go back and look you'll see I did one installment it's actually behind me the tornado on the wall there um Trump the destroyer but because of the Russia angle I couldn't do the story I we quickly realized that this was unreportable for our audience because I had too many questions about the stuff that people like Amy Klobuchar were saying on the Senate floor about Trump I would go back to editors and I would say this doesn't scan that doesn't scan I went to Adam Schiff's office I asked where did they get this did they check this no right how do I report this right like it's it's not true or it's it's not reliable and so you know that that was the first moment that started me down the road of leaving the magazine that also came with an avalanche of social media invective I think we've all gone through this it was very nasty in my case in a lot of ways but all the reporters who who didn't go along went through this it was very personally upsetting we lost friends we were frozen out you know probably 95 percent of the people that were in my Rolodex in 2016 would not speak to me during the Trump years at all like I couldn't pick up the phone former good sources of mine completely ghosted me and I was just I mean again I was just doing my job like I was not like a crusader on this issue for a long time I just felt like I would sort of gently do a column about how hey maybe we should reconsider some of these facts and I don't know I'd be curious to hear what everybody else's experience is because it was totally different than anything else I'd ever dealt with before in public life the the response was so disproportionate and and crazy but I think you know they created a lot of enemies and motivation for people in this process so I don't know well I would say that that that's kind of the trajectory of any good reporter it ends up you end up being pretty lonely I mean right I mean that's kind of it I mean whether it's I.F. Stone or Seymour Ursch or and all the people you and I respect I mean look what they've done to Seymour he can't even publish in the United States anymore so I would say that if you and I would I would add Julian Assange to that and you know if you really do your job you know it's it's I mean I went through it overseas I mean you know the for instance in Kosovo I rigorously reported on Serb atrocities against Kosovo Albanians and and you know they loved me and then the moments the Serbs left I you know I my job as a journalist is to report on those people who are being persecuted or don't have a voice or vulnerable all I did was write about the Kosovo Albanians attacking ethnic Serbs and I instantly became persona non grata in a big way and and I think that that's you know that's Orwell I mean that's any any great any serious like Matt I hold in very high esteem I mean any serious journalist in the end is going to alienate all sorts of people who aren't interested in honesty and aren't interested in any kind of you know investigations that disrupt their particular worldview or ideology so you know I I'm not going to go through the trajectory of my own career but I think that's I mean part of the way I deal with it unlike Matt and Glenn is I'm I don't have a Twitter account I'm not on so I don't have a Facebook account on Instagram I don't even own a television and it gets kind of really good for my mental health maybe people call up and say do you know what they and I don't actually know I don't really I mean I used to be a big target for APAC and I would like Matt to when he has time to look at the hand of the israel lobby there because all of us who have been outspoken against Palestinian rights and supporters of BDS have been targeted relentlessly by APAC and I'm curious as to whether you know they had any kind of I would think they had a deplatforming program towards Palestinian activists would be my guess so you know I think I think Matt's you know paying the price for being a good journalist and I'm gonna get better yeah um on the Palestinian front I uh the first story I did about internet censorship which I thought was a big deal that was that there was another sort of disillusioning moment because I I thought this was a big thing and nobody else in the business seemed to think it was but um one of the things that you learn is that the Palestinians are like sort of the test subjects for every new digital uh censorship tool um every time they come up with something new to do what twitter called visibility filtering right um whether it's trends blacklisting search blacklist whatever it is um they would do it to Palestinian accounts first the Facebook did all kinds of things with um the Mossad uh they had a sort of an open arrangement there uh to censor because Facebook is basically the it was the press for in in Palestine as far as I understood um so yeah there's I'm sure there's something there and if I just haven't seen it talked about because probably they they found a way to algorithmically squash the Palestinians so long ago that it's it's before the that I'm looking at um but it's probably in there somewhere John if I could ask you a question um this seems to me to be an intelligence operation the Hamilton 68 it's only fronted by former intelligence what kind of relations do they have to current is I mean we don't have any proof obviously but what is your speculation about whether this was linked to people who are actually still serving they can't be on a board like this they can't be seen to be involved in any of this but they've got these former people who are now private citizens so I just want to know if you can weigh in on that idea sure um all former directors deputy directors and associate deputy directors maintain their security clearances in perpetuity um all of them are welcome to go back to headquarters whenever they want they are allowed classified briefings not top secret but up to the secret level they have free access to the director's private dining room in fact I I've seen them meeting in in the dining room with journalists over the years so you know there's that there's that tired old saying that that most people who are at the CIA never really leave the CIA at that senior level that's true because after 30 years or 25 years all of your contacts are in the intelligence community everybody's looking to make a lot of money when they leave and they're looking to do something new nobody wants to make his way over to Booz Allen and be yet another former senior CIA person at Booz Allen there are a million of them there they want to do something bigger and more lucrative and I think that's why we're seeing these groups like Hamilton 68 pop up or or these anti this group that that gave a red check mark to a consortium news the name escapes me already um knowledge or what was it called oh a news card news card yeah news guard yeah they want to do something new and and big and more lucrative let the let the lower level guys end up at Booz Allen or at Abraxas Corporation or wherever it is that they go now so yeah I I even though they all have former in front of their titles now to me that doesn't really mean anything because they have as much access at least to people as they ever had you know there's a pillar political agenda here though wasn't just about making money I like to ask you matter absolutely they make money this was an agenda to to smear Trump WikiLeaks Russia and set the stage for the crisis we've got now I think in many ways well there there was a perfect storm that took place you know going back a little bit further what what made John Brennan somebody I listen I worked for John Brennan when he was a GS 14 nobody and um and what made him somebody was a a deep friendship with George Tennant and then when it was time to retire and move on to something else and everybody was going either to the Hillary Clinton campaign or to the John McCain campaign he was literally the only senior CIA retiree that went to the Obama campaign and that made him somebody uh he decided that he could turn that into something even bigger by then going to the media when he was done you know John used to tell everybody who would listen that he wanted to be secretary of defense under the next democratic president well why why would you want to make two hundred thousand dollars as secretary of defense which would then put you into your seventies when you can spend those years at msnbc making ten times which you would have made at the at the Pentagon and then when people saw him making money and and uh uh what's his name the former dni making money and Clapper every former four-star Clapper thank you every former four-star general is a talking head for CNN you know and you've got these democratic credentials because you loyally faithfully served Barack Obama for six years or eight years whatever it was why not run with it and you know the the other thing too Joe is these guys are very very mainstream they're very dnc there there's nothing that's going to carry them out of the mainstream and if the mainstream is telling them that to beat Donald Trump you have to chat up this dnc plan to convince the american people that the first thing Donald Trump does in the morning when he wakes up is he calls his russian handler to get his his marching orders for the day then that's what you do it's worked for them isn't that a whole story so funny can you imagine Donald Trump having the opsec to keep that secret it's just a cousin of mine who's very much a dnc you know mover and shaker set me up um with a with a woman who's an attorney at the dnc lovely lovely woman and we went out for one date and through the entire date all she talked about was how the russians controlled Donald Trump and i said i said you don't really believe that though deep down i mean at the cia if there was one thing i took out of my cia uh career especially from the analytics side it's that if you're gonna say something you absolutely have to have the information to back it up you have to have the facts you can't just throw a grenade into the middle of the room and expect everybody to salute it you have to back it up and she said to me i believe in my heart that donald trump does exactly what vladimir putin tells him to do and you know i i realized there's no sense in carrying on the conversation any longer because they really believed that at the dnc maybe not at that top level that had come up with the big lie but everybody else who was there to implement it they believed it yeah the problem is you have a bunch of analysts sitting around the cia dreaming up all sorts of garbage you know when they drag out the drag out the cardinal in prog who's been sleep deprived for three weeks and he looks like a zombie the cia suddenly decides the soviets have figured out forms of mind control and then sends stanley gotlib off to along with you know hundreds of x nazis to black sites to and i mean and then they're giving lsd to even their own agents or jumping out of windows i mean uh it oh you read my piece in consortium news no i read kinsley's book i read kinsley's book poisoner in chief but but it's uh you know i mean i know overseas they they would come the other thing is that they i mean as you know there's two types of cia there's the guys who come out of special forces and know how to put explosives under trucks and blow them up and uh those guys as soon as you walk in the room you know they work for and then there's the guys who went i had a friend he clearly cia had done his phd in princeton on vogolin and we used to have long dinners talking about vogolin a charming guy cuban american and central america um but they get these theories i mean like for instance when huntington's book came out clash of civilizations they just it was ridiculous it's a ridiculous premise just it doesn't even make any sense when you for instance you know really know the middle east uh but uh that it gave them the kind of shorthand or the slogans or the cliches that they hung their ideology on uh i mean that was my experience with i mean you know i and especially in salvatore we dealt a lot with them about 60 of the embassy was had the same we got the embassy phone list and 60 had exactly the same extension now we had the deputy head of the phoenix program there i mean we had all these guys i mean they were just swarming all over el salvatore didn't speak spanish they'd all been in vietnam they know what the fuck they were doing and sitting in the shared in with their vietnamese wives and uh but a funny story is i'm in bosnia in and i and i hear this guy across the room go hola compañero and it was one of these cuban americans i'm going what the hell is he doing we had felix rodriguez there well we all knew he used to show us the wristwatch he'd taken off chegavara's body um so yeah yeah i mean that again i mean you know it better than i do but it's an it's also a very insular world where you know like the new york times where these people feed off of each other and it can go in really absolutely bizarre directions but you know that's that's my kind of you know having been on the periphery of it that was my take it sounds like you you had them pegged i have to say this the i saved my life though twice once once in el salvatore when the death squads were going to come and kill me and not that they liked me but they showed up with an armored car and said you got to leave right now don't even pack your bag and they flew me to costa rica and the second time was when i was a prisoner in iraq and it being the new york times they got the pope to call tarak aziz who was christian and on my behalf they got schwarzkoff to call the head of the iraqi army they got gorbachev to call saddam hussein and i after the war i had to write thank you notes to all these people and then i had to write one to the cia but i don't know what they did but i had to write them a thank you note john something you were saying john uh it reminded me of just the experience of trump derangement syndrome in general during the whole russia gate era i mean so this hamilton 68 this labeling of american citizens and other you know ordinary people's views and expressions of opinion as disinformation as russian bots it was just at this hysterical pitch and i think as matt was also mentioning earlier it was something that everybody experienced on kind of like the journalist side of it but then as you say john like when you talk to people who really believed it it was like a religious fervor they had about it so i just wanted to you know ask you all kind of about your experience of trump trump derangement syndrome or what you know that hysteria during the russia gate era and if that was unique i mean or if you think this is it'll play out the same way again on the next kind of saga the next moral not moral panic but the next equivalent narrative that the media really pushes john do you want to let me any of you john matt anybody i definitely may i say real quickly um i was at the venezuelan embassy the night that uh that it was ordered closed uh and uh as i was leaving with most everybody else some some elected to stay inside i overheard two uniformed secret service officers talking one of them said so who are these people and the other one said the ones out here with us the ones inside are with putin and the other one kind of chuckled and the second one said no seriously it's like with trump and you know just to hear something like that and to realize that they that they mean it that you know your initial reaction is you think wow what a couple of simpletons and then you realize no it's not that they're simpletons it's that they've been exposed to this propaganda for so long this this unrelenting reporting that that donald trump is a russian agent and that the russians have controlled our elections listen there's a guy that i used to work with at the cia we work together desk to desk for years and now i just read in the washington post a couple of weeks ago he was named to head the new office of election integrity in the office of the director of national intelligence like integrity for what we've already proven that the russians didn't have any impact in our elections but people really believe that they just refuse to look at the evidence that's placed before them we need more reporting from the likes of matt taibi to to prove to the american people that they're just simply mistaken they've been duped they've been led astray there's no evidence to back up what they've been told and we have to make sure that this doesn't happen again uh john just quickly if i could um on that uh so i this story as i alluded to earlier does go in another it goes deeper um i think the themes that are going to emerge from this um are that the intelligence community has been working not just on controlling uh censoring people but also on sort of more fundamental ideas about how to affect people's behavior um their belief systems uh so for instance if you insert a lot of chatter about sunshine or grass or rivers it makes people want to go outside but if you insert the phrase stay at home disease coveted death it makes people want to stay inside right um they've experimented on how this works on a political level uh by sort of market testing how crowds behave when certain phrases are introduced into organic conversation um all the countries do this the russians do it and they're not their program is modeled after ours um and i think where you're gonna what we're gonna find is that a lot of these companies and there's a you've mentioned the contracting before that they don't want to work at booze allen well they want to work at companies like new knowledge or news guard there's this huge booming new industry that everybody knows is coming it's getting it's only going to get bigger that's about things like domestic sorry election integrity uh foreign interference um like extremism watch that that kind of stuff and there's a lot of money in this there there was a lot of money already that's been distributed in public contracts that are already searchable there's already a paper trail connected to the a lot of these companies so these aren't just private efforts these are a lot in many cases like sort of do d efforts um but there is a lot of money here and it coincides joe with the political this sort of hysteria and machinations that you're talking about so it's it's really a story on multiple levels about how a political impulse is coinciding with a practical self sort of financial interest that is sort of the eternal story of washington tribute right remember washington's the modern day roam where everybody goes to get uh all around the world to get uh tribute paid to them well they're this is this is a big hunk of that system is this new sort of digital information network outfits like hamilton 68 are sort of are going to be the forerunner of how things are done in the future they're not going to bother with correcting the new york times they're going to create narratives before they get to the new york times and the whole fabric of reality is going to be altered so that you have people like that person you dated i'm sorry to go on about this but this is exactly what orwell wrote about it's this idea of somebody you can have two contradictory thoughts at once and not be bothered by it the certain conviction that something is untrue but the absolute belief that it is at the same time right that is the that is the new person that is being created by these techniques it is something we've never dealt with before it's a new topic um that hasn't really been studied and it's very scary because they're sort of testing it in real time with stories like russia gate i'm sorry to go on about this but it's i i think i think people have to understand the scale of this isn't just a big wrong story it is is it is something it is heralding a new technique for governance that that that's true map but that's only if you allow yourself to be enslaved to social media right right that's true but everybody is the problem no but that's what's dangerous that is what's dangerous and and you know and so you know those devices you know serve not just as tracking devices and and profiling devices but it you know without being overly dramatic a kind of kind of mind control and they know it and they know how to do it and they know how to uh package stuff so it gives you the right dopamine hits and it's it's really uh yeah i think you're right i think it's very frightening um i i remember when i wrote m barb illusion which hits some of these themes i spent the whole first chapter hanging out at us in square garden with professional wrestling and it reminded me of exactly that where on the one hand if you i would interview these people they all knew it was fake if you asked them on the other hand they were screaming and weeping uh because the narratives that were created around these wrestlers and it was i mean you couldn't make this stuff up i mean it was you know the guy who'd been evicted the guy who i mean my favorite was the guy who just got out of prison and comes into the arena his orange in his orange well they don't actually wear orange in a prison but in an orange glantanamo suit to fight the corrections officer i mean you can't make this stuff up but but it's awesome yeah it is kind of awesome and uh but it resonates so but and when you said that about these contradictory that reminded me exactly of of that kind of spectacle or professional wrestling um because what it does is it grips them emotionally uh and and it and it has embodied within it it's manipulative a kind of emotional truth and that's what i kind of hear you saying they're doing absolutely it's just that they what they've pro wrestling right was for one audience the difference with this story is they they figured out how to do it for the sophisticated cosmopolitan highly educated urban class in western countries who believe themselves above such pretensions but they not only are not i would actually argue that they may even be more susceptible to this kind of behavior than the sort of average working person who has a streak of independence and that a lot of these people don't have because they've been sort of intellectual group thinkers for their whole lives um i don't know i'd be curious john to hear what you think about think about that but it appears to me that they've they've figured out how to crack that audience better uh than ever before it sure seems that way um you know we've been seeing it really since uh 2016 and um it's become so deeply ingrained in society that you know i for one struggle with with uh with how to get out of it how do we turn this around i i think that the that the comparison that you made earlier uh to that period of of McCarthyism is is an apt one how do we turn this around and get out of it it's going to be difficult there was only one man then McCarthy basically who yeah good point it would Mario stood up to him and that guy said you have any decency and and that could have collapsed where this is much broader because it's because McCarthy went after the army the military intelligence community so as soon as he crossed that line he was finished this is completely different so everything is now emanating out of those centers of powers it's it's not at all like McCarthy it's it's far worse yeah i mean they've done this overseas for years i mean you know i mean it's not anything new but in the end with every decaying empire all of the mechanisms they use for control migrate back and and uh and it's uh as things deteriorate they will reach for every tool they have and they they know how to use it because they've used it in all sorts of countries uh and and it's it's just it's already been perfected and tested and it's ready to go uh so it's it is orwellian it is really really dangerous and as the country continues to disintegrate i mean how many mass shootings have we had this month how many people i mean is i mean the fabric of the society just being torn apart and these people are not going to give up power and they will they will use everything at their disposal to keep power and i think that's what we're watching yeah i would just say that the the twist on sort of earlier methods of control is the the technological advance that the internet allows um i mean orwell orwell predicted in 1984 this idea of this totally immersive informational experience that um you know that it works on you at a level but beneath your conscious thinking but you christ you bring up the mass shootings i think they make an assumption that people are able to function without clarity and sanity and truth um that i think is incorrect people can't live without it i my my strong belief is that people can't live without um truth that they will detect it if this kind of organized falsity and a new will drive people crazy yeah they'll detect it but then what was that book was it by celeste milosh you know the captive mind is that milosh wrote that i can't remember but but he but what happens is the society barfricates so yes you're right they recognize that it's all lies but then they retreat into a kind of private world of hedonism and uh and uh you know this certainly happened under Stalinism and uh you know so so you're right that that they can see it you're right that um you know and they're all they're always those great figures solzhenitsyn which i just taught in the prism of gulag archipelago but they're always these figures but when they step out to speak of truth of course they're uh they're discredited and and widely reviled um uh and um uh and what they do is really almost suicidal i mean it is you know they they have to accept that that in order for them to get up and speak a truth in this environment is to put their life in danger they'll do it anyway oscar merrow did it salvo um uh but i i think that in in a climate pervasive manipulation and pervasive intelligence what we may get is that you know that bifurcation that we saw in the captive mind where people just retreat and of course it's a you know what's a what's a pornified culture it's a culture engrossed and spectacle i mean the cicero writes about this at the end of ancient rome where everybody which he invades against but everybody's emotional life is invested in the arena uh meanwhile the roman republic is coughing up nero and calling you on everyone else so that's you are you are right that but but that i i fear that that's kind of probably the path we're headed on that might be a good spot to end it up unless i want a very cheerful memory note yeah yeah so we'll go off into the night well i just want to i just want to close my scene as a i just want to say as a journalist i think matt has done you know just absolutely you know groundbreaking important tremendous magnificent work um and you're going to keep doing it which means you're going to have less and less friends i'll always be one um but uh it is i i mean i read it and i was i just thought it was one of the most important stories i've read maybe since you know wiki leaks i mean i just thought it was really really important and um and so i just want to tell you how much a lot of us really admire you and admire what you do well i mean because i said before there's not a whole lot to it if you're getting the stuff you know um so this was a fluky thing where um you have a very angry you're not angry a very um disaffected billionaire uh very wealthy man who um i i think he felt he had the luxury to do this he's not a group thinker um he has a lot of things about him that people may may not like but this is a fluke right this is something that doesn't normally happen where a gigantic major corporation will suddenly start spilling its guts in public um and it's a unique thing um you know how long that will last isn't really a journalistic issue i think it's going to be a larger you know question of whether he can whether his own race to survive is going to going to work out but as long as it does um you know it's i think that that's really where this whole this whole project started was uh with with that idea which is just interesting i think well you know but that's often true with any great investigative work i mean i'm going i was leaked the major story by mosad and shut down a privately owned airport owned by iranians north of hamburg because they wanted to shut down i mean i went to hamburg i investigated it it was true everything they gave me was true um you know so uh i've i've heard people attack the source that that's irrelevant i've been you know i've i've had multiple sources from the fml end the cia i've got a big report from the fbi i mean etc etc um what matters whether it's true or it isn't right exactly it's our job to which of course all these people went on the dashboard of hamilton 58 68 never did but it's our job to determine whether it's true and and people will feed us crap all the time but if if we find that it's true we don't have a right to withhold it from the public that gets into grand inquisitor territory it's our job to and i've written stories as i know you have that have hurt groups that i care about uh you know and uh but as orwell said the only product we as journalists really have to sell is our credibility and a lie always works in the short term but in the long term it destroys everything that we're about which is why of course he put in the p o u m suppression and homage to catalonia and the barcelona riots which he was part of and everything else and victor glance in the left wrote a money that victor glance wouldn't publish it or about orange catalonia sold 600 books in his lifetime but i think that that yeah yeah it didn't sell at all it's a great book but it didn't sell so but you know i think that that that you know that's what you're doing and and and that's what we have to do um and it's you know the longer you do it the more isolated you're going to become and the more you expose the more vicious they're going to become because rather than owning up to the fraud that they participated in they'll seek as they have done with julia to essentially destroy the messengers so oh as that's what just doesn't matter as you just said it doesn't matter the source of true and it doesn't even matter for us it was the source of the dnc emails they were true yeah doesn't well i've always said you know you can argue that you shouldn't publish them the padesa emails but you can't then call yourself a journalist right exactly that's something else yeah and i think that's the other thing that people just to close on this there's been a lot of uproar about how a lot of the twitter stories you know they're they're framed in a way that's very pleasing to right wing audiences some of them because that's what we're seeing you know in other words we're looking at documents most of what we're seeing is a certain kind of narrative but i think people have to understand that it's it's not just that there's a layer beneath that that is uh it kind of goes in all directions um but you just got to follow where it leads yeah well we'll end it there with the last word with matt tell you me and we thank you matt so much for coming on and sharing all these insights about your story and i think we all agree with chris that we admire what you've done here very much when you look forward to more stories like that and you coming back on cn life sometimes so john curiaco uh thank you very much for coming on and giving an intelligent part of you and and chris with your incredible deep knowledge of many things going from maroam to uh well as nia to today we thank you and again matt so much and i thank elizabeth lost our co-host and kathy wogan back in sydney australia our producer so for cn life this is joe lory saying good night and we'll see you again soon goodbye if you are a consumer of independent news in the first place you should be going to is consortium news and please do try to support them when you can it doesn't have its articles behind a paywall it's free for everyone it's one of the best news sites out there and it's been in the business of independent journalism and adversarial independent journalism for over two decades i hope that with the public's continuing support of consortium news it will continue for a very long time to come thank you so much