Gaslit Nation Transcript “Trump Let Putin Kill US Soldiers” July 08 2020

Audrey Strauss: In addition to allegedly enabling and participating in the sexual abuse of young victims, Maxwell compounded her crimes by repeatedly lying in 2016 when she was questioned under oath. Maxwell lied because the truth as alleged was almost unspeakable. Maxwell enticed minor girls, got them to trust her, then delivered them into the trap that she and Epstein had set for them. She pretended to be a woman they could trust, all the while she was setting them up to be sexually abused by Epstein and in some cases by Maxwell herself.

Audrey Strauss: Today, after many years, Ghislaine Maxwell finally stands charged for her role in these crimes. My office and the FBI remained committed to doing all within our ability to bring justice to individuals who enabled, facilitated, and participated in the acts of abuse. Combating the exploitation of children is a priority of our office. We are committed to pursuing and prosecuting those who exploit and abuse minors.

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, available now where you stream your films. It's so crazy I can say that now, finally.

Sarah Kendzior: And this is Gaslit Nation, a podcast covering corruption in the Trump administration and rising autocracy around the world. And so we are back during the week where there is a sense of collective breakdown in the United States. We are now only four months from the presidential election and are facing a nationwide pandemic whose numbers won't stop rising, the worst economy that anyone alive has ever seen, mass protests against racism, which the media has largely stopped covering, Neo-Nazi speeches by Trump, which the media never stops covering, and the continual consolidation of a transnational crime syndicate masquerading as a government, which is exploiting all of the aforementioned crises for personal and financial gain.

Sarah Kendzior: So we have a lot to talk about today, but we're going to start off with a topic that we have been discussing on Gaslit Nation since we launched in 2018, which is the sex trafficking operation of Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell. So there is a new development there. On July 2nd, Ghislaine Maxwell, Epstein's partner, was finally arrested for her role in procuring underage girls for Epstein and forcing them into sexual slavery where they were raped by some of the wealthiest and most powerful men in the world. Though the indictment only covers the years 1994 through 1997, Maxwell was involved in Epstein's operation for several decades and this arrest was long overdue. Sarah Kendzior: Ghislaine Maxwell and Jeffrey Epstein are the subjects of one of the chapters of my book, Hiding in Plain Sight, and to my knowledge this is the only book that connects Epstein and Maxwell, not only to international espionage and organized crime plots in which her father–UK publishing tycoon and Mossad agent Robert Maxwell–participated, and also to the Russian mafia, but to the contemporary world of Donald Trump, Bill Barr and other enablers currently running the U.S. federal government.

Sarah Kendzior: This is an extremely complicated story so I recommend you either read the book or listen to the Gaslit Nation episode we did on Hiding in Plain Sight a few months ago. And I also recommend reading the works I cited in that chapter by other authors who've approached different angles of this story.

Sarah Kendzior: For those who haven't read it, I'm going to summarize some of the key conclusions before moving on to the new arrest. So Ghislaine's father, Robert, as I mentioned, was a UK publishing tycoon and secret Mossad operative. His role in Mossad was not revealed until 1986 when a former employee of Israel's Military Intelligence Directorate identified him as an agent. The accusation came to public light after Maxwell played a role in Mossad's kidnapping of Israeli whistleblower Mordechai Vanunu, who was trying to alert the West that Israel had nuclear weapons.

Sarah Kendzior: Vanunu was taken back to Israel and given 18 years in prison. In November 1991, Maxwell's status in Israel was again confirmed after he died under mysterious circumstances. Officially, he fell off his yacht. Researchers and his own family members say he was murdered. He was given an elaborate hero's funeral in Jerusalem where Israeli state officials praised him for his contributions to Israel while not naming what they were.

Sarah Kendzior: Israel was not Maxwell's only secret foreign tie, in the late 1980s, he had become a partner of Semion Mogilevich, the head of the Russian mafia, allegedly in search of money to keep his businesses afloat. We've discussed Mogilevich numerous times on Gaslit Nation. He was the subject of Robert Mueller's 2011 speech on the threat of new forms of organized crime, and he was on the FBI's 10 Most Wanted list for years before James Comey abruptly removed him with no justification in December 2015.

Sarah Kendzior: Robert Maxwell made Mogilevich's international operation possible by getting him an Israeli passport, which allowed Mogilevich to travel outside the Soviet Union to Israel, and then to Hungary, and then to Western Europe, and then to the United States where he set up an elaborate criminal operation that overlapped with Wall Street and the rise of white-collar crime.

Sarah Kendzior: When Maxwell died, his finances mystified analysts due to millions of dollars of unidentified transactions. These were later assumed to be evidence of mafia activity. Among the activities Mogilevich participated in, very likely with Maxwell's help, were money laundering, arms trading and sex trafficking. Sarah Kendzior: After Maxwell died in 1991, his daughter, Ghislaine moved to New York City, set herself up as a socialite and began partnering with Jeffrey Epstein in a massive sex trafficking operation aimed at providing high profile men with underage girls, and then very likely blackmailing those men on behalf of multiple countries and private interests. Alex Acosta, the Trump former Secretary of Labor who prosecuted the Epstein case said, "Epstein belonged to intelligence," but would not specify to which country's intelligence he belonged.

Sarah Kendzior: The answer is likely many, including the U.S., Israel and Russia, and the same is true of Ghislaine Maxwell. Some of the famous men who used Epstein's child rape services have been sued by their victims. Among them are Alan Dershowitz, Prince Andrew and Donald Trump. Trump was sued by a victim who says he raped her when she was 13 years old in 1994. As noted, the Maxwell indictment covers the years 1994 to 1997.

Sarah Kendzior: Another famous person associated with the Epstein case is Bill Clinton, who flew on Epstein's plane–nicknamed the Lolita Express–numerous times. Clinton was of course president during the time of the trafficking described in this indictment. I'm bringing both Trump and Clinton up because of speculation regarding those dates. But what's so horrific about this indictment is that it could allude to a number of powerful people due to the sheer volume of participants and witnesses.

Sarah Kendzior: This all went on in plain sight for decades. The media and the government conspired to cover it up and the victims have never seen justice. And so that's the general background. Again, I highly recommend reading my book as well as other books that are willing to point to the international connections surrounding this crime. It's often framed as a, I don't want to say a regular sex trafficking operation, but this is America, so I suppose I can. But there are deeper connections at play, including ties to members of the Trump administration.

Sarah Kendzior: And so on that note, we had a little prelude that this was coming. Some strange things happened. There was a statue of Epstein erected in Albuquerque, New Mexico the day before Ghislaine's arrest. Epstein of course, had a ranch in New Mexico where he wanted to conduct scientific experiments on human beings, including impregnating captured women with his sperm to create some sort of super race.

Sarah Kendzior: There's all sorts of horrific, awful stuff that we're not even getting to in this episode and in general, so I encourage you to research that. So, that happened. And another precursor was that on June 20th, SDNY attorney, Jeff Berman, was abruptly fired by Bill Barr in what seems like an effort to cover up the case. Much as Barr attempted to control the Epstein case when Epstein was arrested last summer, it's important to remind everyone that it was Bill Barr's father, Donald Barr, who brought Epstein to prominence by hiring him to teach at the Dalton school, despite Epstein's lack of qualifications, in the early 1970s. Sarah Kendzior: After which, Epstein partnered with Les Wexner, partnered with other people in Wall Street, in New York high society and this operation took off. So I've been chattering on for a while about espionage-based sex traffickers. Andrea, do you have any thoughts on that around... What do you think about the Berman firing? Is it related?

Andrea Chalupa: Oh, I think absolutely. In fact, we could play old audio from episodes from a while back of this show where we warned you. We warned you that Attorney General Barr with his four page coverup memo, which muddled what was really happening with the Mueller Report–Bill Barr coming in as the coverup general–we warned you when he did that for the Mueller Report. Bill Barr getting all of the major newspapers in America to run front page headlines saying "Mueller exonerates Trump."

Andrea Chalupa: They all fell for it, hook, line, and sinker. We warned you that the rest was at risk. The other investigations that Mueller farmed out to places like SDNY, that Barr's coverup tentacles were going to get there eventually. We warned you not to count on those farmed out Mueller investigations because Barr was coming for them. And go back to the transcripts. We have transcripts for Gaslit Nation on gaslitnationpod.com.

Andrea Chalupa: So this was all very obvious. And if you’ve listened to the show for a while, you would have seen this coming. So obviously, Berman being pushed out was very much part of Barr's reason for even being the Attorney General in the first place. He auditioned with some essay saying that he believed the president was above the law, and that's how he got the job. We had pundits in the media who gave him way too much the benefit of the doubt because he dressed up nicely in a suit, he looked like them, he was one of them.

Andrea Chalupa: There was this whole exhale of relief on political pundit twitter and on the Cable News shows saying that, "Attorney General Barr would be an adult in the room." No, he is a coverup king. He is the Iran-Contra cleanup guy. This was another casualty of Americans refusing to learn from history, to bother with history and it's coming back around again. So Barr is in place, as we've said with his corrupt ties to dirty Russian money and so forth.

Andrea Chalupa: Barr is in place to protect the coalition of corruption that stole the election in 2016 and is continuing to violate norms in America and seriously threaten our democracy. And as Sarah and I say to each other in our private discussions, this coalition of corruption will steal the 2020 election because they need to steal the 2020 election. We're not looking at polls. We're not looking to see whether Biden wins or not in November. We're looking to see whether America will have a free and fair election.

Andrea Chalupa: And right now, when we have a lot of massive vulnerabilities from long voting lines, which are deliberately engineered by local GOP leaders, that's a deliberate strategy. They rely on that to steal elections, and come to power, and stay in power. We had widespread election hacking in 2016 in all 50 States, and it took forever for us to finally find out about that. And part of why we found out about that was because a young whistleblower, Reality Winner, was willing to sacrifice her freedom to inform the public.

Andrea Chalupa: So we have a lot tipping the scales of stealing the election in November. So all of us aren't looking to see whether Biden wins or not because if there is a free and fair election, Biden sweeps it, that's for sure. But there's so much going for Barr and Trump in terms of widespread corruption that we're really just waiting to see whether the election gets stolen or not again.

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Sarah Kendzior: It's not so much a matter of does Trump win, but is Trump successfully re-installed? That's also why, of course, you see Trump not caring whether he actually wins over the American people or even wins over his base, some of whom are catching coronavirus at his rallies or due to the negligence of the governors and local officials who support him. This is about rigging, this is about control, and this is about elite criminal impunity. And that is why Bill Barr was there.

Sarah Kendzior: There is an incredible continuity between operatives who were active in the early 1970s–people who surrounded Nixon and Watergate like Roger Stone, later Paul Manafort–and the people who are running this now. And a lot of it congeals around Iran-Contra which Barr, as Andrea mentioned, was the coverup general. But one of the other really horrifying things is the refusal of the FBI to do its job.

Sarah Kendzior: I mentioned before about James Comey taking Mogilevich off of the FBI's Most Wanted list. Comey also refused to tell America about potential election rigging, about the fact that Russia not only was interfering in terms of propaganda, but sought to falsify election results as Harry Reid put it in an open letter. He did not act on that, and as I describe in my book, in Hiding in Plain Sight, Comey's predecessors at the FBI, Louis Freeh and William Sessions, went on to work for the Russian mafia as consultants, as lobbyists.

Sarah Kendzior: So there's something very disturbing here and I think that the Epstein-Maxwell case is at the heart of it. It's certainly a major component. And so here's something else that's very weird. When I wrote this book, I sent in basically the final version in August of 2019. I had to make some last minute rewrites after Epstein allegedly died. I also had to rewrite it a bit after he was arrested, but at least nobody questioned why I was focusing on this man by that point.

Sarah Kendzior: But anyway, when it went to press shortly after his death, I listed the whereabouts of Ghislaine Maxwell as Massachusetts because that's where she had last been reported to be seen, that's what the news was saying. And so I managed to place her in New England, yet after that, it was claimed that they couldn't find her, police couldn't find her, FBI couldn't find her. She was found in New Hampshire. She was found an hour and a half away from where I knew she was, from where other reporters and outlets knew she was.

Sarah Kendzior: So, yeah, I have a lot of questions about why it took so long. And one thing that I'm finding disheartening–everyone's asking us, "How is this going to end? What's going to happen next? –is I don't have confidence that this is a good faith operation. I don't think that the arrest of Jeffrey Epstein was aimed at actually pursuing justice in any way. It was the ultimate catch and kill.

Sarah Kendzior: They arrested him so that they could keep the cases from going to court. They arrested him so that his victims couldn't have a voice, and I think that the same thing is likely to happen with Ghislaine. So to just run through a few potential outcomes People of course are asking, "Will she meet an Epstein-like end … where she is declared dead in prison?" I think that this is possible, but I think another thing that could happen is that the information that she possesses–which of course implicate rich and powerful men all around the world and potentially women who either participated or knew about it and said nothing–that this information will be weaponized by the Trump administration, and in particular by Barr, to protect their own political circles and to punish their opponents

Sarah Kendzior: We've already seen Alan Dershowitz who is not just Epstein's lawyer, but his friend and his client–and who of course is also accused of raping a teenage girl procured by Maxwell and Epstein–Dershowitz is saying he wants Epstein's videos to be shown to the world to prove his own innocence. And so aside from the sheer horror of Dershowitz saying that he wants pedophile rape videos to be shown to the public, which is actually not that surprising a stance from him given that he wrote an op ed in 1997 arguing that the age of consent be drastically lowered. One should question Dershowitz's motivations. As Epstein's lawyer, he likely knows what's on those videos, should they exist.

Sarah Kendzior: And if he feels safe about them, it's because they are either selectively showcasing evidence or they are possibly deep fakes. Deep fake videos have been a looming political threat for a long time, and along with actual deep fake videos, we are likely to see accusations of deep fake videos if damning video does emerge. And so that is what happens when you live in a digital era marked by a continual assault on truth and law, and marked by elite criminal impunity in which people will literally invent reality and control reality in order to carry out their horrific operations.

Sarah Kendzior: So do you have thoughts on that, Andrea?

Andrea Chalupa: Yeah. I want to comment. My thought on that–I want to comment on the photos of Ghislaine... Is it Ghisaine or Ghislaine? How do you say her-

Sarah Kendzior: Ghislaine, I think.

Andrea Chalupa: Ghislaine, some fancy first name, Maxwell. I want to comment-

Sarah Kendzior: Well it’s what the surveillance yacht was named that Robert Maxwell bought from Adnan Khashoggi. He renamed it “Lady Ghislaine” in honor of his future sex trafficker daughter. But anyway, go on.

Andrea Chalupa: That so describes the age that we live in, a yacht named after a sex trafficker. So, Ghislaine Maxwell and her Where's Waldo photos, how she keeps popping up like Forrest Gump in all of these photos with illustrious people. I'm repeating a commentary that's out there. This viral idea that she's... People were putting her face, her image, at the signing of the Declaration of Independence to make a point that she's everywhere. She's just photobombing all these notable people throughout time.

Andrea Chalupa: So the reason why we're all shocked by that and we make this comparison to her and Where's Waldo or Forrest Gump is a simple fact that she popped into our minds as this fully formed sex trafficker. So we saw her as the criminal that she is, but all these photos that she's in from people like Kevin Spacey–who's facing his own sexual charges–to Donald Trump and Melania. There's a couple of them together with this sex trafficker, both of them, Epstein and Maxwell.

Andrea Chalupa: Prince Andrew is cheesing it up in a photo with her and one of the victims. Prince Andrew, of course, is wanted in the U.S. by the FBI for questioning. And then you have her again popping up with Elon Musk, the Kanye West of Silicon Valley. Then there she is again at Chelsea Clinton's wedding. So all of these photos that people are making fun of and saying, "How does she get in everywhere?", this is what socialites do. Socialites take photos with other socialites. Andrea Chalupa: So when we're seeing all of these photos floating around, this is what normalization looks like. So just remember that she was out there among some of the rich and powerful, just floating around. And it is the job of the rich and powerful to have information on other people. Information is power. These guys are socialites; they're navigating this high stakes world across industries. Of course, they would know who she was. Of course, they would have heard, at the very least, gossip about them.

Andrea Chalupa: This was also insurance for her. This was also underlying the fact that if she got busted, if Epstein got busted, this would be mutually assured destruction. She would be spilling secrets in the investigations and causing humiliation, and careers to fall, and reputations to be ruined. This is a whole house of cards, from Democrats to Republicans, that would come toppling down if we got the truth here in a full sweeping investigation, which certainly, likely, whether it's a Democrat or Republican in the White House, I don't think will happen because of how far reaching this would likely be.

Andrea Chalupa: Because remember, this was allowed to go on for so long. So I think we have to keep all of that in mind. And another thing, as we watch this case unfold and all of us are expecting her to be offed any minute now–another suicide that the guard should have stopped, but didn't–look at Epstein's case. This was a guy that was full of arrogance. He was fired from Dalton. There'd been several reports that at this prestigious high school in New York City, that he made female students uncomfortable with unwanted physical contact.

Andrea Chalupa: There's even allegations of an inappropriate relationship with a female student. He was fired from Bear Stearns. There's even accusations that he made his fortune running a Ponzi scheme. So Epstein was a brazen criminal who kept thriving through years of corruption and just getting more and more famous, and more sought after. It got to the point where he wanted to create this entire sperm vault for himself, where he would spread his genes. That's how brazen and arrogant this guy was.

Andrea Chalupa: When he finally did get a slap on the wrist and he was under house arrest in Florida, he was coming and going as he pleased. Epstein's house arrest in Florida is like most people's idea of a vacation. So this is someone that even though he was locked up in New York finally, this is someone that was so arrogant and so brazen. Mentally, emotionally, I don't think a guy like that could ever come to terms with the fact that it was finally his time. He was caught. There's no way that a character like this would kill himself.

Andrea Chalupa: So we want to remind you that Epstein did not kill himself. And if Maxwell "commits suicide" in prison, she did not kill herself either. To Sarah's point, Maxwell and Epstein was a kompromat operation. Yes, they were drug pushers. Yes, they were pimps, and yes, their drug of choice was abusing underage girls. That was the guy at the party that if you wanted that, you knew to go to him. You knew to go to his place, and a lot of powerful people did. A lot of powerful people across business and finance did.

Andrea Chalupa: He was their guy. He was their pimp. He was their drug pusher. And through that, to protect themselves and to also build their influence and their wealth and leverage what they could, they collected that kompromat. And because of that kompromat, it is very doubtful that the public will get the full, sweeping truth of how far their operation reached and who enjoyed it and took advantage.

Sarah Kendzior: Yup. And I want to just comment briefly on what you said about this kind of public kompromat of Ghislaine Maxwell being in all of these photos and the way that digital media allows that to spread and become a form of intimidation and a form of control. It's very interesting to me that the Maxwell family is so key to, basically, the modernization of the internet and the use of the internet, even, by our legal institutions.

Sarah Kendzior: You have to have two of Maxwell’s sisters–Christine and Isabel, who are twins–they developed Magellan software, which later became Excite, which was an early search engine. This is a family that is deeply involved in the creation of modern technology. And Robert Maxwell–this is another very complicated story–was involved with PROMIS software. And then you see some of the software that the Maxwell sisters were involved in being used later by the FBI.

Sarah Kendzior: And so this world of digital imagery, of surveillance, of technology, this was a world that the Maxwell family had long been involved in. This is the world that Jeffrey Epstein was very involved in through online publications and groups like Edge, through MIT and Harvard and their internet initiatives. He was interested in science and not for good reasons. There's the giant, I think untold or not well-told story there. Xeni Jardin on Twitter is someone who alludes to this a lot.

Sarah Kendzior: I hope we eventually find out all of the details because this is another case where a tremendous number of powerful people are implicated. It's not just people in politics or high finance; it's people in technology and in Silicon Valley as well. In addition to that, you also have the media–the mainstream media–as complicit actors going back to the '80s up until now.

Sarah Kendzior: In my book, I describe and quote from a number of puff pieces about Epstein meant to whitewash his crimes that were planted in newspapers and in magazines like New York or the New York Times, mostly by the publicist Howard Rubenstein, whose other clients included Trump and Kushner. And what they did back then was try to portray Epstein as a philanthropist and Maxwell as a socialite.

Sarah Kendzior: Nowadays, we are still seeing headlines where Epstein is called "a disgraced financier." And let me emphasize that Epstein was convicted. He was a convicted felon. This is a well known, well-documented sex trafficking operation of children. None of this is in dispute. So to put it in a headline would not be breaking any kind of ethical or legal boundaries, but they refuse to do so.

Sarah Kendzior: Maxwell is still being called a socialite instead of what she is, which is a partner in a well-documented criminal plot. And so you're seeing this getting whitewashed in the media. We're also going to be seeing over the next few weeks, conspiracy theories from both sides of the aisle muddying what are already very murky waters. This reminds me of the circumstances around Epstein's death kind of marring the bigger picture of his life and the crimes that he committed, where people got so caught up debating whether he was murdered or whether he killed himself, that they lost that big picture, the center of which is the victims

Sarah Kendzior: So Epstein’s protectors in 2019 needed Epstein to be declared legally dead so that the court cases from those victims would stop. All credit here to the Miami Herald and to Julie K. Brown whose reporting on Epstein empowered those victims, made them feel brave enough to come to the fore and try to get those cases back in court.

Sarah Kendzior: The ultimate goal of Epstein's backers was to keep those women from speaking out and protect people like Alan Dershowitz and others from having to testify under oath. Epstein being actually dead and the alleged circumstances around that alleged death does not matter as much as Epstein being proclaimed dead by legal officials, and therefore unable to appear in court. And so that's something to watch for when you're dealing with Ghislaine Maxwell. It's not that it matters exactly what happens to her should she be proclaimed dead, but the fact that death, or the proclamation of death, has proven a very effective means of getting yourself out of court cases, which could open the door to revelations about politics, organized crime, espionage, trafficking, and the complicity of a multitude of elites in those activities. And I'm sorry, I don't think that this capture of Maxwell came out of the blue. As I said, it came a year later and they had known her whereabouts.

Sarah Kendzior: We saw precursors with the firing of Berman and other strange events. And one more strange event–I'll wrap up this now–is that shortly before Maxwell's arrest, a yacht showed up on the coast of Massachusetts where Maxwell used to live with her boyfriend, businessman Scott Borgerson–my God, the number of yachts mentioned on the show already. Anyway, I'm going to read a little passage from the Patch Local News of Beverly, Massachusetts. So, go Patch for breaking the story.

Sarah Kendzior: "The yacht that showed up in Beverley this week is owned by Alexander Mashkevich, a Russian businessman and Jewish philanthropist with close ties to political leaders in Kazakhstan. It's not clear if Mashkevich was on board the yacht when it anchored in Beverly Harbor, or if there's any connection to Maxwell's arrest.

Sarah Kendzior: In 2010, Turkish police seized another one of his yachts on suspicion that it had been used to host a sex party with nine young women, including two underage girls, for Kazak businessman. Mashkevich was not charged or arrested in the 2010 incident."

Sarah Kendzior: And so brief background here: Mashkevich, as mentioned, was born in the USSR. He became a citizen of Israel, just like Mogilevich and others in this crime syndicate, and he is closely linked to the Russian mafia network in which Trump and his associates participate. In my book, Hiding in Plain Sight, I actually described that 2010 yacht arrest which also included Trump former business partner, Tevfik Arif, an alleged I should say pedophile. There is ample evidence about this, but the case was ultimately dismissed.

Sarah Kendzior: So what was Mashkevich doing on the shores of Massachusetts right before Maxwell's arrest? I don't know because this story basically seems to be limited to coverage by the Patch Bureau of Beverly Massachusetts. Hopefully people will actually investigate what seems to be a rather significant development, but what amazes me continually about this story, about Epstein and Trump and the rest, is that this is the kind of lurid content that also has incredible national security repercussions, is widely devoured by a massive audience.

Sarah Kendzior: No matter who you like, whether you are in QAnon, pledging your loyalty to the Trump administration, or whether you're on the Left or in the center, everyone wants to know the truth about this. Everyone wants to get to the bottom of Epstein and Maxwell. Everyone has some kind of interest in the perpetrators. And I would hope, hopefully, that in everyone's hearts, they want to see justice for these victims, for these girls, because that's what matters.

Sarah Kendzior: You don't see to this day thorough reporting about this case. You see a lot of selective commentary. You see a lot of whitewashing. You see a lot of people straying away from discussing particular individuals because of their role in it, because they're associated with the Democratic Party, or they're associated with the Republican Party. It's obvious that many people know more than what they're letting on.

Sarah Kendzior: I find this behavior shameful because as I said, this is an issue of justice for real people, for girls, for victims. It's also a matter of national security. If they have been blackmailing our officials into compliance on other issues with the material they've procured, or even if they have our agencies unwilling to intervene to stop massive abuse of children, then that's a phenomenal problem and every angle of this should be investigated and covered thoroughly.

Sarah Kendzior: And the fact that it's not by Congress, it's not by our law enforcement agencies, and it rarely is by mainstream publications–it's just an enormous shame for America right now.

Andrea Chalupa: It's been a month of news since Sarah and I last recorded the show two weeks ago. We have to talk about the fact that all the reporting, including much of it confirmed reporting by various outlets, of Russia paying fighters in Afghanistan to murder U.S. troops, putting bounties on the heads of U.S. troops. Trump was briefed on this and didn't do anything. And his response was of course, to fight for Russia to get reinstated into the elite alliance known as the G7, making it the G8 again. Andrea Chalupa: Well, yeah, so Donald Trump is letting Putin get away with murdering U.S. soldiers in Afghanistan. We can't forget this. This is enormous. This is a new level of treason.

Sarah Kendzior: Yes.

Andrea Chalupa: As the show started–Gaslit Nation started–we pointed out that this is the first U.S. president where we had to ask, "Who is he loyal to?" And the answer is he's loyal, like any kleptocrat, like any aspiring autocrat, to himself, and to enriching himself and his family. The guy that did this and Ukraine, Yanukovych, was run out of the country by a popular uprising.

Andrea Chalupa: And he and his clan known as “The Family”, that's what they did. They enriched themselves. They stole an estimated $30 billion to $100 billion from Ukrainian taxpayers. Look at who got bailed out with taxpayer money–all of their friends. Their whole clan of corruption got massive amounts of bailouts through all of these big funding programs meant to bring relief to U.S. taxpayers. So these are just pigs at the trough. That's what kleptocracy is. That's what we're dealing with now. The Ukrainianization of American politics. We're there now.

Andrea Chalupa: Authoritarianism, as we’ve pointed out for a very long time on the show, doesn't announce itself. It doesn't have a big ticker tape parade. It doesn't put a lay of barbed wire around you and say, "Welcome to authoritarianism." It is the water around you growing hotter, and hotter, and hotter until it starts boiling and you're getting acclimated, you're getting normalized through it. That's what normalization is.

Andrea Chalupa: And so that's what we're constantly having to resist by fact checking the gaslighting that we're all being bombarded with. Some of that comes, as we point out in the show, from even very credible journalists and mainstream outlets. So here is reporting by Paul Sonne in the Washington Post. I don't know if he was assigned this piece–God help him if he was–and he just did his best with it.

Andrea Chalupa: But in it, he talks about Russia paying soldiers in Afghanistan to murder U.S. troops. He quotes Kissinger Associates. Yes, that Kissinger Associates. It's a geopolitical consulting firm run by war criminal, Henry ​ ​ Kissinger. Why would a Washington Post reporter ask Kissinger or anyone associated with him for his opinion on anything? Because here's what he got and this is what he published. This is how he desecrated the Washington Post by publishing this statement from someone at Kissinger Associates.

Andrea Chalupa: "’It is bringing Russia back to the center of the election, not so much as a foreign policy challenge, but as a tool for domestic political struggle.’ said Thomas Graham, a senior advisor at Kissinger Associates who served as Senior Director for Russia on the White House National Security Council under ” another war … criminal... “President George W. Bush. According to The New Yorker, Kissinger pushed for and supported the violent military coup in Argentina that killed around 3,000 people. He also ordered sweeping bombing campaigns of Vietnam and Cambodia, which killed countless more.”

Andrea Chalupa: So Kissinger is like the Epstein of geopolitics. He should be socially shamed for what he did and continues to do, but instead, here he is being normalized in this article by the Washington Post, and this normalization continues to go on. Kissinger is known for pushing this idea that Ukraine is just some pawn in this chess game between Russia and the rest of the world. He's very much somebody that likes to take one of the greatest threats we're facing today, which is Putin–all the reporting adds up that it's Putin, from attacking elections across Europe and our own, and also funding Far Right parties and politicians, allowing all of these horrible atrocities to go on inside Russia, deliberately bombing civilians in Syria and so forth. There's a long list of war crimes that Putin himself has gone on under his watch. And guess what? He just, as of this last week, has made himself a King, a Tsar, in Russia.

Andrea Chalupa: They just did some fake referendum in Russia and like in any autocracy, the outcome was already known before the election actually took place. And this changed the Constitution so Putin can stay in power until he dies, following a long tradition of Soviet leaders doing the same thing.

Sarah Kendzior: Yeah. Along the lines of war criminals weighing in on this, John Bolton,–war criminal–has his new book out and has–

Andrea Chalupa: I love when war criminals fight. The infighting of war criminals.

Sarah Kendzior: Yeah. That's our great hope for peace is that they just out each other. But war criminal John Bolton has his little bestseller, which true to form, true to the Michael Wolf-Bob Woodward-James Comey model basically covers up crime with scandal. That's what a lot of these tell all books do. They don't bring up things that you could actually be prosecuted on. I think Bolton's comes a little bit closer to that, but Bolton is now, I guess, rightfully, accusing Trump of allowing U.S. troops to be murdered by Russia have bounties put on their head by Russia in collaboration with the Taliban.

Sarah Kendzior: This is not really new. Last year, Trump was planning to invite the Taliban to Camp David right before 9/11, an idea which I do not think is his. It probably came from his Russian backers who of course love to do shady things to America around 9/11. That was one of the days, along with July 4th, that they invited a number of Congresspeople to Russia for still unknown reasons. But Bolton says, "Of course Trump knew about this."

Sarah Kendzior: I agree that Trump very likely knew about this, not necessarily from his security briefs but from his backers. But then you have Susan Rice in The Guardian saying, "Elsewhere, former Obama national security advisor, Susan Rice says, 'Bolton would have known about the bounties intelligence while he was in the role, which he left in September 2019 and would therefore have briefed Trump himself.'" And she says, "’I don't buy the story that he was never briefed.’

Sarah Kendzior: “Rice told NBC's Meet the Press, ‘I believe that when the information first came to light in 2019, my successor, John Bolton would have walked straight into the Oval office as I would have and informed the president of this intelligence.’” So, yeah, I think she has a point, which is Bolton, of course, has been withholding vital national security information for this book on a multitude of levels, whether Trump’s trying to shake down Ukraine, to Trump's various foreign crimes or scandal-borderline-crimes that he documents in his book, and now this. He does not seem to be invested, truly, in our international security because when you are, you speak immediately. And if he was interested now, he would have a hearing now, and the House would be calling him now, and he could tell us about Russia and the Taliban.

Sarah Kendzior: And he could also tell us about why he helped defund the CDC, thus making us unprepared for the pandemic that arrived the next year. There's all sorts of interesting questions that one could ask John Bolton. But he's not naive. I'm disgusted, honestly, at the way that the publishing industry is working to protect these people. We've talked about this a little before.

Sarah Kendzior: It's almost like it works as an informal, internal NDA where people who have extremely valuable, immediately pertinent information about our own safety and security as Americans don't give it to Congress, don't testify, don't go under oath and don't even bring it to the press when it could be used, even though people like our own troops are an active danger. They wait and they get their book deal, and the stipulations of the deal often seem to require that they withhold this information until publication so that they can maximize profit.

Sarah Kendzior: I'm a little suspicious of all of this because Bolton already has so much money. It's not like he really needs it. I think a bigger manipulation is at hand, but at any rate, it's gross. And so that's my thought on that.

Andrea Chalupa: We’ve got to make some time to talk about the Nazis. Every episode-

Sarah Kendzior: Go for it.

Andrea Chalupa: Every episode of Gaslit Nation, we're talking about the Nazis. All of this that we are up against, it can be boiled down to white people behaving badly, white people having the worst murder record from Stalin to Hitler and so forth, killing tens of millions combined. So here we have white people, they're at it again. So there's this extraordinary front page article that ran over the weekend in the New York Times that the Nazis are back in Germany. Andrea Chalupa: This is really amazing for a number of reasons, obviously, because we need Angela Merkel to be the leader of the free world now that the U.S. is under occupation by the Russian mafia and things are getting worse. We really needed Merkel to hold together the Western alliance, along with Canada and France and others, especially now that you have Boris Johnson as Prime Minister in the UK more closely aligned politically and ideologically with his twin in the White House.

Andrea Chalupa: So we need Germany to be a strong voice of transparency, of fighting corruption, of standing up against this growing white supremacy around the world, which is being flamed by Donald Trump, the guy that ran his campaign–the great white supremacist, Steve Bannon–and of course Putin who, in Russia, they have a Nazi training camp. This is going on right now. And Putin, of course, his government is financially propping up Far Right parties across Europe and so forth. This is all a global threat.

Andrea Chalupa: So all these kids, these white boys you see getting radicalized off the internet and shooting up mosques, and shooting up synagogues, and so forth, it's not surprising that they're turning to two guys like Trump in their manifesto. White terror is the greatest threat that the world is facing today and it's time for the Western alliance to put that front and center and to recognize that.

Andrea Chalupa: So that's why this whole crisis of the Nazis coming back in Germany is so extremely troubling. We're going to link to this article in our show notes, everyone should read it. I'm going to read from it now.

Andrea Chalupa: "Germany has a problem. For years, politicians and security chiefs rejected the notion of any far-right infiltration of the security services, speaking only of, 'Individual cases.’ The idea of networks was dismissed. The superiors of those exposed as extremists were protected. Guns and ammunition disappeared from military stockpiles with no real investigation. The government is now waking up. Cases of far-right extremists in the military and the police, some hoarding weapons and explosives, have multiplied alarmingly.

Andrea Chalupa: “The nation's top intelligence officials and senior military commanders are moving to confront an issue that has become too dangerous to ignore. For decades, Germany tried to forge a force that represented a democratic society and its values, but in 2011, it abolished conscription and moved to a volunteer force. As a result, the military increasingly reflects not the broad society, but a narrow slice of it.

Andrea Chalupa: “General Kreitmayr said that ‘a big percentage’ of his soldiers are eastern Germans, a region where the AFD,”– a far-right party in Germany–“does disproportionately well. Roughly half the men on the list of KSK members suspected of being far-right extremists are also from the east, he added."

Andrea Chalupa: The article goes on to say... They cite a man covered in cyrillic tattoos who enjoys "Cage fighting in his spare time”. And then they talk about how a lot of radicalization picked up when a flood of asylum seekers from Syria and Afghanistan made their way to Germany and it was all just radicalized through this network.

Andrea Chalupa: And now it's become this doomsday cult of Nazis, stockpiling weapons, stealing weapons from the military, the German military that they serve, and prophesying some doomsday, some crisis point where they're all going to strike. And it's become this mass Nazi hysteria that's infiltrated some of the highest ranks of power and security in Germany. So the Nazis are back in Germany.

Andrea Chalupa: So I want to just point to the fact that why eastern Germany? Why is there such a large number of these Nazis in Germany coming from eastern Germany, specifically? And we're going to look back to a 2014 opinion piece for the New York Times by Jochen Bittner, a political editor for the weekly German newspaper, Die Zeit. He wrote a piece that we'll link to called “Eastern Germans’ Soft Spot for Russia” and it goes like this:

Andrea Chalupa: "The other day I called the author of an indignant letter to my newspaper to find out why he was so angry at us. It was because, he said, my paper had taken a critical line against Russia over its actions in Crimea and Ukraine. Having grown up in Communist aast Germany, he said, gave him a 'special antenna' for when the news media started to act in conformity with the government and against the interests of the people.

Andrea Chalupa: “My paper isn't alone. Most major news outlets in Germany have criticized Russia, and almost all of them have been accused of being anti-Russian, either having been steered in that direction by American interests or, at least, having uncritically adopted a pro-Western worldview. With much of the same furor, countless Germans have denounced government politicians who have dared to speak out against Russia's actions.

Andrea Chalupa: “Remarkably, many of the most outspoken critics are from eastern Germany and are old enough to have lived under Moscow's oppressive east German puppet state. In Dresden, thousands of pro-Russian protesters have taken to the streets for several weeks, denouncing the Lugenpresse–the liar press–as part of an out-of-touch political elite.

Andrea Chalupa: “Polls find a significantly friendlier attitude toward Russia among Easterners. In the six states that once made up the German Democratic Republic, 58 percent of respondents want Europe and the United States to stay out of the conflict between Ukraine and Russia and to lift the sanctions. In western Germany, only one-third share this view."

Andrea Chalupa: All of this is to say that you have right now, Germany and France, trying to broker a peace deal between Ukraine and Russia, and Russia is making all of these demands that are on par with a political invasion of Ukraine. Russian corruption continues to pull powerful puppet strings in Ukraine, like it does in the UK. It's about time that the Western alliance stops tiptoeing around Putin and Russia, and stops trying to make all of these concessions, which just strengthen Russia.

Andrea Chalupa: Putin has a way of negotiating where he wants everything. He pushes for everything. Nothing will ever be enough for him. He's a dictator. And he formalized, just as of this last week, being a dictator. He made it official. So it's about damn time that the Western alliance and all Russia-watchers in the Western press start dedicating more resources, more time, to covering the rampant institutional, racism and xenophobia across Russia.

Andrea Chalupa: The Nazism. Putin launched a nationalist march in Russia which the Neo-Nazis quickly took to. There's Nazi training camps in Russia. The Western alliance has to stand for values that are for human rights, and part of that has to be dismantling white supremacy and confronting white terrorism, including the dictatorships like Putin's that prop up and fund white terrorism.

Andrea Chalupa: It's very easy for the Western alliance to rally around an enemy like ISIS because of the brown color of their skin. That tends to scare white people and that becomes an easier enemy. But understand, for far too long now, many in the Western alliance and many journalists in Western media have turned a blind eye to Putin's atrocities and turned a blind eye to how Putin was funding and fanning the flames of actual Nazism because his whiteness protected him.

Andrea Chalupa: There was a sort of line that you didn't cross for so long where it wasn't pushed to the same extreme as, say, confronting ISIS' terror, which is black and white. ISIS is a terrorist team. They exist for terror. Well, Putin's regime is a terror regime. They exist for terror and part of that terror, part of their dark arts, is pushing an actual Nazi ideology.

Andrea Chalupa: And so obviously what happened in Germany, that's homegrown. That's very much homegrown, and what's happening in Germany could happen absolutely anywhere. No country on this planet is immune from authoritarianism taking hold, and it tends to take hold through ideas of genocide which are planted through propaganda. We have to be vigilant that the homegrown Nazism that all of us are under threat by, those flames can be easily fanned and exploited by dictatorships that are determined to destroy us from within and divide us.

Sarah Kendzior: I think one of the most remarkable things about what you said is that you had to specify now that these are German Nazis. It used to be when you would say the word “Nazi” that you would just assume the individual in question was from Germany, associated with the Third Reich. We now have such an ethnic multitude of Nazis. We have Neo-Nazi movements in Hungary, in Russia, in the UK. Sarah Kendzior: Definitely in the United States, in our government, in people like Stephen Miller–who openly embraces Neo-Nazi policy, tries to enforce them through things like concentration camps in the border–through, as you mentioned, Bannon. And then you see even this public flaunting of an ideology that people are all too reluctant to admit guides this White House. In the Trump store, you see merchandise that is intended to mirror the insignias and emblems of Nazi Germany.

Sarah Kendzior: Or you see symbols of 14 and 88–these numbers associated with Nazi Germany, code for heil Hitler and so on–being used as price points in this store. It's the same as when he would post his little memes all the way back in 2016 and then have plausible deniability on it. People would be accused of being paranoid, of being alarmist, when they would look at what was directly in front of them, which is the backing of Trump by a large number of white supremacists, white supremacist group connections that span the world but are encouraged and often funded by Russia and by operatives associated with the Kremlin.

Sarah Kendzior: This isn't your imagination. You're not being paranoid. We've seen what's happened as a result of this in the U.S. with the rise of hate crimes, with shootings in synagogues among other places. It is a national security threat. It's a far greater threat than Islamic terrorism and it's one that the administration both under Jeff Sessions, and especially under Bill Barr has been trying to play down.

Sarah Kendzior: And along with that, you've gotten mainstream media, not just normalization, but glorification of these Neo-Nazis, especially in the earliest years of the Trump administration where you would see puff piece profiles of Nazis. Nazis going to the supermarket, Nazi's watching Seinfeld. “Nazis, they're just like us.” It was like some perverse version of US Weekly. That's what the New York Times, for a while, turned into, I think until the violence that resulted from this proliferation of Nazi ideology became too hard to ignore and their own role as accomplices in that death became too hard to ignore. Sarah Kendzior: The good people, the people who may have opposed this have long ago been purged and gutted out of our agencies, out of the state department, out of the department of justice. And they get replaced by lackeys who either share this Neo-Nazi ideology or they're willing to tolerate it, they're willing to countenance it. And that's just as dangerous.

Sarah Kendzior: So it's kind of died down a little now that people realized there's nothing amusing about this; this is something you need to take seriously. What we do have though is a regime that has consolidated to the point that it's very difficult to combat it. The good people, the people who may have opposed this, have long ago been purged and gutted out of our agencies, out of the State Department, out of the Department of Justice, and they get replaced by lackeys who either share this Nazi ideology or they’re willing to tolerate it. They’re willing to countenance it and that’s just as dangerous. When we had Timothy Snyder on our show a few weeks ago, he talked about that, about the conformity of the good Germans, about the banality of evil. That, today, is still one of the biggest threats that we face in America. Andrea Chalupa: Yeah. And it's shocking because Germany has made great efforts to invest in confronting its history. And it just goes to show how deeply rooted this ideology of genocide remains in Germany. We've seen it as well in the U.S. We're finally confronting the traitors, the Confederates, banning their flags and taking down their monuments. It's about damn time that we got around to doing that all-important human rights work.

Andrea Chalupa: So if you want to sum up the battle of our age and I think any age moving forward until we have strengthened our systems, reformed our systems and built up our education systems as well so people understand how authoritarianism works as part of their own civic education. Until the media is subsidized by governments to strengthen our media, especially local media. We need to all be vigilant.

Andrea Chalupa: So the threat of our lives for the rest of our lives is the same threat that caused so much destruction in the last century, and that is the Nazi ideology. We're up against that. It just has different names every century. It was called the Confederacy in the 1800s, and Nazism in the 20th century, and today it's called Trumpism. Today it's called Putinism, but it's the same ideology of hate.

Andrea Chalupa: It's an ideology of genocide and yes, some of its followers are ridiculous and say silly things. And we all like to gawk at them and there's some morbid fascination of these characters in the media. But genocide begins with propaganda. Genocide begins with the court jesters of these movements sucking the oxygen out of the room and getting a lot of attention for themselves and fascinating Twitter.

Andrea Chalupa: That's where genocides begin. It starts with those little amusements for the public that lacks imagination and lacks a basic understanding of history. And so it's up to us to be vigilant of this. So I really encourage everyone to read this article and read between the lines here. And when they talk about Syrian asylum seekers coming in, there was a NATO general that testified to Congress saying that Putin was deliberately bombing civilians in Syria so that they would flood Europe, further dividing Europe and further giving leverage to hit the far-right parties that he was backing and so forth.

Andrea Chalupa: So it's all connected and it's about time the Western alliance spoke openly, directly, and took bold action and unity towards confronting white supremacy because we're all under threat of that.

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. We also encourage you to donate to Direct Relief at directrelief.org, which is supplying much needed protective gear to first responders working on the front lines in the U.S., China, and other hard hit parts of the world.

Andrea Chalupa: We encourage you to donate to the International Rescue Committee, a humanitarian relief organization helping refugees from Syria. Donate at rescue.org. And if you want to help critically endangered orangutans already under pressure from the palm oil industry, donate at The Orangutan Project at theorangutanproject.org.

Andrea Chalupa: 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. And check out our Patreon, it keeps us going.

Sarah Kendzior: Our production managers are Nicholas Torres and Karlyn Daigle. Our episodes are edited by Nicholas Torres and our Patreon exclusive content is edited by Karlyn Daigle.

Andrea Chalupa: Original music in Gaslit Nation is produced by David Whitehead, Martin Visonberg, Nick Farr, Demian 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...