'Twitter Files' Matt Taibbi says FBI, IRS are targeting him | The Chris Hedges Report — Transcript

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1. 0:21Chris Hedges:
2. 0:34The journalist Matt Taibbi has been  targeted by the Democratic Party for
3. 0:38exposing extensive government blacklists used  to censor left-wing and right-wing critics.
4. 0:44Given access to the internal traffic of Twitter  by Twitter's new owner, Elon Musk, he documented
5. 0:51cases where the FBI and other government agencies  repeatedly suppressed news and commentary. The
6. 0:58censored content was almost exclusively produced  by those critical of the dominant narrative
7. 1:04advanced by the Democratic Party and the old  establishment wing of the Republican Party which
8. 1:10has joined forces with the Democrats. Threads  that were censored include those from the Yellow
9. 1:15Vest movement, activists from the Occupy movement,  Global Revolution Live. Negative stories about Joe
10. 1:22Biden. Reports on the Ukrainian Energy Company,  Burisma, that paid Hunter Biden about $1 million a
11. 1:29year while his father was vice president. Positive  stories about Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro,
12. 1:36reports about Ukrainian human rights abuses, and  details of the contents of Hunter Biden's laptop.
13. 1:43The accounts were flagged and usually disappeared.  The so-called “moderation requests” were sent by
14. 1:50an entity called the Foreign Influence Task Force.  The FITF is an FBI-led inter-agency task force
15. 2:00that includes numerous government agencies,  including Homeland Security, the CIA, the
16. 2:05Pentagon, and the State Department. It flags what  it considers objectionable content for about two
17. 2:11dozen social media companies, including Twitter,  Facebook, Google, Pinterest, and Wikimedia.
18. 2:18In March, Taibbi and Michael Shellenberger were  called to testify before the select subcommittee
19. 2:24on the weaponization of the federal government.  While Taibbi was testifying on March 9, an IRS
20. 2:31agent visited his house in New Jersey. Taibbi  discovered that the IRS opened a case against
21. 2:37him on the day he published a Christmas  Eve Twitter thread, from a letter House
22. 2:42Judiciary Chairman Jim Jordan sent to the IRS  commissioner inquiring about Taibbi's case.
23. 2:48It was a Saturday, it was Christmas Eve,  Taibbi did not owe taxes, the case was
24. 2:54four years old. All this suggests that the IRS  case was politically motivated and the FBI was
25. 3:01monitoring Taibbi. Taibbi ran into the buzzsaw  of orchestrated character assassination when he
26. 3:07testified. The Democratic members of the committee  rarely let Taibbi speak, they delivered vicious
27. 3:12and insulting diatribes, which were then broadcast  on outlets such as MSNBC and CNN, part of the
28. 3:20effort to further discredit him. The Ranking  Committee Member, Stacey Plaskett, sent Taibbi
29. 3:26a letter accusing him of lying to Congress and  threatened Taibbi with a 5-year prison sentence.
30. 3:32Joining me to discuss this wholesale censorship  and the efforts by the ruling establishment,
31. 3:37especially the Democratic Party, to discredit him  and his work is Matt Taibbi. Matt, let's go back
32. 3:44to December 24, 2022. You're in the Park 55 Hotel  in San Francisco and explain what you're doing.
33. 3:52Matt Taibbi: Well, I was putting together the  final touches on a story about ... It was going to
34. 3:59be called, Twitter and Other Government Agencies.  About a week and a half into the Twitter Files
35. 4:05project, we found a series of documents that had  come to Twitter through the Foreign Influence Task
36. 4:12Force, and it was a pile of reports that came  from various government agencies. Sometimes
37. 4:21we could tell which ones they were, sometimes  not. But in essence, most of them were simply
38. 4:30a few paragraphs of text along with a gigantic  Excel spreadsheet of account names. And they
39. 4:37would say things like, we assess that the  following are related to Russia's Internet
40. 4:43Research Agency or are working to further  anti-Ukraine objectives, or whatever. And
41. 4:51we would check and see that sometimes all of the  accounts were gone. Sometimes it was a percentage
42. 4:58of them, but in most cases, there was some  action. And this was an important story that we
43. 5:06put out. I was very nervous about it. It included  information about the CIA, the DNI, the Department
44. 5:15of Homeland Security, and the FBI, and that's  what I was preparing to do on Christmas Eve.
45. 5:20Chris Hedges: And we should be clear that before  you made this release on December 24, the FBI
46. 5:27had already denounced your work on  the Twitter Files saying it was,
47. 5:33"The product of conspiracy  theorists," this is quoting them,
48. 5:36"Who fed the public 'misinformation,' whose  sole purpose was discrediting the agency."
49. 5:44Matt Taibbi: Right. Yeah. In fact, I  even referenced the FBI's quote at the
50. 5:51beginning of the thread. Sarcastically  I said, of course, my sole purpose isn't
51. 5:57discrediting the FBI; there are other agencies I  want to discredit as well. And the idea of that
52. 6:03was to, among other things, make the public  aware that the FBI had commented on the story
53. 6:10in a way that was intended to intimidate  a little bit, in addition to not answering
54. 6:17the questions that we sent. But yes, they  had already made it known that they were
55. 6:23paying attention to the story, and that  was unnerving, certainly on one level.
56. 6:28Chris Hedges: Let's talk about the  Foreign Influence Task Force. You
57. 6:33said you estimate that it has a staff  of about 80. What is it? Who's on it,
58. 6:40to the extent that you know of? When  was it set up? And how does it work?
59. 6:43Matt Taibbi: I don't know a whole lot about when  it was set up. Other reporters have done some work
60. 6:48on that. Lee Fong, who is one of the Twitter Files  reporters, had done some work on it. He was where
61. 6:57we got the number 80 for staff for the FITF. As  far as we could determine it was mostly comprised
62. 7:05of FBI, Homeland Security, and the Office of  the Director of National Intelligence. The FITF
63. 7:14became the throughway junction for government  requests for content moderation. And the system
64. 7:22they worked out was, requests that came from the  federal government would come through the FBI,
65. 7:27and anything that came up through  the states would come through DHS.
66. 7:32And they had a very specific  means of doing that. They had a
67. 7:40communications platform they called Teleporter. It  was like a one-way door. It was a little bit like
68. 7:46Mission Impossible. There was a way to rig it so  that once content went through there, it wouldn't
69. 7:53last very long. It would delete after a period  of time but we recovered some of the stuff that
70. 7:57was in there. But that's what the FITF does. And  there are two things that are interesting: One,
71. 8:04it claims that it's only monitoring foreign  material, but we found ample evidence of them
72. 8:11looking at the accounts of very small domestic  American account holders. And the other thing is,
73. 8:22these are not personnel that are trying to make  cases, they're monitoring social media. It's
74. 8:31FBI agents who aren't trying to put together  something for trial, they're just watching.
75. 8:39Chris Hedges: They're not producing evidence.
76. 8:40Matt Taibbi: Right. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. They're  not compiling anything towards any case. Yeah.
77. 8:45Chris Hedges: Which is exactly  how, in the McCarthy era,
78. 8:47the FBI worked. They'd show up even  at high schools – Elaine Schreker
79. 8:50has written about this – with a list. There  was no evidence. There was a list of names,
80. 8:54and all of those teachers were gone. And not  only were they gone; they were blacklisted.
81. 8:58Matt Taibbi: Well, right. And that's why  one of the major reforms that came out of
82. 9:05the Church Committee was a change in the  whole idea of what the FBI would do. They
83. 9:11had to have some predicate to initiate an  investigation. We don't have that anymore.
84. 9:16They started to make that change right  around 2008 or so. But now it's firmly
85. 9:24entrenched that the FBI is a counterintelligence  operation that has a criminal division to it.
86. 9:34It's in the intelligence-gathering business  as much as it is the case-making business.
87. 9:39Chris Hedges: So the FITF has an industry meeting,  explain what that is. And you had told me that,
88. 9:48at first it was monthly, and then it was  weekly as the 2020 election approached.
89. 9:54Matt Taibbi: So the moment that was the light  bulb moment for a lot of us on the Twitter
90. 10:03Files story was when we first found emails that  talked about what you referred to, the industry
91. 10:09meeting. And you would see something would be  forwarded to one of the members of Twitter's
92. 10:18Trust and Safety Department, and there would  be an agenda, and it would come from the FITF,
93. 10:26and you would see the agenda for what they call  the industry meeting. And all these people would
94. 10:33be CC'd on the email, it would probably be  two dozen companies or more. And it would
95. 10:40say something like, OGA briefing, (Ukraine). So  that would be at the top. And OGA as you know,
96. 10:51is usually a euphemism for either intelligence,  generally, or the CIA, specifically.
97. 10:56We had emails that showed that the CIA attended  a couple of these meetings, that they asked to be
98. 11:03there. So we thought that was pretty damning stuff  because among other things, not only did it show
99. 11:13that all of these companies were in regular  contact with federal enforcement agencies,
100. 11:19but that there was this rather elaborate  anti-competitive situation going on that I
101. 11:28don't think anybody's even thought about that  angle of. The anti-trust component of this,
102. 11:34where you have 20 or 25 tech companies getting  together and making secret agreements on what
103. 11:41content they're going to show the public, that's  very serious. And it was all in one email. So that
104. 11:52was the thing where you could show the public  one picture and it would be powerful in that way.
105. 11:57Chris Hedges: Was there any indication  that they were producing content?
106. 12:01Matt Taibbi: No. Although we did have some  indication from a couple of sources. And we were
107. 12:07never able to really report this, but we heard  it from enough people that it's worth mentioning,
108. 12:12that there were some indications that the  government had some input into the drafting of
109. 12:21the terms of service of some of these companies.  So we would see that the FBI was assigning lots
110. 12:31of people to monitor different communications for  possible violations of terms of service. And we
111. 12:39even saw Twitter personnel complaining about  that. One of the lawyers was saying, my God,
112. 12:43it's like they're entering search terms looking  for violations of our terms of service. So we know
113. 12:51they were doing that, but there's a big question  as to whether they were also working on the other
114. 12:57end to help devise what those terms were, and the  implications of that are obviously very serious.
115. 13:04Chris Hedges: Terms of service. That's what  you're allowed to disseminate and what you can't.
116. 13:08Matt Taibbi: Right. So Twitter has policies about  what it can disallow and why they can disallow it.
117. 13:18They have policies about harm, about  expressing hate towards a certain group.
118. 13:27So if the government had any role in  helping draft policies like that for,
119. 13:33not just Twitter but for other  platforms, that would be significant.
120. 13:37We didn't find that smoking gun, but  we certainly heard it from some people.
121. 13:42Chris Hedges: Let's talk about the  Select Subcommittee on Weaponization
122. 13:45of the Federal Government. It's run by the  GOP. You were crucified for cooperating by
123. 13:54the establishment – I don't know, I don't  want to call it liberal, whatever it is,
124. 13:58media – Democratic-allied media. Talk about  the committee and what happened there.
125. 14:03Matt Taibbi: Well, so this is Jim Jordan,
126. 14:08the congressman from Ohio. He's the House  Judiciary Chair. He has a subcommittee, the
127. 14:15Weaponization of the Federal Government Committee  and he invited Michael Shellenberger and me to
128. 14:20testify about the Twitter Files. And we were very  happy to do it for one very big reason which was
129. 14:28that none of the stories we were doing, no matter  how explosive they were, were getting picked up
130. 14:34by national media. So we thought this was a unique  opportunity to get in front of a big audience that
131. 14:41would hear some of this for the first time. And I  have to say, Jim Jordan I thought was very sincere
132. 14:49in his appreciation for the First Amendment. He's  a throwback to the days when members of Congress
133. 14:59could hate each other about certain issues but  agree about basic things. And he really does
134. 15:08believe in the First Amendment, is my guess.  He worked on a SHIELD law for reporters too.
135. 15:17But they brought us in and we testified.  And instead of engaging with the material,
136. 15:22the democratic members, one after the  other, went after us personally and
137. 15:27they didn't let us speak. And this  ended up being a big moment because
138. 15:34audiences didn't get to hear about the Twitter  Files but they saw the way we were being treated,
139. 15:38and it got them so angry that they went and  educated themselves about what the material
140. 15:44was. I thought it was a politically disastrous  move by the Democrats. I didn't understand it.
141. 15:48Chris Hedges: Well, let's talk about what  they did. Like Debbie Wasserman-Schultz.
142. 15:52I watched that, she didn't let you  speak at all. You couldn't even get
143. 15:55three words before she cut you off  saying, it's my time. And the smears
144. 16:01and insults were quite remarkable.  Be specific about what they did.
145. 16:06Matt Taibbi: So the Ranking Member,  Plaskett, called me a so-called journalist.
146. 16:14Debbie Wasserman-Schultz, her line of questioning  was devoted to the idea that I was a paid scribe
147. 16:23of Elon Musk and that I was making a fortune  doing the Twitter Files story and that that was
148. 16:29my entire motivation. When she asked me about how  much money I was making and I told her truthfully,
149. 16:34that I didn't think I'd actually made that much  on it, she wouldn't let me answer that question.
150. 16:41I was told by another member from Texas  that I had to take off my tinfoil hat
151. 16:48and learn to appreciate the FBI's  efforts to keep us all protected.
152. 16:55Daniel Goldman, the member from New York, got mad  at me when I said I couldn't agree or disagree
153. 17:02with Robert Mueller's indictments of purported GRU  members. He's a lawyer, I thought he should know,
154. 17:12but indictments aren't something you can agree  or disagree with. When I said that he got upset,
155. 17:18shut me down, and reclaimed his time again.  But that was the pattern. They were accusing
156. 17:24us of being un-American, financially  motivated, paid operatives of Elon Musk,
157. 17:33and somehow connected to the Russians. And  that was the entire theme of their questioning.
158. 17:39Chris Hedges: And then outlets like MSNBC,
159. 17:41Mehdi Hasan, followed up on all  of that. Explain what they did.
160. 17:47Matt Taibbi: All they did is they took those clips  and that's how they built their stories about what
161. 17:54happened in that hearing. And we weren't the  only ones they did that to, by the way. The
162. 18:01Weaponization of Federal Government Committee  has had other hearings where they've had people
163. 18:05who were FBI whistleblowers and it's the same  formula every time: These people get accused,
164. 18:12they're taking payoffs from somebody, they  get accused of being in league with Russia,
165. 18:18or in league with insurrectionists, or whatever it  is. And then there's a little sound bite that gets
166. 18:25produced and that ends up being broadcast on MSNBC  or CNN, and that's the entirety of the report.
167. 18:32Which, Chris, there was so much frustration on  our part because a lot of what the Twitter Files
168. 18:40were about, they weren't even partisan stories.  That's what's so amazing about it. I thought,
169. 18:47I guess somewhat naively in retrospect,  that at least some of the stuff we put
170. 18:51out would be reported on or would attract some  interest. But it turned out not to be that way,
171. 18:58it turned out to be that we were the enemy for  even bringing this up, which was remarkable.
172. 19:05Chris Hedges: I want to talk about censorship.  Because we're talking about blacklists,
173. 19:09we're talking about wholesale censorship, embraced  by government agencies and the Democratic Party,
174. 19:15and the old wing of the GOP that's defected  from Trump: Liz Cheney-types, who have now been
175. 19:23incorporated into the  Democratic Party. But this is
176. 19:28a change for the old ACLU, Anthony  Lewis liberals. It's something new.
177. 19:35Matt Taibbi: Yeah, I'm old enough to have been an
178. 19:39intern and worked in the same office  with Nat Hentoff, if you remember –
179. 19:42Chris Hedges: Oh, I know Nat.
180. 19:43Matt Taibbi: Yeah, yeah. And that was  back in the day when the Village Voice
181. 19:49was the Bible of American liberalism and Nat  Hentoff's views on free speech. He would pick
182. 19:56up the smallest case of somebody trying to  trample on free speech rights and he would
183. 20:05make the biggest deal out of it. And that was  a big thing in American Intellectual Life at
184. 20:11the time. We did not truck anybody  messing with the First Amendment –
185. 20:15Chris Hedges: Well, I want to interrupt,  because people like Nat would defend right-wing
186. 20:21free speech, like the famous case with the  neo-Nazis marching through Skokie, Illinois.
187. 20:27Matt Taibbi: Right. And to American liberalism  back then, as you know, the rationale behind
188. 20:36that was not hard to understand. If you don't  protect the right of people to march in Skokie,
189. 20:44the next thing that's going to happen is that  every mayor in every small town in Alabama,
190. 20:47Mississippi, and the panhandle of Florida, is  going to prevent the NAACP from marching. This
191. 20:54stuff's not rocket science, it was really simple  reasoning but it's gone out of style. There's
192. 21:02been this massive public relations campaign that  has told a whole generation of young people that
193. 21:11counter-speech and allowing certain people  to talk doesn't work, and de-platforming
194. 21:18does. And people believe it. And this is the  rationale behind this new movement. And they
195. 21:26see Donald Trump as evidence that more stringent  measures are needed, and it's provided the cover
196. 21:34for this incredible revolution and technological  censorship that we found in the Twitter Files.
197. 21:43Chris Hedges: I want to talk about Mehdi  Hasan, who I have zero respect for.
198. 21:49Matt Taibbi: He's a good interviewer though.
199. 21:51Chris Hedges: No, he's a bully. It's the classic  technique, he seized on these incredibly minor
200. 21:59errors. We've all made them, we used to run error  boxes in the New York Times. You've made them,
201. 22:05I've made them, we all make them. But they were  almost irrelevant. You confused a timeline, you
202. 22:12had a misplaced acronym. But then he blows this  up into evidence that you've lied to Congress.
203. 22:20Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez seconds this accusation  and that's when Plaskett sends this letter.
204. 22:30And that's the first step in trying to  destroy. If you look at the pattern and
205. 22:37the attacks on Julian Assange, it's the same.  You discredit their reporting then you begin a
206. 22:46sustained campaign of character assassination.  And once they're isolated the way Julian was,
207. 22:54you can pretty much do whatever you want to  them. And it hasn't gone as far, obviously,
208. 23:00as it has with Julian but I certainly see  that pattern being played out against you.
209. 23:05Matt Taibbi: Yeah. So I made a big mistake  with Mehdi. I had beef with MSNBC for years
210. 23:13because I used to be a regular guest on the  channel. I was the last person on MSNBC who
211. 23:22was invited on who expressed any skepticism  at all about the Russia case. And even then
212. 23:27it was quite mild. But after that, I wasn't  invited back on. And I always thought that
213. 23:36MSNBC owed it to its audience to answer critics  about its wrong reporting on the Russia story.
214. 23:45So I thought it would've been hypocritical to  refuse an invitation to come on Mehdi's show.
215. 23:51I did come on and I wasn't prepared. I was  overconfident and I thought I had everything
216. 23:55locked up. I thought the worst thing that could  happen to me was that I'd sound a little bit
217. 24:00stupid on air but he found some errors and that  rattled me. But the problem was he misunderstood
218. 24:11what those errors meant. He thought they were  far more significant than they were, in fact. I
219. 24:20confused the Center for American Security and the  Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency,
220. 24:26the latter being a part of the Homeland  Security Agency. And he thought that I was
221. 24:37saying an intelligence agency was involved with  content moderation when it wasn't. In fact, both
222. 24:44CIS and CISA were involved in this one program  and he didn't understand that. So he thought
223. 24:51it was a huge, significant, intentional error.  It was actually a picayune, meaningless error.
224. 25:00But then he took the additional step of trying to  get members of Congress interested in prosecuting
225. 25:07me for lying to Congress. And it was at this  point that I tweeted at him and I said, Mehdi,
226. 25:13come on. All jokes aside now, it's time to  get serious. You're trying to put me in jail
227. 25:18for this stuff and you're wrong. And nothing.  And that was a real eye-opener for me. I get
228. 25:25all's fair in love and war, even on Twitter  everything's in bounds. But this is no joke.
229. 25:32And they really mean it. They really want  to press this stuff as far as they can.
230. 25:41Chris Hedges: You've raised this, but  it's important, about the National Guard
231. 25:46Technology support staffer  who posted documents online
232. 25:49and then the response of the media,  which like you, I found terrifying.
233. 25:54Matt Taibbi: So this is the so-called Pentagon  leaker story, where you have a 21-year-old Air
234. 26:00National Guardsman from Massachusetts, and God  knows how he gets access to this intelligence,
235. 26:06but he does. And he's in a Discord room where  he is playing Minecraft, which is a game I
236. 26:14play with my kids, and they're passing around  some intelligence. And what's incredible about
237. 26:21this is that the Washington Post, The New York  Times, and Bellingcat track down this person and
238. 26:28deliver them to the authorities. And now they're  doing stories based on the stuff he was leaking.
239. 26:38Can you ever remember, Chris, journalists working  to turn in sources? It's a total violation of what
240. 26:50journalism is. We're not on the side, we're not  part of the government's investigatory apparatus.
241. 26:58But they see themselves that way. And when they  pair up with these organizations like Bellingcat,
242. 27:03which are government funded, what they  call open-source intelligence agencies,
243. 27:11it's a totally new role for the media.  And they see themselves as doing the
244. 27:18right thing by putting the people  in the crosshairs of the government.
245. 27:23Chris Hedges: Is this driven by fear of  Trump? Would you say that's the engine?
246. 27:27Matt Taibbi: I would hope so. Because  that's at least a reason. But I worry
247. 27:33sometimes that it's an even baser phenomenon  in that this is groupthink, it's careerism,
248. 27:45and it's a new political movement that is  developing where there's a new sensation within
249. 27:55the media business that I had not clued into for  a long time. But it's this belief that whatever we
250. 28:03were doing before, when the type of approach  we were taking to reporting no longer works,
251. 28:10we can't put stuff out there and hope  that the public makes the right decisions.
252. 28:15We have to act and make sure that they do the  right thing with the information, which means
253. 28:21that we have to have lockstep discipline about  what we say. We have to filter out things that
254. 28:31we think the public can't handle and we have to  exaggerate things that we think they need to know.
255. 28:37And this is a new vision for how information  is disseminated. Again, I'd be curious to hear
256. 28:47your thoughts on it. But to me, it reminds me of  something that you would've seen in the Soviet
257. 28:52Union in the late ‘20s or early’30s, or in other  countries that have authoritarian traditions.
258. 29:01Chris Hedges: Well, isn't it because  their own credibility has been shredded?
259. 29:03Matt Taibbi: Well, yes. Yes. But to me,  that's exactly the wrong way to respond to –
260. 29:10Chris Hedges: Well of course, but that's the way  they're responding. They're not trusted. What's
261. 29:16the approval rating for the press? It's probably  in the single digits. Who knows? It's pretty low.
262. 29:21Matt Taibbi: Well, they're probably looking up  at Congress right now, right? It’s remarkable,
263. 29:28you would think it's impossible, right? It's  like the Woody Allen joke: they're a notch
264. 29:32below child molesters at this point. But as  you know, the only way to win back trust in
265. 29:42media is to be straight with people and own up to  mistakes and to look people in the eye and say,
266. 29:48we got this wrong. We're going to try  to be square with you the next time.
267. 29:54They're not doing that. Instead,  they're locking arms and saying,
268. 29:57we are the only source of information. We  have legitimacy because we're credentialed
269. 30:05and that gives us authority that other people  lack, and we want you to discount any information
270. 30:11you get from any other source. And  they're going with that. You know,
271. 30:17as well as anybody else, that this is a  belief system that's become pervasive.
272. 30:22Chris Hedges: Great. Thanks, Matt. I  want to thank The Real News Network
273. 30:25and its production team: Cameron  Granadino, Adam Coley, David Hebden,
274. 30:28and Kayla Rivara. You can find  me at ChrisHedges.SubStack.com.