Speaker 1: When Donald Trump is a full on birther promoting this
Speaker 1: racist conspiracy theory.
Speaker 2: He goes to Las Vegas.
Speaker 1: Mitt Romney does and accepts Trump's endorsement, hugs him, says
Speaker 1: how excited he is, and praises Trump. So here is
Speaker 1: good old decent Mitt Romney validating Donald Trump, the racist
Speaker 1: conspiracy theorist. So yes, Mitt, it was always there, and
Speaker 1: yes you helped.
Speaker 2: I'm John Cipher and I'm Jerry O'Shea.
Speaker 3: I served in the CIA's Clandestine Service for twenty eight years,
Speaker 3: living undercover all around the.
Speaker 4: World, and in my thirty three years with the CIA,
Speaker 4: I served in Africa, Asia, Europe, and the Middle East.
Speaker 3: Although we don't usually look at it this way, we
Speaker 3: created conspiracies.
Speaker 4: In our operations. We got people to believe things that
Speaker 4: weren't true.
Speaker 3: Now we're investigating the conspiracy theories we see in the
Speaker 3: news almost every day.
Speaker 4: We'll break them down for you to determine whether they
Speaker 4: could be real or whether we're being manipulated.
Speaker 3: Welcome to Mission Implausible.
Speaker 5: All right, guys, my new favorite show with slow horses.
Speaker 5: Have you watched slow horses?
Speaker 2: I love slow horses.
Speaker 4: I'm suing them though you are, Yeah, because it's about
Speaker 4: a you know, incompetent older intelligence officers and are like, that's.
Speaker 2: Clearly why that's my life story they're talking about.
Speaker 5: If you haven't seen it, I mean you guys have,
Speaker 5: But it's about a group of sort of failed intelligence
Speaker 5: officers who aren't fired there.
Speaker 2: It could be genre. It's interesting.
Speaker 3: It came from a writer who has no experience in intelligence,
Speaker 3: and it's interested Like slow Horses comes up, but it's
Speaker 3: not realistic. But the sort of painful bureaucratic stuff that
Speaker 3: happens in there does feel realistic, even though the fact
Speaker 3: that people are getting shot on the streets of London doesn't.
Speaker 5: I mean that it does give an impression of a
Speaker 5: lot of choices happen because of like higher ups making
Speaker 5: political moves and bureaucratic sleeping with.
Speaker 3: Each other and trying to screw each other.
Speaker 4: So let's get into conspiracy theories and who entertains them
Speaker 4: in our politics and why.
Speaker 3: We've spoken some about how conspiracies have started to infect
Speaker 3: our poll politics. We've spoken also about how foreign enemies
Speaker 3: are weaponizing conspiracies, and so I think we should dig
Speaker 3: into how specifically they're being used in the political system.
Speaker 5: Right now, this has been a big issue within journalism.
Speaker 5: We call it both sideism, where whatever the issue is,
Speaker 5: you know, if someone's saying climate change is real, we
Speaker 5: have to find someone who says climate change isn't real.
Speaker 5: It's really hard for journalists when there really is not
Speaker 5: both sides, certainly not too equal sides. So it's not
Speaker 5: to say no democrat at all has ever thought of
Speaker 5: a conspiracy theory, you know, because there's lots of them,
Speaker 5: but clearly as a tool of power, a tool of influence,
Speaker 5: Republicans and Republican leaning media is just way over indexed.
Speaker 5: So I think it would be a disservice to the
Speaker 5: truth to pretend this is some kind of bipartisan issue
Speaker 5: right now.
Speaker 3: So today I want to welcome David Korn. David's a
Speaker 3: prolific journalist and author. He's presently the Washington bureau chief
Speaker 3: for Mother Jones magazine, and he's written about conspiration to
Speaker 3: see some real some not in books and articles for decades,
Speaker 3: everything from the CIA to JFK assassination, the Iraq invasion,
Speaker 3: Trump and Russia.
Speaker 2: It was really really great to have you here.
Speaker 1: Good to do with you, guys.
Speaker 3: So we want to talk a little bit about conspiracies
Speaker 3: taking over our political space. Conspiracies have always seemed to
Speaker 3: have been in politics, but it seems to be an
Speaker 3: increasing problem. The world's richest man is now a conspiracy theorist,
Speaker 3: and one of our political parties relies on conspiracies to
Speaker 3: keep their followers angry and confused. And it seems like
Speaker 3: now they're not even doing just to attract voters, because
Speaker 3: more and more actual conspiracy theorists themselves are getting elected.
Speaker 3: So the question really is why Republicans, more than Democrats,
Speaker 3: at least at this point, seem to embrace conspiracy theories.
Speaker 1: That's a really good question. I wrote a book came
Speaker 1: out last year that it's called American Psychosis, historical investigation
Speaker 1: of how the Republican Party went crazy. And it's been
Speaker 1: very easy for us to focus on what's happened the
Speaker 1: last couple of years with Donald Trump, who rose to
Speaker 1: power as a conspiracy theorist pushing the racist birth conspiracy
Speaker 1: theory about Barack Obama. Correct, but this is very similar
Speaker 1: to the nineteen fifties when the Republican Party was almost
Speaker 1: destroyed at the end of World War Two because they'd
Speaker 1: been isolationist and it had been pro business during the depression,
Speaker 1: it really had no standing. It grasped this new conspiracy theory,
Speaker 1: which was McCarthyism, that the Democrats and even Republicans were
Speaker 1: doing the bidding of the Soviet Union. And McCarthy even
Speaker 1: accused George C. Marshall, who was Eisenhower's Defense secretary, the
Speaker 1: guy who helped win the war a few years earlier,
Speaker 1: he now said that he was a Communist agent in
Speaker 1: a conspiracy. There's the word right, so immense that it
Speaker 1: was almost unfathomable, and the Republican Party rallied around Joe McCarthy. Eisenhower,
Speaker 1: when he was running for president, wanted to denounce McCarthy,
Speaker 1: but his advisors talked him out of it, and he
Speaker 1: hated the guy, but publicly didn't do much to push
Speaker 1: that off. So there are a lot of reasons why
Speaker 1: the Republican Party establishment, even though they disparaged McCarthy privately
Speaker 1: thought he was a charlatan and a drunk, went along
Speaker 1: with this, And so it's kind of in the DNA
Speaker 1: of the party. What we see with Trump and his
Speaker 1: conspiracy theories is that they're often designed to turn your
Speaker 1: political opponents or some opposing force into an ultimate evil.
Speaker 1: It's basically a process of othering. So QAnon democrats aren't
Speaker 1: bad because of their policies. They're bad because they're killing babies,
Speaker 1: trafficking and sects in their pedophiles, and they want to
Speaker 1: create a one world government. It's this notion of the
Speaker 1: enemy within, which often is the heart of conspiracy theories.
Speaker 1: If you go this is what Barry Goward did in
Speaker 1: nineteen sixty four. He cut a deal with a John
Speaker 1: Birch society. They were in favor of him because he
Speaker 1: was a far right candidate. They were paranoid, wackos. They
Speaker 1: were McCarthyism on steroids. The leader of the Birches believed
Speaker 1: that Eisenhower himself had been a Communist agent, and the
Speaker 1: Communists that infiltrated every pta, every church, every union, every
Speaker 1: media outlet, and they were responsible for the rise of
Speaker 1: abstract art, you know, an avant garde theater, and of
Speaker 1: course we're behind the civil rights movement and the anti
Speaker 1: war movement. Obviously, they were wackos, and so he brought
Speaker 1: him into the party and they kind of stayed there.
Speaker 2: David, I love the historical precedents on this.
Speaker 4: I mean, you could take it back to the Know
Speaker 4: Nothing Party right eighteen fifties in the United States, where
Speaker 4: it was the Whigs were claiming that the new Catholic
Speaker 4: immigrants were at the best of the pope and were
Speaker 4: taking over.
Speaker 2: So what's your sense.
Speaker 4: Of the difference between now and something that seems to
Speaker 4: be a constant in either US politics or in the
Speaker 4: way human beings, you know, process information.
Speaker 1: Instead of those pamphlets that were being handed out with
Speaker 1: the John Birch Society, we have this free flow of
Speaker 1: information and you have Donald Trump tweeting a q Andon influencer,
Speaker 1: Elon Musk doing that and literally hundreds of thousands, if
Speaker 1: not millions, of people see it instantaneously. Donald Trump's core
Speaker 1: narrative was conspiracy oriented that people were out to get him,
Speaker 1: the deep State you are proud members of were out
Speaker 1: to get him, and everything was a conspiracy against him.
Speaker 1: And then he tried to make it about well, that
Speaker 1: means they're against you as well as voters.
Speaker 4: So you've mentioned Trump and I'm trying to reach back.
Speaker 4: There's been so much he retweeted, so I don't know
Speaker 4: whether that means he believes it, but he's sort of
Speaker 4: serving it up to people who want to know what
Speaker 4: he thinks, but there was a retweet of I think
Speaker 4: it was that bin Laden was still alive and he
Speaker 4: was being held by the US government and all the
Speaker 4: people who were involved in the killing of bin Laden
Speaker 4: they were all killed. I don't think today anybody believes that.
Speaker 2: And yet this was.
Speaker 4: Put out if he paid no price for it with
Speaker 4: the stuff that comes out sometimes fire host wise, do
Speaker 4: you think people really believe it or is it almost
Speaker 4: sort of like a nihilism you can believe anything and
Speaker 4: nothing at the same time.
Speaker 1: That's a really good question, you know. I did this
Speaker 1: book with Mike Gizikov called Hubris about the selling of
Speaker 1: the Iraq War, and one debate I have over and
Speaker 1: over again with people is whether George Bush lied when
Speaker 1: he said that Iraq had WMD's and so is it
Speaker 1: you know, George Costanza, Seinfeld, Jerry, Remember, it's not a
Speaker 1: lie if you believe it, right, right? And so did
Speaker 1: they believe this? Cheney said things that were demonstrably untrue
Speaker 1: about the intelligence. As you get to Donald Trump, it
Speaker 1: becomes even more intriguing because he is such a liar.
Speaker 1: He lies about everything. Does he have a conception of
Speaker 1: truth like the rest of us in which one could
Speaker 1: say that he is lying or is he just not
Speaker 1: believe in anything resembling the truth.
Speaker 3: But let's go back quickly to the Joseph McCarthy and
Speaker 3: sort of the history of how the party became this way.
Speaker 3: In all conspiracies are in many conspiracies, there's a neuggative
Speaker 3: truth that the conspiracy is built around. And with Joseph McCarthy,
Speaker 3: who was claiming there was red spies throughout the government,
Speaker 3: in fact, there were a lot of spies in the
Speaker 3: government at the time we now know with Whitiker Chambers
Speaker 3: brought up things the atomic program was riddled with spies.
Speaker 3: In fact, when Truman became president, arguably Stalin knew more
Speaker 3: about the US atomic program than Truman did. There were
Speaker 3: spies in the USS there were spies in the State Department,
Speaker 3: there were spies in the Treasury Department, there were spies
Speaker 3: in the White House. Of course, it wasn't anything like
Speaker 3: what Justin McCarthy and his followers were spewing, but there
Speaker 3: was a neuggative truth there that sort of this was
Speaker 3: all built on.
Speaker 1: Let me kind of siddle up to your question by
Speaker 1: also reminding people that back in the nineties, the Conservatives
Speaker 1: and Republicans unleashed this fusillade of conspiracy theory against the Clintons.
Speaker 1: Remember Vince Foster, Yeah, right right.
Speaker 2: There are all the.
Speaker 1: Stuff about how the Clintons killed Vince Foster, and also
Speaker 1: how the Clintons killed dozens of other people.
Speaker 2: You know.
Speaker 1: Jerry Fowell, the leader of something called the Moral Majority,
Speaker 1: which helped elect Ronald Reagan president in nineteen eighty, was
Speaker 1: out there with a video claiming that the Clintons, on
Speaker 1: their way to power, had killed dozens of people. And
Speaker 1: there was also the conspiracy theory that they were running
Speaker 1: a drug operation on the Arkansas. And yet people like
Speaker 1: Nut Ginridge before and after he became speaker, and even
Speaker 1: good old Bob Dole saying we need to look into
Speaker 1: these things, you know. And Rush Lumbaugh was you know,
Speaker 1: writing high at that point, who was a drug addict. Yeah,
Speaker 1: he was a drug actut Yeah, and he was out
Speaker 1: there giving voice and spreading all these Clinton conspiracy theories.
Speaker 1: The nugget of truth was that Vince Foster did indeed
Speaker 1: commit suicide. With Trump and bertherism, there was nothing. There
Speaker 1: was a guy who made a claim. As a writer,
Speaker 1: what I'm always conscious of is that everybody likes a
Speaker 1: good story. Donald Trump has made money by telling people
Speaker 1: that you could become rich if you go to Trump University.
Speaker 1: Alex Jones was a great showman, and he started as
Speaker 1: a late night radio host talking about this stuff in
Speaker 1: the wee hours, which is some perfect time to do
Speaker 1: it and to find hundreds of thousands of people. And
Speaker 1: then you know, all these companies selling survival seeds, you know,
Speaker 1: advertise with him and he makes a lot of money.
Speaker 2: Let's take a break, we'll be right back, and we're back.
Speaker 3: So, David, I'm sure you saw this Atlantic article about
Speaker 3: Mitt Romney, but one of the things that he said
Speaker 3: is that there are other senators like Hawley and Cruz
Speaker 3: in vance who know better, but they use disinformation or
Speaker 3: conspiracies or what have you. They exploit them. In other words,
Speaker 3: they know the stuff they're saying is lies, but they
Speaker 3: know it benefits them. So I want to talk a
Speaker 3: little bit about how people are purposely exploiting conspiracies. And
Speaker 3: I think back to twenty sixteen when you did excellent
Speaker 3: reporting on Russia and Steve Bannon's Cambridge Analytica was taking
Speaker 3: massive information from Facebook data and they were using that
Speaker 3: to identify and target people with neurotic and conspiratorial dispositions,
Speaker 3: and then they were purposely disseminating propaganda to deepen and
Speaker 3: accentuate those traits. In other words, they were finding angry
Speaker 3: right wing people who never voted, and they were pumping
Speaker 3: disinformation to them to get them even more angry to
Speaker 3: get out and vote. And so they were creating this
Speaker 3: machine to contaminate America with paranoia in order to get votes.
Speaker 3: And so how would you explain now these groups? And
Speaker 3: we're talking mostly about Republicans now, but you know, there's RFK,
Speaker 3: there's Cornel West, there's these other people on the left
Speaker 3: that know better but are exploiting conspiracies and disinformation for
Speaker 3: their own purpose or for political purpose.
Speaker 1: I don't know what you do other then call the massholes.
Speaker 1: I mean, seriously, there are people who know better.
Speaker 3: So what do you think about Mitt Romney in his position?
Speaker 2: Now, First I.
Speaker 1: Should say I feel a bond with Mitt Romney because
Speaker 1: I was the reporter who broke the story of the
Speaker 1: forty seven percent remarks in twenty twelve that caused his
Speaker 1: campaign a fair amount of difficulty, and it's one of
Speaker 1: the biggest stories I've done in my career, so I
Speaker 1: feel kind of tied to the guy. I know, people
Speaker 1: know him, and as I've said, you know, I think
Speaker 1: in some ways he's a decent fellow. But at some
Speaker 1: point he says, I want to know whether the elements
Speaker 1: of trump Ism have always been within the party and
Speaker 1: whether the GOP establishment, meaning him, helped enable that or
Speaker 1: encourage that. And the answer is yes, and yes, I
Speaker 1: mean that's the whole point of my book. It was
Speaker 1: always there, and that people like NT and others used
Speaker 1: it to their advantage but also turned a bit of
Speaker 1: a blind eye to it and thought, once we get elected,
Speaker 1: we can shove these people to the side. And you know,
Speaker 1: the best example is in twenty twelve, when he's running
Speaker 1: for president and when Donald Trump is a full on
Speaker 1: birther promoting this race's conspiracy theory. He goes to Las Vegas.
Speaker 1: Mitt Romney does and accepts Trump's endorsement, hugs him, says
Speaker 1: how excited he is, and praises Trump. So here is good,
Speaker 1: old decent Knit Romney validating Donald Trump, the racist conspiracy theorist.
Speaker 1: So yes, Mitt, it was always there, and yes, hands
Speaker 1: me to say this, but you helped and when I
Speaker 1: look at these people that you mentioned, John, I mean,
Speaker 1: I don't know how they sleep at night. I've been
Speaker 1: at hearings with Jim Jordan and he just says things
Speaker 1: again that are not true. And I know a few
Speaker 1: times I'd gone up to him or Mark Meadows when
Speaker 1: Medals was in congressizing, you know what you just said
Speaker 1: was not true. It's not what the report says, and
Speaker 1: they would say, no, it's true, it's true. It's true.
Speaker 4: Yeah, there's there's Bartolini's law, and I'm trying to remember
Speaker 4: exactly how that goes.
Speaker 2: And it's the other word.
Speaker 4: The other term for it is the asymmetric principle, Right
Speaker 4: that it's much quicker to make up a fact, and
Speaker 4: it's exponentially more difficult and takes more time to show
Speaker 4: that fact to not be true, to actually do a
Speaker 4: Snopes on it. Right, you know, you can make stuff
Speaker 4: up and no one has comes back and checks on it.
Speaker 3: Later, they say who just they say a democratic president
Speaker 3: is going to take your guns. They come in, they
Speaker 3: didn't take the guns. Next one comes in, they're going
Speaker 3: to take your guns.
Speaker 1: They're like no. In the Obama years, this right winger
Speaker 1: who Trump hardened de Nesh de Susan did movies and
Speaker 1: documentaries about Obama's secret plan to impose the dictatorship direct
Speaker 1: the economy. Well, still waiting. I'm still waiting for flying
Speaker 1: cars too, And so he got that totally wrong.
Speaker 4: When I was younger in the seventies, the mid seventies,
Speaker 4: I went to Germany as a young man and I
Speaker 4: had this one conversation I'll never forget. It was a
Speaker 4: small town in Bavaria, and I was talking to somebody
Speaker 4: who was an elderly gentleman in his eighties, but he
Speaker 4: admitted that he was in this small town. He was
Speaker 4: a Nazi in the Nazi Party, and he had a
Speaker 4: position of influence in this small town called Fussen. And
Speaker 4: I asked him, ah, you know, how did you you know?
Speaker 2: He says, I never really believed.
Speaker 4: It, the conspiracy theories behind it, the Jewish conspiracy and
Speaker 4: all the rest of it. And I said, well, how
Speaker 4: could you be in the party and hold a position?
Speaker 4: He said, well, if I didn't do it, then the
Speaker 4: real Nazis, the people to be afraid of, would be there.
Speaker 4: So I look at Lindsey Graham as one person, I'm like,
Speaker 4: is this what he's thinking? I mean, if I don't
Speaker 4: get on this train, then somebody who really believes this
Speaker 4: stuff will get on, and that would be much worse.
Speaker 1: Right, That's what Jim Kelly and Rense, previous people were
Speaker 1: chiefs of staff Trump have explicitly said that they wanted
Speaker 1: to be guardrails. And it sure seems that everybody who
Speaker 1: went in thinking they could do that were proven wrong.
Speaker 3: I mean, the one thing that comes to me, and
Speaker 3: I don't think we have an answer, is like what
Speaker 3: broke McCarthyism.
Speaker 1: You know, McCarthyism in a small way was broken by McCarthy.
Speaker 1: He ran hearings that ended up being foolish, and it
Speaker 1: was seen from being mean spirited and hate driven, and
Speaker 1: he was drinking a lot, and he kind of like
Speaker 1: sowed the seeds of his own destruction. But the notion
Speaker 1: of commy plot, some version blacklists, all that continued on
Speaker 1: without McCarthy well into the fifties, sixties, and seventies. In
Speaker 1: the eighties, you even had Ronald Reagan redbaiting the nuclear
Speaker 1: freeze movement, putting out material that his own FBI said
Speaker 1: wasn't true, that the freeze movement was being controlled out
Speaker 1: of Moscow. So McCarthy has lived on as an impulse
Speaker 1: within American politics, and so that's why I say trump
Speaker 1: Ism will live on with or without Donald Trump. So
Speaker 1: there's no going back. The question is whether the party collapses,
Speaker 1: whether it continues in a trumpy fashion, if there's some
Speaker 1: external event that changes things. But for now, I think
Speaker 1: the immediate future, in the near future, I think the
Speaker 1: technical term is that the Republican Party is fucked.
Speaker 3: David, is there any sense that you have of how
Speaker 3: much of this is being manipulated or used by Republicans
Speaker 3: that know better and how much of it is about
Speaker 3: actual believers? So is there any sense that you have?
Speaker 1: That is such a difficult question to answer because I
Speaker 1: do ponder it almost on a daily basis. Do they
Speaker 1: really believe that Russia did not attack? Do they really
Speaker 1: believe the election was stolen? Do they really believe that
Speaker 1: the deep state is plotting against Trump? On an hourly basis,
Speaker 1: do they really believe that ever at president is going
Speaker 1: to come in and impose a dictatorship or take guns away?
Speaker 1: It's do they really believe? Marjorie tail A Green that
Speaker 1: Ukrainians are harvesting the organs of children, which is now
Speaker 1: per reason for opposing military assistance to Ukraine. Does Tucker
Speaker 1: Carlson believe the US was working with secret biological weapons
Speaker 1: labs in Ukraine and that's why Putin had to invade?
Speaker 1: There was something interesting that happened a couple of years back,
Speaker 1: and that's all. These text messages came out from Paul
Speaker 1: Manifort's phone, And he was working with the Russians or
Speaker 1: in touch with the Russian during the twenty sixteen campaign
Speaker 1: while he was CEO or chief executive of the Trump
Speaker 1: campaign and was later deemed to be a counterintelligence threat
Speaker 1: by the Bipartisan sent Intelligence Committee for what he did
Speaker 1: with the Russians during the campaign. But he was texting
Speaker 1: to and from Sean Hannity, and Sean Hannity was on
Speaker 1: talking about all the Russian stuff was fogus, a hoax,
Speaker 1: and Manafort was writing in saying, you're right. You're doing
Speaker 1: such a great job, Sean, And you know they want
Speaker 1: me to say all these things they implicate Trump and
Speaker 1: I'm not going to do it, And Sean was writing
Speaker 1: back then, you are a hero, Paul Manafort. You are
Speaker 1: a hero for standing firm and not letting anyone buy
Speaker 1: this bullshit about Russia, and I realized they really they
Speaker 1: seem to believe this.
Speaker 3: So David, based on that point, we actually have a
Speaker 3: dramatic reading for you here. It's a selection of texts
Speaker 3: between Sean Hannity and Paul Manifort. Brendan Jennings is going
Speaker 3: to be reading the part of Sean Hannity and Mark
Speaker 3: Raiderman will be reading the part of Paul Manafort.
Speaker 6: Please know you're in my prayers.
Speaker 7: Thank you. I need them. I feel so violated from
Speaker 7: what I'm seeing today.
Speaker 6: There are so many obvious crimes that are not being
Speaker 6: investigated AJRC nothing. I am truly frightened for the future
Speaker 6: of this country. We love, God help us in a
Speaker 6: world if we don't get all this straightened out. I
Speaker 6: pray that God give you the grace and peace in
Speaker 6: this difficult moment. I sadly know from experience that in
Speaker 6: times like these, friends will abandon you. The apostles Peter Jesus,
Speaker 6: they showed us this. Know this very hard, stand tall
Speaker 6: and strong in my prayers.
Speaker 2: Sean.
Speaker 6: Did you see last night?
Speaker 7: Yes, very clever Pierro sort of God Heraldo missed it.
Speaker 6: Yes, she is smart. I know and have great attorneys
Speaker 6: that I now keep on retainer to help and protect me.
Speaker 6: There has never been a time thirty years Radio twenty
Speaker 6: two on Fox where I felt a bull's eye is
Speaker 6: at my head every single day.
Speaker 7: I hope Potus understands your point.
Speaker 6: I tell them a lot, real lot, brutal, honest relationship,
Speaker 6: and I'll say it all on air.
Speaker 7: Your attitude keeps you free.
Speaker 6: Are you up?
Speaker 7: Just saw your last text? They have a ratchet up
Speaker 7: pressure on me with this bs on my bail.
Speaker 6: My brother thinking about you. Merry Christmas in twenty eighteen
Speaker 6: is the year of exposing the truth.
Speaker 7: John, Your ears must have been burning. Just told my
Speaker 7: relatives how you will not give up?
Speaker 8: Ever?
Speaker 6: You watching?
Speaker 7: Yes, I love you. You're the best that was powerful. In
Speaker 7: a fair world, you would get a Pulitzer for your
Speaker 7: incredible reporting.
Speaker 6: Lol. I'll take those assholes going to jail. How you.
Speaker 6: I am disgusted at this corruption. It should not happen
Speaker 6: in the USA. I can tell you Potus is disgusted too.
Speaker 7: I live in a nightmare every day, but I won't
Speaker 7: give in it.
Speaker 6: Tell Paul and they don't give a shit.
Speaker 7: They relish it. Great interview with Rudy tonight. You are
Speaker 7: so important to saving our country.
Speaker 6: Hillary belongs in jail.
Speaker 7: I am really proud to be associated with you against
Speaker 7: these bad people.
Speaker 6: These are bad people.
Speaker 7: And they are destroying our country.
Speaker 6: Either we win or welcome to Venezuela or worse.
Speaker 4: Pure and simple, I think that's pretty self explanatory. It's
Speaker 4: sort of, you know, too, conment trying to cont each other, right.
Speaker 3: Yeah, one of them looking for money, one of them
Speaker 3: looking to go on a show, which is also money
Speaker 3: for him. So you know, it's interesting they both have
Speaker 3: the same political bent, but they're also trying to benefit
Speaker 3: financially off of it.
Speaker 4: I'd like to know, and I don't recall from this
Speaker 4: whether this is after or before. Paul Manifort, in his book,
Speaker 4: admits that he was working with Constantine Khalimnik, a Russian
Speaker 4: intelligence officer, while he was on the Trump campaign.
Speaker 3: Passing campaign data to a billionaire.
Speaker 4: And passing confidential data that the Russians can operationalize and
Speaker 4: the FBI is watching. Now he's admitted that this guy
Speaker 4: is an agent of Russian intelligence if he's working with
Speaker 4: them and not telling anybody.
Speaker 3: I think we knew that before he admitted it, but
Speaker 3: none of us.
Speaker 4: And who let off who gave this guy a pardon?
Speaker 4: I don't want to go there, but we all know
Speaker 4: who that is.
Speaker 3: I think we're seeing a little bit behind the scenes
Speaker 3: of the kind of stuff that we see actually out
Speaker 3: in front. And that's what's sort of right odd about
Speaker 3: this is the conspiratorial thinking has become just part and
Speaker 3: parcel of the politics. Like these people are publicly saying
Speaker 3: things that in the past would have been at best
Speaker 3: hidden if they actually believe these things.
Speaker 4: But now, as someone you know, as you and I,
Speaker 4: as people who've actually like unraveled conspiracies against us, and
Speaker 4: as someone who's been involved in national security and you
Speaker 4: and counterintelligence issues, those are things that I would be
Speaker 4: worried about as actual conspiracies. When you've got a you know,
Speaker 4: someone that close to the president who is secretly working
Speaker 4: with the Russians, or whose national security advisor is lying
Speaker 4: to the FBI about his connections to the Russians, or
Speaker 4: about his foreign policy advisor telling the Australians that the
Speaker 4: Russians are operating against the Democrats. All of these things
Speaker 4: come together and I see a pattern that you know
Speaker 4: could be a conspiracy.
Speaker 3: Well, the Russian intelligence services have had decades and decades
Speaker 3: of experience playing these conspiratorial games and using they have
Speaker 3: terms for all of these people, useful idiots or whatever
Speaker 3: to do their bidding. And so in a lot of ways,
Speaker 3: you know, Sean Hannity and Paul Manniford are sort of
Speaker 3: like mice that the Kremlin cat can just play with
Speaker 3: to achieve its goals.
Speaker 4: Let's take a breather and back in a moment.
Speaker 1: And we're back when you see. Like the Ginny Thomas
Speaker 1: texts to Mark Meadows, I wrote about her conspiracy theories
Speaker 1: back in twenty thirteen, over a decade ago. Now I
Speaker 1: got access to some memos from a group that she
Speaker 1: was running at the time, and so she's writing to
Speaker 1: Mark Meadows and she has promoted other conspiracy theories previously,
Speaker 1: so she does believe it.
Speaker 4: We have a dramatic reading of a selection of Mark
Speaker 4: Meadows and Genny Thomas protects Greg Hess as Mark Meadows
Speaker 4: and Lily Sullivan as Genny Thomas.
Speaker 9: Watermark ballads and over twelve states have been part of
Speaker 9: a huge Trump and military white hat sting operation. In
Speaker 9: twelve key battleground states, Biden crime family and ballot fraud
Speaker 9: co conspirators, elected officials, bureaucrats, social media censorship mongers, fake
Speaker 9: stream media reporters, etc. Are being arrested and detained for
Speaker 9: ballot fraud right now and overcoming days, and we'll be
Speaker 9: living in barges off gim to face military tribunals. Per Sedition.
Speaker 9: Do not concede. It takes time for the army who
Speaker 9: is gathering for his back.
Speaker 7: Mark.
Speaker 9: I wanted to text you and tell you for days
Speaker 9: that you are in my prayers. Help this great president
Speaker 9: stand firm.
Speaker 8: Mark.
Speaker 9: The majority knows Biden and the Left is attempting the
Speaker 9: greatest hests of our history.
Speaker 10: I will stand firm. We will fight until there is
Speaker 10: no fight left. Our country is too precious to give
Speaker 10: up on. Thanks for all you do.
Speaker 9: Tearing up and praying for you guys. Oh proud to
Speaker 9: know you just forwarded to your Gmail an email I
Speaker 9: sent Jared This am Sydney Powell. An improved coordination now
Speaker 9: will help the cavalry come and fraud exposed and America saved. Mark,
Speaker 9: don't want to wake you. Sounds like Sydney and her
Speaker 9: team are getting inundated with evidence of fraud. Make a plan,
Speaker 9: release the kraken and save us from the Left taking
Speaker 9: America down.
Speaker 2: Made that way probably bias.
Speaker 9: Tears are flowing at what Rudy is doing right now.
Speaker 10: This is a fight of good versus evil. Evil always
Speaker 10: looks like the victor until the king of King's triumphs.
Speaker 10: Do not grow weary and well doing the fight continues.
Speaker 10: I've staked my career on it, well, at least my
Speaker 10: time in DC on it.
Speaker 9: Thank you needed that. This plus a conversation with a
Speaker 9: best friend just now, I will try to keep holding
Speaker 9: on America is worth it. We are living through what
Speaker 9: feels like the end of America amazing times, the end
Speaker 9: of liberty.
Speaker 3: Boy, when I hear that, you know, we talk about conspiracies,
Speaker 3: we talk about politicians using information for political benefit or
Speaker 3: sometimes for personal financial benefit. Boy, and these guys sound
Speaker 3: like true believers. They sound like they actually believe this stuff,
Speaker 3: which is oftentimes not what we think is happening behind
Speaker 3: the scenes.
Speaker 2: Yeah, this is this is cult stuff.
Speaker 4: I mean, it's okay to believe things if you have evidence,
Speaker 4: but if you have no evidence or the evidence.
Speaker 2: Is so bad.
Speaker 4: You know, Italy Gate, Italian s satellites Steel. In the election,
Speaker 4: there was a congressman named Bob English. He was from
Speaker 4: South Carolina, he was like a ninety nine percent conservative rating.
Speaker 4: This is like in the early two thousand and nine period.
Speaker 4: Twenty ten, he cared about climate change. He thought it
Speaker 4: was real, and he came up with a whole plan,
Speaker 4: a conservative plan for Republicans, you know, private enterprise based,
Speaker 4: free market solutions, met with a House Republican caucus, presented
Speaker 4: it to is two hundred and some other Republicans. Crickets, crickets,
Speaker 4: thank you very.
Speaker 1: Much, Bob. Don't send anything, no questions. He was up
Speaker 1: for election, as they all were in twenty ten. This
Speaker 1: is the tea party period. He goes down to his
Speaker 1: district in South Carolina and people are saying to him,
Speaker 1: how come you're not calling Obama a socialist. He goes, well,
Speaker 1: I disagree with the guy. I'm almost everything, and I
Speaker 1: criticize his pology, but you know he's a socialist who
Speaker 1: wants to take over America already president. But he goes, well,
Speaker 1: I don't find that useful. I'm going to go with
Speaker 1: him on the facts. Well, we're not sure we're with you.
Speaker 1: Then if you don't say he's a socialist wants to
Speaker 1: destroy the country. And as the year goes on, things
Speaker 1: get worse, And he talked about one particular meeting at
Speaker 1: a house meeting with some of his previous supporters, and
Speaker 1: they said, well, what about that number in the back
Speaker 1: of your Social Security card? What number in the back
Speaker 1: of your Social Security card? They go, you know that
Speaker 1: number that shows what camp you're going to be sent to?
Speaker 1: And he says, well, I'm not sure that's what it means.
Speaker 11: Well, if you don't know that, if you're unaware of that,
Speaker 11: why should we send you back to Washington. He ended
Speaker 11: up being destroyed in the Republican primary by a guy
Speaker 11: named Trey Goudi, who went on to run all those
Speaker 11: Benghazi hearings and all the Benghazi conspiracy theories and all that.
Speaker 11: But in some ways, intent doesn't matter. It's the action
Speaker 11: that matters. I mean, motives are good for understanding and
Speaker 11: maybe for dealing with. But at the end of the day,
Speaker 11: Lindsey Graham is doing what Lindsay Graham is doing. Whether
Speaker 11: he believes it or not. We can use that to
Speaker 11: judge him. But he's still out there helping a guy
Speaker 11: who wants to impose an authoritarian regime should he get
Speaker 11: back in the White House.
Speaker 2: This has been a real treat. It really has. I've
Speaker 2: really enjoyed this.
Speaker 1: Well, thank you guys, it's been very interesting talking to you,
Speaker 1: particularly with your perspective from the inner sanctum of the
Speaker 1: deep state.
Speaker 2: The deep State.
Speaker 3: Well, a big thank you to David Korn for spending
Speaker 3: so much time with us today. He's been covering these
Speaker 3: issues for decades and we really really appreciate it. And
Speaker 3: so that's all for today with Mission Implausible.
Speaker 8: Mission Implausible is produced by Adam Davidson, Jerry O'shay, John Cipher,
Speaker 8: and Jonathan Stern.
Speaker 2: The associate producer is Rachel Harner.
Speaker 8: Mission Implausible is a production of Honorable, Mention and Abominable
Speaker 8: Pictures for iHeartMedia.