Investigations Now!
Welcome to the first Gaslit Nation episode held in the Biden eras! The Trump administration is no longer a transnational crime syndicate masquerading as a government – but unfortunately there is still a transnational crime syndicate at large. While it’s obviously a relief to no longer have a mafia White House, the hostile actors that helped a Kremlin asset to take executive power still remain, and we break down these ongoing threats in this episode.
Show Notes for This Episode Are Available Here
Music - I Wait by Gaelynn Lea (https://gaelynnlea.bandcamp.com/track/i-wait-2)
Gaelynn Lea:
Can you see me
Way in the back here?
I've been waiting
I've been waiting in line.
It's been a long time
Can't get no service
Still I'm hoping
I am hoping for a sign
Sarah Kendzior:
I'm Sarah Kendzior, the author of the bestselling books, The View From Flyover Country and Hiding in Plain Sight.
Andrea Chalupa:
I'm Andrea Chalupa, a journalist and filmmaker and the writer and producer of the journalistic thriller, Mr. Jones.
Sarah Kendzior:
This is Gaslit Nation, a podcast covering corruption in the United States and rising autocracy around the world.
Andrea Chalupa:
The opening song you heard is the very first song of our Gaslit Nation Make Art Celebration. The song is called “I Wait” and it's by Gaelynn Lea. From her biography, from her website: “Gaelynn Lea is a violinist, songwriter, disability rights advocate, and public speaker from Duluth, Minnesota. She won NPR's Tiny Desk Contest in 2016 and has been touring nationally and internationally ever since. So far, she's toured in 45 states and nine countries, captivating audiences around the world with her unique mix of haunting original songs and traditional fiddle tunes. Gaelynn Lea has appeared in several major festivals over the years, including South By Southwest, Winnipeg Folk Festival, and Reykjavik Arts Festival. She's also opened for well known bands, such as Wilco, The Decemberists, and The Jayhawks.”
Andrea Chalupa:
“In addition to performing and recording, Gaelynn also does speaking engagements about disability rights, finding inner freedom, and accessibility in the arts. She uses her music as a platform to advocate for disabled people and to promote positive change.” Gaelynn writes, "I am a disabled violinist and songwriter, and I wrote this song to express the frustration I feel about the lack of enforcement of disability rights legislation, like the Americans With Disabilities Act. It's about demanding a seat at the table. I create because I get so much energy from making music!" We'll link to her website and social media links at the top of the show notes for this episode, which you can access for free every week on Patreon, where we publish each week's episode. If you have a song to submit for the Gaslit Nation Make Art Celebration, we will share that link where you can submit your music also in the show notes for this week's episode.
Sarah Kendzior:
All right. Well, welcome to our first episode held in the brand new Biden Administration, which feels very nice to say. The Trump administration is no longer a transnational crime syndicate masquerading as a government, but unfortunately, there is still a transnational crime syndicate. While it's obviously a tremendous relief to no longer have a mafia White House, the hostile actors that helped a Kremlin asset take executive power still endure, and there is no clearer example of that than Vladimir Putin's continued reign of terror and crackdown on the brave protestors who oppose him. Today, we're going to start off the show with some updates about Russia's political future and how it is intertwined with our own. Andrea, I'm going to pass it to you.
Andrea Chalupa:
Yes. It's been a harrowing time, especially lately, in Russia. It's thrilling to see what has been going on in terms of this being, without a doubt, an extraordinary turning point. I say that as someone who has been watching the Russian opposition for a very long time now. As I've shared on the show, I was about to give up on making my film, Mr. Jones, about Stalin's genocide famine in Ukraine. Then, Boris Nemtsov was assassinated in the shadow of the Kremlin. At that time, I was joining Russian friends here in New York City to do a solidarity march in New York City with Boris Nemtsov's march in Russia against Putin's invasion of Ukraine when he was murdered. So, our march here in New York turned into a vigil.
Andrea Chalupa:
Just seeing the fear and heartache in the eyes of my Russian friends inspired me to double down on my efforts to make Mr. Jones. This film was very much not just for Ukrainians, but for Russians. For instance, there's a character in the film, if you've seen it, named Paul Kleb, who's based on a real person, a journalist—a German journalist—that tipped off the real Gareth Jones to what was going on inside Russian at that time, that mass murder. But I named him Paul Kleb after the editor of the Russian edition of Forbes who was killed in Moscow in 2004 after the magazine published a list of 100 richest Russians. Paul Kleb, in the film Mr. Jones, gets murdered with four bullets in his back, just like Boris Nemtsov did.
Andrea Chalupa:
When I had to premiere the film in Berlin and speak at the press conference, I was ready for Kremlin trolls planted in the audience to speak up and spout lies against me and the film, just like they'd been doing for years. I was used to doing that. I was used to speaking places. I spoke, for instance, at the National Arts Club and a whole group of Russians from the consulate and embassy walked out in the middle of my speech. I spoke about Ukraine at the Council of Europe in front of 1,000 people, and a Russian in the audience was spouting nonsense about me and lies, so I'm used to these Kremlin trolls, seeing them face to face, in person. At the premiere of Mr. Jones in Berlin, I was ready for them.
Andrea Chalupa:
Instead, there were Russian journalists in the audience who were asking the most thoughtful, powerful questions and then appearing at the premiere that night. I'm just so moved by all the courage and determination that the Russian opposition has committed themselves to after being under such stress. I've seen it in my friends. I've seen the pressure they've been under all these years leading up to Putin's invasion of our democracy in 2016. When I was working for democracy in Ukraine, I was working alongside Russians. It's very well known that Kyiv is a hotbed of Russian resistance. Ukrainians, in civil society, see themselves as keeping the flame of revolution warm for Russia when Russia's ready.
Andrea Chalupa:
What we saw this weekend, on January 23rd: Russians are ready. This is a sea change, and the reason why it's such a sea change is people have to understand that Putin and his cronies love to scare Russians into submission by saying essentially, "If you overthrow us, you're going to go back to the chaos, and poverty, and instability of the 1990s," when the Soviet Union first fell and it was just a big, old free for all, and there was these oligarch turf wars, and monsters like Deripaska, who won the aluminum war. There's an actual body count. We all know Deripaska as having Mitch McConnell now on a leash, the Republican party on a leash, British politicians on a leash, spreading his blood money. He's a ruthless thug in Putin's oligarch court. The ‘90s were ruthless. I've referred to them as the Car Bomb ‘90s. It was like that. So, Putin's like, "Hey. You get rid of me, you get the car bomb ‘90s back. It's going to be instability."
Andrea Chalupa:
Well, guess what? In the streets that we saw marching kids that were born after the 1990s or the tail end of the 1990s, so all they know is Putin, and the kids don't like Putin. That is the big difference here is this TikTok generation is coming in and they're physically fighting back. We saw that in the streets. Obviously, we want a peaceful revolution, but things are very different now. What people need to also understand is that this is larger than Navalny. As I mentioned Boris Nemtsov earlier, Boris Nemtsov, who was assassinated, he was the true spirit of the opposition that could unite the Russian opposition, and that's why he had to be murdered by the machine.
Andrea Chalupa:
Boris Nemtsov was an honorary Ukrainian. He gave speeches in Ukraine saying, "Crimea belongs to Ukraine." He was a wonderful, unifying force for Russian Ukrainians. Of course, that meant he had to be killed to protect Putin's corruption. Navalny's clearly a problematic character. He's spoken out in support of Putin's invasion of Crimea. He has said horrific things and horrific, dangerous rhetoric towards minorities in Russia, including Muslims. So it's important to know that this isn't about him anymore. Yes, he has served as a catalyst, but what we ultimately want for him and all people inside Russia are human rights, fairness, rule of law, free and fair elections. So, Navalny can and should continue to play his part, but all of us have to push him on the issues where he falls short, and all of us have to stand united in solidarity for human rights for all Russians and hope that day comes where Navalny can run for president of Russia and state his case, and so can a lot of truly qualified candidates that believe in peace, and democracy, and rule of law.
Sarah Kendzior:
Yeah. Absolutely. The emotion with which we talk about this, the toll of autocracy is enormous. The toll of it on our consciences, on our souls, is enormous. That's true if you're a witness. That's true if you're a target. That's true if you're a human being. We narrowly dodged a very dire fate with the election of Biden. If we had continued with Trump, we would have, I think, had a government increasingly resembling that of Putin: an entrenched autocracy with further tax on freedom of assembly, freedom of speech. We're still very much on the precipice. We're not out of the woods. This is something we're going to be emphasizing relentlessly because we've been dealt, as Americans, this second chance to try to fix things.
Sarah Kendzior:
We've seen in other countries how tentative those sorts of changes are and how, even when people put up an incredibly admirable fight, how long those odds are when you're dealing with massive state forces backed by billionaires, backed by oligarchs, backed by some of the worst people in the world. We're also on the 10th anniversary of the Arab Spring. A lot of folks from that region who I follow have been very emotional about that because it is such an incredibly powerful thing to do—to go out and protest corruption against those sorts of odds. But we're also seeing what happens, you know, children are growing up in the midst of this. I have tremendous respect for all the protesters that have come out, but it's also just such a tragic thing to see.
Sarah Kendzior:
I remember this with Uzbekistan nearly five years ago, when their dictator, Islam Karimov, finally died, that the majority of the country at that point had no memory of anyone being in power but Karimov. He'd been in power since 1989 onwards. What that does to you psychologically, what it does to you in terms of your expectations of what's possible in life, what's possible for democracy, what it means, it takes quite a toll. What we're seeing is just an incredible amount of pushback against that, pushback against a defined, imposed reality created from above by Putin and his propaganda apparatus. The same is true of any autocracy. We're still battling those kinds of conditions now in terms of how powerful lead actors are trying to create a narrative of what's been happening in our own country—in the United States—how they're going to try to use that narrative to guide people toward political decisions that are damaging. We'll get into all this, but one thing that just ... I'm still not used to the Biden Administration. I'm still kind of like-
Andrea Chalupa:
Can I just say ...? I just want to end this bit on Russia to just say here's what to look out for. Like Trump, Putin will burn it down to stay in power. He mass murders in Ukraine with the ongoing invasion of Ukraine. He deliberately slaughters civilians in Syria to show that both revolutions must fail, because for Putin, pro-democracy revolutions cannot succeed because the biggest thing Putin fears are the Russian people. My fear is that the dictatorship terror is going to increase. Western democracies have to unite to show consequences and understand that Navalnys' documentary, Putin's Palace, that exposes the lavish wealth stolen with corruption and blood money, that shows how illegitimate this regime is.
Andrea Chalupa:
If western democracies continue to go about as business as normal, allowing Nord Stream 2 to go forward in Germany to essentially reward Putin by entrenching Germany's dependence on Russian gas, by having Putin speak at the World Economic Forum, all of this stuff, if you continue, western societies, western governments, to legitimize Putin ... He's illegitimate. This Putin's Palace documentary was the death knell that finally showed once and for all that he's illegitimate. Okay? You will be showing how you are illegitimate, Germany, Canada, EU, United States, if you do not isolate him, if you do not sanction him personally, if you do not ratchet up the pressure and shove in his face his illegitimacy. You need to do that now for those TikTok kids. They should not be cannon fodder for what you are unable to do and your lack of moral courage.
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Sarah Kendzior:
For the last four years, the United States has been part of an axis of autocrats—an axis between Russia, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Hungary, Israel, at times even North Korea. You know, that was the Trump administration policy. That was the policy of the United States. There were a lot of “foreign policy experts” who really wanted to deny that this was possible. They wanted to believe that our tradition of democracy and promoting it around the world was just so strong that this was some sort of an anomaly. Those alliances were real and they were there before. They pre-existed. The alliances we've had with Saudi Arabia, for example, were so strong that you had George Bush flying out Saudis after 9/11, when nobody else was allowed to fly.
Sarah Kendzior:
This is always there. This is always seething underneath the surface, but what we do have now that's obviously different is we don't have a Kremlin asset in the role of the presidency. We don't have a series of oligarch lackeys filling up the administration. We have a strong obligation here as the United States with the Biden administration to have a different policy against Russia, as Andrea was just saying, to actually enforce sanctions. I mean, technically we've had sanctions on Russia, but you also had Steve Mnuchin never—almost never—enforcing those sanctions in practice and in fact granting favors to people like Oleg Deripaska to build factories in places like Kentucky.
Sarah Kendzior:
You know, we're in a national security crisis. We've been cyber attacked by Russia in December in the worst cyber attack in US history. We have a lot of things to work out here. We absolutely do not want a war. We want to avoid violence, but we also need a very strong defense against Russia, which is a hostile state. That was something that the Obama administration to a large degree denied, or at least they underestimated Russia's power. They were looking at it in a very sort of traditional way. They weren't looking at information warfare, at cyber warfare, at espionage and all these other things that Russia is actually extremely good at, very adept at. I think, hopefully, they've learned their lesson, but they have a strong obligation here.
Sarah Kendzior:
The other side to this that every administration has refused to look at—Democrat and Republican alike—is transnational crime. Transnational organized crime is something that holds up the Kremlin. You cannot separate it. It's an appendage of this apparatus. The United States is that as well. Again, it was always there in the background. Like my book, Hiding in Plain Sight, traces this back 40 years. You can find precursors earlier than that with things like Meyer Lansky and his syndicate. All of this needs to be rooted out. All of these dark, transnational alliances need to be brought into the limelight, and investigated, and talked about as part of mainstream discussion, and we'll get to that a little later in the show.
Sarah Kendzior:
I want to switch to talking about the violent coup—I'm just going to scream that every time because I feel like everyone's forgetting that it happened—unless you've got more to say on Russia?
Andrea Chalupa:
No. No. No. Go on. Go on.
Sarah Kendzior:
All right. We're just still ... We're in shock. Andrea and I have been working for the last, I mean, more than four years, but we've been working for four years on one very specific topic. It's amazing to finally have a change where we're not seeing which motherfucking asshole in the Trump Administration did which horrific thing each day. It's nice to wake up in the morning and not have the first thing I do be see whether he launched a nuke overnight or tried to buy Greenland again or whatever. It's nice to have that kind of break, although quite honestly, I find it disconcerting that the de-platforming of Trump has closed the door to the visibility of their actions. I'll get to that, too.
Sarah Kendzior:
I don't know what he's planning. I don't know what all of the goons and mafiosos that he pardoned are planning. I just know that they're not planning to kick back and enjoy a nice post-criminal retirement life on their yachts. They're much more likely to continue their battle for total control over the United States with the ultimate aim being profiting over its collapse. That's what we've been telling you for four years. That's what they want is to strip this country down and sell it for parts. One avenue to that, of course, is encouraging civil war, encouraging factionalism, and attacking the Capitol in a violent coup. I'm sorry. This is driving me fucking nuts.
Sarah Kendzior:
It's been three weeks since this happened and we already have cries to just move on, make nice, unify. I mean, honestly, we heard that the day of, which is just unbelievable. But what's distressing me is that, more and more, it looks like there will not be accountability despite this being the worst terrorist attack on our Capitol in its history and despite our own representatives nearly being murdered. So, here are some bad signs over the last few weeks that accountability is not on the horizon. I hope I'm wrong and I hope that you raise these points to your representatives to ensure that I'm wrong.
Sarah Kendzior:
First, we have from the Washington Post, the headline is, “Justice Department, FBI Debate Not Charging Some Capitol Rioters”. Already, what the fuck? Okay. They say, and I quote, "Due to the wide variety of behaviors, some federal officials have argued internally that those people who are known only to have committed unlawful entry and were not engaged in violent, threatening, or destructive behavior should not be charged, according to people familiar with the discussions. Other agents and prosecutors have pushed back against that suggestion, arguing that it is important to send a forceful message that the kind of political violence and mayhem on display January 6th needs to be punished to the full extent of the law, so as to discourage similar conduct in the future.” Jesus. You think?
Sarah Kendzior:
I read this and I'm just like, "My god." There was a siege on the capitol. This is like a worst case movie scenario, and we're honestly lucky that more people didn't die. They went in there with the intention of murdering representatives in Congress. They had certain representatives—like AOC—picked out. They trashed offices. They stole computers. They were going to hang Mike Pence. They were chanting that. They confessed their actions online. They bragged about them. This was not covert. Again, it's like the Trump administration all over again in miniature. They feel that because they did this openly, and they did this with the encouragement of Trump, and they did this with the encouragement of seditious senators—like Ted Cruz and Josh Hawley—that somehow, it's okay. It's not okay to do a violent siege on the Capitol and threaten to murder people. I don't know why I have to explain this. I don't know why anybody has to explain this. The fact that it failed is not an excuse, because had it succeeded, we would not be having this discussion because we would be living in an entrenched autocracy led by violent insurrectionists. [laughs[ I'm sorry. Just, this is so infuriating.
Andrea Chalupa:
It's like the Mueller investigation all over again, and we all know how that went.
Sarah Kendzior:
Yes!
Andrea Chalupa:
You can't do that again, guys. They're at war with you.
Sarah Kendzior:
Like when he tweeted out the Trump Tower meeting evidence, and we were just like, "Okay. It's right there, Mueller," or when Trump would go on TV and confess to obstruction of justice with Lester Holt. It's like, wow, we've solved this crime. It's the exact same thing. These guys—these people who invaded the Capitol with violent intent—went on to do interviews with the New York Times and gave their real names and their real hometowns, and that's how the FBI found them. Now, why were they so comfortable doing that? One, because of the Trump administration coddling them and Trump lying to them and saying, "I've got your back. I'm going to protect you." That's bullshit, but I think also the constant circulation of Nazi puff pieces in the New York Times itself may have had something to do with it.
Sarah Kendzior:
We have a culture which coddles these criminals. That's what they are. Even if the crime is unlawful entry, it is still a crime. It is the Capitol building. You cannot do that. You definitely cannot do that when they're having a vote in the midst of an incredibly heated, and angry, and violent protest, where you have some cops letting them in but others getting wounded and injured on the job, one dying. This should not be hard for me to explain. So yes, they all need to be charged. The incarceration aspect of it I'm less concerned with with non-violent actors, but this needs to go on their record. It needs to be said, you cannot do this. There needs to be repercussions and consequences and a precedent set. But instead, we're just seeing this array of bullshit.
Sarah Kendzior:
Another example of this is Riley Williams, a 22 year old, violent insurrectionist who stole Nancy Pelosi's laptop, allegedly with the hope of delivering it to the Russian government. Yeah. Totally normal. You know, she has been basically let off the hook, put on some sort of probationary house arrest. I think her court date is today. We're taping this Tuesday morning. So, we'll see. Then, once home, she went on to pull a Manafort. Despite being accused of “theft, obstruction, and trespassing, as well as violent entry and disorderly conduct,” she was allowed internet access at home and then began to delete evidence and encourage other people to delete evidence, which is exactly what Manafort did when they gave him house arrest. He just went on to go commit internet crimes. You may recall he had some issues turning a Word doc into a PDF and managed to get busted that way, so perhaps the same fate awaits Riley Williams. But for god's sake, when someone is trying to overthrow your country—which is true of both Paul Manafort and Riley Williams—don't give them internet access. Hot tip from Gaslit Nation. I don't even know what to tell you at this point. Then we have these senators.
Andrea Chalupa:
We're like a vigilante justice crime show.
Sarah Kendzior:
This is fucking ... I'm sorry. I keep swearing. This is nuts. I mean, if this was a group of Black Lives Matters protestors, would they be all home chilling, deleting evidence on their computer, being coddled, having people come out and say, "Oh, gosh. They didn't know what they were doing. Let's give everyone a second chance. It's time for unity"? No! If these were Muslim Americans, no. If these were foreign Muslims—if this was ISIS or something—can you even imagine? If ISIS stormed the Capitol, and killed a police officer, and four other people died, and they were in there saying they were going to kill the vice president, I mean, would we be having a debate here?
Sarah Kendzior:
The double standard is so incredible. It's so deeply rooted in white supremacy. It's so deeply rooted in treating white, young adults—like Riley Williams—as if they're incapable of making adult decisions, as if they don't know right from wrong, as if they don't know you're not supposed to violently attack the Capitol building of your own country, as if they don't know that's against the law. I mean, even if you don't know that that's against the law somehow, well, guess what? You're about to learn the hard way. I'm sorry, there's no excuse here. All the guys calling for mass murder of the representatives really should have been a clue. Apparently, that clue was not picked up on by Ted Cruz or Josh Hawley, or maybe they're just fine with their colleagues in Congress getting slaughtered because they are unrepentant in encouraging sedition and insurrection, and they are backed up by senior GOP officials like Chuck Grassley, who is making excuses for them and making excuses for the people who stormed the Capitol.
Sarah Kendzior:
I don't know how other members of Congress, especially those whose offices seemed to be targeted or purposefully destroyed, people like Ayanna Pressley, for example, people like AOC who, you know—an aspiring assassin was there. He has since apologized for his assassinate AOC tweet—I don't know how they're showing up to work feeling safe in the slightest. They are showing up to work with traitors who seemed fine with their potential murder. You know? There's nothing funny about this. There's nothing that you can just kind of be like, "Oh. That's the GOP being the GOP." This is a very serious security situation and they need to be removed.
Sarah Kendzior:
We also have new extremist Republican congresspeople, like Lauren Boebert, who is insisting on bringing her gun into the Capitol building. If there are not consequences for that kind of behavior three weeks after the most violent attack on our Capitol in centuries, there are going to be just more carnage, more violence, to come. It's just a matter of time. They've tried to put in metal detectors and to fine people who won't use them, but as we've pointed out numerous times on Gaslit Nation, this group of people, they're not random Joes off the street. That's how people like to portray it, that they're just regular folks who got sucked into the vortex. Of course, there are some people like that. But they are backed up by billionaires. They are backed up by powerful lawyers. They were led by Lin Wood, a very wealthy, very powerful lawyer. They were led by Michael Flynn, Roger Stone. You know, this is not the salt of the earth here.
Sarah Kendzior:
These are people who have been engaged in some cases—like Stone or Manafort, whose involvement I also suspect, and I'd like to see more about that—they've been engaged in trying to destroy this country and overthrow this country in a sense for decades. Flynn has certainly been engaged in that behavior very vocally for about seven years, and especially in the months leading up to it. It's going to take more than a metal detector to deter that. You are dealing with a very well financed, very violent movement. Yes, within that movement there are a variety of people, and some I believe do have severe regrets about what they did or what they supported, and it's good if they have those regrets and have learned something, but you can't just let folks off the hook for that level of crime.
Sarah Kendzior:
As AOC tweeted after she heard about her potential assassin being arrested, she said, "On one hand, you have to laugh, and on the other, know that the reason they were this brazen is because they thought they were going to succeed." That is the takeaway here. They thought they were going to win. They thought Trump was going to protect them. They thought that they were going to be able to control our country with utter impunity. This goes for the individuals in the crowd who rushed the Capitol, but it particularly goes for the group of felons who worked for Trump's campaign, who helped bring him to power, and who Trump pardoned just weeks before with this in mind.
Sarah Kendzior:
The degree to which this was carefully planned gets revealed more and more every day. We suspected this back in December—you should listen to our archived episode—where we knew, when Bill Barr quit, for example, that it was not out of the goodness of his heart. It was because there was something being planned that was so awful that even Bill Barr didn't want to be a part of it because of legal liability. He saw this coming a mile away and tried to extract himself from the situation. As we said in that episode, do not ever rehabilitate Bill Barr's reputation. He did tremendous damage as attorney general. He committed a multitude of crimes and covered up for others, but even he knew that this was going very far. The same is true of Esper at the DOD who quit. We, at the time, didn't know exactly what was going on. We thought it might be a war in Iran. We thought it might be a domestic insurgency or an illegal use of emergency powers. We knew it was going to be very bad.
Sarah Kendzior:
All of this happened in plain sight; the planning, the execution, and now the lack of accountability is also happening in plain sight. You can't let that be the excuse. A plan doesn't need to be secret to be revolting, and dangerous, and atrocious. I don't know. You would think folks would have learned after four years of this, but not so much. I've got more on that, but do you have thoughts on the violent coup that nearly succeeded?
Andrea Chalupa:
Yeah, I think part of accountability has to be exposing all those who prop up Josh Hawley and Ted Cruz, all those who donate, the institutional donors, the companies that give to Cruz, and Hawley, and other seditionists. When you're watching Putin's Palace, the documentary fact-checking the Kremlin's gaslighting of the Russian people and the world, it’s not just about exposing Putin's hideous, dictator chic palace paid for by corruption and blood money. Putin's Palace is about how Russia legalized corruption with Putin at the helm. He was the guy to do it. He was the guy to avoid accountability, but Navalny brilliantly exposes all these individuals that get hidden by the mystique of Putin. So I think that's a lesson for us in the US. Let's expose all the individuals that get hidden by Josh Hawley and Ted Cruz and their court jester antics, because it's not just about the clown car. It's about the dark forces bringing the clown car to power.
Andrea Chalupa:
I'm talking about naming and shaming the corporate executives of the companies who are donating to these fascist Republicans that violently attempted to overthrow our democracy. They will do it again. They are at war with us. Whether you like it or not, Democratic leadership, you need to be on a war footing, because our democracy is quite literally at stake.
Sarah Kendzior:
Yeah. As for Hawley, one thing that would be very beneficial would be for people to follow the dark money trail into his campaigns, particularly his Senate campaign in 2018. I write about this in Hiding in Plain Sight, like the second chapter. The first chapter after the introduction is about Missouri as the bellwether of American decline. The reason I call it that is because it's the dark money capital of America. We basically have no rules against elite corruption. People can put enormous amounts of money from unnamed donors into campaigns, create incredible amounts of propaganda, and there's very little we can do about it.
Sarah Kendzior:
When people ask, "Why is Missouri the way it is?", dark money is much of the answer to that problem. It actually pre-dated Citizens United. We were like the testing ground for Republican streamlined criminal behavior. Among those backers of Hawley is the NRA. I think he was the largest recipient of NRA money during that campaign, and that was, of course, during a time when the Russian mafia was pumping an enormous amount of money into the NRA. That was something that Mueller was looking into, and then it was dropped. And then there are the unnamed donors. Hawley has one donor in particular—we don't know who it is—who pumped an incredible amount of money into that campaign. I think, because he has no moral core—there's no “there” there with Hawley. It's just greed, ambition, and just general contempt for this country, contempt for human life—he's a malleable actor. He can be moved and shaped in whatever direction his donors and backers want to push him. That's what makes him dangerous, much more than Hawley the human being. He is my senator. I've been watching him, and I know this.
Sarah Kendzior:
That's something really worth looking into. And looking into Cruz, you know, looking into who funded the seditious Republicans. We still don't have great investigatory journalism on that, in part because it's incredibly difficult to do. I mean, that's why the Republicans created this system, is so it would be hard to track, but it's incredibly important. We now don't have this kind of incessant crisis every hour atmosphere that we had under the Trump administration and it's really time to unpack these layers of GOP financial corruption. That also goes for old cases like Brett Kavanaugh. Who paid off all that debt? That's a question that people have been asking for years now, and it kind of gets lost in the shuffle, as we had to deal with Trump scandal after Trump scandal and Trump crisis after Trump crisis. Part of getting accountability is getting the truth, getting answers to these questions. That means following the dark money trail. I encourage anybody who needs a project, plenty to choose from here.
Andrea Chalupa:
Do it for the Democrats also.
Sarah Kendzior:
Yes. Yes.
Andrea Chalupa:
Because it's a dark money epidemic.
Sarah Kendzior:
Yeah. We've talked on the show about Len Blavatnik—the partner of sanctioned oligarch, Oleg Deripaska—and how he has pumped money into not only Republican representatives, like Kevin McCarthy, but into the DCCC. The largest donation in the DCCC's history was made by him in 2019, after we completely knew what was going on with Trump and Russia. They gave half of it back, I think, after the outcry. You should vet everybody. Treat everybody like they are brand new. We have so many senior citizens in Congress—people who have been around for a long time—that there's this assumption that if there's something really shady about them, we would know about it by now. They would have been vetted by now. But it's kind of like the opposite happens.
Sarah Kendzior:
Their seniority gives them this kind of gravitas or this sense of trustworthiness that's not always merited. You should feel free to dig into their pasts, to look into their finances, to look into their connections. The world has changed a lot since a lot of these folks got into power, and God knows campaign finance rules have changed enormously. Our economy has changed enormously. Our relationships with adversaries abroad and the infiltration of transnational organized crime into our institutions has changed our political culture enormously. So, you should absolutely be investigating everybody. That's our new motto at Gaslit Nation.
Sarah Kendzior:
From here, speaking of investigating people who were given respect and trust for unmerited reasons, we can talk about Michael Flynn. We have a story about him. His brother, Charles Flynn—a general—was involved in the attack on the Capitol. The most interesting and frightening part about that, at least for me, is that the Army lied about this fact for days before finally admitting that it was true. From, again, the Washington Post: "Charles Flynn confirmed in a statement issued to the Washington Post on Wednesday that he was in the room for a tense January 6th phone call, during which the Capitol Police and DC officials pleaded with the Pentagon to dispatch the National Guard urgently, but top Army officials expressed concern about having the Guard at the Capitol. Flynn left the room before the meeting was over, anticipating that then Army Secretary, Ryan McCarthy—who was in another meeting—would soon take action to deploy more guard members, he said.” A quote from Flynn, “'I entered the room before the call began and departed prior to the call ending, as I believed the decision was imminent from the secretary and I needed to be in my office to assist in executing the decision.'"
Sarah Kendzior:
Then a little later in the article it says, "Army officials declined to answer several questions about Flynn's statement, including how long he was in the room during the call, whether he said anything, and if he was the one who described the crowd at the Capitol as ‘mostly peaceful’. The Army also declined to answer why it falsely said for days that Flynn, who already has been confirmed by the Senate for promotion to four star general, was not involved. 'Thank you for the opportunity to comment. However, we have nothing further to add,' the Army said in response to questions posed by The Post. One official directly familiar with the situation said there was concern in both the Army and National Guard about possible political fallout if it was discovered that Flynn was involved in the Army's deliberations."
Sarah Kendzior:
This is a very frightening story, in part because Michael Flynn himself is a very frightening character. We've discussed his past in great detail. This is someone who not only had illicit deals with the Kremlin and was sitting next to Putin at the RT Gala, but who also, among other things, tried to get a Turkish cleric assassinated on US soil, tried to illicitly sell nuclear material to the Saudis, was confirmed as an unregistered foreign agent for both Russia and for Turkey, was involved in threatening a number of private citizens. His son, Michael Flynn Jr, was essential in creating the PizzaGate conspiracy narrative, which led to somebody nearly being murdered in a pizza parlor in Washington DC, which Flynn and others were claiming was actually a venue for pedophile cannibals. It was basically the precursor to the QAnon narrative, which is another thing that Flynn endorsed. QAnon thought that it had a general in Michael Flynn. They thought that they had a real military leader. The fact that Flynn's brother is a general active in the Army, I didn't know this. Did you know this, Andrea, before the story came out?
Andrea Chalupa:
I learned about it from Flynn and his brother committing sedition against the United States of America in a violent coup attempt.
Sarah Kendzior:
Yes. That is also how I learned about it. So, you know, Andrea and I follow this stuff pretty closely. If we didn't know about it, I'm kind of thinking to myself, "Well, what else don't we know about Charles Flynn, and what has he been doing this whole time?" There were a bunch of stories that broke during the transition period about the Pentagon and the Pentagon refusing to cooperate with the Biden team during the transition, withholding information, not respecting Biden as the incoming commander in chief, and so forth. One of our great worries was that as Trump was building his coup—and it was always an attempted coup from the very start, whether it was going through court cases to propaganda to an actual violent insurrection, it was always an attempted coup—our question was always, on what side will the military fall?
Sarah Kendzior:
We assumed it would be divided. We assumed there would of course be people in the military whose foremost obligation was towards our country, our Constitution, who would behave honorably, but we also knew, you know, seeing as Flynn himself came from the military, that there would be others in there who would back Trump above all else and who would betray our country. Had I known that Flynn's brother was in there, I would have named him as a likely person to go along with Michael Flynn's seditious, violent plans. It makes me wonder, what else did people know? Why did the press not cover this? Maybe they didn't know either. It could be that. I don't know. It's a really frightening thing, because we've had this weird kind of quietness over the last two weeks, if you could call it that.
Sarah Kendzior:
Basically, after January 6th, we were preparing for more violent attacks, in part because the perpetrators announced them. They said, "Yes. We're going to attack all these state capitals on January 17th and then again on inauguration day. We've built ourself up an army." This is like a mix of various militant groups, along with QAnon, along with just people who are interested in that sort of seditious, violent activity and were gunning for the chance for it. Then it didn't happen. I think one of the reasons that it didn't happen is because there were some arrests of the perpetrators of the Capitol siege. We saw them getting arrested at airports and bursting into tears when they found out that they were on the no-fly list because the’re domestic terrorists. Because that's what happens when you're a domestic terrorist. You don't get to commit your terrorism and then fly back to your house.
Sarah Kendzior:
It's very troubling though, because we've had—throughout the tenure of the Trump Administration, we had so many relationships in that administration formed through nepotism, whether Ivanka and Jared, Mitch McConnell and Elaine Chao. God, what was I going to say? Betsy DeVos and Erik Prince, the mercenary, Stephen Miller and Katie Miller, the two white supremacist sadists. Gosh, I mean, I've listed them all before. Of course, Trump himself with Ivanka and Jared. It goes on, and on, and on. Nepotism is the glue that held that administration together, and so we have another nepotistic tie within the military itself, which makes me wonder, again, how close did we come to fully losing our country? How close did we come to the military actually backing Trump and this violent, seditious coup? I don't know. Do you have thoughts on that?
Andrea Chalupa:
We're not going to be as lucky next time around. That's for sure.
Sarah Kendzior:
Yeah. Definitely not. People keep asking us, "What is Gaslit Nation going to be doing going forward?", as if somehow the inauguration of Biden magically made our problems go away. As you can hear from this episode, it did not. We have a very long, hard road ahead of us. We have an opportunity ahead of us. I think it's good to think of it that way, think of it in terms of possibility. But one of the things that we've always emphasized on this show and that I have emphasized in Hiding in Plain Sight is that even in times of relative peace—say, during the Obama administration or during the Clinton administration—these malicious actors were plotting, and building alliances, and making plans, and waiting for the moment to strike. Some of them do that with blackmail. You saw that with Roger Stone. You saw that with Jeffrey Epstein's operation. Many of them did it through corruption, by streamlining white-collar corruption, streamlining transnational crime into Wall Street, into government institutions, in a way that it's often not defined as crime at all because the people committing the crimes are just so respectable, so polished, that they seem above prosecution. Then eventually they were.
Sarah Kendzior:
We're living in a time of elite criminal impunity and that is what we want to change. I think we are not at all alone in that goal. Even Trump's supporters, even the people who were joining movements like QAnon, that was one of their core complaints was elite criminal impunity, the fact that Epstein could get away with what he did and be celebrated by elites and politicians and be whitewashed by the media, that the Sackler family could do what they did to our country. They peddled opioids and laughed about it—laughed about American deaths—and they get a slap on the wrist or they disappear under mysterious circumstances, like with Epstein's, quote unquote, suicide in prison.
Sarah Kendzior:
We have a lot of criminality that needs to be brought to the surface. If we don't do this, if we don't have investigations and commissions to deal with the atrocities that the Trump administration committed and the background behind them—which likely implicates other administrations and actors across the board—I worry this country will collapse, if not immediately, then within a decade and certainly within my lifetime. A nation cannot survive the level of attack on the body politic that the US just endured, so steps must be taken immediately to not only remedy them, but to clarify the severity of these crimes to the American public. There can be no unity without accountability, and there can be no accountability without the truth. These crimes are so incredibly severe that there's simply not a choice about whether or not to pursue justice. It needs to be done for the sake of the victims, for the sake of restoring public trust, for the sake of prosecuting the perpetrators, and for the sake of setting a precedent, so that this can never happen again.
Sarah Kendzior:
I know that we have a multitude of crimes, because Trump committed, like, a crime every day, but these are the four I think they should start with, both because they're so severe, but because they tend to be all encompassing. They really affected every American, or for the last one, they're just particularly horrific. The first one that I think needs a full, separate commission and investigation is the handling of the coronavirus crisis, which includes lying about the nature of the disease, lying about its prevalence, stealing and selling medical equipment, shaking down and threatening governors and other public officials, and purposefully infecting hundreds of thousands of Americans through a practice they sometimes labeled as “herd immunity” but which is really selective genocide. They literally said, "Let them be infected." That was the goal. The goal was to kill the American public.
Sarah Kendzior:
That policy, the fact that that policy was formed in malice became particularly clear when people realized that COVID-19 was far more likely to kill Black Americans, Native Americans, and Latino Americans than it was white Americans. It also disproportionately affected poor and disabled Americans. This was a purposeful, sadistic policy created by a eugenicist neo-Nazi administration. So who is to blame? Among those who designed this policy and who were on the coronavirus team, you have Jared Kushner, Ivanka Trump, Mike Pence, Steve Mnuchin, Wilbur Ross, Michael Caputo, Stephen Miller, Katie Miller (who is his wife), and of course Donald Trump himself. They all must be held accountable.
Sarah Kendzior:
After that, we have the attack on the Capitol. I don't think I need to say too much more after that than obviously the seditious congresspeople who encouraged this attack or even maybe helped plan it need to be removed from power. They're a danger to the American public. They're a danger to their own constituents, no matter how much they like to declare otherwise (Josh Hawley, you do not represent me) and they need to go for the sake of our nation.
Sarah Kendzior:
The third is Trump's complicity with the Kremlin and the Russian mafia in the 2016 election and throughout the administration. Trump needs to be investigated for treason. If you're interested in this goal and you are looking for evidence, you can find it in the Gaslit Nation archives. Where Mueller failed, Gaslit Nation filled in. The broad network of transnational organized crime that continues to infiltrate our institutions, most notably the Treasury (and I would start there if you're looking at a point of inquiry) must be eliminated and the crimes documented and prosecuted.
Sarah Kendzior:
Among the worst crimes that Trump committed in this broader aim of treason and the collapse of the American Republic and servitude to a hostile foreign state was the litany of death threats against Americans who testified or attempted to alert the public about these crimes. We saw this a year ago in the impeachment hearings with Alexander Vindman, Marie Yovanovitch, Fiona Hill. We saw this with threats to judges, to juries, to Fauci, to whistle blowers, including Andrea's sister, to Reality Winner, who remains incarcerated. All of that needs to be rectified.
Sarah Kendzior:
My fourth biggest crime, which I think does need its own commission and prosecution, is the abuse of migrant families on the border—the torture of migrant families on the border. This is a crime against humanity worthy of a Nuremberg style trial. Once again, we find Stephen Miller as the architect of the crimes. What I'm referring to here, of course, is the fact that they purposefully separated families who had crossed the border in Texas. There are still over 1,000 missing children. The children and the adults were tortured in the camps. There were reports of forced hysterectomies. You cannot sweep this under the rug. This is one of the worst things the United States government has ever done.
Sarah Kendzior:
One of my questions is, we have Miller in charge of the genocidal coronavirus policy, Miller in charge of this genocidal policy—this torturous policy against migrants—so why was he never removed? They could have removed him for security clearance violations alone. He lied on his clearance forms, just like Jared and Ivanka. He covered up ties to foreign countries and malicious actors abroad. He was never punished for that. They had a pretext to get him out before he could hurt anymore people. They didn't take it. So, why was he viewed as so valuable? Who is protecting him? I think they need to look at his path from David Horowitz mentoring him, and training him, and then bringing him to Jeff Sessions— neo-confederate white supremacist, Jess Sessions—who was working on Trump's foreign policy team despite having no real foreign policy experience, and was forming his own alliances with Russia. The whole story of how he got in there and then what he did when he was in there needs to be told.
Sarah Kendzior:
Then others, of course, who need to be tried are Sessions himself, Rod Rosenstein, who encouraged and seemed to get off on this policy with sadistic glee, Kirstjen Nielsen, anyone who was in charge of implementing this or profiting off of this, John Kelly, the private prison fan. All of this needs to be brought to justice. Andrea, do you have particular crimes you think should be investigated, or do you want to save it for next episode?
Andrea Chalupa:
A whole series. Human trafficking, exploitation of children and women, that's an industry across post-Soviet states, states that have oligarchs and dirty money that have propped up Trump's businesses, I would say that should be a focus as well. If you think about Trump-ism—the whole Trump movement—they've been projecting. They've been trying to label their political opponents with their own crimes. One example is using “the Biden crime family”. I think as part of that, we have to look at QAnon as a confession. Trump is accused of raping a child. He's accused of raping Ivana Trump, his former wife.
Andrea Chalupa:
He was very close with Jeffrey Epstein for many years. A horrendous story just came out on how Leon Black was forced to step down as CEO of the private equity firm, Apollo, after it was revealed that he paid child pedophile pimp, Jeffrey Epstein, $150 million. That's a huge red flag. As to why, Epstein of course was a pimp to the rich and famous who supplied his network with underage girls. Trump was all up in that. As part of this you have to investigate, expose, prosecute that whole culture of human trafficking and exploitation of children and women that Trump was very much a part of for a very long time.
Sarah Kendzior:
We're going to need to be relentless, because the courts aren't necessarily going to do their job. We need to step in, and investigate, and document where they don't. We're already seeing an early sign of this, where emoluments lawsuits were brought to the Supreme Court this week and they ended them. The Supreme Court ended lawsuits over whether Trump illegally profited off the presidency, which is something he did basically every day. That is why Trump packed the Supreme Court. That's why the GOP packed the Supreme Court. They have put preconditions in place to make this much more difficult for us, but that's why we need to take advantage of the time we have, of this little bit of breathing room that having the Biden administration is giving us, and go full throttle into gutting out this corruption and making sure that none of this can happen again.
Music - I Wait by Gaelynn Lea (https://gaelynnlea.bandcamp.com/track/i-wait-2)
Gaelynn Lea:
(singing)
Can you see me
Way in the back here?
I've been waiting
I've been waiting in line.
It's been a long time
Can't get no service
Still I'm hoping
I am hoping for a sign
That one day things will change
And we can finally take our place
That history won't forget us
Or try to minimize our pain
And so I wait
And so I wait
Did you know that
When I get angry
I breathe fire
I could burn this place down?
You may not realize
All of the small ways
I am not welcome
But just take a look around
Still everybody knows
That you need a place to go
And livin' isn't easy
If you incinerate your home
And so I stay
And so I stay
I may seem angry
So please forgive me
But I am still not free
In this society
How long must we keep fighting
For our right to be living?
Wrongs overdue for righting
We're a bit too forgiving
So when you hear them
Make claims of progress
Take a good look
And see who isn't there
We need a seat now
At the table
So please invite us
Or don't pretend to care.
Andrea Chalupa:
Our discussion continues, and you can get access to that by signing up on our Patreon at the truth teller level or higher.
Sarah Kendzior:
We want to encourage you to donate to your local food bank, which is experiencing a spike in demand due to the coronavirus crisis. We also would like to share our deepest condolences to Representative Jamie Raskin and his family on the death of his son, Tommy Raskin, an activist who fought for human rights and animal rights. We encourage you to donate to the Tommy Raskin Memorial Fund For People and Animals, which we have linked to on our Patreon page.
Andrea Chalupa:
We also encourage you to donate to the International Rescue Committee, a humanitarian relief organization helping refugees from Syria. Donate at rescue.org. If you want to help critically endangered orangutans already under pressure from the palm oil industry, donate to the Orangutan Project at the orangutanproject.org. Gaslit Nation is produced by Sarah Kendzior and Andrea Chalupa. If you like what we do, leave us a review on iTunes. It helps us reach more listeners. Check out our Patreon. It keeps us going. And you can also subscribe to us on YouTube.
Sarah Kendzior:
Our production managers are Nicholas Torres and Karlyn Daigle. Our episodes are edited by Nicholas Torres. Our Patreon exclusive content is edited by Karlyn Daigle.
Andrea Chalupa:
Original music in Gaslit Nation is produced by David Whitehead, Martin Vissenberg, Nick Farr, Demien Arriaga, and Karlyn Daigle.
Sarah Kendzior:
Our logo design was donated to us by Hamish Smyth of the New York based firm, Order. Thank you so much, Hamish.
Andrea Chalupa:
Gaslit Nation would like to thank our supporters at the Producer level on Patreon and higher...