Episode 35: "America This Week," with Matt Taibbi and Walter Kirn

Biden seems to be being coy in some fashion about whether he's going. He says he'll participate, but in some sense, I'll participate in the next election. Will he participate as a candidate? is the question.

I'm not even sure, sometimes, whether the parties are going to be around in any recognizable fashion. Because the Republicans don't seem to be having an identity crisis. That is bottomless in some fashion.

I'm going to bring them back out, set them on the table and deal with them.

That could work. I also think that just being in the debates would be wonderful. See, that's the only part of the thing I covet doing the job, No?

I think she might have been president of a tiny Republican club in our small town. She kept all her campaign buttons pristine in a drawer, going back to, I don't know Goldwater or something. I used to take them out the way you'd run a rifle through your parents drawers. And think about the romance of each campaign. They seemed so simple in retrospect.

Now they made a button, they gave a couple of speeches, they had a platform.

Then they retired from the scene after losing. Now, ever since the invention of pro-wrestling or big-time pro-wrestling and other fake-blood sports, it's become just a grueling spectacle that never ends. I might be too old to insert myself in that, though it seems that the latest qualification for you as president is that you'd be very old.

Anyway, yeah, so we'll handle your presidential campaign later, but I'm serious about this. I know there's got to be somebody who's willing to run and I think you'd be a good candidate.

To run, you appeal to both sides anyway.

Open minds, open hearts, that could be my slogan, and I could get up, and they always talk about listening tours, but I could actually listen.

I mean, two huge guys and I just remember seeing them stand together, thinking like, if these dudes ran the country, I'd be physically intimidated. Which is not. Maybe we should have physically intimidating presidents. Shouldn't they be the largest among us?

In an ancient tribal civilization, that would have been obvious.

There was a you had to be at least as big as an N.FL offensive tackle to play to be the president. Like, if that was the thing in the Constitution, yeah. Born in the continental United States, at least 35 years old and at least 36-inch arms and 6'7".

Right?

We all become auxiliary teammates of whoever we back and we all get beat up, but it shouldn't happen that the people get beat up. It should be the candidates and we should watch them draw blood, pin each other to the mat. UFC style, no holds barred.

Hector Elizondo.

Kamado.

Anyway, yeah, we'll move on, so we know we have to. There's some other stuff we've got to talk about today, obviously, but we wanted to start.

Here's the name Dwayne Elizondo Mountain Dew Kamacho.

That's awesome Terry crews great role.

Okay, so we know we have some stuff we've got to get to today of more of a personal nature. But the self-referential thing is getting a little exhausting. So we're going to start with some other things that happened this week. There was a lot of stuff, but one story that was kind of fascinating. And let's just read the opening to the New York Post story about this.

Ex-CIA chief spills on how he got spies to write false Hunter Biden laptop letter to quote Help Biden. Miranda Devines.

Flyline reads. Joe Biden's presidential campaign prompted former acting CIA director Mike Morrell to quote. Help Biden by organizing 50 colleagues to sign a letter in October 2020, falsely claiming that damning emails from Hunter Biden's laptop, published by the Post, were Russian disinformation. In private sworn testimony, Morrell told the House Judiciary Committee that Anthony Blinken, now secretary of state, was the senior campaign official who reached out to him on or about October 17, 2020. Three days after the Post published an email from the laptop suggesting Hunter had introduced his Ukrainian business partner to his father. Then-vice President Biden Morrell, identified as a potential CIA director under Biden, said he had organized the letter to quote Help Vice President Biden because I wanted him to win the election. Until Blinken's call, Morrell told House investigators he had no intention of writing any statement exonerating Biden, but he agreed that the conversation with Blinken quote triggered that intent in him. So, Walter, your reaction to this?

I wonder if there was any arm twisting. It doesn't seem so since the process went off pretty quickly.

It's amazing how quickly you can get 50 fellow intelligence officials or former officials to agree on a statement. I doubt they thought about it for very long.

Hey man, I hear my my friend signing your letter. how come you didn't ask me I'll sign it too?

Did Biden win? And so so. Is it corruption when you just want your guy to win and you're willing to do anything?

Now, how they could have all known in that short time that it was Russian disinformation is curious. None would have, none would have mounted their own research. I would think there wasn't time for that.

October 17th, You say, I mean.

Let's see what, what's the actual?

And it was published in Politico, which is, which is a very strange thing.

But.

But yeah, no, the almost instantaneously the story just rocketed around media, and what I thought was amazing is that media added elements to it that they didn't even put in. Like, they use the word information operation, and media use the word disinformation, like in headlines.

There were some kind of impressive conflicts of interest, like MSNBC had two of the signatories were actually paid contributors for MSNBC. Who then went on, you know, on the air to to talk about Biden's campaign. And but again, they never had anything on this like it would have been totally legitimate to say. Is there a thing? There are elements about this story that would make you nervous, right? Like the possible involvement of somebody like Andre Dercotch, you know, in talking to Rudy Giuliani Dercotch?

You know, it's pretty spooky guy. Like, probably has Russian, almost certainly has Russian government connections, right? But by saying that they were overtly changing the subject from something that was true to something that was fake.

The letter, when I read it at the time, suggested that they, you know, could prove this, if asked, that they actually had some evidence for their assertion. But now, I guess when I look back after you read that weasel language. They didn't address at all the contents, they just compared it to past Russian disinformation campaigns. And said it bears all the hallmarks, which, you know, neatly sidesteps having to look at its contents. They haven't said what those hallmarks are or were. I'd like to know, maybe this story will go further, and some of these 50 will have to.

Reveal their reasoning, or their, if not reasoning, thinking or reflexive acting. But right now, it just looks terrible. I mean, you say conflicts of interest, but I'm not sure they exist anymore in America, there's just one interest, especially where politics are concerned. And the idea that intelligence, media and electoral politics are any different is probably a fiction. We should dispense with as we go forward, realistically, into our brave future.

All of these people working in concert with these anti-disinformation groups to get people removed from the internet, or to identify things as misinformation. Or seek out places where unfettered conversations that can't be surveilled exist.

Everybody's kind of on the same team and as you said, and I love the phrase you use, there's supposed to be this dynamic tension between all these groups. That's what makes democracy work, is that they're all kind of acting as a check on each other. But once they all jump in the sack together, you just get this big lump of interest. That sort of blindly goes in whatever direction it wants, and there's nothing to check its worst instincts.

And it was important, I think, because once that letter had been issued, it gave cover to journalism and the disinformation complex. To do things like suppress, you know, suppress the discussion on Twitter, right? That happened.

Kick the New York Post off of Twitter, which has happened?

I mean, journalists against journalists. There's an Elizabethan play famously titled Women Beware Women. And we now live in the Journalists, Beware Journalists age, in which MSNBC contributors, also known as former heads of intelligence agencies, then get another journalistic outlet, the New York Post, banished from Twitter.

The New York Post being owned by Rupert Murdoch, who also owns one of the major competitor of MSNBC.

We're really looking at internecine, media wars, among other things.

And you know, I like this story only because, as I say it, it gives us a clear, organizational look at how these things work. And because, because, whenever, whenever these apparent cascades happen, we're told that it's sort of an organic process, but I don't know that power lets organic processes happen.

You know, politics is the art of stopping and guiding, and making appear organic all kinds of processes that serve power. But here it was just flat campaign work, filtering down into the media and out into social media.

Morrell wrote an editorial for The New York Times called I Ran the CIA. Now I'm endorsing Hillary Clinton. And remember, this was six days after the FBI had launched its crossfire Hurricane probe into Trump, Russia and Morrell. In the middle of talking about why he was for, Hillary starts talking about Trump's relationship with Russia. And he said Mr Trump has also taken policy positions consistent with Russian, not American interests, endorsing Russian espionage against the United States, supporting Russia's annexation of Crimea and giving a green light to possible Russian invasion of the Baltic States.

In the intelligence business, we would say that Mr. Putin had recruited Mr. Trump as an unwitting agent of the Russian Federation.

And this, this kind of put wind into the sails of this whole. Like, let's talk about about Trump as a, you know, as a as a useful idiot, or, as any, as a at least an unwitting agent of Russia. It triggered a number of I don't know, triggered the wrong word. We don't know that, but it was, it was the beginning of a number of stories that started to trickle out.

It kind of, you know, pushed the damn thing off from the dock. To say someone has been recruited is interesting language that suggests there was a meeting, that suggests there's a deal.

Not just that you know someone. Can you be recruited just sentimentally sort of over through the atmosphere, or does that require, you know, a negotiation somewhere? It would suggest that it does.

In that, in that statement, we do have the seed of about how many years now? Seven years of bullshit, well, right?

Those reports were beginning to float around.

I mean, I didn't hear, I heard. I first started hearing from media people who had seen something like in late August or September of that year. Maybe the first, but I didn't know what it was. But the first report that came out about it was Isikoff's in mid-September, but that stuff was already in the Ether. If you go back and look, you can see it's kind of alluded to.

And since, in a couple of opinion pieces here and there, I knew it was in the Ether because.

You know, I. Just as a footnote, we should. We should note that Buzzfeed News, the original publisher of the Steele Dossier, is closing this week, announced that it's closing after the scoop of the century. You'd think they could have run for another 30 years, but.

But good old BuzzFeed News was ready to stake its reputation, not at that point non-existent.

Mostly because I didn't understand him. I met David Korn, I remember at the at the 2016 convention. And the guy was so on fire and knew so much and had so many certainties in his system. That I thought, how can I get to know these people without being in some way drawn into their force field?

I still wanted in my little town way, to see the world as I thought it was, and in a case by case fashion. And it seemed that longtime political reporters all had a kind of career out of some point of view and advancing it. And that's how they made their career, and that's how they had they defended their niche.

And so I shied away from them.

I remember at the time when, when Smith, when Buzzfeed published that, thinking, OK, there's going to be a hue and a cry from all the media reporters. And there was some, but it was. It was a bit of a split decision, if I remember correctly. Among the like, the pure sort of media ethicists. Because I figured they're like, at least those people would say this is like a bit of a dangerous road to go down. Like, just publishing stuff that, you know, is problematic. Actually, because they, because they said that in the in, in the opening, right?

And you know, do you want to be owning that later on? You know if if this awful falls apart, that's a scary place to be. Like, I'm not sure I'd want to be the person who made that call, you know?