Matt Taibbi Surprised by FBI & Twitter's Collusion; Russiagate Info in Twitter Files

I've enjoyed your work with the Twitter file. I've enjoyed all your work, but I really have enjoyed the Twitter files. That has been some really fascinating views behind the curtain. It's been one of the weirder, more surreal experiences of my life because, you know, as a reporter, you're always kind of banging away to try to get one little piece of reality, right? Like, you might make 30 or 40 phone calls to get one sentence. The Twitter files is, oh, by the way, here, you know, take a laptop and look at 50,000 emails, you know, full of all kinds of stuff. And so it's, you know, for somebody like me, it's like a dream come true. We get to see all kinds of things, get the answers to questions that we've had for years, and it's been really incredible. Has anything been surprising to you? A little bit. I think going into it, I thought that the relationship between the security agencies like the FBI and the DHS and companies like Twitter and Facebook, I thought it was a little bit less formal. Like I thought maybe they had kind of an advisory role. And what we find is that it's not that. It's very formalized. They have a really intense structure that they've worked out over a period of years where they have regular meetings. They have a system where the DHS handles, you know, censorship requests that come up from the states, and the FBI handles the international ones, and they all float all these companies. It's a big bureaucracy, and I don't think we expected to see that. It's very bizarre to me that they would just openly call for censorship in emails and these private transmissions, but ones that are easily duplicated, you could send them to other people. It can easily get out. Like that they're so comfortable with the idea that the government should be involved in this censorship of what turns out to be true information, especially in regards to the Hunter Biden laptop, that they would be so comfortable that they would just send it in emails. Yeah. Yeah. Well, I think that shows you the mentality, right? Like that they really genuinely felt that they were impregnable, that they don't have anybody to answer to. I mean, a normal person doesn't put incriminating things in emails because we all have the expectation that someday it might come out, you know? But these folks didn't act that way. I mean, you see, I was especially shocked by an email from a staffer for Adam Schiff, the congressperson, the California congressman. And they're just outright saying, we would like you to suspend the accounts of this journalist and anybody who retweets information about this committee. You know, I mean, this is a member of Congress, right? Most of these people have legal backgrounds. They've got lawyers in the office for sure. And this is the House Intelligence Committee. You would think they would have better operational security. Another moment that was shocking to me, there was an email from an FBI agent named Elvis Chan in San Francisco to Twitter. And they're setting up this signal group, which is going to include all the top sort of censorship executives at all the big companies. And it's a Word document that has all the phone numbers of all these important executives. And the email just, the subject line reads phone numbers, right? And then the Word doc has just called secret phone numbers, right? And I'm thinking, this is how they taught you to do it at Quantico? Really? You know? I mean, even a journalist can't miss that, you know what I'm saying? Call it something else, you know? I don't know. That part of it was amazing. So strange. It's so strange to get such a peak. Because I don't think anybody ever anticipated that something like this would happen where Twitter would get sold to an eccentric billionaire who's intent on letting all the information get released. Yeah, I mean, I think Elon Musk essentially, he spent $44 billion to become a whistleblower of his own company. And I don't really fully know his motives in doing that. I think he's got a pretty developed sense of humor, though. And that comes through. I think he gets a kick out of seeing all this stuff come out on Twitter, which used to be kind of the private stomping ground of all of these whiny journalists. And now here is all this information that is just horrifying to all of them. I mean, that's a... $44 billion is a lot to spend on that thrill, but I'm glad he did. Well, he truly believes that censored social media is a threat to democracy. He really believes that. Absolutely. Yeah. And I believe it too. I just don't have $44 billion. Right. And I'd be like, I don't want that heat. Right. Right. Yeah. I don't think that's what I would spend it on, but no, he believes that. I think he also believes that the credibility of these companies can only be restored by telling people what they talk about in private or what they have been talking about with the government and that sort of thing. Yeah. And he might be right about that. We'll see, I guess. I think he is. I mean, it's going to be interesting. It's going to be interesting to see how this plays out. There's an amazing amount of resistance against him. And just the publicity campaign against him has been fascinating to watch. People go from thinking that Elon Musk is the savior that's bringing us his amazing electric cars and engineering new reusable rockets to he's an alt-right piece of shit who wants Donald Trump back in the office. And it's very wild. The speed with which they can sort of shuffle somebody into the Hitler or the Month Club routine. Right. Like, you know, we've always done this with foreigners, you know, whether it's Noriega or Saddam Hussein or Milosevic or Assad or whatever it is. We have a playbook for cranking out negative information about foreigners who get in our way for whatever reason. But now we've kind of refined that technique for domestic people who are inconvenient. I think they did it with Trump, obviously. They try to do it with Tucker Carlson, with you. You got a taste of that for a few times. Yeah, it's interesting. Right. And then, you know, with Elon, yeah, he went from being the guy who made electric cars sexy to like, you know, something to the right of Victor Orban in like 10 seconds. It's amazing. It is amazing. And the narrative is spread through progressive people. Well, they'll just say it now. It's like they've reached the memo. The memos got to them. And then they just I hear people in L.A. I hear people that I know like, oh, Elon is just so crazy. It's like something happened to him. He went nuts. And he's a right winger now. How? What are you saying? Like, what examples do you have? Like, they don't have an example. They just have this narrative that reached them the signal like, Elon bad now. Oh, right. Like, right. Oh, right. Oh, right. Oh, right. And they just start saying it. And you go like, what examples are you using of like his behavior? Well, he let Trump back on the platform. Okay. Well, the Taliban's there. Right. Yeah, exactly. You didn't have a problem with the Taliban. The Taliban just bought blue checkmarks. Do you know that? Did they really? I guess didn't know that they're buying blue check mark so they could be verified I'm the real terrorist The fucking Taliban is on and no one has a problem with it the CCP's on Twitter Right. No one has a problem with it, right? But there's like Trump. They'll let Trump back on the Trump is hilarious He's a ridiculous person But don't you think it's better that his tweets get out there and then a bunch of people get to attack him in the tweets And if those tweets that people attack him with are good if people are saying good things Then those things get retweeted and liked and then they rise up to the top of the algorithm It's all good like you need a voice against someone like that You can't have that guy howling into the wind on some QAnon forum and all those wackos Just so they're only talking to each other with no pushback at all. If you really don't like Trump you want him on Twitter You want that guy to have some pushback you want people to be talking against what he's saying you want Twitter the real Twitter now, which will actually fact-check everybody they fact-check Biden, right? They'll fact-check him So he said something stupid they'll go no, that's not what's true. Here's what's true, right? And that would be good and that was actually for a while Twitter's official policy they had something called the public interest policy which specifically laid out exactly what you said like when one in world leader No matter who it is says anything We wanted to be out there because we wanted to be debated. We want people to see it we wanted people to talk about it we want people to reach conclusions about it and one of the things that we found in the Twitter files was after January 6th, there was this intense debate within the company where They were basically saying oh, thank God. We're gonna repeal the public interest policy or we're gonna poke a hole in it, right? And no longer have that belief system that just because somebody is a world leader We need to hear what they have to say. So they invented a new a new policy called glorification of violence or they they called it that and Essentially what they said was you you had to look at Trump not in terms of each individual tweet but in terms of What they called the context surrounding his whole career All the people who followed him whether or not they were violent whether or not they said the things that were offensive it's like the speech version of Stochastic terrorism if you ever heard that term, it's stochastic terrorism is this idea that You you can incite people to violence by saying things that aren't specifically inciting but are statistically likely to Create you know somebody who will do something violent even if it's not individually predictable And that's what they did with Trump. They basically invented this concept that Yes, he may not have actually incited violence, but his whole the whole totality of his persona is Is inciting so we're gonna strike him and so they said they sort of massively expanded The the purview of what of things they can censor just in that one moment And it's you know, you can see it in these dialogues how they came to that decision, which is just fascinating And they've never come out and said We were misinformed that is not the case there really wasn't this crazy collusion between Russia and Donald Trump and in fact, there was Some information that seems to point to that Hillary Clinton had involvement with Russia too and that they've kind of all had involvement with Russia And this this wasn't some grand conspiracy to elect a Russian puppet as the president of the United States. Sorry Yeah, it was it was a Three and a half year Sort of massive stereo experiment, right and I mean this is one of the things It it's one of the reasons I got kind of quietly moved out of mainstream journalism, right? I didn't have particular problem at Rolling Stone, but you know, I Early on in the Trump years. I I said something wrong with the story. I I think There are elements of it that aren't provable. I don't think we should be running this stuff, you know, and then Before I knew it I was working independently. But anyway at the Twitter files We've we're finding stuff that now tells you absolutely like What actually the truth was during that time like for instance one of the big Russiagate stories Was from early 2018 when Devin Nunes remember the he was the Republican congressman He was the head of the House Intelligence Committee at the time. He wrote a memo Basically saying we think they They faked FISA applications. We think the FBI used the Steele dossier to try to get surveillance authority against some Trump people like Carter Page and we think they lied and cheated to do that and so he submitted this classified memo and Not only was he denounced everywhere as a liar and wrong and all that But there was this big story that was all over the place that a hashtag hashtag release the memo Had been amplified by Russian bots You probably don't remember this but but this story was everywhere in January and February of 2018 this idea that that Released the memo was basically a Russian operation and that Nunes was Benefiting from it. Well, I'm reading the Twitter files. I was looking for something else entirely and then suddenly we come across a string of Emails internally at Twitter where the Twitter officials are saying, you know We're not finding any Russians at all behind this hashtag and we told The members of Congress who asked about this That there are no Russians involved in this because Dianne Feinstein Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut they all came out with this accusation about about it being linked to Russia We told them that there's nothing there and they they went and they did it anyway, you know And so there are lots of stories like that now that are kind of falling apart, right?