David Sacks: i put on a jacket because you know we're interviewing a senator but i see that uh it's polo day senator schmidt's pulled a zielinski here i yeah i did but i told them i do have the

SPEAKER_02: stiff i have the stiff collar on the polo which is you look great it looks great and you know i

SPEAKER_04: lost the weight thanks for noticing senator and um uh i've been hitting the weights on like sacks

SPEAKER_07: and so i am too trying to get the gun show going like you have uh achieved there all right besties

SPEAKER_09: i think that was another epic discussion people love the interviews i could hear him talk for

SPEAKER_11: hours absolutely we crushed your questions in a minute we are giving people ground truth data

SPEAKER_12: to underwrite your own opinion what do you guys think that was fun all right everybody welcome

SPEAKER_15: back to a very special interview yeah you know we're doing these interviews here uh with me

SPEAKER_17: my amazing co-host and your czar of crypto and ai the rain man himself david sacks david how you

David Sacks: doing brother how's your summer wrapping up good to be here the summer ended way too soon way too soon

SPEAKER_17: so sad isn't it it's just like i'm 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 you're a public

SPEAKER_21: servant yes and the people demand results and hey we have another civil servant here david why don't

David Sacks: you introduce our guest today this is senator eric schmidt from the state of missouri how did we meet it was it was through another former senator now vice president jd vance i believe that's right that's

SPEAKER_02: right yeah and you guys you guys entered the senate together at the same time we did and uh got to be very close and uh shared a lot of um life experiences and uh in our freshman group got you know pretty tight we go to dinner once a month and try to keep that going now that he's even vp which is a lot of fun but yeah we got introduced through him and uh have enjoyed getting to know you and you now

SPEAKER_24: have a new book called the last line of defense which is about your time in your previous job which was

SPEAKER_27: as attorney general of the state of missouri and i remember talking about before i even knew you on the all-in pod when we were dealing with censorship and talking about that issue the twitter files this is back in i don't know this is like three or four years ago 2022 i would say yeah years ago now my time is moving we talked about the case biden v missouri which you were the one who brought that case when you were attorney general when i met you and then found that out i knew that we had some

SPEAKER_30: views in common let's say about free speech and the need to avoid censorship and you went right at the

SPEAKER_15: show me don't tell me what your fancy speak what's going on you went directly to discovery so maybe you could talk a little bit about the approach uh from the senator from the show me state there were rumors and kind of this feeling people were being censored but nobody knew exactly how it was occurring so you had some intuition that if we do some discovery here there's got 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

SPEAKER_02: question yeah and one of the reasons i wrote the book was just to you know i think it's it's easy the book starts with um you know in november 2024 the fever broke and so if you think about the four previous years you know this was a time of lockdowns and compulsory covid shots and forced masking of five-year-olds but also this vast censorship enterprise that existed that in my view was the greatest affront to the first amendment we've ever seen in the history of our country and so if you go back in time right to to in 2022 you had seen to your point jason you had seen um sort of jen saki at the podium talking about hey we're flagging this for facebook there were rumors of a disinformation governance board um with the mary poppins herself um right um talking about how this misinformation and disinformation i think right right that they needed to to flag this stuff and do something 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 so in may of 2022 when i was attorney general missouri we sued the biden administration and sort of this leviathan of agencies that were working to censor american speech and we filed the lawsuit and we knew that it would be you know highly scrutinized um be called sort of furthering conspiracy theories but we knew that there was something there and a really important strategic decision in the case was normally when you file a lawsuit like that you immediately seek a temporary restraining order or 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 right we had the allegations in the complaint so we sought discovery and the judge granted that discovery and what we found from that discovery was shocking right we got reams and reams tens of thousands of documents emails text messages about this communication the special portals that existed for you know these folks in big government to work with big tech to silence americans and so it really was shocking and 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 uh in charge of northern california that was pre-bunking the hunter biden laptop story even though the fbi had the laptop in 2019 right so we took the deposition of a cdc official who was basically flagging specific words and phrases that the government would then censor and then agencies like cissa all of these groups were part of this enterprise and that's one of the reasons i wrote the book the last line of defense that people can get on amazon right now if you we go inside those deposition rooms you go inside the prep for that what we what were we trying to find out what did we find out how we uncovered this because you got to remember this was before elon bought twitter yeah and before the twitter

SPEAKER_46: files yeah and we were right those first couple days what's interesting about this is that you

SPEAKER_27: were taking the discovery from the government side so you were getting the government documents you were deposing government witnesses and then elon released the twitter files i don't know about six months later and then we saw it from the twitter side yeah and this was happening at facebook

SPEAKER_21: too right like you had oh yeah information on the facebook side yeah yeah you had meta you had

SPEAKER_02: youtube we you know all this was all happening and and the way it was working was as you guys know um these big tech platforms have something called two section 230 protection right which is basically in the 90s when the internet's becoming a thing congress says you're not you're not a publisher you're a platform so you can't be sued that is a huge advantage and by the way 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 a lot of these entities were then becoming publishers they were throttling things they didn't like they were taking down opinions they didn't support that sort of thing and so what you had was joe biden saying maybe there's criminal liability you saw these text messages in the lawsuit from from rob flarity who's the deputy communications director of the white house cussing these guys out saying you you need to know that from the highest levels of the white house we see this you're not doing enough and so as much as i think some of the the people at these big tech companies were willing participants there was a coercion that was happening and that's the basis of the lawsuit which was 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 and i think exposing that was really important of course elon and all the work that he's done in making that a true free speech platform then and then of course the congressional hearings that followed i think all of this has sort of laid the groundwork for this kind of free speech renaissance that we're experiencing one of the things you know when i was in college you know in the late 90s i was um i was always pretty conservative one thing i was kind of jealous of of liberals was that they kind of had the high ground on free speech they were viewed as sort of like the vanguard and even the aclu actually did things like protect free speech that's all gone now like that there's no like it's about power and control and limiting and labeling things misinformation disinformation to suppress speech so i think it's an interesting moment right

SPEAKER_54: now for this new coalition that came together to elect president trump which is for me exciting

SPEAKER_56: it's kind of a working class coalition so just to steal man it senator we know that our foreign

SPEAKER_15: adversaries this is bipartisan for many decades interfere in our elections we know they do that

SPEAKER_35: you would agree yeah yeah they certainly would try to influence certainly try right and of course

SPEAKER_15: we could be like hey is it possible in 50 different states with 50 different set of regulations pretty hard to actually tip an election um as we've seen right if you look at that if we steal man a foreign adversary because this is the cover that they were seeking hey we're doing this to protect america and democracy but the truth was you know they were doing it for their own personal reasons

SPEAKER_60: 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 for the cia for our government to say to twitter to facebook hey you've got people here who are foreign adversaries they're doing something uh that is against the american public we need you to

SPEAKER_15: 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 uh 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 gonna we're gonna come down hard on you not let you buy anything and at the same time this other group from the binding administration is saying hey take this stuff down so they had two really big

SPEAKER_36: clubs to to to threaten these folks but what would be the proper channels to say hey these things are

SPEAKER_02: stolen right yeah there's there's a difference between sort of making people aware um versus the coercion um that was happening under the threat of investigations or losing section 230 protections right that was yeah that was that was our argument which was this went beyond informing in this was about colluding and and coercing which of course then crosses the line of what the government can do you know as far as violating the first amendment there's also to your point there's a couple of things that are happening at the same time here the first is kind of this honestly is kind of legacy of the whole russia gate hoax stuff in that they concocted this um this theme um that is playing out now like tulsi gabbard is exposing a lot of stuff but that gave them the in their view that gave them the guys to talk about russia this russia that everything that they don't like is misinformation disinformation right the other thing that was happening with zuckerberg in particular you know you 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 um what was happening on facebook contributed to his election and it shouldn't have happened but then of course he he then is part of the whole zuckerbucks movement in the lead up to to 2020 then he comes back around and biden's in office then he's pressured um and he kind of you know on the road on joe rogan kind of talks about the the the links at which they went to pressure him and now it it seems as though maybe he's been red pulled again i don't really know where that's at no no i can tell you he's a

SPEAKER_66: weathervane that's just how you know which way the wind's blowing zuckerberg so yeah like it's out of

SPEAKER_54: experience behind but it's interesting like him as sort of this kind of maybe that's the right word of kind of how this was vacillating from from one place to the next but the point is if kamala won

SPEAKER_70: he would have been all in for kamala a hundred percent he would have been at the inauguration for her he would have donated to her trust me we know him it's my opinion well i give him a little

SPEAKER_27: more credit in the following sense is that zuckerberg gave a speech a while back where he talked about how social networking was the fourth estate and you've got the media and then you got social networking and it's very disruptive and therefore people want to censor it and he basically supported that we should have freedom of speech for social networking like we do for the press because it's equally important and i think that is his actual view it's just that the question is you know how much stomach does he have for fighting the government when it's pressuring him and coercing him and some other part of the government is basically threatened to break up his company right yeah right like a fifth estate right and so i think that if he wasn't being pressured by the government at all and just left his own devices i think he'd be fairly pro-free speech but i just think that he wasn't really willing to take up the banner and fight the way that elon was you know

SPEAKER_56: and really in that respect he's the anti-elon he cares about his stock price he cares about money and this is my interpretation and he's going to protect the franchise and the stock but that's

David Sacks: what most business people would do i mean 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 biden v missouri

SPEAKER_27: 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 business people are going to give into that of course and it is and it is de facto censorship well and if

SPEAKER_02: you think about it too i mean there's 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 like if we didn't nobody else had filed if we didn't file that lawsuit and seek discovery and if the richest guy on the planet doesn't choose to buy twitter and expose all of that people would still be claiming that this was some conspiracy theory right like we wouldn't if you just think a world would be a much

SPEAKER_24: different place right now and so i think that's a big success well i agree and just to take

SPEAKER_27: people back you're exactly right that conservatives were called crazy and conspiracy theorists for believing that twitter you know then twitter was shadow banning and throttling traffic and i remember when elon took over you know we had the twitter transition and jay kyle and i were there and we were just helping out first couple of weeks and it was mostly just getting work charts and trying to rationalize the work structure and elon went in and started making cuts but then i think i left around thanksgiving and we were all kind of with our families and you know i think we went down to

David Sacks: mexico and elon was still there working and i remember i got a text from him at like two in the

SPEAKER_27: morning like are you up you up you up yeah i'm like sure yeah so anyway he calls and basically what he told me was that all the conspiracy theories are true that we've now gone into the admin tools that the trust and safety team was using and they literally have check boxes to throttle accounts based on exclude them from search and they had all these different tools that they created again to throttle traffic which was effectively shadow banning so they could just ban you outright or they

SPEAKER_81: could prevent your content from being seen in other words everything that conservatives had claimed was

SPEAKER_15: true and just to add to that senator before you respond the thing that's particularly interesting about this is you talked about 230. we want platforms to have 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 it's

SPEAKER_36: an editorial decision when you assign the story that's an editorial decision the 230 was given to platforms that didn't make editorial decisions this is an editorial decision to say milo yiannopoulos

SPEAKER_15: or laura loomer or alex jones whatever the reason is they could be anti-semitic they could be

SPEAKER_05: crazy they could you know or the president of the united states which was ultimately we'll get into that

SPEAKER_88: one for sure because there's a lot of good questions there this is one of the things that

SPEAKER_27: elon had done that very day was he opened up the twitter jails and let trump back onto the platform

David Sacks: and there were some others jordan peterson was censored like arkham's asylum you did let a couple

SPEAKER_27: of crazy people back on tate no all the bad boys of free speech were let out i mean it was trump tate

SPEAKER_95: jordan peterson um folks like that i don't think the public doesn't need to be protected from any of

SPEAKER_97: these people i mean milo yiannopoulos and alex jones you may find them loathsome or funny or anything

SPEAKER_15: in between but it is freedom of speech but senator this has led to a discussion of 230 being repealed and this is where i think you know the lawsuit you did and there could be further work is clarifying the nuance of 230. should an algorithm de facto be an editorial decision so if you have an algorithm and you 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

SPEAKER_33: the content you see when you open the app just like the new york times editors do right that's

SPEAKER_02: sort of like in in the last line defense book is sort of like what are the solutions are we talk about what's the proper role of section 230 because i actually think if you are a true platform as somebody again that believes in free speech it's a very important thing one of the concerns like i'm not a doomsday guy on on ai i think there's um i think he can add to human flourishing i think he can actually make us more productive and there's a lot of there's a lot of opportunities that roll with it one of the things i'm most concerned though is about censorship creeping in to ai right and so i think you have to be very clear that if you're going to start making these whether it's a you know somebody individually is flagging it or you have an algorithm that is essentially excluding 50 of the points of view you should not get the multi-billion dollar subsidy that effectively what section 230 protection is right it's a huge advantage and it should and by the way i'm all for that but i think this manipulation that by the way is sort of so specifically though the algorithm

SPEAKER_100: because you know what an algorithm is you're yeah like a tech savvy guy and it's great to have

SPEAKER_102: senators who are but you can't but but like just like government how can you have an algorithm that's

SPEAKER_60: designed to produce a certain output how can you have that coexist with 230 is my question i have my own answers but i'm curious in in your answer yeah i think i think you got to get back to one of the

SPEAKER_02: first amendment principles which is it has to be content neutral that's how i view it now you can have protections you you know you there are certain public safety protections that are going to play you could have protections against people you know sort of pedophilia that that you know would violate terms of service something there is a rule violate laws right i mean correct yeah and 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 terms of service to actually meet what the desired outcomes that they wanted and also at in and david you guys were you saw this interestingly the kind of how deep the rot really was let's just take twitter for an 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 the russiagate back then um at the end of 2016. he then after a stint at um some think tank becomes the

SPEAKER_24: general counsel at twitter he was the one inside twitter we now know from the twitter files was

SPEAKER_27: advocating to censor the hunter biden laptop story even though he should have known based on his time at the fbi that the laptop was authentic i.e it was hunter biden's actual laptop and the grounds upon which that story was censored was that the laptop was russian disinformation this was the tried and true tactic for years is that any speech that was inconvenient and that democrats wanted to censor

SPEAKER_02: they just called russian disinformation even though the russians had nothing to do with that laptop in in to dig even further into that what's interesting is so elvis chan is the guy the fbi in um in in late 2000 2019 2020 is briefing the big tech companies um monthly at least monthly then it becomes weekly and we took his deposition in the missouri versus biden lawsuit and it was kind of shocking you read about in the book but like what he what he talked about was they had the they had the hunter biden laptop in in november of 2019 the fbi did they knew it was real like they knew it was real hunter biden's laptop yul roth as you remember who was like the integrity guy at twitter signs an affidavit with the fec after complaint was filed against twitter noting specifically that the fbi was telling them that this could be a hunter biden 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

SPEAKER_15: hillary clinton's email that was confirmed and we don't know that we of course we do the fbi confirmed it absolutely was confirmed that's i think that's all part of the hoax uh okay well let me give you a couple of reasons why i could see the new york post uh oh 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 you should uh hey russia if you're listening send me the emails and you had

SPEAKER_60: paul manafort be indicted you're like the last person believes in this russia gate hoax you're

SPEAKER_86: missing the key point which is the laptop was authentic let me finish mine let me finish mine

SPEAKER_15: and you can give me the key point tell me why i'm wrong there was a bunch of noise around russia i think russia did this on purpose to cause chaos here i don't think they cared who got in i think they just want chaos that's my personal but if you were twitter and the fbi calls and says hey this was hacked and

SPEAKER_36: we have these previous instances of hacking that the fbi has confirmed and has told the world this is what happened and you have paul manafort being indicted and you have 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 this is like the russians really are doing this i don't blame them as much do you well the truth is like

SPEAKER_02: there's parallel tracks here first of all we know now um that the russia that the trump was some some russian asset oh that's totally fake that's like it like he's not an asset we all agree on that it it didn't happen but they use that of course then to spy on the presidential candidate that's what barack obama did and then you had of course brennan and clapper and comey continue this and really tried to sidetrack in a presidential administration so i i think indictments are probably coming that's a sort of a separate issue the reality is because if because you know even though statute of limitation may have expired a conspiracy if ongoing the statute of limitation 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 uh influence and coercing and threatening these big tech companies i would agree that that's a violation the first amendment my point is i just the the idea that the big big tech was so willingly going along with all this though right is a little scary these are some of the biggest companies in the history of the world and the idea that something that the fbi knew to be true wasn't out there for the american people to sort of weigh in on 10 days before an election is kind of orwellian but that's on the fbi

SPEAKER_24: i think yeah i'm totally unclean hands here there's no doubt about that okay yeah let me jump in here with a couple of points so okay let's just focus on this hunter biden story because i think

SPEAKER_27: there is a very plausible argument that the censorship of this story could have swung the results of the 2020 election okay because 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 three different things number one is they could have investigated the crimes that were suggested by the evidence on that laptop they didn't do that number two is they could have just sat on it done nothing they didn't do that they did number three

SPEAKER_95: which is they basically began a campaign to suppress the contents of the laptop how do they do that elvis chan representing the fbi was engaged in weekly meetings with these social networks again this

SPEAKER_27: is from the twitter files and elvis chan represented the intelligence community one of the 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 are submitting takedown requests to twitter and other social networks so this is the scale of the censorship that

SPEAKER_95: was happening in any event in these weekly ic meetings and a lot of the evidence has been destroyed because they're using that disappearing tool teleport in any event 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 they for months 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 there was at one point there was what was called a quote-unquote tabletop exercise where all the heads of trust and safety of 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 two weeks before the election the russians are going to do an oppo 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 like

SPEAKER_60: crazy orwellian stuff i mean in this sense for just a steel man 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

SPEAKER_95: yeah that's what i'm trying that's the only point i'm trying to make remember when zuckerberg went on rogan and he said the reason why we censor that story is because the fbi had told us to most people in that situation would have believed the fbi all three of us would the point is though that the fbi again they 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

SPEAKER_36: revelations as russian information senator what happened to those individuals at the fbi i'm curious if you can get to that as well who were involved in all this were they ever brought up on

SPEAKER_126: charges no do we ever figure out who they are there there needs to be accountability here because i also

SPEAKER_02: think it's important to point out that so take cissa which is the cyber security infrastructure security agency no one's ever heard of it uh it was created effectively to protect infrastructure from cyber attacks in that era when trump was present underground they work on under the guise of russian disinformation what's called the election integrity project so they work with stanford they work with university of washington to flag post to work with social media companies then when you get into covid they just flip the switch and turn it on any you know if you're questioning the efficacy of the vaccine or you're questioning the efficacy of masks they turn that around in the american people too so part of the point that's outlined in the book last line of defense which you can order right now on amazon um the part of the point was exposing all this was this was a leviathan this wasn't just like one person making a phone call this was all these agencies that were lined up with the regime's narrative and then working and coercing and threatening social media companies you will take this down or there will be consequences and so um you know the cdc i mentioned the cdc what were they doing the government went to him and said tell us the phrases that you want us to flag and take down and and then we will work with social media companies effectively right to go do that and so the fbi was involved in this cisa was involved with this the cdc was involved with this and then of course when we had the opportunity to take anthony fauci's deposition at nih uh that was mind-blowing uh it's only the second time his deposition was taken and we find out all the links that which he went to to undermine people like by the way dr jay badacharya who was a plaintiff in missouri versus biden with me um to undermine his efforts to say things like well natural immunity is kind of a thing still i mean they tried to take down this guy's career and anybody like that who would just sort of question anything other than what anthony fauci said so it it really was a time that was wild and crazy and we can't ever let happen again that's the sort of the point and and for me as you guys i i know believe this is a law as a i told jason first time long time on the show now the b 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 like that's really a big part of what this whole thing's about and what you saw during covet in particular was people who who had who never should have had this power were exercising in ways that you would have thought was from another country you know i mean like this couldn't happen here but it was happening here i don't know if you

SPEAKER_15: remember the foil lady literally the person who was supposed to be policing uh and making sure that things were on the up and up uh at the cdc was teaching them allegedly how to use hacker speak or their personal email addresses to subvert freedom of information requests i mean i'll put allegedly in front of it but i think this was all you know uh discoverable and it was in the email she just

SPEAKER_103: taught people how to lie and how to subvert foyer requests so when you start saying orwellian it does feel like this absolute power has that ability to absolutely you know eric mentioned the ngos that

David Sacks: are part of this leviathan i think that is a really important part of it because i think that

SPEAKER_27: one of the ways that the biden administration was able to kind of create cover for the censorship they wanted is to kind of 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 did you look at this at all eric or 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 tybee's reporting where it was set up by another former fbi official named clint watts you know these former fbi guys are are kind of all over and they claimed that they were tracking 600 or so russian disinformation accounts or bots and they claimed to know which accounts these were and they would put out stories that whenever there was a story that democrats didn't like they would accuse the russians of being behind it amplifying that story and this was the the source for thousands of msnbc stories thousands of cnn reports and so on claiming that the russians were involved in our politics they were engaging in disinformation well why why is this relevant well during the twitter files we found out there was um yoel roth you mentioned was the head of trust and safety and definitely not a conservative there was correspondence inside of twitter saying hey we looked at their so-called api and these are just regular accounts and he said basically this is all i mean i think he used that word in other words the whole idea they were tracking russian accounts was just total nonsense these were you know it's just a random smattering of some more conservative accounts some were canadian accounts they were just random accounts and so anytime they needed to oppose conservative opinion on an issue they would just supposedly point to this hamilton 68 dashboard hamilton 68 created this dashboard that supposedly showed you know this um vast russian influence campaign it all ended up

SPEAKER_95: being nonsense well and i think it totally created a thin air i think there's a long track record of

SPEAKER_15: the russians hacking including the rnc recently so you know i i i do think you are painting a very one-sided picture here sax maybe it's all you think the russians are not hacking foreign adversaries

SPEAKER_27: 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 that was largely a made-up story now look do i want to say that no russian ever was 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 okay it was a hoax and for years it was the basis for thousands of stories that the russians were interfering in our politics we also know that the steel dossier was a hoax and that was the whole basis once laundered through the fbi and that whole investigation that somehow the russians had interfered in the 2016 election so when you start to peel away all these bogus accusations jason yeah i don't really believe any of this stuff when i hear the words russian disinformation what i hear

SPEAKER_103: now is red scare senator i'm gonna have you uh senator i'm gonna have you chime in here and maybe balance out

SPEAKER_60: our two 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

SPEAKER_147: that is a fact and also i don't think anybody thinks like uh trump is a manchurian candidate so you tell me where reality is between these chinese do it too there's no question of course but i

SPEAKER_02: think what what separates this though was that now that we know what we know i mean actually in the documents that were released by released by tulsi gabbard the director of national intelligence was that hillary clinton was the preferred candidate they had the goods on her they had her medical records all this stuff they so trump was not like this preferred the russians had all that hacked information yeah they had that and so what was done was hillary clinton knew that she had an email problem and then she works with a joros george soros funded um ngo right they come up with this plan to say well trump is is is cozy with russia the steel dossier finds this oppo whatever is fake oppo then they as david said they launder it through intelligence agencies then that became the thing and i think the problem is 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 and there's going to be have to be a sort of a a lot of accountability but i think before people gain that trust back so yeah that was my next question is

SPEAKER_56: how do we get past this because we're sitting here with like one group who feels hey there's all

SPEAKER_147: these really suspicious russian connections to trump and the people around him jason can't you see

SPEAKER_155: that this was manufactured it's many you have to start with some parts of it are manufactured

SPEAKER_156: yes and then some parts of the real steel dossier manufactured it was a hoax we get it there

SPEAKER_160: there's there's hamilton 68 and all the stories based on it manufactured hoax how do we get to

SPEAKER_165: reality well first you gotta peel back you gotta peel back all the fakeness well i think also you

SPEAKER_36: have to accept that the russians are hackers and don't have our best interests and they actually want to come after us politically david this idea that they're not cyber operations i'm sure they do that

SPEAKER_168: they hacked hill he's and you know he knows and this has all been confirmed the problem here is that

SPEAKER_02: that was used um as a as a as a predicate again this is why it's it's so jarring it was used as a predicate to spy barack obama authorizes to spy on a presidential candidate and then as a predicate then to investigate a a president in waiting and then as a predicate to try to destroy his administration it was used and it gobbled up so much time in those first two years that to me is is a pretty unique circumstance and beyond just yeah foreign nations are trying to get information since we're here

SPEAKER_60: there's this lawsuit that is now happening uh or this investigation i guess as a as an attorney and you were the ag explain to the american people what the case is right now that they're going after

SPEAKER_15: you know um with uh this russiagate allegations and then where is it in the courts give us the mechanics of it and where do you think it winds up so the question is um was there was anything done

SPEAKER_02: um illegal uh during this sort of russiagate hoax stuff that could be chargeable i think you've got ironically um uh barack obama has presidential immunity because of the case that president trump won at the supreme court which by the way my solicitor general at the time in missouri was john sour he's now the solicitor general in the united states he was also trump's lawyer who argued that presidential immunity case uh about a year ago but so um he probably has immunity from official acts when he was in office but not when he's out of office so the the real question will be um he's sort of uh a conspiracy i think the most likely charge he can make the case is a conspiracy against a conspiracy to defraud the united states this is a very elaborate scheme again to undermine people and and whether they get indictments or not i think they should pursue them and and we'll see if that happens um but i think that like the most likely targets of that are comey clapper and brennan um for their role and they're being accused of what exactly of manipulating this admit and manipulating these falsehoods into actionable intelligence again against the president of the

SPEAKER_34: united states donald trump what are they being charged with i guess is what i'm getting at or has that

SPEAKER_02: not gotten to that point you can't be the head of the fbi or the head of the cia and have information you know is false to then open up a criminal investigation against the president which is what happened right and so that's a kind of a big thing so um again most people would say probably the statute of limitations has has run on on many of those charges but again an ongoing conspiracy is something different and by the way the conspiracy doesn't need to involve you from point a to point z once you sort of begin the conspiracy so like uh you know again it just go down this rabbit hole a little bit like what was jack smith looking for at mar-a-lago um when he went down there like he's probably looking for some of the uh the information related to the steel dossier that they thought that he probably took with him i don't know that for certain but that's certainly a plausible explanation so this and again you have to remember jason that president trump leaves office he announces he's running for president in the fall of 2022 three days later a few things happen then the assistant district attorney in atlanta in a state case visits the white house counsel's office the number three person at doj leaves the department of justice and goes work for alvin bragg who then later brings a case against president trump jack smith is appointed as special counsel who's in prosecutor world you know he's this hired gun he goes out and tries to put president trump in jail for the rest of his life they try to bankrupt his family so like it is very obvious to anyone paying attention that this lawfare that was aimed against donald trump was meant to make sure he never got back in office again and by the way if he never got back in office again all this stuff that tulsi gabbard discovered and and laid out there that cash patel found in burn bags wouldn't be out in the open so much like how we expose the corruption in missouri versus biden i think that's kind of where we're at right now this is a big jump

SPEAKER_60: though because the fbi raid on mar-a-lago was because trump wouldn't give back these uh specific

SPEAKER_175: documents that they were asking for they were looking for right what were the documents there and that

SPEAKER_60: he was obstructing justice and that they were you know and that was thrown out cameras etc and that

SPEAKER_176: case didn't didn't get past a motion to dismiss right you're making the jump from that that they

SPEAKER_163: were looking for something related to the steel dossier and trump could have just given those

SPEAKER_17: document backs i always wondered in that one why he just didn't give the documents back like why was

SPEAKER_67: he so steadfast he can classify anything as president which was the likely scenario but they but they did

SPEAKER_147: it anyway i mean i think but why would he just i mean if you were advising him wouldn't you just

SPEAKER_02: sound like hey just give the documents back like i think he was in touch with the archivist um and and that was an ongoing conversation and then jack smith with the federal prosecutor down in in florida

SPEAKER_67: moved with guns to seize these documents right i mean it's very it was dramatic for sure i just don't

SPEAKER_18: right i mean i just never understood why he just didn't give the documents back it would just i mean

SPEAKER_60: i know trump does unique things in the world and but i would have just given the documents back which is

SPEAKER_182: what every other president did when they were asked to give documents back sure but except remember joe

SPEAKER_02: biden who wasn't ever president he was vice president who can't declassify document had boxes and boxes of

SPEAKER_24: classified documents in his garage where hunter biden lived so yeah so like it was down to now jacal you

SPEAKER_27: started believing that trump was a russian asset he's a russian spy based yeah you did you were

SPEAKER_186: tweeting at the time i i thought you should no no i didn't if i i always thought that was like a crazy

SPEAKER_30: concept but you did no no it's okay you were fooled by the media it's okay i always thought

SPEAKER_34: people were fooled i said this very clear on the pod i always believe the russians wanted to create

SPEAKER_15: chaos like we're experiencing here in this discussion amongst americans to distract us and that they would do it even handily with anybody they would do it people who were creating the

David Sacks: chaos were actually the people who perpetrated this coup attempt against the president the people

SPEAKER_27: who perpetrated the hamilton 68 dashboard fraud those are the people who perpetrated the chaos sure

SPEAKER_193: i i think if the russians you don't really have any evidence no no you don't have specific evidence

SPEAKER_27: you don't have specific evidence of a russian hack go read matt tabee's reporting i just gave this

SPEAKER_159: is refuted i just gave it to the the rnc the head of the rnc said yes we were hacked our our partners

SPEAKER_15: were hacked they they explicitly said this this is all facts david but anyway we got the senator here we

SPEAKER_193: we can have our russian gate debate forever you can tell me that i think trump's a russian asset i don't think right trump's a russian asset i think that's insane but i do think the russians like to

SPEAKER_27: 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 i mean other people may have their own opinion is that it shows that i think there's a there's a document there where brennan brennan was like 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 we haven't the steel dossier you're saying not just the steel dossier but the whole idea of somehow that the russians had run this elaborate interference operation in the 2016 election and that somehow trump was compromised in other words the intelligence analyst did their job and came up with the correct conclusion and nonetheless brennan said that the steel dossier should be included in the official intelligence assessment because it had the quote ring of truth to it okay so he was advised by his own analysts that this was nonsense and yet he pushed to include it in the official intelligence report and then that became the basis for opening the

SPEAKER_95: investigation you see how this worked allegedly and we'll find out who'll have their day in court

SPEAKER_200: i mean i'm totally allegedly this is what's in the documents well i mean we'll find out if this is a

SPEAKER_36: um a theatrical exercise or if it's actually going to go to court what do you think i think it'll go to

SPEAKER_02: court i think this is um and and by the way i think it's one of the reasons why they were so obsessed in making sure president trump never got back into office one of the reasons i mean again in the book i talk about how there's this a an emergency real or perceived then you other people and then you try to silence dissent i think it happened with covid um it happened with this anybody that that claimed that russia didn't have um you know that president trump wasn't a russian asset was a traitor and a putin lover i mean this stuff it's kind of wild honestly but i i think we're on the other side of the fever dream uh and but there does need to be some accountability now this is your first term a senator i believe yes yeah so i was elected in 2022. yep i'm curious one any great

SPEAKER_207: stock tips uh two because you have to call the russiagate now we're just trying to get some inside

SPEAKER_208: information to trade on number two look i think one of the reasons why the russia we can stop talking

SPEAKER_27: about russia gate but i think one of the reasons why it was so important first of all it was effectively a coup against the president united states because these were executive branch officials who owe a duty of loyalty to the elected president instead they were working to subvert and undermine him based on essentially lies and and hoaxes and manufactured material i mean that is that is basically the definition of a of a coup so i think that is a big deal in and of itself but i think the other reason why it's such a big deal is i do think 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 we are basically in a war with russia or at least we're backing ukraine in a war with russia and actually you heard this at the alaska summit i think that 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 somehow trump was a russian asset and somehow they had interfered in our elections and i think this helped create a very hostile relationship between the united states

SPEAKER_211: and russia clearly russiagate led to the putin invading the ukraine it led to it led to him crossing the

SPEAKER_214: border it led to a souring of the relationship it led to a souring of the relationship and it doesn't

SPEAKER_219: justify his murderous campaign in ukraine david you would agree i'm not that's not the argument i'm

SPEAKER_100: making i know but i'm forcing you to agree that he invaded ukraine and murdered people and he's a war criminal and you know that those are just facts as well david i'm sorry i think those are cliches

SPEAKER_27: that that basically attempt to strip that complicated war of all of its context so that we can achieve a peaceful solution to it obviously but you gotta accept reality 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 relationships with russia that's the point i'm trying to make senator i'll

SPEAKER_60: give you the choice i want to talk to you about just the senate in general and um and then i wanted to talk a little in your experiences there or we could just go right into what's happening with this

SPEAKER_229: russian peace deal and the status of that we can do both i i um i think i was actually i was on a

SPEAKER_02: sunday show yesterday and and yeah i consider myself firmly in the camp of being an american realist i i think that a lot of the people that 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 right who presided over the with the disastrous withdrawal of in afghanistan who um by basically on his watch russia

SPEAKER_232: invaded what is their position senator what do you think their position is like why are they so tweaked

SPEAKER_02: that he met with putin do you think i don't know uh because there is no plan there's never been a plan the only plan they ever had was is that the united states taxpayer would continue to funnel over 200 billion dollars gone out of plan and i had a problem with that in my first couple years the vice president vance viewed the world kind of similarly with that in the same way i think we ought to focus on our core national interest the homeland we have to figure out a way to pivot to china 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 you know these european countries who are going to be in the white house in the oval office today they talk about putin being this existential threat well they sure don't act like it they don't you know they don't they don't spend like it you mean correct and it by the way if they spent what we spent on national defense that would free about 300 billion dollars for us to focus actually on the end of pacific where china now has a bigger navy than we have not a better navy

SPEAKER_33: but a bigger navy they're in space for real trump's biggest accomplishment is probably

SPEAKER_235: geopolitically getting nato uh to spend what they're supposed to spend yeah yeah i went over to uh i was

SPEAKER_02: actually at the uh the um the munich security conference i went over there 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 um this kind of wilsonian adventurism that's dominated permanent washington for a long time just to tell them the truth which is not what they wanted to hear but the truth which is the things i just said you need to step up in a meaningful way um you know 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 so this is kind of the place that i've been hoping to be but i think president trump's trying to broker a peace here the problem with the critics is 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 so if you're if you're if your solution is that well we shouldn't 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

SPEAKER_54: marry but like you accept the world as it is and try to move forward and i think that's what he's

SPEAKER_15: trying to do and david i think the chances of successfully negotiating anything with a dictator who gets to do whatever he wants is like five or ten percent on on a good day are you talking

SPEAKER_160: about zelinski my lord you have it in for the the emerging democracy that was invaded zelinski is now

David Sacks: in his what is it fifth or sixth year of a four-year turn hold on no this is this is just me saying

SPEAKER_27: i'm not treating anyone else you're out of your lane so zelinski basically banned opposition political parties he basically cracked down on the press democracy you don't get 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 so forth he's basically sees the assets of his political opponents and most importantly he's now in the like fifth year of a four-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

SPEAKER_144: and you know this whole idea that zelinski represents democracy whereas who represents authoritarianism that's not what's going on just statistically you're wrong if you

SPEAKER_33: were to look at any of the ratings of democracies in the world russia would be amongst the lowest

SPEAKER_15: scores and the ukraine would be in the high middle scores compared to the truly free country

David Sacks: before zelinski canceled elections but i'd have to you have to think twice about that after since you canceled elections there is no democracy there is no democracy in ukraine right now there's just not

SPEAKER_244: well they're at war yeah okay fine but fighting for that but we had we had elections when we were in

SPEAKER_02: you know the civil war and we were we were in world war ii we had elections i don't know that that's

SPEAKER_242: a greater reason senator which is a more democratic country ukraine or russian russia is an authoritarian

SPEAKER_02: regime but i think david makes some like i'll give you one example when we were you can't just answer the

SPEAKER_27: question i know i understand you're a senator i mean just you're using jacal 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 on the screen this is gallup this and this before the alaska summits this was not politically motivated in any way and 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

SPEAKER_95: want a resolution to the conflict even if it means making concessions yeah i know i i wouldn't you

SPEAKER_73: can't dispute this of course they're they've got war fatigue like they should this is what democracy

SPEAKER_24: means to me is that we should actually listen to the desires of the ukrainian people russia has

SPEAKER_02: five times the people three times them are three times the people five times the munitions um they have an industrial base um this you know for ukraine i think the next step here is um there has to be a negotiated peace here this this can't go on forever europe is not in a position i think to provide what they claim to want to provide in the united states of america i mean part of the problem is and other people have made this point that even if you spent let's just say we wanted to spend another hundred billion dollars the industrial base doesn't exist to build all of the stuff that they need right now anyway like they have a there's a real problem here and i think president trump campaigned on the idea of negotiating peace i don't know why that's so controversial and um and i'm not saying from you i'm saying but the pundits yeah it's like you know the idea that you know russia has nuclear weapons the idea that he wouldn't have a one-on-one conversation yeah that's why i

SPEAKER_18: asked that question like is there any steel manning of this position that we shouldn't meet with

SPEAKER_15: putin or you know president xi or kim jong-un we should obviously meet with all of them it makes sense if we have even a one percent chance of making forward progress when should the united states

SPEAKER_56: senator say uh enough is enough we're out figure it out for yourselves you've got the eu right there

SPEAKER_147: you 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 and i think trump has done an amazing job of uh enforcing the loan lease that

SPEAKER_56: biden set these up so when we keep saying we're spending a hundred billion that's no longer true

SPEAKER_15: right we're getting all that money back because trump forced zielinski to uh in the negotiating table we're getting all that money back but when should we just so we have clear facts here that it's not costing the american people you know there's hundreds of billions of dollars anymore thanks to president trump deaf negotiator i'll give him credit where credit is due but when should you we in your mind step back and say you know what not our problem anymore you guys figure it out because that seemed vice president jd vance uh friend of the pods position as well at some point we have to

SPEAKER_103: say enough and trump sort of said that too he alluded to that at some point we're out are we at that point if this doesn't get resolved this time around you think i think yeah i think that um that's what this

SPEAKER_02: phase is all about which is to give a legitimate peace process a chance but the idea that that we're going to be voting on i mean i wouldn't support it more a taxpayer aid to ukraine for a war that you know doesn't seem to look like it's ever going to end and is a blank check it's just unacceptable as a senator for a state in the united states of america right like it's just not now president trump i think has opened up avenues to to sort of 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 it's not going to happen tomorrow but that's really what this diplomacy in this tick tock age that we live in i think we think it's instant gratification but diplomacy is difficult when you're dealing with other countries with their own national interests and their own sort of inner

SPEAKER_235: dynamics possible we walk away this year from the situation you think i don't know i wouldn't want

SPEAKER_02: to put a timetable on i would not want to get in front of the president who's actually sitting in front of the 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 yeah um this is in but i think that up to this point we've wanted to try to provide um a time and space for a solution and i do think if there's anybody who can do it it's trump uh there's nobody else on the planet i mean macron could not broker this i mean you know i mean like so it's the last best hope uh my hope is that you do get to a peace process because you're just gonna have billions of more people die um in really what do you think sax

SPEAKER_04: you think we should walk away if we can't get this resolved with this latest volley of negotiations

SPEAKER_33: or at some point should we to the president say enough because he's he seems exacerbated based on his public statements about this he's kind of exacerbated with the two parties it seems well

SPEAKER_26: look you're asking me what the president should do and i'm not on the foreign policy team

David Sacks: i'm not going to venture and wait into that but is it a possibility i'll just say this

SPEAKER_27: i'll just say this listen to what the ukrainians want i mean zelinski'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 uh

SPEAKER_60: they give up the donbass and whatever other regions you know are on the table here do you think putin

SPEAKER_36: stops here or do you think we'll see him invade another country do you worry about that sex you worry

David Sacks: 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

SPEAKER_27: we're now three and a half 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 for them yeah they haven't made it to the neapur i don't even think they can conquer all of ukraine or at least it'd be extraordinarily difficult and resource consuming so i just think that this threat of of putin conquering or attempting to invade all

SPEAKER_272: of europe this is threat inflation that's my uh that's my takeaway from a senator it's like

SPEAKER_67: putin couldn't even take ukraine i mean agree look this is this is part of the inconsistency of

SPEAKER_02: the argument that i've heard in in the senate for two and a half years which is that he's hitler that he's about ready to march through europe and this is a we can't be neville chamberlain and this is the moment but at the same time he can't get to kiev right like both things can't be true at the

SPEAKER_272: same time so again i think you just have to recognize the realities recruiting north koreans to fight on the front line i mean like what it's so humiliating for him all right listen senator

SPEAKER_147: you're welcome on the pot anytime great having you here everybody buy the book it's out right now i don't know if this interview you were expecting but no no we had a he's no i i talked to him before you came on and i said hey listen to keep it not like a monoculture here like you know tucker and

SPEAKER_272: the senator were like high-fiving the whole interview but it was great it was a great interview it's a great talker classic you need to have a little spice here to i love the debate yeah

SPEAKER_277: i love free speech which is why i wrote the book the last line of defense how to beat the left and

SPEAKER_280: court on amazon right now all right everyone check it out everybody buy the book all right everybody see you next time bye bye great guys thanks great job everybody it was fun i'm a moderate truth be

SPEAKER_286: told but right now the left calls me a maga retard and then the right calls me a libtard so the only

SPEAKER_221: thing they have in common is they both think right i'm an idiot right yeah so i'm uh well everybody agrees that maybe there's something to it there could be consensus if you finally there's your cold open phone