Matt Taibbi
Appearances
The Tucker Carlson Show
Matt Taibbi: All the Top Secret Information Trump Is Releasing & What He Should Declassify Next
Because, you know, we grew up with all the president's men and after the church committee. So we thought it all had come out. The good guys won. There's transparency. We have the Freedom of Information Act. We can find everything out.
The Tucker Carlson Show
Matt Taibbi: All the Top Secret Information Trump Is Releasing & What He Should Declassify Next
Whoever did it, it was effective.
The Tucker Carlson Show
Matt Taibbi: All the Top Secret Information Trump Is Releasing & What He Should Declassify Next
unc saying yes absolutely that was a gain of function uh so there's a little bit of a problem there now he later amended the statement uh and said that he was speaking in a specific way under a specific definition but there's exposure there but that's that's not really the issue with fauci the issue i believe that
The Tucker Carlson Show
Matt Taibbi: All the Top Secret Information Trump Is Releasing & What He Should Declassify Next
There aren't many.
The Tucker Carlson Show
Matt Taibbi: All the Top Secret Information Trump Is Releasing & What He Should Declassify Next
So first of all, just to back up, I tried to make a list a couple of days ago. Oh, did you really? Yeah, of all the things that I would want to investigate if I were, you know, in that kind of a position to order these kinds of things. I'm actually going to take notes as you talk, because I want to follow along at home as this happens.
The Tucker Carlson Show
Matt Taibbi: All the Top Secret Information Trump Is Releasing & What He Should Declassify Next
But I couldn't finish. There were so many different things that I never got to the end. But I would say that the big ones... You know, there are huge glaring questions, which is unusual. For instance, who was president the last four years, especially the last year? I mean, I think that's an enormous question. Tony Blinken.
The Tucker Carlson Show
Matt Taibbi: All the Top Secret Information Trump Is Releasing & What He Should Declassify Next
That's the problem. We don't really know.
The Tucker Carlson Show
Matt Taibbi: All the Top Secret Information Trump Is Releasing & What He Should Declassify Next
So anyway, sorry to interrupt. His State Department was also involved in the censorship stuff too. Who was president? Who was president?
The Tucker Carlson Show
Matt Taibbi: All the Top Secret Information Trump Is Releasing & What He Should Declassify Next
Yeah, no, I mean, I think – of all the crimes that are on the table and the potential corruption issues, people signing documents or somehow getting documents signed by an incompetent president or an unfit president has to rank up there with the most serious things that have ever happened in American history, right? So you have to look at what was the process of the White House operation, right?
The Tucker Carlson Show
Matt Taibbi: All the Top Secret Information Trump Is Releasing & What He Should Declassify Next
Who was actually running things? We know from a surface point,
The Tucker Carlson Show
Matt Taibbi: All the Top Secret Information Trump Is Releasing & What He Should Declassify Next
who was who held the posts right so ron klain was the the chief of staff we know roughly who else was in joe biden's orbit what what were the what was the schedule you know did he did he sign things by auto pen because they have this this machine that does uh and who and who was who basically had the power of attorney to turn that on right like these are all questions that we have to get answers to what was the day-to-day operation of the biden white house uh
The Tucker Carlson Show
Matt Taibbi: All the Top Secret Information Trump Is Releasing & What He Should Declassify Next
And again, especially in the last year, because I think, you know, that gets to bigger questions of who was really making these big foreign policy decisions and who was making decisions about things like, you know, cutting off the Democratic primaries to challengers. You know, these are big party decisions, not necessarily White House decisions. Who decided to kick Trump? Biden off the ticket.
The Tucker Carlson Show
Matt Taibbi: All the Top Secret Information Trump Is Releasing & What He Should Declassify Next
Biden on July 13th was giving a speech in Detroit and he's like, I'm running. I mean, he couldn't have been more affirmative about the idea that he was not going to drop out of the race. Within seven days, he was out of the race.
The Tucker Carlson Show
Matt Taibbi: All the Top Secret Information Trump Is Releasing & What He Should Declassify Next
Within three days after that Detroit thing, there were stories leaked out in Politico that were basically saying that Nancy Pelosi was going to ask him to or going to try to pressure him to drop out. But I don't believe that. I think we need to find out exactly what those communications were.
The Tucker Carlson Show
Matt Taibbi: All the Top Secret Information Trump Is Releasing & What He Should Declassify Next
I mean, who had the authority to push the president of the United States off his own ticket unless he had a sudden change of heart?
The Tucker Carlson Show
Matt Taibbi: All the Top Secret Information Trump Is Releasing & What He Should Declassify Next
mean i i've heard that again i don't know is the truth but um i've heard that it's very conspicuous that when he when he wanted to say things he said it on camera but there were all kinds of things where the wording was much more careful and that was done on twitter or in a letter or in a press release i mean even even the the note explaining the pardons who wrote that right it was on a the you know biden's twitter account i doubt
The Tucker Carlson Show
Matt Taibbi: All the Top Secret Information Trump Is Releasing & What He Should Declassify Next
He's sitting there tweeting. So it's just a coup.
The Tucker Carlson Show
Matt Taibbi: All the Top Secret Information Trump Is Releasing & What He Should Declassify Next
It's on the table. It has to be. Because, you know, Jill Biden has been very circumspect in talking about it. She's said these really curious things about how she wants to reevaluate her relationships. I think she was referring to Nancy Pelosi. But... What exactly happened in that one week period between, you know, the middle of July and the 21st or so?
The Tucker Carlson Show
Matt Taibbi: All the Top Secret Information Trump Is Releasing & What He Should Declassify Next
And then what happened in between the 21st and the 22nd or whenever it was when Biden suddenly came out and made Kamala the nominee? Like, how did that happen? Who made that decision?
The Tucker Carlson Show
Matt Taibbi: All the Top Secret Information Trump Is Releasing & What He Should Declassify Next
The issue is, really, it's about the whole rat's nest of gain of function. How much did the authorities know about what was going on at the Wuhan Institute? Did they have human sources at the Wuhan Institute? Was there advanced warning that this was coming? Were they suppressing investigations into the possibility of a lab leak because of the connections to U.S.
The Tucker Carlson Show
Matt Taibbi: All the Top Secret Information Trump Is Releasing & What He Should Declassify Next
No. There were stories, but they were incredibly incomplete. And this is one of the things where, you know, I was looking at it even from just a professionalism point of view in terms of the New York Times, the Washington Post, all of these papers. How does nobody ask who made the decision to... to nominate Kamala Harris. How did that happen? How was he kicked off?
The Tucker Carlson Show
Matt Taibbi: All the Top Secret Information Trump Is Releasing & What He Should Declassify Next
Or how did he come to that decision? Normally, there would be a big show of that, right? There would be... Somebody would come out and give an interview to, I don't know, 60 minutes and say, well, here's how that happened, right? And whether it was true or not, there would be a grand explanation. Whenever there's something...
The Tucker Carlson Show
Matt Taibbi: All the Top Secret Information Trump Is Releasing & What He Should Declassify Next
big that happens with the president here they just they just kind of did a little tweet or a press release and there were things that were leaked out in newspapers none of it made any sense so you know they have to get all those communications and i think that's what was important there you know there were preservation letters that were sent out by some senate committees i hope it captured a lot of this stuff but we'll see you know
The Tucker Carlson Show
Matt Taibbi: All the Top Secret Information Trump Is Releasing & What He Should Declassify Next
I've only heard theories about this, right? And that's the problem. It's kind of irresponsible for reporters to speculate. I agree. We don't know. All we know, we saw little bits and pieces of things. Like there was a really weird moment You might remember when Biden said something to the effect of, we can't allow Putin to stay in office or whatever it was, right?
The Tucker Carlson Show
Matt Taibbi: All the Top Secret Information Trump Is Releasing & What He Should Declassify Next
And people immediately interpreted that as a regime change comment, right? 47 minutes later, the White House comes out with a walkback clarifying statement. saying, you know, our policy towards Russia is unchanged or something ambiguous like that. But there were leaks in the press about what happened there.
The Tucker Carlson Show
Matt Taibbi: All the Top Secret Information Trump Is Releasing & What He Should Declassify Next
And there was a remarkable line in one of the stories saying that Biden was allowed to participate in the workshopping of that second statement. How is he not in charge of it, first of all, right? And they're talking about Jake Sullivan is involved in the process. But that just gives you a little glimpse into this idea of a collective presidency where, at best, Biden was a participant.
The Tucker Carlson Show
Matt Taibbi: All the Top Secret Information Trump Is Releasing & What He Should Declassify Next
So I think we need to know a lot of things about who was actually making those decisions. It might be different in terms of, you know, for each candidate. Realm of the government, right? Maybe the national security questions were dealt with by one person, then the foreign policy things by another. I don't know. I mean, we'll see.
The Tucker Carlson Show
Matt Taibbi: All the Top Secret Information Trump Is Releasing & What He Should Declassify Next
Oh, that was only the first thing in the list, right?
The Tucker Carlson Show
Matt Taibbi: All the Top Secret Information Trump Is Releasing & What He Should Declassify Next
I mean, I remember being in Russia in the late 90s. There were multiple episodes that you might classify as quasi-coups. Yes. Right? There was an... An episode where people tried to arrest Yeltsin's bodyguard, Alexander Karzhakov, and it kind of turned out the other way in the end. But there was intense reporting about this by the supposedly unfree Russian press at the time.
The Tucker Carlson Show
Matt Taibbi: All the Top Secret Information Trump Is Releasing & What He Should Declassify Next
And then there was also the whole question of, you know, why was Putin brought in? What did he do when he was immediately kind of used to...
The Tucker Carlson Show
Matt Taibbi: All the Top Secret Information Trump Is Releasing & What He Should Declassify Next
research, all that stuff is in play. I mean, there's a lot of stuff that's going on that you want to know.
The Tucker Carlson Show
Matt Taibbi: All the Top Secret Information Trump Is Releasing & What He Should Declassify Next
clamped down on the an investigation of yeltsin that was done by the general prosecutor at the time i mean that's all in the woods what i'm trying to say is even in a third world country we got more information uh about stuff that was going on than we got last year in the united states of america where we had a gigantic press corps sitting in washington supposedly covering all this stuff i
The Tucker Carlson Show
Matt Taibbi: All the Top Secret Information Trump Is Releasing & What He Should Declassify Next
It blows my mind.
The Tucker Carlson Show
Matt Taibbi: All the Top Secret Information Trump Is Releasing & What He Should Declassify Next
A few, but, you know, the ones that I'm still in touch with mostly have been kind of squeezed out. You know, there are people who did try to get to the bottom of what happened. I mean, Cy Hirsch did a story about... The mechanics of how it got to be went from Biden to Kamala. And, you know, that story came out on Substack, but it wasn't picked up anywhere.
The Tucker Carlson Show
Matt Taibbi: All the Top Secret Information Trump Is Releasing & What He Should Declassify Next
And that's kind of the way the media works.
The Tucker Carlson Show
Matt Taibbi: All the Top Secret Information Trump Is Releasing & What He Should Declassify Next
I think it's very notable that a lot of the high-profile investigative reporters just can't even publish in the United States. And look at somebody like Jeff Gerth, who made a point of kind of keeping ties to traditional media and not burning bridges and doing all that stuff. and worked his butt off to get this 24,000-word piece about Russiagate into the Columbia Journalism Review.
The Tucker Carlson Show
Matt Taibbi: All the Top Secret Information Trump Is Releasing & What He Should Declassify Next
And it should have landed hard. It should have landed like a Mike Tyson uppercut, you know? And people just ignored it. So even when they don't kick you out of the club, they just ignore the hardcore reporting.
The Tucker Carlson Show
Matt Taibbi: All the Top Secret Information Trump Is Releasing & What He Should Declassify Next
Big deal guy for many, many years. He was the bulldog going after the Clinton administration on everything. Right. So, I mean, when he did a story, it mattered. It was on the desk of every senator in the country. Of course. You know, and now. That's what's so interesting about this period is that there is none of that.
The Tucker Carlson Show
Matt Taibbi: All the Top Secret Information Trump Is Releasing & What He Should Declassify Next
The stuff that lands on the desks of people in the relevant committees in Washington is PR. There's no reporting there for the most part. Maybe that will change now. I don't know. But I doubt it. People read your stuff.
The Tucker Carlson Show
Matt Taibbi: All the Top Secret Information Trump Is Releasing & What He Should Declassify Next
I mean, we know that there's five or six shifting official explanations of what happened. They eventually settled on this kind of labyrinthine... The story about a rogue Ukrainian operation that apparently without our input went and did this. Yeah, I don't believe it. I mean, it's laughable to think that that's true. But that's the kind of... Nord Stream is just one.
The Tucker Carlson Show
Matt Taibbi: All the Top Secret Information Trump Is Releasing & What He Should Declassify Next
It's like looking up at the stars in the sky. That's just one of them. And that's a huge story. I mean, think about it.
The Tucker Carlson Show
Matt Taibbi: All the Top Secret Information Trump Is Releasing & What He Should Declassify Next
Right. And that's one of the things that raised a red flag for some of the people who were looking. At the COVID phenomenon, just look at the surface characteristics of the disease. It's highly transmissible. It's not terribly symptomatic. Everybody's going to get it. Not everybody's going to be harmed by it. It's...
The Tucker Carlson Show
Matt Taibbi: All the Top Secret Information Trump Is Releasing & What He Should Declassify Next
Absolutely. It strained the incoming relations, and it could have resulted in an immediate nuclear escalation. I mean, there are so many different things, and it was a massive ecological disaster. It was a Deepwater Horizon-level environmental event.
The Tucker Carlson Show
Matt Taibbi: All the Top Secret Information Trump Is Releasing & What He Should Declassify Next
Right, and it's a tiny footnote to the insane lunacies that happened during this period. I'm sorry, but it is. Nord Stream, if you're making a list of the 10 weirdest things that happened in the last eight years, it's probably at the bottom, I would think. Wow.
The Tucker Carlson Show
Matt Taibbi: All the Top Secret Information Trump Is Releasing & What He Should Declassify Next
I mean, there are so many different areas where they're going to have to investigate, reinvestigate that. We just went through a period where there was sort of mass stonewalling of Congress when it was trying to investigate. What happened with COVID? There were key people like Peter Daszak from the EcoHealth Alliance who just didn't answer subpoenas.
The Tucker Carlson Show
Matt Taibbi: All the Top Secret Information Trump Is Releasing & What He Should Declassify Next
There are documents that we know exist that we're going to get now with FBI communications between... The Bureau and a lot of these scientists dating back 10 years, and it's going to tell a crazy story. I mean, a really interesting story. There's a reason why Fauci's pardon is backdated to 2014, because that's the time period that they're going to have to start looking, which is interesting.
The Tucker Carlson Show
Matt Taibbi: All the Top Secret Information Trump Is Releasing & What He Should Declassify Next
You know, when did we start defying the ban on gain-of-function research? We clearly did. I think that's pretty established at this point. Why were we doing it? What connection did that have to the Wuhan thing? What kind of advance notice did we get? What kind of lies were told about it? Who were responsible for those lies? What information did we get about the inefficacy of the vaccine?
The Tucker Carlson Show
Matt Taibbi: All the Top Secret Information Trump Is Releasing & What He Should Declassify Next
And how did that connect to statements by the CDC and the White House? This also connects to the censorship issue in a major way, because there was also a sort of massive effort to control the public conversation about this that went through the health agencies. So we know they're looking at that. And that's another executive order, by the way, the free speech order.
The Tucker Carlson Show
Matt Taibbi: All the Top Secret Information Trump Is Releasing & What He Should Declassify Next
you know, directs them, the Department of Justice, to come up with a comprehensive review of all the censorship stuff. So we're going to find out about that. But I just think COVID is a gigantic rat's nest of stuff. And, you know, it's going to be like a turkey shoot where every direction they look, they're going to find something, you know, revelatory.
The Tucker Carlson Show
Matt Taibbi: All the Top Secret Information Trump Is Releasing & What He Should Declassify Next
What they designed, what you would do if you were designing a disease to carry a vaccine, for instance.
The Tucker Carlson Show
Matt Taibbi: All the Top Secret Information Trump Is Releasing & What He Should Declassify Next
See, I think we do because I think that what we think of as the media is dead. They no longer really matter. The media that matters now are people like you and Joe Rogan and other, you know, there's podcasters out there. There's this gigantic, thriving, independent media culture that turned the last election, clearly. It was also abundantly clear that the old media
The Tucker Carlson Show
Matt Taibbi: All the Top Secret Information Trump Is Releasing & What He Should Declassify Next
no longer had any ability to control the narrative about anything. They're totally discredited. So I think this stuff is going to come out and because it's going to be so explosive, it's going to sort of solidify and heighten the prestige of all this new media. I think we're probably going to see whole institutions that are going to be built around these disclosures.
The Tucker Carlson Show
Matt Taibbi: All the Top Secret Information Trump Is Releasing & What He Should Declassify Next
We're going to have new newspapers, new TV stations.
The Tucker Carlson Show
Matt Taibbi: All the Top Secret Information Trump Is Releasing & What He Should Declassify Next
Oh, thanks. No, I'm at racket.news on Substack where a lot of these news sites are. For those who didn't grow up playing squash, how are you spelling racket? R-A-C-K-E-T dot news.
The Tucker Carlson Show
Matt Taibbi: All the Top Secret Information Trump Is Releasing & What He Should Declassify Next
Not squash racket, like racket, like that's a racket, which this is. Yes. It turned out to be aptly named. Nice. But yeah, no, I'm feeling very optimistic now. I think...
The Tucker Carlson Show
Matt Taibbi: All the Top Secret Information Trump Is Releasing & What He Should Declassify Next
uh there's there are still some holes in this new media landscape we don't have the huge institutions that have reporters who have beats which i think is crucial right uh because you need to have people who develop sources in one small area and but you saw that with julie kelly
The Tucker Carlson Show
Matt Taibbi: All the Top Secret Information Trump Is Releasing & What He Should Declassify Next
No, it's great. It's incredible. And that's exactly how the press is supposed to function. They're not supposed to be credentialed. Like, it's not supposed to be a thing where... Somebody confers a title, you are the official media. No, the citizen, that's part of our job is to be the press, right? That's why the First Amendment was designed for exactly for that to happen.
The Tucker Carlson Show
Matt Taibbi: All the Top Secret Information Trump Is Releasing & What He Should Declassify Next
And there was lots of incredible reporting that was done. By either individuals or small organizations like the U.S. Right to Know. They filed hundreds of FOIA requests on Fauci and gain of function and everything. And they really started the ball rolling on that whole side of that investigation. It's a relatively small site. And they had good young reporters there who were hungry.
The Tucker Carlson Show
Matt Taibbi: All the Top Secret Information Trump Is Releasing & What He Should Declassify Next
And that's how this thing works, you know? Amazing. Right?
The Tucker Carlson Show
Matt Taibbi: All the Top Secret Information Trump Is Releasing & What He Should Declassify Next
Right. Which is important. And that's also how it's supposed to work. I remember hearing a story about I.F. Stone. When I was starting on Substack, I was calling around to some of the old-timers and saying, like, is this a good idea for me to tap out of mainstream media? And they told me a story. And they said, you know, I.F. Stone cranked out a newsletter.
The Tucker Carlson Show
Matt Taibbi: All the Top Secret Information Trump Is Releasing & What He Should Declassify Next
For those people who don't know, he was a... Izzy Stone. Izzy Stone, he was one of the original independent investigative journalists. He worked out of his house. He put out this little newsletter, the IF Stone Weekly. It was great reporting, independent, didn't have to answer to editors who told him to shape things one way or the other.
The Tucker Carlson Show
Matt Taibbi: All the Top Secret Information Trump Is Releasing & What He Should Declassify Next
And he made a nice living, got himself a nice little house, and that was enough, right? And he had an impact. And you can do that now. The internet makes it easier, actually. Yeah. It's amazing.
The Tucker Carlson Show
Matt Taibbi: All the Top Secret Information Trump Is Releasing & What He Should Declassify Next
What are they doing? What was their relation to the Wuhan Institute also? I mean, I think those are all important questions, both the bioweapons and the relation to the pandemic. But the thing is about these pardons, they're a mistake. If you want to know what's happening, they just made it a lot easier for us to find out. Wow.
The Tucker Carlson Show
Matt Taibbi: All the Top Secret Information Trump Is Releasing & What He Should Declassify Next
Yeah.
The Tucker Carlson Show
Matt Taibbi: All the Top Secret Information Trump Is Releasing & What He Should Declassify Next
Yes, yes, but it'll be like, I mean, hopefully it'll be like the church committee hearings where, look, we just have to accept people are going to have their minds blown by discoveries, revelations. For instance, it's already starting in the news media. We're starting to get stories from journalists who are told they had to suppress certain angles, right? You know, there was a...
The Tucker Carlson Show
Matt Taibbi: All the Top Secret Information Trump Is Releasing & What He Should Declassify Next
Politico story about some people who were told to stay away from the Hunter Biden laptop story.
The Tucker Carlson Show
Matt Taibbi: All the Top Secret Information Trump Is Releasing & What He Should Declassify Next
Right, exactly. And my first question is, why didn't you say that when it happened? But I guess people have jobs, right? So that's a thing. But there are going to be a lot more of those. I mean, there are already kind of whispers going around. But Because people are going to learn that institutions they believed in their whole lives were fraudulent, that they lied to them about important things.
The Tucker Carlson Show
Matt Taibbi: All the Top Secret Information Trump Is Releasing & What He Should Declassify Next
And it's going to be difficult at first, especially since there are not solid new institutions in place to replace them. You know, it's one thing if you're taking down the CIA in the 70s and there's a supposedly reformed CIA there, right? This is different. The media is going to have to rebuild itself from the ground up.
The Tucker Carlson Show
Matt Taibbi: All the Top Secret Information Trump Is Releasing & What He Should Declassify Next
I think it's already doing great, but it doesn't have that look for a lot of people, right? No, that's right. It looks very different, for sure. And so, you know, it's going to be, I think that's a good point. It's a transitional period for people.
The Tucker Carlson Show
Matt Taibbi: All the Top Secret Information Trump Is Releasing & What He Should Declassify Next
Like, you know, you've got a lot to lose. Absolutely. Yeah. Yeah. And people in the intelligence agencies whose names are not known to the public, they're about to be. Exactly. And, you know, we don't know what that's going to result in. Right. what impact that's going to have.
The Tucker Carlson Show
Matt Taibbi: All the Top Secret Information Trump Is Releasing & What He Should Declassify Next
Because now, once the pardon's delivered, the person can't plead the fifth. If they're brought before a grand jury, they can't take the fifth anymore. If they're brought before a congressional committee, they can't evoke their right against self-incrimination. So they have to say something.
The Tucker Carlson Show
Matt Taibbi: All the Top Secret Information Trump Is Releasing & What He Should Declassify Next
Really? Yes.
The Tucker Carlson Show
Matt Taibbi: All the Top Secret Information Trump Is Releasing & What He Should Declassify Next
Yeah. Or to keep the public's attention elsewhere. That's what I mean. What possible reason would there be to do this? You're not really going to make any military gains by doing this. So, you're doing it either to provoke the other side or to create a headline. The headline, I don't think it gets you anything. So, what were they doing? And, you know, if that's what you're saying, there were...
The Tucker Carlson Show
Matt Taibbi: All the Top Secret Information Trump Is Releasing & What He Should Declassify Next
fiddling with regime change in the interim. Yeah, I think that was a fear that a lot of people had. I didn't think that, frankly, that Trump would become president. I thought, you know, for a variety of different reasons, I don't know exactly what could have happened to stop that, but... It was hard for me to accept that it did happen.
The Tucker Carlson Show
Matt Taibbi: All the Top Secret Information Trump Is Releasing & What He Should Declassify Next
It does, but I think the moment has passed for the real, like there was a moment where They could have installed, you know, a European-style regime to stop misinformation. This is the new trend, right? Remember the hurricanes happened and immediately FEMA's talking about setting up an anti-misinformation center, right? It just happened in California.
The Tucker Carlson Show
Matt Taibbi: All the Top Secret Information Trump Is Releasing & What He Should Declassify Next
And this is what's so interesting, because I've been talking to criminal defense attorneys, people who are former Senate investigators, some current Senate investigators, and And they all kind of said the same thing. It's so illogical to give somebody a pardon if you're trying to cover up things that the only reason you would really do it is if there's very serious crimes involved, right?
The Tucker Carlson Show
Matt Taibbi: All the Top Secret Information Trump Is Releasing & What He Should Declassify Next
Right. I mean, the fact that Gavin Newsom had time to try to come up with a state bureau for protecting my reputation. But they could really have done that. They could have basically put a net over everything.
The Tucker Carlson Show
Matt Taibbi: All the Top Secret Information Trump Is Releasing & What He Should Declassify Next
I mean, that's the thing that's scary about the European situation is they already have that massive infrastructure in place to completely control the flow of information, what people see, what people don't see. They can punish people who step out of line. And we were this far away from being part of
The Tucker Carlson Show
Matt Taibbi: All the Top Secret Information Trump Is Releasing & What He Should Declassify Next
something like that and if they were going to do that if they had done that and i think there there was probably some thinking that that would have been accomplished by 2024 if you go back and look at some of the european union's papers on the subject they were anticipating that we were
The Tucker Carlson Show
Matt Taibbi: All the Top Secret Information Trump Is Releasing & What He Should Declassify Next
going to be signatories to certain agreements, like the code of practice on disinformation, that we would have our own version by now. If they had done that, then none of this would be possible. You know, all these independent outlets, they could scream to high heavens, but no one would see it. It would be like, you know... No, it's totally right. Right.
The Tucker Carlson Show
Matt Taibbi: All the Top Secret Information Trump Is Releasing & What He Should Declassify Next
I mean, you know this because when you were doing shows about COVID, well, now we can look behind the scenes and see that the White House was demanding that Facebook... dial it down, they turned it down to 50%. I mean, that's in print. What did you think when you saw that, by the way?
The Tucker Carlson Show
Matt Taibbi: All the Top Secret Information Trump Is Releasing & What He Should Declassify Next
No, but the fact that the mechanics, they were trying to install the mechanisms by which all this stuff would have been locked down. And we saw during the COVID period how effective it was. I mean, look, the new head of the NIH, Jay Bhattacharya- We mostly didn't hear about his research, right?
The Tucker Carlson Show
Matt Taibbi: All the Top Secret Information Trump Is Releasing & What He Should Declassify Next
He's like the sweetest guy in the world. Yeah, no, absolutely.
The Tucker Carlson Show
Matt Taibbi: All the Top Secret Information Trump Is Releasing & What He Should Declassify Next
Yeah, I know. Isn't that amazing? I'm kidding! Yeah. He goes from being censored to being the head of NIH. It's an amazing transition, but the thing that's so extraordinary about it is America would have had a completely different idea about lockdowns if they had understood...
The Tucker Carlson Show
Matt Taibbi: All the Top Secret Information Trump Is Releasing & What He Should Declassify Next
how infectious the disease was, how fruitless it was to try to physically prevent people from, you know, getting infected, and how unlikely that was to succeed, and how, you know, compared to all the other negatives that could have happened from keeping people at home and everything like that, like, they wouldn't have made that decision going forward, but they were able to effectively suppress
The Tucker Carlson Show
Matt Taibbi: All the Top Secret Information Trump Is Releasing & What He Should Declassify Next
So that's a red flag for us. When we see somebody getting a pardon, we think... Well, why would they do that unless there's something really bad there, right? So either it's a mistake where they just stupidly made it easier for everybody to investigate or there's something we don't know about that is interesting.
The Tucker Carlson Show
Matt Taibbi: All the Top Secret Information Trump Is Releasing & What He Should Declassify Next
that point of view which is really scary right i mean there was real research out there and most people didn't see it i didn't see it until a year and a half later no i know right no so uh and that's that's what could happen that's what could have happened with all this stuff so but i know that you without getting too specific but you're you know you're in touch with doctors like on a personal level like you know doctors
The Tucker Carlson Show
Matt Taibbi: All the Top Secret Information Trump Is Releasing & What He Should Declassify Next
Well, I mean, I know some ER doctors as well, and they had to go looking for information. And it was very hard to find. And, you know, to this day, if you go on Google and you go looking for things, you're not likely to find anything.
The Tucker Carlson Show
Matt Taibbi: All the Top Secret Information Trump Is Releasing & What He Should Declassify Next
the the sort of counter-narrative thing easily uh and i think for a lot of doctors during that period it was frustrating because um even peer-reviewed research was not always easy to find uh for them so yeah uh during that period it affected the whole question of like
The Tucker Carlson Show
Matt Taibbi: All the Top Secret Information Trump Is Releasing & What He Should Declassify Next
experts who talked to the press like they weren't always informed about what was going on or or about different studies that have been done and yeah we had a completely different idea about the about the pandemic than maybe we should have but the point being is not so much that that was destructive in itself though i think it was
The Tucker Carlson Show
Matt Taibbi: All the Top Secret Information Trump Is Releasing & What He Should Declassify Next
but that it was a proof of concept of something that was to come, you know?
The Tucker Carlson Show
Matt Taibbi: All the Top Secret Information Trump Is Releasing & What He Should Declassify Next
I don't know. I mean, that's, that's what we have to, that's why these documents will be so fascinating to get. Do you think that we'll ever get to that?
The Tucker Carlson Show
Matt Taibbi: All the Top Secret Information Trump Is Releasing & What He Should Declassify Next
We may not know some of the higher level thinking about things. I mean, you're probably not going to get a document that says, look, it's really important that we do this because if we really stress masking, then we'll have established the precedent of that visible symbols of conformity are a positive goal for an authoritarian regime.
The Tucker Carlson Show
Matt Taibbi: All the Top Secret Information Trump Is Releasing & What He Should Declassify Next
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 –
The Tucker Carlson Show
Matt Taibbi: All the Top Secret Information Trump Is Releasing & What He Should Declassify Next
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.
The Tucker Carlson Show
Matt Taibbi: All the Top Secret Information Trump Is Releasing & What He Should Declassify Next
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.
The Tucker Carlson Show
Matt Taibbi: All the Top Secret Information Trump Is Releasing & What He Should Declassify Next
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...
The Tucker Carlson Show
Matt Taibbi: All the Top Secret Information Trump Is Releasing & What He Should Declassify Next
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?
The Tucker Carlson Show
Matt Taibbi: All the Top Secret Information Trump Is Releasing & What He Should Declassify Next
It's not only morally incriminating, it's legally incriminating, as the Department of Justice itself said in a memo, I think, on one of the J6 cases, it said, this does not unring the bell of conviction if you get a pardon going forward. So you're making an admission if you accept a pardon. So, yeah, I wouldn't accept one if I were totally innocent. Of course.
The Tucker Carlson Show
Matt Taibbi: All the Top Secret Information Trump Is Releasing & What He Should Declassify Next
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.
The Tucker Carlson Show
Matt Taibbi: All the Top Secret Information Trump Is Releasing & What He Should Declassify Next
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.
The Tucker Carlson Show
Matt Taibbi: All the Top Secret Information Trump Is Releasing & What He Should Declassify Next
Then that itself, it's an extraordinary scandal just by itself, right?
The Tucker Carlson Show
Matt Taibbi: All the Top Secret Information Trump Is Releasing & What He Should Declassify Next
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.
The Tucker Carlson Show
Matt Taibbi: All the Top Secret Information Trump Is Releasing & What He Should Declassify Next
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.
The Tucker Carlson Show
Matt Taibbi: All the Top Secret Information Trump Is Releasing & What He Should Declassify Next
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.
The Tucker Carlson Show
Matt Taibbi: All the Top Secret Information Trump Is Releasing & What He Should Declassify Next
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.
The Tucker Carlson Show
Matt Taibbi: All the Top Secret Information Trump Is Releasing & What He Should Declassify Next
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.
The Tucker Carlson Show
Matt Taibbi: All the Top Secret Information Trump Is Releasing & What He Should Declassify Next
Yeah, and also I wouldn't accept one if I had something to hide because now, you know, if I'm dragged before a congressional committee or especially a grand jury investigation, now I can't tap out and say, yeah, I'm sorry, I'm going to take the fifth on that. That's fascinating. Right? So the whole thing is really illogical. I think it was more meant to be a symbolic gesture.
The Tucker Carlson Show
Matt Taibbi: All the Top Secret Information Trump Is Releasing & What He Should Declassify Next
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.
The Tucker Carlson Show
Matt Taibbi: All the Top Secret Information Trump Is Releasing & What He Should Declassify Next
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 Tucker Carlson Show
Matt Taibbi: All the Top Secret Information Trump Is Releasing & What He Should Declassify Next
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.
The Tucker Carlson Show
Matt Taibbi: All the Top Secret Information Trump Is Releasing & What He Should Declassify Next
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.
The Tucker Carlson Show
Matt Taibbi: All the Top Secret Information Trump Is Releasing & What He Should Declassify Next
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.
The Tucker Carlson Show
Matt Taibbi: All the Top Secret Information Trump Is Releasing & What He Should Declassify Next
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.
The Tucker Carlson Show
Matt Taibbi: All the Top Secret Information Trump Is Releasing & What He Should Declassify Next
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.
The Tucker Carlson Show
Matt Taibbi: All the Top Secret Information Trump Is Releasing & What He Should Declassify Next
You have to retell the whole thing so that they don't have to go looking for another story to find out what this means. Exactly. And one of the subtle little changes that happened to the media business in the last eight years is they stopped doing that. They would tell you... That's fascinating. Right?
The Tucker Carlson Show
Matt Taibbi: All the Top Secret Information Trump Is Releasing & What He Should Declassify Next
They would tell you the thing that happened that day, and they wouldn't tell you all this backstory that you needed to know to really understand... What you were reading. And so, yeah, I think we're going to have the opportunity now to see these things laid out in full and, you know, in hindsight, and that's hopefully going to be able to persuade people who who didn't see it the first time.
The Tucker Carlson Show
Matt Taibbi: All the Top Secret Information Trump Is Releasing & What He Should Declassify Next
But isn't it true?
The Tucker Carlson Show
Matt Taibbi: All the Top Secret Information Trump Is Releasing & What He Should Declassify Next
Even simple things like when, you know, if Anthony Fauci comes out and says, well, masks are important because of X, well, you have to put in the timeline of what he originally said about that. Yes. Or, you know, Joe Biden saying, you know, we have to...
The Tucker Carlson Show
Matt Taibbi: All the Top Secret Information Trump Is Releasing & What He Should Declassify Next
And this is really, I think, speaks to the thinking of the Biden administration about so many things, right? They were so driven by optics with Trump that they did a lot of things that were incredibly stupid. So they want to portray him as vengeful and out to get people. And the pardons are a good way to do that.
The Tucker Carlson Show
Matt Taibbi: All the Top Secret Information Trump Is Releasing & What He Should Declassify Next
you correct misinformation because they're killing people and you got to point out that they were wrong about things themselves that the the or that the biden administration itself was uh de-amplified uh by by some of these um platforms accidentally but they were right um but yeah they just left out a lot of backstory and we have to get back into the the business of telling people the whole story from the beginning
The Tucker Carlson Show
Matt Taibbi: All the Top Secret Information Trump Is Releasing & What He Should Declassify Next
Okay, so Russiagate. Russiagate, I mean, and that's one of the reasons why the pardon of Adam Schiff is kind of interesting, because he's a central figure of both the J6 committee, but also the Russiagate story. And, you know, he was somebody who was giving interviews saying that preemptive pardons should never be given, but Whatever. Yeah, Russiagate is a thing.
The Tucker Carlson Show
Matt Taibbi: All the Top Secret Information Trump Is Releasing & What He Should Declassify Next
Then there's the whole question of lawfare, right? And the effort to make sure that Biden faced no opposition at all in his reelection campaign. And here I'm not just talking about, you know, Donald Trump and the lawsuit to prevent him from being on the ballot because of the 14th Amendment and all that.
The Tucker Carlson Show
Matt Taibbi: All the Top Secret Information Trump Is Releasing & What He Should Declassify Next
this extends to even to groups like no labels or the green party or dean phillips or marianne williamson or cornell west there was an extraordinary calculated effort to prevent competition now yes that's not necessarily illegal parties can do whatever they want uh internally But it's still fascinating that there had to have been some kind of coordinated campaign.
The Tucker Carlson Show
Matt Taibbi: All the Top Secret Information Trump Is Releasing & What He Should Declassify Next
If there's any communication between the White House, say, and the groups that were suing, you know, no labels or RFK or, you know, issuing challenges, no labels went through this process.
The Tucker Carlson Show
Matt Taibbi: All the Top Secret Information Trump Is Releasing & What He Should Declassify Next
extraordinary incident where somebody created a dummy no-label site and it had a big picture of Donald Trump on it so they would try to associate no labels with Trump and there's a lawsuit going on about it right now. What was the real origin of that? Who financed that whole thing? I think there are a lot of stories about Little tiny dirty tricks that are going to be coming out.
The Tucker Carlson Show
Matt Taibbi: All the Top Secret Information Trump Is Releasing & What He Should Declassify Next
Right. And how is that done? How was the coordination managed with these people? sort of legal action committees that were mass filing suits about everything from, you know, the ballot access issue to, there were clan act suits that were filed against people. I mean, did that have any connection to people who were actually in office?
The Tucker Carlson Show
Matt Taibbi: All the Top Secret Information Trump Is Releasing & What He Should Declassify Next
I mean, if you're aiming for that audience, but it had the negative effect of opening all these investigations up, it seems to me.
The Tucker Carlson Show
Matt Taibbi: All the Top Secret Information Trump Is Releasing & What He Should Declassify Next
If it did, you know, then we have another corruption situation involved. But yeah, the larger question of who was managing all this stuff Because it clearly wasn't Joe Biden. Right. Who runs the country? Who runs the country? In a democracy, we have a right to know. Right.
The Tucker Carlson Show
Matt Taibbi: All the Top Secret Information Trump Is Releasing & What He Should Declassify Next
Our mutual friend, Walter Kern, talked about this, saying that this was the first time that we had a president that had a sign on his desk basically that said, the buck does not stop. here, right? We don't know where the buck stopped during this period. And so that's a fascinating question. But the whole wargaming of the last election season, there are a lot of stories.
The Tucker Carlson Show
Matt Taibbi: All the Top Secret Information Trump Is Releasing & What He Should Declassify Next
People don't even remember this. New Hampshire held a primary, right? People went and they voted in the New Hampshire primary. And then the results were canceled and they held a second nominating event on a Saturday night, months later, where a bunch of officials got together and they just decided to allocate the delegates together.
The Tucker Carlson Show
Matt Taibbi: All the Top Secret Information Trump Is Releasing & What He Should Declassify Next
Like, I'd never heard of that before, just canceling an election and just sort of redoing it in a closed meeting. Like, how does that happen? And just turning the spoils over to somebody else? I mean, I think it ended up mostly... having the same result, but for some reason they held the second contest. It's just very strange, you know, why that happened.
The Tucker Carlson Show
Matt Taibbi: All the Top Secret Information Trump Is Releasing & What He Should Declassify Next
So that we got to get into, you know, then there's the whole question of the investigation of the Trump assassination incidents. we heard nothing about that it was the most extraordinary news story that i've ever i mean apart from the disappearing president and the mysterious nomination and covet uh you know presidential candidate and ex-president gets shot
The Tucker Carlson Show
Matt Taibbi: All the Top Secret Information Trump Is Releasing & What He Should Declassify Next
And the story's dead within like 48 hours. And all you read in the news from the FBI, there are these comments saying that they don't have any motive evidence. We've done 100 interviews, but we don't know anything about why this happened or, you know. What was going on there? Do you believe that? I have a very hard time believing that there's nothing interesting.
The Tucker Carlson Show
Matt Taibbi: All the Top Secret Information Trump Is Releasing & What He Should Declassify Next
So I asked a lot of people, why did they do this? Like, what's the point? And one of the theories was that, that this is messaging. Yes. That they were trying to create a headline. And there were lots of headlines instantaneously. If you saw them, they all basically said the same thing. Like, you know, to ward off future vindictive retaliatory acts by the Trump administration, you know.
The Tucker Carlson Show
Matt Taibbi: All the Top Secret Information Trump Is Releasing & What He Should Declassify Next
Right.
The Tucker Carlson Show
Matt Taibbi: All the Top Secret Information Trump Is Releasing & What He Should Declassify Next
Right. It's like your first joint. Your first joint. Yeah. And then the second one, I mean, you know, the Ryan Routh thing, that's not weird at all. Like... I just flew into Florida last night. I don't think I could have gotten gotten my hands on, you know, a Chinese made SKS semi-automatic rifle without help. I mean, I don't know. That's being a little conspiratorial.
The Tucker Carlson Show
Matt Taibbi: All the Top Secret Information Trump Is Releasing & What He Should Declassify Next
So I've talked to some of them, and I've heard a lot of anger about this, that the And I think this is the impetus for these investigations. I think probably the second attempt was the last straw for some of the people on his staff. And it's part of the reason why I think... They're going to be very public about this. It can't come too soon, I really think.
The Tucker Carlson Show
Matt Taibbi: All the Top Secret Information Trump Is Releasing & What He Should Declassify Next
They're very mad about it. And then, sorry, just to finish off the censorship thing, that is going to be a major investigation. There's at least two that I know of that are already underway. You know, the government affair, the Rand Paul's committee, the government oversight committee in the Senate,
The Tucker Carlson Show
Matt Taibbi: All the Top Secret Information Trump Is Releasing & What He Should Declassify Next
They really want to do a big thing, like a government files type of thing, where it would be like the Twitter files, but for the whole federal government, basically. And I think there are so many different wings of the government that were involved there. in what we got to see in the Twitter files, which, you know, to follow the example of what I just said, I have to repeat what this is.
The Tucker Carlson Show
Matt Taibbi: All the Top Secret Information Trump Is Releasing & What He Should Declassify Next
When Elon Musk bought Twitter, he opened up Twitter, Twitter's internal correspondence, and we got to see that there was this big bureaucracy with government pressuring platforms like Twitter and Facebook to censor content. But we only got to see a little bit of it. And I think what's going to come out is...
The Tucker Carlson Show
Matt Taibbi: All the Top Secret Information Trump Is Releasing & What He Should Declassify Next
how extensive it really was, what agencies were really involved in it, how many people were committed to that effort. Also, were we negotiating with the European Union to be part of the Digital Services Act? Um, was the state department doing that? Uh, you know, I think, so there's going to be a big followed it.
The Tucker Carlson Show
Matt Taibbi: All the Top Secret Information Trump Is Releasing & What He Should Declassify Next
Biden issues pardons. It's always after the comma, right? That's one theory. The other theory is that in the last days of a presidential administration, it gets pretty chaotic in the White House and people who want things and they will come in and there'll be a hurried frenzy to put stuff on paper. And that's why there are unprecedented things in these pardons. For instance, the J6 pardons,
The Tucker Carlson Show
Matt Taibbi: All the Top Secret Information Trump Is Releasing & What He Should Declassify Next
The digital services act is like the, it's like the wet dream of every sensor in the world, right? Basically it mandates that every, uh, internet platform, uh,
The Tucker Carlson Show
Matt Taibbi: All the Top Secret Information Trump Is Releasing & What He Should Declassify Next
abide by the recommendations of these people called trusted flaggers who are basically licensed content reviewers who look on at things on social media and if they see a narrative that they don't like um they will elevate it to the platform if the platform does not abide by the recommendations they get crippling enormous fines and this is one of the reasons why there was a
The Tucker Carlson Show
Matt Taibbi: All the Top Secret Information Trump Is Releasing & What He Should Declassify Next
dispute between Elon Musk and Europe about whether or not he was following these rules closely enough. This just came into effect last year, but it's an extremely effective way to regulate speech because it doesn't require the government to actually do it. It's the private platform that actually commits the censorship. And this third-party methodology, which is
The Tucker Carlson Show
Matt Taibbi: All the Top Secret Information Trump Is Releasing & What He Should Declassify Next
specifically by the way what uh what donald trump referenced in his free speech executive order we we don't want that to happen we're gonna not allow that uh they already have the full-blown death star version in europe of that right and so the investigation here in the united states is going to basically uncover how far along were we into developing the same kind of thing
The Tucker Carlson Show
Matt Taibbi: All the Top Secret Information Trump Is Releasing & What He Should Declassify Next
The Twitter file suggested that we were already doing it informally and illegally, probably, but we want to find out exactly. With Snopes and all the other fact-checkers? Yes, all the fact-checking organizations, right? You know, sometimes that was done informally, by inference. Or it was done through NGOs that made recommendations.
The Tucker Carlson Show
Matt Taibbi: All the Top Secret Information Trump Is Releasing & What He Should Declassify Next
But I think the really dangerous stuff is when you had State Department agencies like the Global Engagement Center or the FBI's Foreign Influence Task Force making direct recommendations to these platforms, or the White House in your case. Yeah, we're going to find out all of these communications, not just little pieces of them.
The Tucker Carlson Show
Matt Taibbi: All the Top Secret Information Trump Is Releasing & What He Should Declassify Next
Yeah, I mean, Wikipedia has a very advanced system for regulating what gets into Wikipedia pages. If it's not a certain kind of source, it doesn't get on there. There was a bizarre incident last year where the real clear politics... You know, polling average, which is a tool that reporters have been using for almost two decades.
The Tucker Carlson Show
Matt Taibbi: All the Top Secret Information Trump Is Releasing & What He Should Declassify Next
They kind of left it off their their page of polling average sites because they didn't like the page, I guess. I don't know. But yeah, I think we have to get some clarity about what happened there. Obviously, the former head of Wikipedia is now in a senior position in NPR. The deputy or the COO... One government media job to another. Yeah, exactly.
The Tucker Carlson Show
Matt Taibbi: All the Top Secret Information Trump Is Releasing & What He Should Declassify Next
And the COO of NPR is the former head of this thing called the Aspen Commission on Information Disorder, which is one of the groups that we investigated in the Twitter files. It was sort of heavily into this whole... Content moderation questions. So the merging of state media with platforms and regulation of sourcing and all that stuff, that's probably going to come out too.
The Tucker Carlson Show
Matt Taibbi: All the Top Secret Information Trump Is Releasing & What He Should Declassify Next
Right, yeah, exactly, yeah. Walter Pincus, right?
The Tucker Carlson Show
Matt Taibbi: All the Top Secret Information Trump Is Releasing & What He Should Declassify Next
Isaacson, sorry.
The Tucker Carlson Show
Matt Taibbi: All the Top Secret Information Trump Is Releasing & What He Should Declassify Next
Can you cut that? Sorry.
The Tucker Carlson Show
Matt Taibbi: All the Top Secret Information Trump Is Releasing & What He Should Declassify Next
Yeah, no, it is weird. The Aspen Institute, I mean, they played a very strange role in the whole censorship story, but yeah. Yeah.
The Tucker Carlson Show
Matt Taibbi: All the Top Secret Information Trump Is Releasing & What He Should Declassify Next
This has never happened before where you give a pardon to a category of unnamed people, right? It says to the members of the committee, to the Capitol Police officers who testified, to the staff, but it doesn't delineate the names of the people who are pardoned. So now, if you want to invoke your pardon, you actually have to go over a test to prove that you're actually part of that category.
The Tucker Carlson Show
Matt Taibbi: All the Top Secret Information Trump Is Releasing & What He Should Declassify Next
They're going to struggle, I think, to get audience back. You already see that the strategy of some of them is to try to pander to the audiences that they betrayed previously. funny episode over last weekend where NBC and Saturday Night Live, you know, they finally did a joke picking on Rachel Maddow.
The Tucker Carlson Show
Matt Taibbi: All the Top Secret Information Trump Is Releasing & What He Should Declassify Next
It wasn't particularly funny, but it was a signal that, OK, we're going to suck up to this group now. Right. As opposed to the other one, which is so loathsome. Right. And that was Rachel Maddow was not the core.
The Tucker Carlson Show
Matt Taibbi: All the Top Secret Information Trump Is Releasing & What He Should Declassify Next
Of course. And my only point is that... just by changing the direction of their BS, they're not going to win back audience, right? And this is something that I've noticed since I've been in the business. People in media continually underestimate audiences. They think that they're much stupider than they really are.
The Tucker Carlson Show
Matt Taibbi: All the Top Secret Information Trump Is Releasing & What He Should Declassify Next
I remember when I covered Wall Street, I was constantly told that you can't do these big stories on credit default swaps and all these other things because audiences don't want to hear about it. They'll turn the page. But it's not true. People have a great hunger to find out things and they have... a much stronger ability to understand things than most media people imagine.
The Tucker Carlson Show
Matt Taibbi: All the Top Secret Information Trump Is Releasing & What He Should Declassify Next
And so when they do these sort of transparent exercises in lying and PR and political propaganda, and they think that people won't notice, it makes it worse. The numbers are going to go down rather than up when they start. Totally. Don't you think?
The Tucker Carlson Show
Matt Taibbi: All the Top Secret Information Trump Is Releasing & What He Should Declassify Next
Absolutely. You think so? Oh, 100%. I think that. I think that especially when you're talking about interventionist military policies, whether or not they've been effective. Try pitching stories to one of the big newspapers about... You know, maybe some kind of downside to an invasion or an occupation or the expansion of, you know, a thousand military bases in the Middle East or whatever it is.
The Tucker Carlson Show
Matt Taibbi: All the Top Secret Information Trump Is Releasing & What He Should Declassify Next
Drone warfare, like, you know, you're going to have a hard time selling that one, right?
The Tucker Carlson Show
Matt Taibbi: All the Top Secret Information Trump Is Releasing & What He Should Declassify Next
That I testified before the committee. Does that mean that the committee called you? That you talked to a staffer once? Or does that mean you actually sat in front of the hall and testified? It's very weird. And the only explanation that I could come up with from people is that they were in a hurry. They didn't have all the names.
The Tucker Carlson Show
Matt Taibbi: All the Top Secret Information Trump Is Releasing & What He Should Declassify Next
Yeah, and it's worse in TV than it is in print, but it shouldn't be, right? And I got the same thing. I mean, not so much at Rolling Stone, but I remember we did one story where our plan was to do one story on what caused the financial crisis. And we got such an overwhelming response because it wasn't anywhere. People could not read anywhere.
The Tucker Carlson Show
Matt Taibbi: All the Top Secret Information Trump Is Releasing & What He Should Declassify Next
Right, but it wasn't so much what I was doing. It was just the fact of, you know, how does this work? Who was really profiting by it? What happened to the people who bought these homes? Et cetera, et cetera. Just basic questions, and people wanted to know. And as you discover, they want to know other things. Where are they spending the money that I send every year that goes to the Pentagon?
The Tucker Carlson Show
Matt Taibbi: All the Top Secret Information Trump Is Releasing & What He Should Declassify Next
That's right. Right? How does it disappear into a black hole and it's not auditable and that's okay?
The Tucker Carlson Show
Matt Taibbi: All the Top Secret Information Trump Is Releasing & What He Should Declassify Next
Right?
The Tucker Carlson Show
Matt Taibbi: All the Top Secret Information Trump Is Releasing & What He Should Declassify Next
Yeah, those were the good old days when the manias were things like the summer of the shark, right?
The Tucker Carlson Show
Matt Taibbi: All the Top Secret Information Trump Is Releasing & What He Should Declassify Next
Yeah. Why didn't we do that? Honestly. And it came as a shock to a lot of people. Like, a complete shock. Were you in the country when that happened? No, I was in Russia.
The Tucker Carlson Show
Matt Taibbi: All the Top Secret Information Trump Is Releasing & What He Should Declassify Next
That's a terrifying feeling, right? You got to cover something that you have no background in.
The Tucker Carlson Show
Matt Taibbi: All the Top Secret Information Trump Is Releasing & What He Should Declassify Next
Right.
The Tucker Carlson Show
Matt Taibbi: All the Top Secret Information Trump Is Releasing & What He Should Declassify Next
Yeah.
The Tucker Carlson Show
Matt Taibbi: All the Top Secret Information Trump Is Releasing & What He Should Declassify Next
Right, right. And, you know, there are a lot of people who didn't ask basic questions before. In the last eight years. I've noticed.
The Tucker Carlson Show
Matt Taibbi: All the Top Secret Information Trump Is Releasing & What He Should Declassify Next
Well, it becomes overwhelming after a while. That's right. I mean, you know, the 50th time they tell you that democracy is going to end in 10 minutes or, you know, you're going to die if you don't, you know, take this medicine or whatever it is or, you know, your kids are going to die. Yeah. It emotionally, it wears on people and it becomes very difficult.
The Tucker Carlson Show
Matt Taibbi: All the Top Secret Information Trump Is Releasing & What He Should Declassify Next
I mean, I think this was a factor in, it was a factor in a lot of the corruption stories because the audiences were not, they were not going to be receptive to alternative versions of what they had just heard because it was such an emotionally wrenching experience for them. So it's going to take a while for people to digest a lot of these things.
The Tucker Carlson Show
Matt Taibbi: All the Top Secret Information Trump Is Releasing & What He Should Declassify Next
I think it's happening slowly, but what's going to be interesting about this period is that there's going to be this avalanche of primary material that's going to come out. And I'm fascinated. I can't wait. You're going to need to hire more staff to keep up with it all. Yeah, probably that's the case. And it's going to be a fun time for journalists like me.
The Tucker Carlson Show
Matt Taibbi: All the Top Secret Information Trump Is Releasing & What He Should Declassify Next
But just as a citizen, I can't wait to read it, you know? So can I ask one last question?
The Tucker Carlson Show
Matt Taibbi: All the Top Secret Information Trump Is Releasing & What He Should Declassify Next
I mean, I think the thing that happened last year with that frenzied week in July with Biden and, you know, and the lying about the poll numbers and the phony, the clearly planted stories about Nancy Pelosi. Lying about the poll numbers?
The Tucker Carlson Show
Matt Taibbi: All the Top Secret Information Trump Is Releasing & What He Should Declassify Next
Look, there were stories that Biden was ahead in the polls that came out as they were telling us that he had to drop out because the poll numbers were so dire. NPR did a story like virtually, I believe it was a couple of days after the debate. I'll have to go back and look at this. But there were stories that he was doing fine in the polls. And of course, we later found out from...
The Tucker Carlson Show
Matt Taibbi: All the Top Secret Information Trump Is Releasing & What He Should Declassify Next
Biden staffers that they said they never had... I'm sorry, that was about Kamala. They never had internal polling showing Kamala ahead, even though there were scads of stories telling us the opposite, which is... For me, the story that I just can't get past is what happened in that one week. And how did they manufacture that whole thing without anybody showing any kind of curiosity about it?
The Tucker Carlson Show
Matt Taibbi: All the Top Secret Information Trump Is Releasing & What He Should Declassify Next
No, it is absolutely crazy. And if I were some of those people, I'd be offended. Yes. Especially the people who testified and who didn't.
The Tucker Carlson Show
Matt Taibbi: All the Top Secret Information Trump Is Releasing & What He Should Declassify Next
You know, had the media been so completely paper-trained by that moment that they... I guess so, right? But...
The Tucker Carlson Show
Matt Taibbi: All the Top Secret Information Trump Is Releasing & What He Should Declassify Next
I never understood that. You know, like what you're going to agree with a. a bunch of people on everything that they do and you're going to support that it's one thing for politicians to act that way but i cannot understand it an immediate person you think that's a defining fact of like our life is this commitment to party
The Tucker Carlson Show
Matt Taibbi: All the Top Secret Information Trump Is Releasing & What He Should Declassify Next
Well, right now we have the situation where the only versions of things that you get are essentially party explanations. And that's why it's so interesting that there's this sort of intermediate podcast space where people are exploring things from all different directions. And that's where all the people are going. I don't think it's a coincidence. Can that last? I think it can.
The Tucker Carlson Show
Matt Taibbi: All the Top Secret Information Trump Is Releasing & What He Should Declassify Next
I think what's going to happen is you're going to have... New institutions that are built up around that, that are just going to find new ways to... And you can't have, as long as that lasts, you can't have authoritarian rule. Right. Oh, yeah. And that was proven. I mean, look, the handful of... podcasts that a lot of people chuckled about had a huge impact in the last election.
The Tucker Carlson Show
Matt Taibbi: All the Top Secret Information Trump Is Releasing & What He Should Declassify Next
uh lie under oath yes for instance right because they're all named um yeah all the police officers who testified uh to the committee now what if they're only really trying to protect a couple of them and there are some very conspicuous names i think we know who they are right yeah exactly the ones they're trying to protect right but what if you're one of the other ones
The Tucker Carlson Show
Matt Taibbi: All the Top Secret Information Trump Is Releasing & What He Should Declassify Next
And you know what? Shame on those media people who laugh at those podcasts because among other things, they had lower numbers than a lot of those podcasts, like significantly lower. Most of them, yeah. Right? And, you know, they're snobs about it. They say, oh, well, that's, you know, we have a better quality of audience. No, you just are not convincing.
The Tucker Carlson Show
Matt Taibbi: All the Top Secret Information Trump Is Releasing & What He Should Declassify Next
Right. Yeah. And they're more willing and partly because they watch shows like Joe Rogan, which ask them to entertain multiple points of view on things. Right. That's kind of the whole idea. You'll see somebody. There are lots of people who go on the Rogan show that I disagree with. Me too. But I hear it. you know? Um, and that's the whole point, right?
The Tucker Carlson Show
Matt Taibbi: All the Top Secret Information Trump Is Releasing & What He Should Declassify Next
Is you get to hear different points of view and that's been excluded from this other form of media, this kind of bifurcated red, blue landscape, um, which doesn't work anymore and is in collapse. But, um, And I just think that this period now, it's going to be great for launching this new media that's necessary because they're going to have all this material to work with.
The Tucker Carlson Show
Matt Taibbi: All the Top Secret Information Trump Is Releasing & What He Should Declassify Next
And because it's going to be all documents, people are going to trust it, right? In the same way that they trusted the Twitter files, I didn't have anything to say about it. I just sort of put it out there. Right. all these independent organs are going to look at these reams of material and they're going to discuss it and pass it around.
The Tucker Carlson Show
Matt Taibbi: All the Top Secret Information Trump Is Releasing & What He Should Declassify Next
And that's going to be how the public is educated, which is great. I love it. It's the best. Right?
The Tucker Carlson Show
Matt Taibbi: All the Top Secret Information Trump Is Releasing & What He Should Declassify Next
Who just gave some testimony.
The Tucker Carlson Show
Matt Taibbi: All the Top Secret Information Trump Is Releasing & What He Should Declassify Next
I think that's probably the case. Yeah. I mean, especially if you're under oath and you're law enforcement. enforcement officer. I mean, it's a very serious thing to lie in those situations. And, you know, there are a couple of places in the testimony where it doesn't look good for some of the people who testified.
The Tucker Carlson Show
Matt Taibbi: All the Top Secret Information Trump Is Releasing & What He Should Declassify Next
But for the vast majority of them, I would take it as a grievous insult to be given that pardon and especially to not be named. That's what's so weird about it.
The Tucker Carlson Show
Matt Taibbi: All the Top Secret Information Trump Is Releasing & What He Should Declassify Next
Well, with Fauci specifically, the one thing that comes to mind immediately is perjury. Yes. Because he's been accused of that essentially already by the House committee. Lying under oath to the Congress. Lying under oath to the Congress.
The Tucker Carlson Show
Matt Taibbi: All the Top Secret Information Trump Is Releasing & What He Should Declassify Next
I think we will. I think we're heading into a golden age for investigative journalism. I think this is after eight years of crazy misleading news stories and dead ends and unanswered questions and fake news, you know, ranging from Russiagate to Nord Stream to to the COVID origins where we were actively kept away from one side of that story for years.
The Tucker Carlson Show
Matt Taibbi: All the Top Secret Information Trump Is Releasing & What He Should Declassify Next
I think we're going to find out a lot of this stuff. There are investigations already underway, document hunts going on all over the place. There are reports that have been commissioned to look into a lot of these questions, and they're going to be staffed up with a lot of money and a lot of personnel.
The Tucker Carlson Show
Matt Taibbi: All the Top Secret Information Trump Is Releasing & What He Should Declassify Next
And it's just an unprecedented situation where, for instance, the DHS or the FBI or the DOJ would be in sync with congressional investigators to the point where they're not going to have to issue subpoenas for a lot of this stuff. They're just going to sit down and say, here's a list of the documents we want to find. And I think that they're going to have that collaborative arrangement.
The Tucker Carlson Show
Matt Taibbi: All the Top Secret Information Trump Is Releasing & What He Should Declassify Next
It's incredible.
The Tucker Carlson Show
Matt Taibbi: All the Top Secret Information Trump Is Releasing & What He Should Declassify Next
Well, they should be panicked because if you read the executive order on the weaponization of government, it specifically empowers the director of national intelligence to conduct a wide-ranging report into the possible misdeeds of the entire intelligence community and orders her to come up with, you know, anything negative that they can find. Holy shit. So, can you imagine? Right.
The Tucker Carlson Show
Matt Taibbi: All the Top Secret Information Trump Is Releasing & What He Should Declassify Next
in particular saying that we have never funded gain of research, that we weren't doing it during this time period, even as there are other people in the government like the deputy director of the NIH saying, yes, we were, or Ralph Baric, who was one of the scientists that
The Tucker Carlson Show
Matt Taibbi: All the Top Secret Information Trump Is Releasing & What He Should Declassify Next
I mean, that's like trying to make a list of everything. She'll be doing it from now to the end of time. But no, I mean, in perfect seriousness, this is it's setting the stage for, you know, kind of a second church committee hearings era. And that was a great moment in American history. Once every 50 years. Right.
The Tucker Carlson Show
Matt Taibbi: All the Top Secret Information Trump Is Releasing & What He Should Declassify Next
Yeah. Yeah. And really, in the mid 70s, who would have known, right, that we were doing such an incredibly wide ranging, you know, list of horrible, stupid things from, you know, trying to murder Castro with exploding seashells to spying on Martin Luther King Jr. to trying to You know, leaked news about mistresses of civil rights leaders. I mean, the list went on and on and on.
The Tucker Carlson Show
Matt Taibbi: All the Top Secret Information Trump Is Releasing & What He Should Declassify Next
And we only found out about it because they went too far. Right. And now suddenly people in the Senate had a hammer to start looking. you know, into this direction. And it all came out. Well, not all of it, but a lot of it came out.
The Tucker Carlson Show
Matt Taibbi: All the Top Secret Information Trump Is Releasing & What He Should Declassify Next
Sorry. No, it's all right. I mean, look, it's hard not to think. I never thought this way until like a year ago, maybe a year and a half ago.
The Tucker Carlson Show
Matt Taibbi: All the Top Secret Information Trump Is Releasing & What He Should Declassify Next
Of course.
The Tucker Carlson Show
Matt Taibbi: All the Top Secret Information Trump Is Releasing & What He Should Declassify Next
Yeah. I don't know why I didn't get that. It's probably just our generation that thought the schoolhouse rock thing was true. I mean, right?