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The FBI arrested a 21-year-old whom they claim is the person who leaked dozens of classified documents on the Internet showing far greater U.S. involvement in the war in Ukraine than had been previously acknowledged by the Biden administration. But it was not the FBI that hunted down and found the accused leaker, Jack Teixeira, of the Massachusetts Air National Guard. Instead, it was two newspapers – The Washington Post, which early this morning provided every possible detail about the leaker to enable the FBI to identify and find him, and then, The New York Times, which named him, outed him before the FBI could find him itself. They've now arrested him as a result of the work of those two newspapers. It was their work in conjunction with the site Bellingcat, funded by both the United States government and the EU, that enabled the FBI to find and apprehend the alleged leaker.
The idea of journalism, ostensibly, in theory, is to bring transparency to what the most secretive and powerful institutions are doing in the dark. Exactly what this leak did. Why, then, would self-proclaimed journalism outlets do the job of the FBI and hunt down the leaker and boast of the fact that they were the ones who found him even before the FBI did? Why would a 21-year-old with the National Guard, whom the BBC describes as holding the rank of airman first class, “a relatively junior” position, have access to what media outlets have been claiming are the government's most sensitive and potentially damaging secrets?
As we have been reporting and demonstrating since Trump was inaugurated, the function of the U.S. corporate media has always been to act as propagandists and messengers for the U.S. Security State. But in the Trump era, this relationship even intensified further as the CIA, FBI and Homeland Security became the most valuable allies – the leaders of the ongoing attempt to sabotage Trump and his movement.
Still, the only thing more bizarre and twisted than watching journalists turn themselves into the leading advocates for Internet censorship is watching them so eagerly and explicitly dedicate themselves to doing the work of the FBI by hunting down and exposing leakers of classified documents, handing their head on a pipe to the U.S. government. And yet that's exactly what media outlets did. We’ll examine all of the implications of that.
For now, welcome to a new episode of System Update starting right now.
There aren't many ways to define the function of a free press and what journalism is without referencing the way in which journalists are supposed to bring transparency to the most powerful institutions. Nobody needs a free press to bring to the public the messages of institutions of authority and power. They're very capable of doing that themselves. There would be no value to a free press if that's all they did. If every day you picked up the New York Times and The Washington Post and read what you, in fact, read in those newspapers, which is X, Y, and Z happened, according to government officials. That's the framework - the standard metric for how media outlets report. But if they don't expose government secrets that the government doesn't want you to know, there's really no value to a free press because it's not serving as a check and adversarial check and institutions of authority, which is the foundational reason why a free press matters.
If you read the Founders, the entire idea of checks and balances included what they called the fourth estate, which, though not part of the government, is nonetheless a crucial part of the framework to maintain a balance of power between various institutions, knowing that there are people out there who are doing journalism, who are using what was then the printing press, and now as all kinds of other technology, to check what institutions of authority are saying to you, what you can reveal, what they're trying to hide. It was one of the most crucial ways to keep these institutions of authority honest. One of the ways, arguably the only real way, that we, as journalists, now have to show the public what these institutions of power are doing in the dark is through leaks. Leaks of the things that they don't want you to see oftentimes being classified information.
Classified information is not some sacred text. Classified information is nothing more than a document or a piece of information that the government has stamped on that word “classified” or “top-secret,” because they want to make it illegal for you to learn about it. That's the effect of calling a document classified or top secret. And one of the things I learned in working with many large archives of government secrets and classified material is that, more often than not, when the government calls something classified or top secret, it's not because they're trying to protect you. It's because they're trying to protect themselves. They're trying to make it illegal for anybody to show what it is that they're saying and doing in the dark because what they're saying and doing in the dark is composed of deceit, corruption, or illegality. And that's why the most important journalism over the last 50 years, beginning with the Pentagon Papers, through the WikiLeaks reporting, the Snowden reporting, and all kinds of other major investigations have taken place when people have been able to show you, the public, documents and other information that people inside the government wanted you not to see and made it illegal for anyone to show it to you. That's the dynamic between actual journalism on the one hand and powerful institutional state actors on the other. That is always supposed to be what that relationship is about.
But along the way, over, not since just Trump, but over the last many decades, the largest media corporations in the United States – The New York Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, CNN – have become the opposite of adversarial to intelligence agencies. They have become the leading propagandists, the leading messengers, whenever the CIA or the FBI or Homeland Security wants to disseminate propaganda, they go to those their favorite media outlets, their favorite journalists. They tell them what to say. And those journalists then go and say it.
Oftentimes, it's presented as a leak to make you feel like it's unauthorized. They'll refer to anonymous sources to make you kind of evoke that sentiment of Deep Throat meeting the Watergate reporters in a garage and passing information, even though that kind of original transaction that is supposed to have that image pop into your mind itself is highly suspicious. But that's what most leaks are when they're given to places like The New York Times and The Washington Post. They have the theater, the appearance, the costume of being unauthorized but, in fact, they're completely authorized. So, the CIA goes to Natasha Bertrand, now at CNN, and tells CNN and tells her to say that Hunter Biden’s laptop is Russian disinformation or that Trump has been found to have a secret server with the Russian Alfa Bank, or that Russians have put bounties on the heads of American soldiers and Trump is doing nothing about it, all of which turned out to be totally untrue. Or the FBI goes to Ken Dilanian or the CIA goes to Ken Dilanian, NBC News, and tells him that the Russians are using some kind of super-advanced machine to attack the brains of service members and diplomats in Havana and around the world, the Havana syndrome, to make you think that Trump is allowing Russia to attack our service members without doing anything about it. This is propaganda and deceit. These are authorized leaks in the government and that's, of course, where Russiagate came from. it's how the Bush and Cheney administration sold the country on the lies that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction by going to The New York Times and The Washington Post and ABC News and feeding them instructions about what they should say and then, those newspapers mindlessly put it on the front page of the newspaper. And so, we learned from the Iraq war, from the War on Terror, and then from the Trump years, including Russiagate, that the real function, the actual function of these media outlets is not to be adversarial at all to intelligence agencies or to the U.S. government but to be their servants, their messengers, their allies, their propagandists. And oftentimes they'll go so far as they did in Russiagate, to even give themselves Pulitzers when they publish information and disseminate information to the public that came directly from the CIA and the FBI, even though it turned out to be totally false.
So, the fact that this relationship, on the one hand, between the largest media corporations in the country and, on the other, the intelligence community, in particular, is one of subservience and collaboration is something that we have been writing about and reporting on and talking about for many years. But what happened in the last 48 hours is really a new manifestation of it. It's a completely new escalation. What they're really telling you is they don't even want to pretend anymore what their real function is. They are basically acknowledging to you that their role is to act as servants for the FBI and the CIA.
As you know, we've been covering it on our show. There has been a leak of dozens of classified materials, some of which have been labeled top secret. But as we reviewed, there's really nothing particularly dangerous about any of these revelations. There's no even viable argument that it's putting people in harm's way. They don't contain any names of undercover agents in the field. There's nothing in there that is even particularly sensitive. And we try to dissect these documents to demonstrate to you, based on my experience of many years of working on many different archives of classified information with WikiLeaks and the NSA, that these are not the kind of documents that are really the most sensitive secrets. That's clear and obvious. But that doesn't mean that they are bereft of important revelations. They do have some important revelations. Some of them show, for example, that the United States, contrary to the claims of the Biden administration, has deployed U.S. Special Forces inside Ukraine and there are other NATO countries, including the U.K. and Latvia and others that have done the same. Of course, that's something we ought to know if the government is more involved in the war in Ukraine than they've been telling us. And we'll go through some of the other important revelations, including the fact that the United States government is saying there will be no resolution to the war in Ukraine through 2023. There will be no negotiations, there will be no diplomatic settlement, there will be nothing but ongoing grinding, endless war that you will pay for beyond the $100 billion already authorized. That was the purpose of this leak, to show people that the Biden administration has been deceiving the public about the role that we're playing there and about what our objectives are.
And there are other important revelations here as well. And yet The New York Times and The Washington Post, instead of protecting sources, which is the role of journalists, instead, has led the way to hunt down this source, to hunt down the leaker, to dig in an investigative way to find out who this leaker is and hand that information over to the FBI. They're handmaidens now of the FBI. I've never seen anything like it before. As journalists, we're supposed to rely on leaks. That's what we need and use in order to do our reporting. The idea that a journalist would be the one to actually go and find out who this leaker is and then reveal it publicly to the FBI is something that, honestly, I didn't even think I would see, notwithstanding that, there are few people who hold them in greater contempt than I do.
Let's look at what's really going on here. First, what they did and the broader context of what the corporate media has become in terms of its relationship to the intelligence community. So, as I said earlier this morning, The Washington Post published a lengthy article, the title of which was “Discord member details how documents leaked from closed chat group.” It was out last night and so, a lot of people saw it first thing in the morning. This was essentially a blueprint for the FBI to find exactly who this leaker was and where he was. It penetrated the Discord group, the small Discord group, where these documents were first leaked. They spoke on tape to a 17-year-old who was part of the group – and they stressed they did it with his parents’ permission – and the 17-year-old described in detail who this person was, who was the leaker, that he was a young man in his early twenties, that he was a member of the military and gave all the digital breadcrumbs for the FBI to find him. I was shocked when I saw this article. I really was. It was focused not on the substantive revelations of what these documents show but, instead, on painting the perfect path, kind of leading the FBI down the path with breadcrumbs directly to the door of this leaker. It was incredibly obvious. Soon, as you saw in this Washington Post article, it was just a matter of hours before the FBI find the leaker because The Washington Post led the FBI to him on purpose. And I watched all day today as not a single journalist in corporate media stood up and said, “Wait a minute, is this really our role now, to act as law enforcement? We're going to expose leakers to the public and ensure they go to prison? Isn’t it supposed to be our role to work with leakers and encourage them to come forward and give us information about what the government is doing in secret that is the truth rather than what they're telling the public?
Journalists played the role of wanting to see punished leakers and people who disclose classified information. But evidently, that is not just the role of The Washington Post, but the understanding of the role of almost everybody in corporate media, because virtually nobody stood up and said, “Wait a minute, we shouldn't be doing this. This is the opposite of our role.” Everybody cheered The Washington Post and said, wow, this is an incredibly important and intrepid scoop that they got.
It wasn't the FBI who found where those breadcrumbs got first. It was instead The New York Times. They obviously felt annoyed that The Washington Post had scooped them and they went one step further. They went and found the name of the leaker and announced it to the world and described the proof that they had that he was actually the leaker. So here is the New York Times article that was just out this afternoon. And the headline is: “Here's what we know about the leader of the online group where secret documents were leaked. Jack Teixeira, a 21-year-old member of the Massachusetts Air National Guard, was arrested on Thursday.”
The article tells us,
The leader of a small online gaming chat group where a trove of classified U.S. intelligence documents leaked over the last few months is a 21-year-old member of the intelligence wing of the Massachusetts Air National Guard, according to interviews and documents reviewed by The New York Times.
The National Guardsman, whose name is Jack Teixeira, oversaw a private online group named Thug Shaker Central, where about 20 to 30 people, mostly young men and teenagers, came together over a shared love of guns, racist online memes and video games (The New York Times. April 13, 2023).
Note how they're already trying to get you to hate this person by telling you that he was spreading racist memes already. That is a signal to the liberal leaders that this is a bad and evil person whom you're supposed to hate and be happy has been arrested – even though he did the work of The New York Times and The Washington Post, which is exposing the reality of the U.S. role in the war in Ukraine.
The New York Times goes on.
Federal investigators have been searching for days for the person who leaked the top-secret documents online but have not identified Airman Teixeira or anyone else as a suspect (The New York Times. April 13, 2023).
Exactly. That's the job of the FBI. The FBI has been searching. They have not found the leaker until The Washington Post and The New York Times did their job for them of showing the FBI “Here's your leaker. We're delivering to you with his head on a pike.”
The FBI declined to comment.
The New York Times spoke with four members of the thug Shaker Central chat group, one of whom said he has known the person who leaked for at least three years, had met him in person, and referred to him as the OG. The friends described him as older than most of the group members who were in their teens, and the undisputed leader. One of the friends said the OG had access to intelligence documents through his job. While the gaming friends would not identify the group's leader by name. A trail of digital evidence compiled by The Times leads to Airmen Teixeira (The New York Times. April 13, 2023).
So, you see there, they weren't even told what their name was. It was The New York Times that on their own did that work.
The Times has been able to link Airmen Teixeira to other members of the Tug Shaker Central group through his online gaming profile and other records. Details of the interior of Airmen Teixeira’s childhood home – posted on social media in family photographs also match details on the margins of some of the photographs of the leaked secret documents.
The Times also has established, through social media posts and military records, that Airmen Teixeira is enlisted in the 102nd Intelligence Wing of the Massachusetts Air National Guard. Posts on the unit's official Facebook page congratulated Airman Teixeira and colleagues for being promoted to Airman First Class in July 2022 (The New York Times. April 13, 2023).
So, there you see what the New York Times did. They did the work of a law enforcement investigator. They followed the trail and found out who this person was, investigated where he lives and published it. And that's what enabled the FBI to go and find this leaker. It is remarkable. I mean, if you actually think about it, it is remarkable. Let's remember that the function of journalism is supposed to be to try and cultivate sources who have access to this sort of information. When you have a leaker of classified information – and The New York Times has been reporting on these documents, they've been going through these documents and writing article after article after article, discussing what it is that they reveal – obviously, necessarily signifying that the judgment of The New York Times journalistically is that these documents have real value to the public. The New York Times has been using them in their reporting day after day after day.
It is ingrained in you as a journalist that your central overarching duty is to protect people who do this. This was for shielding them from being found out. You're supposed to guide them to use encrypted channels so that they're not caught by the government. You're supposed to provide them with secure means in order to enable this information to be given to the public. And remember, so sacred is this journalistic duty to protect sources and help them avoid exposure, that if you're a journalist and you get subpoenaed by the government or the courts and the court orders you to testify about the identity of your source, the person who provided you classified information, you're expected to go to jail. You're expected to refuse to disclose their name and instead go to jail in order to protect your source. The New York Times and The Washington Post are doing exactly the opposite. They're working for the FBI and revealing that information to ensure that this source ends up in prison.
This is not the first time this behavior has been not just committed but celebrated during the Trump years. There was a woman who is a blogger, she's a resistance blogger. She was a fanatical Russiagator. To be honest, I believe very strongly she's unwell. She worked at The Intercept for a very short period of time, so I don't even want to name her. I've never felt comfortable criticizing her publicly because I don't think she's well. But she believed – she says that someone whom she regarded as a source who was giving her information for her blog – she started fantasizing, she created this elaborate fantasy that this person who was actually a very old man who was dying of cancer, was instead a central cog in the collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia. She believed she had discovered the smoking gun that would enable Robert Mueller to prove the conspiracy that the Trump campaign had worked with the Russian government to hack into the DNC and Podesta's emails. And what she did was she picked up the phone and she called the Mueller team and the FBI and she said, I have a source who I believe is crucial to your investigation. And she snitched on him. She turned the name of her source over to the FBI in the Mueller investigation. No one even subpoenaed her to do that. No one asked her to do that. No one sought that information for decades. The idea was, if you're a journalist, you’re supposed to go to prison rather than give over the name of your source when you're subpoenaed when a Court asks you to, you're still not supposed to. She did it voluntarily. She picked up the phone and called the Mueller team and called the FBI and said and begged them to pay attention to her.
As it turned out, it was completely unhinged. This person wasn't even mentioned in the Mueller report. He had no role at all to play. And of course, even Mueller himself ultimately concluded that he could find no evidence to establish this crazy conspiracy theory that people like her and the resistance part of the media spent years promoting. But she was applauded for having done that, for having snitched on her own source, because in the Trump years, everything changed. They turned journalism on its head. And so, what was once something that would have been the biggest disgrace for a journalist to do – turn over the identity of their source to the government, even if they were subpoenaed – became something they applauded. They had a big write-up in The Washington Post by Margaret Sullivan, the media columnist for The Washington Post, who used to be the public editor of The New York Times. And she got another very favorable write-up in CNN. They were applauding her, this unwell woman, whom they were treating as a journalist for having snitched on her own source without even being asked to do so. She was begging the Mueller team; she had this fantasy that she was an important part of the team and she had found the smoking gun. So, this ethos has been being stomped on for years like so much else under the Trump administration, to the point where it is now considered noble for journalists to partner with the CIA and the FBI and Homeland Security and root out people who provide transparency to the government, which is supposed to be the job of journalists and media outlets. Now everybody is fighting for the credit, for the snitching credit.
So, earlier today, the group that is very popular among the corporate media, called Bellingcat, which as we're about to show you, is actually funded by the U.S. government and by the EU went on to Twitter and demanded their credit. In the official Bellingcat Twitter account, they wrote,
New: Bellingcat @AricToller worked with @nytimes to uncover a trail of digital evidence that appears to identify Jack Teixeira, a 21-year-old Air National Guardsman as the leader of an online gaming chat group where U.S. intelligence documents leaked (April 13, 2023).
Do you see how they're all so proud of themselves? We're about to show you who it is, who actually funds Bellingcat. They get treated as some kind of independent media outlet. These news outlets constantly partner with them and claim they're some sort of independent investigatory outlet when they work hand-in-hand with Western intelligence communities all over the world and do the bidding of Western intelligence communities. I'm not even remotely surprised that Bellingcat is doing this.
So here you see on the screen the funding. From their own account there, that first line you see, it says, “Income from nonprofit organizations” and the first item is the National Endowment for Democracy, which is budgeted to give them $160,000 in 2020. The National Endowment for Democracy is an entity created by the U.S. Congress, funded by the U.S. Congress. It's a well-known arm of the CIA and always has been. You could find reporting everywhere that demonstrates that. And what the National Endowment for Democracy has always done is it's work with the CIA, hand-in-hand, to destabilize governments around the world in the name of spreading democracy. They're an arm of the U.S. government. That, too, funds Bellingcat.
And then, if you go to the next item, you see income from the government. They admit they're funded by the government. They're funded right there by the EU as well. $50,000 budgeted for 2020 on top of the $160,000 budgeted from the National Endowment of Democracy, that they're directly funded by the government while the media pretends they're independent. And this is whom the New York Times worked with, partnered with – a government-funded agency – to track down a leaker to turn him over to the FBI.
Here from Declassified UK, which is an independent media outlet, quite a good one: it details what the National Endowment of Democracy is, that they funded groups such as Bellingcat and others; a former CIA officer tells them that it's a “vehicle” for U.S. government propaganda, and it goes to the history of the National Endowment of Democracy in the way in which Congress has plowed huge amounts of money into them over the years, because, of course, they do the bidding of the U.S. government, just like the New York Times and The Washington Post do now.
There was a Pentagon briefing today about this leak and journalists could have gone there and pressed the Pentagon on the lies they got caught telling. They've been denying that there are U.S. troops deployed in Ukraine yet these documents show that there are special forces on the ground in Ukraine. Why did you lie to the American public? Why did you deceive the American public? They could have done that. Things like that and all the other revelations substantively in this document that we reviewed in our reporting on Monday – and by the way, we published the key documents we included as well as other ones we reviewed, and we'll continue to, on our Locals platform for those of you who want to see it – but this press briefing today at the Pentagon was unbelievable because they were uninterested in pressing the government on those lies. What they were doing instead was demanding that the government do more to go and hunt down the leaker and arrest him and punish him, and more importantly, demanding that the government tighten the reins on the information that will be available in the future. Listen to what these journalists did today.
(Video. Pentagon Press Briefing. April 13, 2023)
Journalist 1: In the days after the leaks came to light, what steps has DOD taken to reduce the number of people who have access to not only these classified briefings but the classified material in general?
Journalist 2: But you are taking steps to tighten that, I guess, population who might have access to this level of information?
Journalist 3: General Rider, you say that there are strict protocols in place and yet a 21-year-old Airman was able to access some of the nation's top secrets. How did this happen? And isn't this a massive security breach? What is your message to anyone who might be thinking of leaking these kinds of documents in the future?
Journalist 4: Can you tell us, were there less people who have access to this type of information today than there were a week ago?
Journalist 5: To follow on that, these documents were available long before April 5 and 6. So, what took so long for DOD and the intelligence community to locate these documents?
Journalist 6: Are you going to release this Airman's service record?
Journalist 7: What technologies is the Pentagon applying right now to both spot leaked documents online and track potential indicators of leaking type practices? Do you plan to be investing in more?
Journalist 8: Given the gravity of the situation, are you actively paring down the distribution list now? Is this a process that's moving quickly or is it going to take time for there to be meaningful, substantive changes to the distribution? And then is DOD or has DOD taken additional measures to restrict the access to classified information of others in the Massachusetts Air National Guard?
Journalist 9: Can you say whether DOD has anyone looking at chat rooms on Discord, for example, or other social media platforms right now for leaked information? And if not, should DOD have these people?
Can you believe that? I mean, it is mind-boggling. These are journalists. At least that's a title that they are given within their corporations by the human resources department. And they marched down to the Pentagon today in unison not to demand accountability about what the Pentagon did and how it lied, but they were demanding that more be done to prevent leaks in the future. They were angry the Pentagon didn't stop this leak earlier. They were angry the Pentagon would allow a leak like this to take place. They're demanding that technology be used to restrict who can access classified information to ensure that there are no leaks in the future. What kind of journalist would have the mindset that you would want the government to have less information available and demand they make things more secretive and more classified, and complain that something leaked? Unless you are such an apparatchik and servant of the U.S. Security State that you are begging them to clamp down on leaks – which is what they're doing – it is mind-boggling that this is the mentality of journalists – although it shouldn't be. I mean that's the paradox.
I come before this camera frequently, I've been writing for years arguing that the real function of the people in these media corporations is to serve as propagandists and servants for these agencies. Nonetheless, why am I so indignant? And why do I consider it mind-boggling when I watch it happen? I don't know, except I guess I could just say that this is a particularly egregious and vivid example. It is an escalation to actually watch these media outlets out in public, proudly assuming the role of the FBI and punishing leakers.
As we noted, we did a whole show on Monday, there are unquestionably important revelations in these documents. I'm not going to say that if I had been given these documents, I would have published every one of these documents. I would not have. I would have redacted some, I would have concluded probably aren't in the public interest. But unquestionably, there are important revelations. The most important one of which is the one I referenced earlier, that the U.S. actually has deployed special forces that were on the ground in Ukraine. No congressional authorization, no public acknowledgment.
But from The Washington Post – we actually talked a lot about this when we referenced the fact that people in the region suspect this might be a disinformation campaign – the headline is “No Russia-Ukraine Peace Talks Expected This Year, U.S. Leaks Show.” According to these documents, the position of the U.S. government is there will be no resolution of the war this year. So, get ready to keep reaching into your pocket and sending more and more of your money to President Zelenskyy and his very corrupt minions in Kyiv.
The grinding war between Ukraine and Russia is expected to bleed into 2024, with neither side securing victory yet both refusing to negotiate an end to the conflict, according to a Defense Intelligence Agency assessment that is among the highly sensitive U.S. government materials leaked online and obtained by the Washington Post. “Negotiations to end the conflict are unlikely during 2023 in all considered scenarios,” says the document, which has not been disclosed previously. At the same time, Ukraine will probably intensify its reliance on strikes in Russian territory, the document says, a dynamic that has disquieted some U.S. officials fearful that such attacks could compel President Vladimir Putin to escalate the conflict or give China cause to begin providing lethal support to Russia (The Washington Post. April 12, 2023).
As an American, do you want to know that? I do. I want to know that the position of our government is there will be no meaningful negotiations in 2023 and no prospect to end the war. And I also want to know that President Zelenskyy intends to use the money we're sending him and the weapons we're providing to launch strikes deep inside Russia. We were told when we furnished increasingly advanced weapons systems to Kyiv, that it was on the condition that it not be used to launch strikes deep inside Russia because of the obvious danger that could immediately provoke escalation with a nuclear power. And yet now we learn, as we should know, that, in fact, that's exactly what's happening.
There are all kinds of important revelations inside these materials that journalists ought to be applauding – if you are actually a journalist – if you really are devoted to the journalistic function of providing transparency and informing the American people and exposing the deceit of what the government says. They are not. That's why they're angry. You would be angry at this leaker and these leaks if you work for the FBI or the CIA or Homeland Security, or the Pentagon. The people who are at the New York Times and The Washington Post work for those agencies, that is why they're angry. It is mind-boggling to see it all play out this way.
I think it's very worth emphasizing that there are times when these same media outlets love leaks and leakers. In fact, during the Trump years, the leaks that under the law are considered to be grievous crimes were ones that were celebrated by The Washington Post. Let me just show you one example. This is from May 2020. It is a Washington Post article headlined Here! Have the transcripts of the calls between Michael Flynn and the Russian diplomat as they discussed sanctions.
Let me just remind you what happened here. General Flynn was supposed to be President Trump's national security adviser as part of the transition when Trump won the election. He did what transition teams always do, which is he reached out to his counterparts inside other governments. And he specifically reached out – as one of the many calls he was doing – to the Russian Ambassador Kislyak and they talked about whether or not the sanctions regime that President Obama had imposed as a response to supposed Russian interference in our election would continue. He was doing exactly what a national security adviser was supposed to do. What happened, though, was the government, the NSA was spying on Kislyak’s calls, which is appropriate, but as a result, they ended up spying on Michael Flynn's conversations as well. And somebody inside the government gave the transcript of that recorded conversation between Ambassador Kislyak and Michael Flynn to The Washington Post and gave it to David Ignatius. He reported on that call early in the Trump presidency, in February of 2017. That leak was celebrated. We have no idea who that leaker was. No one ever looked for that leaker. The New York Times didn't find that leaker. The Washington Post didn't find that leaker. And in the entire universe of types of information that you want to leak, there are only about three or four categories that are considered the most serious. These categories of information are so serious that it's not only a crime for someone inside the government, who's authorized to have these secrets, to leak them to someone outside of the government – that's true of all classified information. It's always a crime. If you're someone who works in the government, you're authorized to get classified information and you leak it to someone outside the government. That's automatically a crime. But it's not a crime for journalists to publish the information. The journalist who gets that classified information can publish it freely and not be guilty of a crime. Only the leaker is guilty of a crime, except in three cases where the information is deemed so sensitive and so dangerous to leak that it's even a crime for the journalist who gets it to publish it. And one of those is things like transcripts between targets of the NSA and foreign nationals. Or U.S. citizens.
So here is the U.S. Code 18. Section 797 98. It's called Disclosure of Classified Information. Here they define which of the specific categories if journalists leak, journalists can be held accountable criminally, not just the source. One such category of document is,
Whoever knowingly and willfully communicates … or otherwise makes available to an unauthorized person …any classified information:
4) obtained by the processes of communication intelligence from the communications of any foreign government knowing the same to have been obtained by such processes… shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than ten years, or both (18 U.S. Code § 798).
The reason for that is obvious. If you expose to Ambassador Kislyak that the NSA is able to spy on his calls, he will change the way he communicates. That is what the Washington Post did. That is how much they loved leaks. Nobody cared. Nobody objected. Nobody ever found that leaker. A far graver disclosure and leak than what this 21-year-old just did. Obviously, a 21-year-old member of the Massachusetts Air National Guard does not have access to the most sensitive secrets. So, there was virtually no harm that could even conceivably come from these leaks, this one today, but The New York Times and The Washington Post were so outraged, they actually amassed far greater and more serious and more severe and more dangerous leaks were approved up and cheered during the Trump administration.
Just to show you how selective the corporate media is when it comes to leaks, let's remember that somebody is basically destroyed. The protocol for how the Supreme Court functions, the way in which the justices can trust one another during the process of negotiating drafts by leaking a draft, an early draft of the decision in the Dobbs’ case that overturns Roe versus Wade. And I'd like to remind you, despite a supposed very thorough investigation, I have no idea who that leaker is either. The New York Times, Bellingcat, and The Washington Post never found those, didn’t look for them, didn't find them. And, in fact, here you have an article from the liberal New Republic in January 2023, the headline says it all: “We still don't know who leaked Dobbs. Good!” Why should we root against leak investigations? So, when it comes to leaks that they like, we're supposed to root against leak investigations. We should be happy that the leaker isn't found. Do you see how craven they are, how completely unmoored from any principles?
Now regarding this idea that corporate media has become in the Trump era servants of agents of federal law enforcement, the FBI, there is a reporter who was at Huffington Post, named Ryan Reilly, who after Jan. 6, became so devoted to also doing the FBI's work of finding every conceivable person who had any relationship to Jan. 6 – not people who carried out violence inside the Capitol, just anyone who was on the Capitol grounds, who was near the rally. And, in fact, he actually celebrated this group that was called Sedition Hunters because he devoted himself to doing the FBI's work of finding everyone involved in Jan. 6.
There you see the headline where he celebrated Sedition Hunters: “Meet The Online Sleuths Aiding The FBI's Capitol Manhunt. Six months and 500 arrests into the Jan. 6 probe, a motley crew of online sleuths is generating leads, making connections, and keeping the feds on their toes.” This reporter, Ryan Reilly, participated in this, he was a central player in doing the FBI’s work, as he said, and he got promoted. He now works for NBC News because of how much help he lent to the FBI to hunt down American citizens protesting the 2020 election. Attorney General Merrick Garland went to testify before the Senate, and he heaped praise on these hunters. Here's the tweet from Ryan Reilly, celebrating the fact. This tweet is from October 2021.
In which Attorney General Merrick Garland gives a shoutout to “citizens sleuths across the country” who are identifying Capitol rioters. (Oct. 2021).
He's so happy that he got a pat on the head from the attorney general who oversees the FBI. Thank you. This is what these journalists do. This is how they see themselves.
During the Obama administration, just like during the Biden administration, leakers were hated. Here, for example, is PolitiFact fact-checking a Jake Tapper’s statement where he pointed out,
“The Obama administration has used the Espionage Act to go after whistleblowers who leaked to journalists more than all previous administrations combined.” (The Lead with J. Tapper. Jan. 2, 2014)
That was in the Obama era. The leakers were hated. Obama used the Espionage Act of 1917 to prosecute more whistleblowers than every single administration combined since 1917. In fact, double the number. So again, under Biden and under Obama, they hate leakers. They want to destroy them. But under Trump, they were venerated. People like Alexander Vindman were turned into national heroes. The person who leaked the Dobbs’ ruling; the person who leaked the NSA transcripts, the most closely guarded secret of Michael Flynn’s conversation with Ambassador Kislyak. That's because the NSA, the Security State, were the ones doing those leaks to undermine Trump and that’s the side the corporate media is.
Just to conclude, a lot of what I saw about the corporate media, I learned during the Snowden reporting. When we started doing the Snowden reporting, the corporate media was incredibly hostile, in part, out of just professional jealousy that the leaks didn't go to them, but also because they were indignant that Edward Snowden – and then working with me and Laura Poitras as an independent journalist – had exposed NSA spying on American citizens. They were furious about it, just like they hate Matt Taibbi and the Twitter Files journalists for exposing what Homeland Security and the CIA and the FBI are doing in imposing a censorship regime on the Internet. They hate people who expose the secrets of their masters, which is the U.S. Security State.
The first time I went to “Meet the Press” after the Snowden story broke, I was asked by the then-host of “Meet the Press”, David Gregory, “Mr. Greenwald, shouldn't you be in prison along with Mr. Snowden?” – that's how angry they were about the start of the reporting. But the most despicable thing I've ever seen is that The Washington Post got hold of one part of the Snowden archive, and they used those documents to do reporting on the NSA, just like The New York Times, The Washington Post used this recently. And along with us, The Washington Post won a Pulitzer, shared the Pulitzer Prize for public service for the reporting that they did on the NSA based on the documents from Edward Snowden that Edward Snowden furnished to us. The Washington Post used them and exploited them, got tons of traffic to their site for these articles, and then ultimately won a Pulitzer. And they celebrated themselves. They could not have heaped enough praise on themselves and their bravery and courage when they won a Pulitzer.
Here you see, on April 14, 2014, The Washington Post article “Washington Post Wins Pulitzer Prize for NSA Spying Revelations. The Guardian is Also Honored.” The Washington Post had no courage. They wouldn't go to Hong Kong with us to meet Edward Snowden. They let us take those risks. They got one part of the archive. They used those documents. They claim that they did a great public service. They celebrated themselves. And then this is what they did. Edward Snowden was their source for that Pulitzer Prize-winning reporting they did. And when, at the end of the Obama administration, in 2016, there was a move by the ACLU, by me, by The New York Times, even to their credit, to advocate that Edward Snowden should be pardoned or should have his sentence commuted because he did a great public service – as we revealed the other day – the spying system, he let me reveal, was declared unconstitutional and illegal by a court of appeals because it infringed the privacy rights of American citizens. And when that debate was happening about whether to pardon Edward Snowden, the same Washington Post that celebrated itself and its courage for its use of his documents, turned around and published an editorial entitled “No Pardon for Edward Snowden.” In other words, they were demanding that Edward Snowden, their source be prosecuted and imprisoned because, according to them, he broke the law and deserved to go to prison, even though The Washington Post themselves benefited and used those documents. Listen to what they said.
Mr. Snowden's defenders don't deny that he broke the law – not to mention oaths and contractual obligations – when he copied and kept 1.5 million classified documents.
By the way, that number is a total lie that came from the FBI. The Washington Post has no idea how many documents Snowden had because he never gave his full archives to the Post. That's a figure they got from the government and that figure was derived because it was based on the number of documents with which Snowden interacted over the years that he worked there. The Post goes on.
They argue, rather, that Mr. Snowden’s noble purposes and the policy changes his “whistleblowing” prompted, justified his actions. Specifically, he made the documents public through journalists, including reporters working for the Post, enabling the American public to learn for the first time that the NSA was collecting domestic telephone “metadata” – information about the time of a call and the parties to it, but not its contents – en masse with no case-by-case court approval.
The program was a stretch, if not an outright violation, of federal surveillance law and posed risks to privacy. Congress and the president eventually responded with corrective legislation. It's fair to say we owe these necessary reforms to Mr. Snowden.
The complication is that Mr. Snowden did more than that. He also pilfered, and leaked, information about a separate overseas NSA Internet-monitoring program, PRISM, that was both clearly legal and not clearly threatening to privacy (The Washington Post. Sept. 17, 2016).
Now, that is why the PRISM program allowed NSA to spy on American citizens. Do you know the name of the newspaper that first exposed the presidential program? The Washington Post. They're the ones who decided that that story was worthy of publication. I published it at the same time. So, they're the ones who decided it was in the public interest. The public had a right to know. And then they turn around and cite their own story as a reason Snowden should go to prison. And then they say this. They list the stories they think were inappropriate. Every single one of these stories was published not by me, but by The New York Times and The Washington Post over Snowden's objections. Many of these stories enraged Snowden because these were not the kinds of stories he wanted the archive used for.
So, The Washington Post says,
Worse – far worse – he also leaked details of basically defensible international intelligence operations: cooperation with Scandinavian services against Russia; spying on the wife of an Osama bin Laden associate; and certain offensive cyber operations in China. No specific harm, actual or attempted, to any individual American was ever shown to have resulted from the NSA telephone metadata program.
In contrast, his revelations about the agency's international operations disrupted lawful intelligence gathering, causing possibly tremendous damage to national security, according to a unanimous bipartisan report by the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence. What higher cause did that serve? (The Washington Post. Sept. 17, 2016).
Do you understand that? There's that newspaper admitting that they use this source to win a Pulitzer and then, because they're such servants to the intelligence community, they turned around and said, “We don't want the government to pardon him. We want the government to prosecute him.” And in order to make that argument, they cited the stories that they – The Washington Post and The New York Times – decided to publish, not that Edward Snowden wanted to publish, not that I published. And that's exactly what they're doing today. Obviously, this leak is not the Snowden leak. It's not going to win a Pulitzer, but it's most definitely in the public interest. And the fact that the media outlets are doing yet again what their role is, which is working for the FBI, demanding the government keep information from you instead of enabling you to see the truth about what your government is doing should forever reveal their real function, which is the exact opposite of what they claim. They are not here to inform and bring transparency. They are here to propagandize on behalf of the state. And I cannot think of any incident, any event that proves that more compellingly than the events of the last 24 hours.
So that concludes our show for today. As always, we are very appreciative of those of you who have watched. Please keep coming back every night at 7 p.m. EST, exclusively here on Rumble.
Have a great evening, everybody.