参议员 Eric Schmitt：揭露美国历史上最大的审查丑闻

I put on a jacket because we’re interviewing a senator, but I see that it’s polo day.

Senator Schmitt pulled a Zelensky here.

I did, but I told them I have this stiff collar on the polo, which is—

You look great. It looks great. And, you know, I lost the weight. Thanks for noticing, Senator. I’ve been hitting the weights, unlike Sacks, so I’m trying to get the gun show going like you have achieved there.

All right, besties. I think that was another epic discussion. People love the interviews. I could hear him talk for hours.

Absolutely. We crushed your questions in a minute.

We are giving people ground truth data to underwrite your own opinion. What do you guys think? That was fun.

All right, everybody. Welcome back to a very special interview with me, my amazing co-host and your czar of crypto and AI, the Rain Man himself, David Sacks. David, how are you doing, brother? How’s your summer wrapping up?

Good to be here. The summer ended way too soon.

Way too soon. It’s so sad, isn’t it?

It’s just like—we’re not ready for it to be over.

Kids going back to school, all that. And look, you’re a civil servant now. You are working for the people, and the people demand results. And, hey, we have another civil servant here. David, why don’t you introduce our guest today?

This is Senator Eric Schmitt from the state of Missouri. How did we meet? It was through another former senator, now vice president, J.D. Vance, I believe.

That’s right.

That’s right. Yeah. And you guys entered the Senate together at the same time.

We did. We got to be very close and shared a lot of life experiences. In our freshman group, we got pretty tight. We go to dinner once a month and try to keep that going now that he’s even vice president, which is a lot of fun. But, yeah, we got introduced through him and have enjoyed getting to know you.

And you now have a new book called The Last Line of Defense, which is about your time in your previous job as attorney general of the state of Missouri. I remember talking about you before I even knew you on the All-In podcast when we were dealing with censorship and talking about that issue—the Twitter Files. This was back in—I don’t know—like 3 or 4 years ago.

2022, I would say. A few years ago now. Time is moving.

We talked about the case Missouri v. Biden, which you brought when you were attorney general. When I met you and found that out, I knew that we had some views in common, let’s say, about free speech and the need to avoid censorship. You went right at the Show-Me: don’t tell me, show me what’s going on. You went directly to discovery.

Maybe you could talk a little bit about the approach from the senator from the Show-Me State. There were rumors and this feeling that people were being censored, but nobody knew exactly how it was occurring. So you had some intuition that if we did some discovery here, there had to be something under the surface. Or had somebody leaked something to you? How did you know to go after this, I guess, was my question?

Yeah. One of the reasons I wrote the book was just to explain what happened. I think it’s easy to forget. The book starts with November 2024: the fever broke. If you think about the 4 previous years, this was a time of lockdowns, compulsory COVID shots and forced masking of 5-year-olds, but also this vast censorship enterprise that existed. In my view, it was the greatest affront to the First Amendment we’ve ever seen in the history of our country.

If you go back in time to 2022, you had seen, to your point, Jason, Jen Psaki at the podium talking about, “Hey, we’re flagging this for Facebook.” There were rumors of a Disinformation Governance Board, with Nina Jankowicz herself talking about how this misinformation and disinformation needed to be flagged and something done about it. We knew that if they were willing to talk about that stuff so publicly, there had to be something much more beneath the surface.

In May 2022, when I was attorney general of Missouri, we sued the Biden administration and this leviathan of agencies that were working to censor American speech. We filed the lawsuit, and we knew that it would be highly scrutinized and called conspiracy theory–mongering, but we knew there was something there.

A really important strategic decision in the case was that normally, when you file a lawsuit like that, you immediately seek a temporary restraining order or a preliminary injunction to get the government or another party to stop what they’re doing. But we felt like we needed to get evidence first. We had the allegations in the complaint, so we sought discovery. The judge granted that discovery, and what we found was shocking.

We got reams and reams—tens of thousands—of documents, emails and text messages about this communication, the special portals that existed for people in big government to work with big tech to silence Americans. It really was shocking. Then, of course, we got to the point where we were able to take depositions. We took the deposition of Anthony Fauci. We took the deposition of Elvis Chan, who was the FBI agent in charge of Northern California and was prebunking the Hunter Biden laptop story, even though the FBI had the laptop in 2019.

We took the deposition of a CDC official who was basically flagging specific words and phrases that the government would then censor, and agencies like CISA. All of these groups were part of this enterprise. That’s one of the reasons I wrote The Last Line of Defense, which people can get on Amazon right now. We go inside those deposition rooms and inside the preparation for them: What were we trying to find out? What did we find out? How did we uncover this?

You have to remember, this was before Elon bought Twitter.

What’s interesting about this is that you were taking the discovery from the government side. You were getting the government documents and deposing government witnesses.

Yeah.

And this was happening at Facebook too, right? You had information on the Facebook side.

Yeah. You had Meta and YouTube. All of this was happening. The way it was working was, as you guys know, these big tech platforms have something called Section 230 protection. Basically, in the ’90s, when the internet was becoming a thing, Congress said, “You’re not a publisher; you’re a platform, so you can’t be sued.” That is a huge advantage.

If they’re actually acting as a platform, as a proponent of free speech—almost as a free-speech absolutist—that’s a great thing. The problem was that a lot of these entities were then becoming publishers. They were throttling things they didn’t like and taking down opinions they didn’t support.

What you had was Joe Biden saying there might be criminal liability. You saw these text messages in the lawsuit from Rob Flaherty, who was the deputy communications director of the White House, cussing these guys out and saying, “You need to know that from the highest levels of the White House, we see this. You’re not doing enough.”

As much as I think some of the people at these big tech companies were willing participants, there was coercion happening. That’s the basis of the lawsuit: We all know the government can’t censor speech, but you also can’t outsource that censorship to private companies, which is exactly what was going down.

I think exposing that was really important. Of course, Elon and all the work that he’s done in making Twitter a true free-speech platform, and then, of course, the congressional hearings that followed—I think all of this has laid the groundwork for this kind of free-speech renaissance that we’re experiencing.

One of the things I was kind of jealous of when I was in college in the late ’90s—I was always pretty conservative—was that liberals had the high ground on free speech. They were viewed as the vanguard, and even the ACLU actually did things like protect free speech. That’s all gone now. It’s about power and control, limiting and labeling things misinformation and disinformation to suppress speech.

So I think it’s an interesting moment right now for this new coalition that came together to elect President Trump. For me, that’s exciting. It’s kind of a working-class coalition.

Just to steelman it, Senator, we know that our foreign adversaries—this is bipartisan, for many decades—interfere in our elections. We know they do that. You would agree?

Yeah.

They certainly would try to influence.

Certainly try.

Right. And, of course, we could say, “Hey, is it possible in 50 different states with 50 different sets of regulations?” It’s pretty hard to actually tip an election, as we’ve seen, right?

If we steelman a foreign adversary—because this is the cover they were seeking—“Hey, we’re doing this to protect America and democracy.” But the truth was, they were doing it for their own personal reasons and their affiliation with one particular party.

If you just look at the percentage of people who are Democrats at those companies, it’s like 80%, 90%, 95%. So I think we all agree on that. Is there a way for the FBI, the CIA, or our government to say to Twitter and Facebook, “Hey, you’ve got people here who are foreign adversaries. They’re doing something that is against the American public. We need you to monitor this account and take them down”? What would have been the proper channel, as opposed to setting up a covert back channel where they kind of threatened them?

One layer here that I've never heard anybody connect, but when I was listening to your Tucker interview, it just dawned on me. They also put Lena Khan in. Now, Zuckerberg is a cutthroat business executive. He likes to buy companies. That's his thing. And Twitter was known for buying a lot of companies. So now you got Lena Khan saying, "We're going to come down hard on you, not let you buy anything." And at the same time, this other group from the Biden administration is saying, "Hey, take this stuff down." So they had two really big clubs to threaten these folks. But what would be the proper channels to say, "Hey, these things are stolen." Right.

Yeah. There’s a difference between making people aware versus the coercion that was happening under the threat of investigations or losing Section 230 protections. That was our argument: This went beyond informing and was about colluding and coercing, which, of course, crosses the line of what the government can do as far as violating the First Amendment.

There are also a couple of things happening at the same time here. The first is honestly kind of a legacy of the whole Russiagate hoax, in that they concocted this theme that is playing out now. Tulsi Gabbard is exposing a lot of stuff, but that gave them the guise to talk about Russia—this Russia, that Russia. Everything they don’t like is misinformation or disinformation.

The other thing that was happening with Zuckerberg in particular—you’ve got to remember, if you go back to 2016, a lot of people blamed him. If he didn’t like Trump, they blamed him because they thought that somehow what was happening on Facebook contributed to his election, and it shouldn’t have happened. Then, of course, he was part of the whole Zuckerbucks movement in the lead-up to 2020. He comes back around, Biden is in office, and he’s pressured. Then he goes on Joe Rogan and talks about the lengths to which they went to pressure him. Now it seems as though maybe he’s been red-pilled again. I don’t really know where that’s at.

No, no, I can tell you he’s a weather vane. That’s just how you know which way the wind’s blowing: Zuckerberg.

But it’s interesting how he was vacillating from one place to the next.

He would have been all in for Kamala—100%. He would have been at the inauguration for her. He would have donated to her. Trust me, we know him. It’s my opinion.

But I give him a little more credit in the following sense: Zuckerberg gave a speech a while back where he talked about how social networking was the fourth estate. You’ve got the media, and then you’ve got social networking. It’s very disruptive, and therefore people want to censor it. He basically supported the idea that we should have freedom of speech for social networking, like we do for the press, because it’s equally important. I think that is his actual view.

The question is, how much stomach does he have for fighting the government when it’s pressuring and coercing him, while some other part of the government is basically threatening to break up his company?

Right.

Yeah. Right.

Like a fifth estate, right? I think that if he wasn’t being pressured by the government at all and were just left to his own devices, he’d be fairly pro-free speech. But I don’t think he was really willing to take up the banner and fight the way Elon was.

He’s anti-Elon in that respect. He’s the anti-Elon. He cares about his stock price. He cares about money. This is my interpretation. He’s going to protect the franchise and the stock price.

But that’s what most businesspeople would do. I think Elon was an outlier in terms of being willing to fight for principle, which is why I think that, going back to the central premise of Missouri v. Biden, when the government is jawboning these companies, instructing them to take down content or highly suggesting it, and basically threatening that there’ll be repercussions if they don’t, most businesspeople are going to give in to that. Of course.

And it is de facto censorship.

Well, if you think about it, too, there are just a couple of things: If they didn’t happen, all of this stuff would still be considered a conspiracy theory, or we wouldn’t know about it. If nobody else had filed—if we hadn’t filed that lawsuit and sought discovery—and if the richest guy on the planet hadn’t chosen to buy Twitter and expose all of that, people would still be claiming that this was some conspiracy theory, right? We wouldn’t know. If you just think about it, the world would be a much different place right now. I think that’s a big success.

Well, I agree. Just to take people back, you’re exactly right that conservatives were called crazy and conspiracy theorists for believing that Twitter was shadow-banning and throttling traffic.

I remember when Elon took over. We had the Twitter transition, and Jason Calacanis and I were there. We were just helping out for the first couple of weeks. It was mostly getting org charts and trying to rationalize the org structure, and Elon went in and started making cuts. I think I left around Thanksgiving, and we were all with our families. I think we went down to Mexico, and Elon was still there working. I remember I got a text from him at about 2:00 in the morning: “Are you up?”

Hang you up. You up? Going to be a banger?

Yeah, I’m like, “Sure.” So anyway, he calls, and basically what he told me was that all the conspiracy theories were true. We had now gone into the admin tools that the Trust and Safety team was using, and they literally had checkboxes to throttle accounts, exclude them from search, and use all these different tools that they had created to throttle traffic, which was effectively shadow-banning. They could just ban you outright, or they could prevent your content from being seen. In other words, everything that conservatives had claimed was true.

To add to that, Senator, before you respond, the thing that’s particularly interesting about this is that you talked about Section 230. We want platforms to have Section 230, but when you start making editorial decisions—when you’re The New York Times and you say, “Hey, this is going on the front page,” that’s an editorial decision. When you assign the story, that’s an editorial decision.

Section 230 was given to platforms that didn’t make editorial decisions. This is an editorial decision to say, “Milo Yiannopoulos, Laura Loomer, or Alex Jones”—whatever the reason is. They could be antisemitic. They could be crazy.

Or the president of the United States, which was—

We’ll get into that one for sure, because there are a lot of good questions there.

This was one of the things that Elon had done that very day: He opened up the Twitter jails and let Trump back onto the platform, and there were some others. Jordan Peterson was—

It was a little bit like Arkham Asylum. You did let a couple of crazy people back on, too.

No, all the bad boys of free speech were let out. I mean, it was Trump, Tate, Jordan Peterson, Jaria [?], folks like Peterson. The public doesn’t need to be protected from any of these people.

I mean, Milo Yiannopoulos and Alex Jones—you may find them loathsome or funny, or anything in between—but it is freedom of speech. But, Senator, this has led to a discussion of Section 230 being repealed. This is where I think the lawsuit you filed—and there could be further work—is clarifying the nuance of Section 230.

Should an algorithm de facto be an editorial decision? If you have an algorithm and say, “Hey, I’m going to show you more MAGA stuff. I’m going to show you more AOC,” that’s an editorial decision in my mind. Should that break Section 230 if somebody decides to build an algorithm that shapes the content you see when you open the app, just like The New York Times editors do?

Right. That’s sort of what we talk about in The Last Line of Defense: What are the solutions? What’s the proper role of Section 230? I actually think that if you are a true platform—somebody who believes in free speech—it’s a very important thing.

One of my concerns—I’m not a doomsday guy on AI. I think it can add to human flourishing. I think it can actually make us more productive, and there are a lot of opportunities that come with it. One of the things I’m most concerned about, though, is censorship creeping into AI.

You have to be very clear that if you’re going to start making these edits, whether somebody is individually flagging it or you have an algorithm that is essentially excluding 50% of the points of view, you should not get the multibillion-dollar subsidy.

That’s effectively what Section 230 protection is, right? It’s a huge advantage, and it should be. By the way, I’m all for that, but I think this manipulation—which, by the way, is sort of sewn into the heart—

—of the algorithm. Because you know what an algorithm is, you’re a tech-savvy guy, and it’s great to have senators who are—

But you can’t—but, just like government—

How can you have an algorithm that’s designed to produce a certain output coexist with Section 230? That’s my question. I have my own answers, but I’m curious about your answer.

Yeah. I think you have to get back to one of the First Amendment principles, which is that it has to be content-neutral. That’s how I view it. Now, you can have protections. There are certain public-safety protections that are going to be in play. You could have protections against pedophilia that would violate the terms of service. There is a role—

—to violate laws, right? I mean—

Correct. Yeah.

But I also think what’s interesting is, when you go back and look at this case, the pressure on the platforms wasn’t just about phrases. They made them alter their terms of service to actually meet the desired outcomes that they wanted.

And, David, you guys saw this. Interestingly, the kind of—how deep the rot really was. Let’s just take Twitter, for example. James Baker—who’s James Baker? James Baker was the general counsel for the FBI during the Hunter Biden—I’m sorry, the briefings during Russiagate back then, at the end of 2016. He then, after a stint at some think tank, became the general counsel at Twitter.

He was the one inside Twitter—we now know from the Twitter Files—who was advocating censoring the Hunter Biden laptop story, even though he should have known, based on his time at the FBI, that the laptop was authentic. That is, it was Hunter Biden’s actual laptop. The grounds upon which that story was censored was that the laptop was Russian disinformation.

This was the tried-and-true tactic for years: Any speech that was inconvenient and that Democrats wanted to censor, they just called Russian disinformation, even though the Russians had nothing to do with that laptop.

To dig even further into that, what’s interesting is that Elvis Chan was the guy at the FBI in late 2019 and 2020 briefing the big tech companies monthly—at least monthly, then it became weekly. We took his deposition in the Missouri v. Biden lawsuit, and it was kind of shocking. You can read about it in the book, but what he talked about was that they had the Hunter Biden laptop in November 2019. The FBI did. They knew it was real. It’s Hunter Biden’s laptop.

Yoel Roth, as you remember, who was the integrity guy at Twitter, signed an affidavit with the FEC after a complaint was filed against Twitter, noting specifically that the FBI was telling them that this could be a Hunter Biden story. So this wasn’t just going to be some random hack-and-leak operation from the Russians. It was related specifically to Hunter Biden.

Senator, in fairness, the Russians did hack Hillary Clinton’s email. That was confirmed.

We don’t know that.

Of course we do. The FBI confirmed it. It absolutely was confirmed.

I think that’s all part of the hoax.

Okay, well, let me give you a couple of reasons why I could see the New York Post—I’m sorry, we could see the platform—saying, if the FBI calls and says it’s a Russian hack, and we’ve had a bunch of Russian hacks before, and the president said, “Hey, Russia, if you’re listening, send me the emails,” and you had Paul Manafort being indicted. People believed in this Russiagate hoax, even though the laptop was authentic, and you had all this other noise.

It’s a reasonable thing for Facebook or Twitter, in my mind, to say, “Okay, maybe we wait a week. Maybe the Russians really are doing this.” I don’t blame them as much. Do you?

Well, the truth is, there are parallel tracks here. First of all, we know now that the claim that Trump was some Russian asset is totally fake. We all agree on that.

It didn’t happen. But they used that, of course, to spy on a presidential candidate. That’s what Barack Obama did. And then you had Brennan, Clapper, and Comey continue this and really try to sidetrack a presidential administration. So I think indictments are probably coming. That’s a sort of separate issue. The reality is that even though the statute of limitations may have expired, if a conspiracy is ongoing, the statute of limitations has not expired. So we’ll see where that all goes.

But if you’re making the point that the government shouldn’t be having that much influence, coercing, and threatening these big tech companies, I would agree with you that that’s a violation of the First Amendment. My point is, I just—the idea that big tech was so willingly going along with all this is a little scary. These are some of the biggest companies in the history of the world. And the idea that something the FBI knew to be true wasn’t out there for the American people to weigh in on 10 days before an election is kind of Orwellian.

But that’s on the FBI, I think. Yeah. Not—

—the FBI. I have totally unclean hands here. There’s no doubt about that.

Okay, yeah. Let me jump in here with a couple of points. Let’s just focus on this Hunter Biden story, because I think there’s a very plausible argument that the censorship of this story could have swung the results of the 2020 election. The Hunter Biden laptop showed a bunch of shady foreign business dealings between the Biden family and China and Ukraine and other countries. And if that had been properly examined by the media instead of being censored by social media 10 days before the election, who knows what the outcome would have been? So this was a major, major deal.

Now, why did that story get censored? We now know from the Twitter Files—this is the reporting of Matt Taibbi, who was given access to the Twitter Files—that, like Eric is saying, the FBI knew in late 2019 that the laptop was real because they had it in their possession and therefore authenticated it.

What was their reaction to it? In my view, they could have done 3 different things. Number 1, they could have investigated the crimes that were suggested by the evidence on that laptop. They didn’t do that. Number 2, they could have just sat on it and done nothing. They didn’t do that. They did number 3, which is they basically began a campaign to suppress the contents of the laptop. How did they do that?

Elvis Chan, representing the FBI, was engaged in weekly meetings with these social networks. Again, this is from the Twitter Files. Elvis Chan represented the intelligence community. One of the emails described his group as the “belly button” of the conduit between the social networks and the intelligence community.

And remember, Elvis Chan had something like 80 FBI agents who were submitting takedown requests to Twitter and other social networks. So this is the scale of the censorship that was happening.

In any event, in these weekly IC meetings—and a lot of the evidence has been destroyed because they were using that disappearing tool, Teleporter—in these weekly meetings, we now know that they were warning the social networks: “Be on the lookout for a Russian disinformation campaign in which Hunter Biden is accused of something.” And so, for months, they were priming the social networks to view any story, any revelations about Hunter Biden, as being Russian disinformation. Now, why were they doing that?

In fact, at one point there was what was called a “tabletop exercise” where all the heads of trust and safety at these social networks were brought—I think they were brought to the Aspen Institute—and they literally ran a tabletop exercise where they said, “Okay, 2 weeks before the election, the Russians are going to do an opposition dump on Hunter Biden. What’s your response to that going to be?” And where they all ended up is that they would censor the story. I mean, this is crazy Orwellian stuff.

It makes sense, just to steelman it, for them to want to do the right thing if the FBI is telling them it’s Russian disinformation.

Oh, I don’t blame the social networks. They—

That’s what I’m trying—that’s the only point I’m trying to make. And Zuckerberg went on—remember when Zuckerberg went on Rogan and said the reason we censored that story is because the FBI had told us to? Most people in that situation would have believed the FBI.

All 3 of us would. The point is, though, that the FBI, again, could have investigated the crimes on the laptop. They could have sat on the laptop and done nothing. That’s not what they did. Instead, they began this campaign to discredit the eventual revelations from that information.

Senator, what happened to those individuals at the FBI who were involved in all this? I’m curious if you can get to that as well. Were they ever brought up on charges? No. Do we ever figure out who they are? There needs to be accountability here.

I also think it’s important to point out that—take CISA, which is the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency. No one’s ever heard of it. It was created effectively to protect infrastructure from cyberattacks.

In that era, when Trump was president, under the guise of Russian disinformation, they worked on what’s called the Election Integrity Partnership. They work with Stanford and the University of Washington to flag posts and work with social media companies. Then, when you get into COVID, they just flip the switch and turn it on: If you’re questioning the efficacy of the vaccine or the efficacy of masks, they turn that around on the American people, too.

Part of the point outlined in the book Last Line of Defense was exposing all this. This was a Leviathan. This wasn't just one person making a phone call; this was all these agencies lined up with the regime's narrative, working with, coercing, and threatening social media companies: “You will take this down, or there will be consequences.”

The CDC—I mentioned the CDC. What were they doing? The government went to them and said, “Tell us the phrases that you want us to flag and take down, and then we will work with social media companies to go do that.” The FBI was involved in this. CISA was involved in this. The CDC was involved in this.

Then, of course, when we had the opportunity to take Anthony Fauci's deposition at NIH, that was mind-blowing. It was only the 2nd time his deposition had been taken, and we found out all the lengths to which he went to undermine people like Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, who was a plaintiff in Missouri v. Biden with me and was trying to say things like, “Natural immunity is kind of a thing still.” They tried to take down this guy's career and anybody like him who would question anything other than what Anthony Fauci said.

It really was a wild and crazy time, and we can't ever let it happen again. That's sort of the point.

The First Amendment really is the beating heart of the Constitution. One of the great tests of this American experiment is our ability to tolerate people's point of view, or their expression of a point of view, that we vehemently disagree with, even if we think it's dangerous. That's a big part of what this whole thing is about.

What you saw during COVID in particular was people who had power they never should have had, exercising it in ways that you would have thought were from another country. This couldn't happen here, but it was happening here. I don't know if you remember the FOIA lady—the person who was supposed to be policing and making sure that things were on the up and up at the CDC was teaching them, allegedly, how to use hacker speak or their personal email addresses to subvert Freedom of Information Act requests.

I'll put “allegedly” in front of it, but I think this was all discoverable, and it was in the email. She just taught people how to lie and how to subvert FOIA requests. So when you start saying “Orwellian,” it does feel like absolute power has the ability to corrupt absolutely.

You know, Eric mentioned the NGOs that are part of this Leviathan. I think that's a really important part of it, because one of the ways that the Biden administration was able to create cover for the censorship they wanted was to launder those censorship requests through some of these NGOs, in addition to using the FBI and the IC and their connections to trust and safety.

One NGO in particular I want to talk about—or ask about—is Hamilton 68. Did you look at this at all, Eric?

Remind me which one Hamilton 68 is?

The reason I wanted to talk about this one is this idea of Russian disinformation, because Hamilton 68 was another one of these groups. This is all exposed in Matt Taibbi's reporting. It was set up by another former FBI official named Clint Watts. These former FBI guys are kind of all over.

They claimed that they were tracking 600 or so Russian disinformation accounts or bots, and they claimed to know which accounts these were. Whenever there was a story that Democrats didn't like, they would accuse the Russians of being behind it and amplifying that story. This was the source for thousands of MSNBC stories, thousands of CNN reports, and so on, claiming that the Russians were involved in our politics and engaging in disinformation.

Why is this relevant? During the Twitter Files, we found out there was Yoel Roth, who you mentioned was the head of trust and safety and definitely not a conservative. There was correspondence inside Twitter saying, “Hey, we looked at their so-called API, and these are just regular accounts.” He said, “Basically, this is all bullshit.”

In other words, the whole idea that they were tracking Russian accounts was just total nonsense. These were just a random smattering: some were conservative accounts, some were Canadian accounts. They were just random accounts. Anytime they needed to oppose conservative opinion on an issue, they would supposedly point to this Hamilton 68 dashboard.

Hamilton 68 created this dashboard that supposedly showed this vast Russian influence campaign. It all ended up being nonsense. I think it totally came out of thin air.

The Russians have a long track record of hacking, including the RNC recently. I do think you are painting a very one-sided picture here, Sacks.

Maybe it's all—

Do you think the Russians are not hacking foreign adversaries at all? You don't believe any of it?

Russia's got a lot of good hackers in it, and I'm sure they have cyber operations and things like that. But again, that's a little different than saying that the Russians are heavily involved in our elections. I believe that was largely a made-up story.

Do I want to say that no Russian was ever involved in some sort of operation? I'm not going to say that. But we know Hamilton 68 was total nonsense. In fact, it was worse than that: It was a hoax. It was a hoax. For years, it was the basis for thousands of stories that the Russians were interfering in our politics.

We also know that the Steele dossier was a hoax. That was the whole basis, once laundered through the FBI and that whole investigation, for the idea that somehow the Russians had interfered in the 2016 election. So when you start to peel away all these bogus accusations, Jason, I don't really believe any of this stuff. When I hear the words “Russian disinformation,” what I hear now is “red scare.”

Senator, I'm going to have you chime in here and maybe balance out our 2 opinions. Obviously, the Russians have been hacking political organizations in the United States and other countries for decades. They did it to the RNC. They did it to Hillary. They do it as a tactic. That is a fact.

Also, I don't think anybody thinks Trump is a Manchurian candidate. So tell me where reality is between the two.

The Chinese do it too. There's no question.

Yeah, the Chinese are big, of course. But I think what separates this, though, is that now that we know what we know—I mean, actually, in the documents released by Tulsi Gabbard, the director of national intelligence, Hillary Clinton was the preferred candidate. They had the goods on her, including her medical records and all this stuff. So Trump was not Putin's preferred candidate.

The Russians had all that hacked information. They had that. And so what was done was that Hillary Clinton knew she had an email problem, and then she worked with a George Soros-funded NGO, right? They came up with this plan to say, “Well, Trump is cozy with Russia.” The Steele dossier found this oppo—whatever, it's fake oppo. Then they, as David said, laundered it through intelligence agents. Then that became the thing.

I think the problem—and why people have lost trust in a lot of these institutions, in many cases rightfully so—is because they were really weaponized against political opponents, and they were weaponized against the American people. There's going to have to be a lot of accountability, I think, before people gain that trust back.

That was my next question: How do we get past this? We're sitting here with one group that feels, “Hey, there are all these really suspicious Russian connections to Trump and the people around him.”

Jason, can't you see that this was manufactured? You have to start with the fact that some parts of it were manufactured. Yes, some parts of it were real, but the whole thing was manufactured. It was a hoax.

We get it.

Hamilton 68 and all the stories based on it: manufactured hoax.

How do we get to reality?

First, you have to peel back all the fakeness.

I think you also have to accept that the Russians are hackers, don't have our best interests in mind, and actually want to come after us politically.

I'm sure the Russians have cyber operations and that they hacked Hillary; this has all been confirmed. The problem here is that this was used as a predicate. Again, this is why it's so jarring: It was used as a predicate for spying on a presidential candidate, which Barack Obama authorized, and then as a predicate to investigate a president-in-waiting, and then as a predicate to try to destroy his administration.

It gobbled up so much time in those first 2 years. That, to me, is a pretty unique circumstance. Beyond that, yes, foreign nations are trying to get information.

Since we're here, there's this lawsuit that's now happening—or this investigation, I guess. As an attorney, and since you were the AG, explain to the American people what the case is right now that they're going after with these Russiagate allegations, and where is it in the courts? Give us the mechanics of it, and where do you think it winds up?

The question is: Was anything done illegally during the Russiagate hoax that could be chargeable? I think, ironically, Barack Obama has presidential immunity because of the case that President Trump won at the Supreme Court. By the way, my solicitor general at the time in Missouri was John Sauer.

He's now the solicitor general of the United States. He was also Trump's lawyer who argued that presidential immunity case about a year ago. He probably has immunity from official acts when he was in office, but not when he's out of office.

The real question will be whether you can make a case for a conspiracy to defraud the United States. This was a very elaborate scheme to undermine people, and whether they get indictments or not, I think they should pursue them. We'll see if that happens, but I think the most likely targets are Comey, Clapper, and Brennan for their roles.

And what exactly are they being accused of?

Of manipulating these falsehoods into actionable intelligence against the president of the United States, Donald Trump.

What are they being charged with, I guess, is what I'm getting at? Or has that point been reached? You can't be the head of the FBI or the head of the CIA and have information you know is false, then open up a criminal investigation against the president, which is what happened, right? That's a big thing.

Again, most people would say the statute of limitations has probably run on many of those charges. But an ongoing conspiracy is something different. The conspiracy doesn't need to involve you from point A to point Z. Once you begin the conspiracy, that's enough.

So, again, just going down this rabbit hole a little bit, what was Jack Smith looking for at Mar-a-Lago when he went down there? He was probably looking for some of the information related to the Steele dossier that they thought Trump probably took with him. I don't know that for certain, but that's certainly a plausible explanation.

You have to remember, Jason, that President Trump left office and announced he was running for president in the fall of 2022. Three days later, a few things happened. The assistant district attorney in Atlanta in a state case visited the White House counsel's office. The number 3 person at the Department of Justice left the department and went to work for Alvin Bragg, who later brought a case against President Trump.

Jack Smith was appointed special counsel. In the prosecutor world, he's a hired gun. He went out and tried to put President Trump in jail for the rest of his life. They tried to bankrupt his family. It is very obvious to anyone paying attention that this lawfare aimed at Donald Trump was meant to make sure he never got back in office again.

If he never got back in office, all the things that Tulsi Gabbard discovered and laid out there, and that Kash Patel found in burn bags, wouldn't be out in the open. Much like how we exposed the corruption in Missouri v. Biden, I think that's where we're at right now with Russiagate.

This is a big jump, though, because the FBI raid on Mar-a-Lago was because Trump wouldn't give back these specific documents—

What were the documents they were looking for, right? What were the documents they were looking for? They alleged that he was obstructing justice, and there were video cameras, et cetera.

And that case didn't get past a motion to dismiss.

Right.

You're making the jump from that to saying they were looking for something related to the Steele dossier, and Trump could have just given those documents back. I always wondered in that case why he just didn't give the documents back. Why was he so steadfast?

He could declassify anything as president, which was the likely scenario, but they did it anyway. I think he was in touch with the archivist, and that was an ongoing conversation. Then Jack Smith, the federal prosecutor down in Florida, moved with guns to seize these documents. It's very unusual.

I just never understood why he didn't give the documents back. If I were advising him, I would have just given the documents back, which is what every other president did when they were asked to give documents back.

Sure. But remember Joe Biden, who was never president. He was vice president, and he can't declassify documents. He had boxes and boxes of classified documents in his garage, where Hunter Biden lived.

So what you're down to now, Jason, is that you started believing that Trump was a Russian asset. He's a Russian spy—

No, no, I didn't. I always thought that was a crazy concept.

You deleted those tweets, but you did.

No, no. It's okay. You were fooled by the media. It's okay. A lot of people were fooled.

I said this very clearly on the pod.

I always believed the Russians wanted to create chaos, like we're experiencing here in this discussion among Americans, to distract us, and that they would do it even-handedly with anybody. They would do it with anybody.

The people who were creating the chaos were actually the people who perpetrated this coup attempt against the president. The people who perpetrated the Hamilton 68 dashboard fraud were the people who perpetrated the chaos.

Sure. I think if the Russians were involved, you don't have specific evidence. You don't have specific evidence of a Russian hack.

Go read Matt Taibbi's reporting.

I just gave this to you. The head of the RNC said, “Yes, we were hacked. Our partners were hacked.” They explicitly said this.

This is all facts, David. But anyway, we've got the senator here. We could have our Russiagate debate forever. You could tell me that you think Trump's a Russian asset. I don't think Trump's a Russian asset. I think that's insane. But I do think the Russians like to cause chaos. Moving on.

Brennan—I believe it was Brennan—and these Tulsi documents that just got released: Here's what I think is so notable about them. Other people may have their own opinion, but I think it shows that there's a document there where Brennan was the head of the CIA—

Correct. He received an intelligence assessment from the organization in which they said, “Look, there's nothing to this. It's bogus.”

The Steele dossier. You're saying—

Not just the Steele dossier, but the whole idea that the Russians had run this elaborate interference operation in the 2016 election and that Trump was somehow compromised. In other words, the intelligence analysts did their job and came up with the correct conclusion.

Nonetheless, Brennan said the Steele dossier should be included in the official intelligence assessment because it had the “ring of truth” to it. He was advised by his own analysts that this was nonsense, yet he pushed to include it—

In the official intelligence report, and then that became the basis for opening the investigation. You see how this worked—

Allegedly. We'll find out. They'll have their day in court. I'm totally—

This is what's in the documents.

Well, we'll find out if this is a theatrical exercise or if it's actually going to go to court. What do you think?

I think it'll go to court. I think this is one of the reasons why they were so obsessed with making sure President Trump never got back into office. It's one of the reasons.

Again, in the book, I talk about how there's an emergency, real or perceived. Then you other people, and you try to silence dissent. I think it happened with COVID. It happened with Russiagate. Anybody who claimed that Russia didn't have a role, or that President Trump wasn't a Russian asset, was a traitor and a Putin lover.

This stuff is wild, honestly, but I think we're on the other side of the fever dream. There does need to be some accountability now.

This is your first term as senator, I believe.

Yes. I was elected in 2022.

I'm curious. First, any great stock tips? Second—

You have to call. Are we done with Russiagate now? Is that—

Russiagate? We're just trying to get some inside information on number 2. Look, I think we can stop talking about Russiagate, but I think one of the reasons it was so important is that, first of all, it was effectively a coup against the president of the United States.

These were executive branch officials who owed a duty of loyalty to the elected president. Instead, they were working to subvert and undermine him based essentially on lies, hoaxes, and manufactured material. That is basically the definition of a coup. I think that's a big deal in and of itself.

But I think the other reason it's such a big deal is that it helped create this intense Russophobia in the United States that has led us to the point we're at right now, which is that we're basically in a war with Russia, or at least we're backing Ukraine in a war with Russia.

You heard this at the Alaska summit. I think this whole Russiagate thing, which we now know is completely bogus, poisoned relations between the United States and Russia for years because the media kept reporting this bogus idea that Trump was somehow a Russian asset and that they had interfered in our elections. I think this helped create a very hostile relationship between the United States and Russia.

Clearly, Russiagate led to Putin...

Well, it led to a souring of the relationship.

That doesn't justify his murderous campaign in Ukraine. David, you would agree.

I'm not—that's not the argument I'm making.

I know, but I'm forcing you to agree that he invaded Ukraine, murdered people, and is a war criminal. You know that those are just facts as well, David.

I think those are clichés that basically attempt to strip that complicated war of all of its context so that we can achieve a peaceful solution to it. Obviously, Putin invaded the country, but the conflict there goes back 10 years. There's a long history to it.

Yeah.

I'm not looking to rehash all of that. The point is, we could have worked out a resolution to this conflict maybe before it started if we didn't have hostile relations with Russia. That's the point I'm trying to make.

Senator, I'll give you the choice. I want to talk to you about the Senate in general and your experiences there, or we could just go right into what's happening with this Russian peace deal and its status.

We can do both. I think I was actually on a Sunday show yesterday, and I consider myself firmly in the camp of being an American realist. I think that a lot of the people who are really critical of President Trump's efforts right now have been wrong about foreign policy for a very, very long time—Jake Sullivan included, who presided over the disastrous withdrawal from Afghanistan and, basically on his watch, Russia invaded.

What is their position, Senator? What do you think their position is? Why are they so tweaked that he met with Putin?

I don't know, because there is no plan. There's never been a plan. The only plan they ever had was that the United States taxpayer would continue to funnel over $200 billion without a plan. I had a problem with that in my first couple of years. Vice President Vance viewed the world similarly.

I think we ought to focus on our core national interest: the homeland. We have to figure out a way to pivot to China, and we have to get our NATO allies to step up in a much more meaningful way. I think one of the great ironies of all this is that these European countries that are going to be in the White House, in the Oval Office, today talk about Putin being this existential threat. Well, they sure don't act like it. They don't spend like it.

You mean?

Correct. And, by the way, if they spent what we spent on national defense, that would free up about $300 billion for us to focus on the Indo-Pacific, where China now has a bigger navy than we have. Not a better navy, but a bigger navy. There is space for it.

Trump's biggest accomplishment is probably geopolitically getting NATO to spend what they're supposed to spend.

Yeah. I went over to the Munich Security Conference. I'm a bit of a contrarian there. I guess I would say the ascending wing of the Republican Party on this kind of realism versus the Wilsonian adventurism that's dominated Permanent Washington for a long time—I went over there to tell them the truth, which is not what they wanted to hear.

You need to step up in a more meaningful way. If you think about the Cold War, it was meant to sort of prop them up to defeat Soviet communism. Our trade deals were never renegotiated. We never expected much more from them, and all that's happening now. This is kind of the place that I've been hoping to be.

But I think President Trump is trying to broker a peace here. The problem with the critics is that they just don't have an alternative. This is a meat grinder. This is a war of attrition. This is what Russia does. That's what they've done for centuries. If your solution is that we shouldn't talk to Putin, I don't know how you get to a peace deal. Diplomacy means you talk to some people that you would never want your daughter to marry, but you accept the world as it is and try to move forward. I think that's what he's trying to do.

David, I think the chances of successfully negotiating anything with a dictator who gets to do whatever he wants is 5% or 10% on a good day.

Are you talking about Zelenskyy? My lord, you have it in for the emerging democracy that was invaded by—

Zelenskyy is now in his—what is it?—fifth or sixth year of a 4-year term. Hold on. No, this is just me saying it. I'm not anyone else.

No, you're out of your lane.

So, Zelenskyy basically banned opposition political parties. He cracked down on the press. You don't get to be a reporter in Ukraine unless you get a license from the government. He cracked down on religion, on the Russian Orthodox Church, priests, nuns, and so forth. He's basically seized the assets of his political opponents. Most importantly, he's now in something like the fifth year of a 4-year term. He canceled elections.

So, I'm not quite sure upon what exactly you're making these highly moralistic condemnations. I just think the conflict is much more complicated than you would like it to be. This whole idea that Zelenskyy represents democracy whereas Putin represents authoritarianism—that's not what's going on.

Just statistically, you're wrong. If you were to look at any of the ratings of democracies in the world, Russia would be among the lowest scores, and Ukraine would be in the high-middle scores compared to the truly free countries.

Of course he canceled elections. But you'd have to think twice about that, since he canceled elections. There is no democracy in Ukraine right now. There's just not. They're at war.

Okay, fine.

Fighting for their lives.

But we had elections when we were in the Civil War, and we were in World War II. We had elections. I don't know that that's a great reason. Senator, which is a more democratic country, Ukraine or Russia?

Russia is an authoritarian regime, but I think David makes some points. I'll give you 1 example. When we were going—

You can't just answer the question. I mean, you're a senator. You're using democracy as a bumper sticker and a buzzword instead of actually thinking about what it really means.

And actually, if we're really going to think about what democracy means, then let's ask what the people of Ukraine think. That's what, to me, democracy means. You actually listen to the people. Gallup just did a survey of the people of Ukraine. Let's put these numbers on the screen. This is Gallup. This was before the Alaska summit. This was not politically motivated in any way.

What they found is that Ukrainians have lost their appetite for war. Support for the war has collapsed. A year ago, support for the war was in the 60s or 70s. Now it's collapsed to 24%. So, the vast majority of Ukrainians now want a resolution to the conflict, even if it means making concessions.

Yeah, I know. You can't dispute this. Of course, they've got war fatigue, as they should.

This is what democracy means to me: We should actually listen to the desires of the Ukrainian people. Russia has 3 times the people and 5 times the ammunition. They have an industrial base. For Ukraine, I think the next step here is that there has to be a negotiated peace. This can't go on forever.

Europe is not in a position, I think, to provide what they claim to want to provide, and neither is the United States of America. Part of the problem is, as other people have made this point, that even if you spent—let's just say we wanted to spend another $100 billion—the industrial base doesn't exist to build all of the stuff that they need right now anyway. They have a real problem here.

I think President Trump campaigned on the idea of negotiating a peace. I don't know why that's so controversial. I'm not saying this about you; I'm talking about the pundits.

Yeah.

It's like, the idea—you know, Russia has nuclear weapons. The idea that he wouldn't have a 1-on-1 conversation—

Yeah, that's why I asked that question. Is there any steelmanning of this position that we shouldn't meet with Putin, President Xi, or Kim Jong-un? We should obviously meet with all of them. It makes sense if we have even a 1% chance of making forward progress.

When should the United States senator say, "Enough is enough. We're out. Figure it out for yourselves"? You've got the EU right there. You've got Europe. They've got plenty of money, but America's out. If you want to buy some weapons, we sell weapons. That's fine.

I think Trump has done an amazing job of enforcing the Lend-Lease that Biden set up. So, when we keep saying we're spending $100 billion, that's no longer true, right? We're getting all that money back because Trump forced Zelenskyy to the negotiating table. We're getting all that money back.

But when should we, in your mind, step back and say, "You know what? Not our problem anymore. You guys figure it out"? That seemed to be Vice President JD Vance, friend of the pod's, position as well. At some point, we have to say enough, and Trump sort of said that too. He alluded to that at some point. Are we at that point if this doesn't get resolved this time around? Do you think?

I think that's what this phase is all about: giving a legitimate peace process a chance.

But the idea that we're going to be voting on more aid—I mean, I wouldn't support it. More taxpayer aid to Ukraine for a war that doesn't seem like it's ever going to end is a blank check, and it's just unacceptable as a senator for a state in the United States of America.

President Trump, I think, has opened up avenues to make it clear to both parties that there's pressure that could be ramped up to try to bring this to a head. And I think that's where we're at. It's not going to all happen today or tomorrow, but that's really what this diplomacy is in this TikTok age that we live in. I think we expect instant gratification, but diplomacy is difficult when you're dealing with other countries with their own national interests and their own inner dynamics.

Is it possible we walk away this year from the situation? Do you think?

I don't know. I wouldn't want to put a timetable on it. I would not want to get in front of the president who's actually sitting across the table from these world leaders. But look, I think that he's been pretty clear: This is not our war. It's not our war.

But I think that up to this point, we've wanted to try to provide a time and space for a solution. And I do think if there's anybody who can do it, it's Trump. There's nobody else on the planet. Macron could not broker this. It's the last best hope. My hope is that you do get to a peace process, because you're just going to have billions of more people die.

What do you think, Sacks? Do you think we should walk away if we can't get this resolved with this latest volley of negotiations? Or at some point, should the president say, “Enough”? Because he seems exasperated based on his public statements about this. He's kind of exasperated with the 2 parties, it seems.

Well, look, you're asking me what the president should do, and I'm not on the foreign policy team.

Right?

I'm not going to venture and wade into that, but—

Is it a possibility?

I'll just say this: Listen to what the Ukrainians want. I mean, Zelenskyy's interests may not be the same as his people's, because as long as there's a war, there's no election. They've canceled democracy over there while the war is going on. And as long as that is true, he stays in power.

So he has incentives that may not be true for all of his people. His people want a negotiated peace.

And you think if they give up the Donbas and whatever other regions are on the table here, do you think Putin stops here, or do you think we'll see him invade another country? Do you worry about that, Sacks? Do you worry that this is enabling his behavior, his worst demons?

I don't think the Russians have the intention to invade another country, and they don't have the capability. Look at how much trouble they've had. We're now 3.5 years into the war. They're definitely winning the war, but they've only conquered this eastern part of Ukraine. They haven't made it to the Dnieper.

I don't even think they can conquer all of Ukraine, or at least it would be extraordinarily difficult and resource-consuming. So I just think that this threat of Putin conquering or attempting to invade all of Europe—this is threat inflation. That's my takeaway from it, Senator. It's like Putin couldn't even take Ukraine. I mean—

I agree. Look, this is part of the inconsistency of the argument that I've heard in the Senate for 2.5 years, which is that he's Hitler, that he's about ready to march through Europe, that we can't be Neville Chamberlain, and that this is the moment. But at the same time, he can't get to Kyiv, right? Both things can't be true at the same time.

So again, I think he's supposedly recruiting North Koreans to fight on the front line.

What?

It's so humiliating for him.

Senator, you're welcome on the pod anytime. Great having you here.

I don't know if that's the interview you were expecting, but—

No, no, we had a—no, I talked to him before you came on, and I said, “Hey, listen, keep it not like a monoculture here.” Tucker and the senator were hyping the whole interview. But it was great. It was a great interview. It's a great Tucker classic. You need to have a little spice here, too.

I love the debate. I love free speech, which is why I wrote the book, The Last Line of Defense: How to Beat the Left Court. Available on Amazon right now.

All right, everyone. Check it out.

Everybody buy the book. All right, everybody. We'll see you next time. Bye-bye.

Great, guys. Thanks.

Great job, everybody. It was fun.

[Music]

I'm a moderate, truth be told. But right now, the left calls me a MAGA and then the right calls me a libtard. So the only thing they have in common is they both think I'm an idiot, right?

Well, everybody agrees, then maybe there's something to it.

There could be consensus. You finally there's your cold open folks.