Gaslit Nation Transcript 30 June 2021 Why Are The Democrats Keeping Louis DeJoy? https://www.patreon.com/posts/why-are-keeping-53098447
Intro Music:
“I Can’t Change” by Danny Golden: https://open.spotify.com/track/62Y5aVtY4DCjus0ynnIRDg
Danny Golden:
I can’t seem to see the forest for the trees Bent down on the floor and I’m bent down on my knees Might be what you want but I know I’m not what you need
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, about Stalin's genocide, famine in Ukraine. And the opening song you heard ... Oh, sorry. Do you want to say what the show's about?
Sarah Kendzior: That would be good, yes. This is Gaslit Nation, a podcast covering corruption in the United States and rising autocracy around the world.
Andrea Chalupa: And the opening song you heard is called “I Can't Change” and it's by Danny Golden. Danny Golden is an Austin-based singer/songwriter, a rock and roller and a lifelong searcher for truth and people to share it with. He says the artist's job is to investigate the depths of our world and bring some meaning back to the surface. His projects have included members of Austin music staples like the Black Pumas, White Denim, and Shakey Graves. Shakey Graves is a really cool name for a band.
Andrea Chalupa: Golden's 2021 EP Changes is his first release in almost two years. It's a lifetime look at a man coming to terms with themself and struggles, both inner and external. It kicks off with a cymbal crash and a wall of guitar sound as Golden begins to examine a descent into a painful period with the single “I Can't Change”. It's a search filled with dead ends and “I Can't Change” documents the songwriter grasping for clarity. We can all relate to that.
Andrea Chalupa: After a fruitless search for answers outside of himself, Golden finds himself forced to look inward, and the music reflects a reckoning from this place of self-honesty. This most recent collection of songs is another powerful statement in Golden's growing discography: bold and broken, but putting itself back together one chord at a time.
Andrea Chalupa: He goes on to create a statement for why he submitted this song: "Creating this song helped me get through a difficult period of depression, and releasing it has given me a chance to hope that my art touches the hearts of listeners who need some light in the dark. A lot of elements put me in that place, mainly the destruction of a very unhealthy relationship and the emotional fallout from that, but also very much the daily struggle of trying to exist in Trump era America and the search for positivity and meaning amid that."
Andrea Chalupa: "Huge fan of Mr. Jones," thank you very much, "and the podcast." Thank you. "Your work is so important and incredibly well done, and I'm proud to be a patron." You are our supporter on Patreon. Wow! That is not why we chose you. We chose you because the song is excellent.
Sarah Kendzior: [laughs]
Andrea Chalupa: We want to say that, Danny, personally speaking, I listened to your song and I read this and it was inspirational. You helped me center and get focused in my own creative process currently, and I want to thank you for that.
Andrea Chalupa: And I want to just say how grateful I am to our production manager, Karlyn Daigle, who came up with this idea to connect us with all the Gaslit Nation listeners out there through their art by featuring their songs. It is so needed, personally speaking. It is so wonderful. And it reminds us that we're all in this together and that we're all jumping out of bed and facing what we must face together.
Andrea Chalupa: We're going to continue to do it because what we're doing matters and we matter, and art is a great, great way to resist and rage against the machine. We appreciate you, Danny, for your music. Thank you.
Andrea Chalupa: Now let's get our little group of hobbits together and enter this journey of Louis DeJoy, who is the poster child of breaking up the country and selling it for parts. Louis DeJoy is, of course, the big time Trump donor who was installed deliberately as the postmaster general, as Trump was openly trying to steal the election in 2020.
Andrea Chalupa: One way that Trump was telling us he was trying to do this was by deliberately slowing down the mail and he had Mr. Privatization Louis DeJoy to thank for that attempt. The mail did indeed slow down at a time when we were in a pandemic—a once in a century pandemic—and dependent on the mail in order to cast our votes.
Andrea Chalupa: And so, this was part of the pressure cooker our democracy was under, was would they succeed with making sure that ballots didn't arrive in time? We obviously had to overcome this challenge, among many others that Trump presented along with his Kremlin friends to try to steal 2020.
Andrea Chalupa: DeJoy is proudly trying to deteriorate our treasured US Postal Service with a very long, proud history, a postal service that people depend on for their social security checks, for their medicines. Rural areas depend on them. It's a lifeline, especially where you have limited internet.
Andrea Chalupa: Louis DeJoy does not care about that. He cares about, first and foremost, making money and dodging accountability. Right now, he appears to be doing both. The FBI is currently investigating DeJoy for some shady political donations that he made. From Slate, I'll read from that now, just to give you an update.
Andrea Chalupa: "Overlapping with the election controversy was DeJoy's role as a major Republican donor prior to his government service in a possible illegal straw donor scheme he allegedly orchestrated during that time. The Washington Post first reported on allegations by former employees of DeJoy's company, that he pressured workers to donate to Republican causes and then reimburse them via bonuses. All of this would be a clear violation of the law, and it is what the Department of Justice is reportedly investigating now after local law enforcement in North Carolina said it would not be moving forward with the case."
Andrea Chalupa: [Sigh] So this whole pressuring employees to donate—which is political representation, it's putting your political voice out there—that reminds me so much of how Yanukovych tried to steal the 2004 presidential election in Ukraine. Part of that sweeping effort of Kremlin-backed election stealing in 2004 in Ukraine included pressuring employees to hand you over their ballots, and then using those ballots to stuff the boxes for Yanukovych. DeJoy did something very similar here.
Andrea Chalupa: He currently remains the postmaster general. All of us thought when we were making phone calls and getting out the vote for Biden and Kamala Harris that one of the many things we would get with a Biden presidency was DeJoy being replaced by somebody who actually cares about preserving and improving and protecting the US Postal Service and making sure that we all get our mail on time, especially the checks we depend on, the medicines we depend on.
Andrea Chalupa: That has not been the case. DeJoy is still there and it is a horrific, horrific testament to the fact that we have not been getting the accountability that we so sorely need to not only bring people to justice for their wrongdoing, but to ensure that they don't get away with their schemes, they don't get away with their damage, that people do not suffer in the process.
Andrea Chalupa: Right now, we all remain vulnerable to DeJoy, because what is he going to do to our mail? How is he going to milk us for further profits? How is he going to increase prices? How is he going to deprive people of the connections they desperately need and depend on? Lives are literally at stake. This is not hyperbole. Literally, lives are at stake.
Andrea Chalupa: I've noticed that I've been working around all the issues of slowed down mail myself. For instance, I walked two hours in the snow with a baby carriage to hand-deliver my updated voting status to the election board in New York city, because I didn't trust the mail that it'd get there in time. I had a week, but I didn't trust the mail that it'd get there in time.
Andrea Chalupa: I recently sent out some checks. They did not arrive. I had to spend $90 canceling those checks, $90 using digital Venmo and other things to pay people. So I’ve been feeling it. So if I'm feeling it in New York City, I can't even imagine what people in more rural areas are experiencing.
Andrea Chalupa: Let me tell you something, Biden administration and the Democratic Party, whatever people are feeling wherever they live across the country, that's reflected on you. DeJoy is reflected on you. All of the bad services he's providing, those are Biden services. So why is DeJoy still the postmaster general?
Sarah Kendzior: Yeah, exactly. DeJoy joins a number of people in this regard. We did an episode previously about Christopher Wray and the mystery of him still being the head of the FBI when he let Trump and his cohorts' crimes go on unimpeded. He has also, as we've noted many times, not cracked down on the organizers and instigators of the January 6th Capitol attacks among other things.
Sarah Kendzior: But DeJoy is probably the most blatant and obvious person to go after. It's more unorthodox to remove the FBI head. Of course, there's a storied history there of FBI entanglement with Russian mafia operations, we've gotten into that on many episodes, of previous directors like Louis Freeh and William Sessions working for the Russian mafia after they left their position.
Sarah Kendzior: That is a deeply corrupt body within the US government that is much more difficult to deal with than the postal service. The postal service is like the only US governmental institution—maybe the National Park System too—that everybody loves and everybody wants preserved and everybody is mad at right now because people are not getting their mail.
Sarah Kendzior: They recently announced a plan to delay mail even more than it already is. This is not a hidden policy. This is an official plan of the Biden administration under Louis DeJoy. So as Andrea said, well, why is he not there?
Sarah Kendzior: Biden did get rid of several Trump-appointed Republican lackeys who were there to basically make sure that DeJoy remains in his position. That's how he's appointed is through the board of directors of the United States Postal Service. The Board of Governors is what it's called. And so, the way Trump was able to get him in was by packing that board and making sure that DeJoy, who notably also worked alongside Michael Cohen and others for the Republican National Committee, was able to be there to sabotage the election and to move for the destruction of the postal service for personal profit.
Sarah Kendzior: And so, why is he still there? The answer appears to lie in an individual named Ron Bloom, who is the vice chair and managing partner of Brookfield Asset Management, which I will get to in a second, and is serving as the chairman of the Board of Governors of the US Postal Service.
Sarah Kendzior: And Ron Bloom is a Democrat. A lot of people falsely assumed that because Bloom was a Democrat, he would oppose DeJoy, that he would save the postal service—this venerated and obviously very necessary institution—from destruction. That is not the case.
Sarah Kendzior: So what is going on here? I'm going to read a little bit about Ron Bloom from the Revolving Door Project. Here I quote: "In 2016, Bloom left Lazard to join controversial private equity firm Brookfield Asset Management as a vice chairman. Brookfield made headlines in 2018 for allegedly using Qatari financing to lease a Manhattan skyscraper from the Kushner family while Jared Kushner was serving as a senior White House advisor.”
Sarah Kendzior: “Last December, Democratic Senator Ron Wyden and Congressman Joaquin Castro opened a formal probe into Brookfield’s dealings with Kushner Companies and Qatar, focusing on whether its Qatari-financed bailout of Kushner’s 666 Fifth Avenue was linked to Trump’s withdrawal of support for the Saudi-led blockade of Qatar.”
Sarah Kendzior: “Since being appointed by Trump to the Postal Board in 2019, Bloom has served as a reliable vote, both for DeJoy and his agenda. Amidst the national outcry against DeJoy’s dismantling of mail-sorting machines last year, Bloom did not respond to press inquiries about his thoughts on DeJoy’s leadership. The subsequent chaos caused by DeJoy’s operational changes prompted New Jersey Congressman Bill Pascrell to call for the immediate firing of Bloom and the rest of the Board for their 'silence and complicity in a deliberate campaign to subvert vote-by-mail elections and destroy the Post Office.'
Sarah Kendzior: “When asked by The Atlantic earlier this year about whether DeJoy’s operational changes had affected the situation, Bloom offered a jaw-dropping response that such claims were 'absolute BS' and called the agency’s handling of 2020 mail-in ballots 'awesome and amazing'. He then added that DeJoy will ‘have my support until he doesn’t, and I have no particular reason to believe he will lose it.’”
Sarah Kendzior: So, yet again, we have an individual connected to the Trump crime cult, a continuation—a direct continuation in this case—of the transnational crime syndicate masquerading as a government that we have gone over so many times.
Sarah Kendzior: What is really disturbing here isn't just Biden's refusal to fire this individual and then fire DeJoy, which is all completely feasible ... This is a decision that actually is in Biden's hands; it is not in the hands of Congress, there's no one else to really blame here ... is that this is the direction we are heading generally as a country, regardless of which party holds the reins of power. The only difference is in accelerationism, sociopathy, sadism, and also the marketing and packaging of what is at heart, regardless who is in power, stripping this country down and selling it for parts.
Sarah Kendzior: Getting rid of the postal service, which enables people to vote by mail, enables people to get their medications, enables people to get necessary government documents on time, in addition to being the major force during a pandemic, which is still on... country survives ... This is an institutionalist action. A lot of times when the Biden administration does something, people will excuse it by saying they're following protocol. They're following norms. They're institutionalists.
Sarah Kendzior: That is not what this is. This is purposeful. This is new. This is destructive. This is the action of somebody content to deny Americans basic goods and services, as well as destroy the very mechanisms that enabled the Democrats to get into office in the first place, which included the ability to vote by mail.
Sarah Kendzior: And so, people should ask why. The buzzword that the Biden administration is using to describe these sorts of actions is called asset recycling. You should watch for this word because what it really is is privatization of essential goods and services. It's the takeover of beloved public institutions and facilities by plutocrats like Ron Bloom, by oligarchs.
Sarah Kendzior: This is something that has been there our whole lives. Andrea and I are Reagan babies. We have never seen our country move in a direction other than this. But it is so profoundly disturbing that after 40 years, to see it still moving in this direction, accelerating in this direction, and of course doing so under climate change, when we really need to be going in the opposite direction and making sure that corrupt individuals like Ron Bloom, like DeJoy, and certainly like the members of the Trump administration do not have control over something as fundamental and basic as the postal service.
Sarah Kendzior: It's like, if you can't rescue the postal service, I don't know how you then gut out the rot in the DOJ, in the FBI, in the IRS, and all of these other much more corrupt agencies. They've actually taken one of the few uncorrupted agencies and made it deeply corrupt and dysfunctional. And so, yeah, you should be asking yourself why.
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Andrea Chalupa: I want to point out that The Washington Post just did a piece (that we'll link to in the show notes for this episode) talking about DeJoy's new plan with some gaslighting branding name that he slapped on and I'm not even going to repeat because these guys are all masters at gaslighting.
Andrea Chalupa: So The Washington Post provided an investigation on how DeJoy’s continuing destruction of the US Postal Service is going to slow down the mail even further. The most vulnerable, of course, are those who live in rural areas, the people that Biden likes to think he wants to reach. Right? We assume that Biden wants to be president for all Americans, including those living out in rural areas that are dependent on the mail. So, they're going to be hit the hardest, according to the reporting.
Andrea Chalupa: Pushing back against this are attorney generals from 21 states led by Pennsylvania and New York. Then you have, in the House, Democrats who introduced legislation to block DeJoy's plan to continue his destruction of the US Postal Service. They're naming it “Delivering Envelopes Judiciously on Time Year-Round Act”. Sarah Kendzior: [laughs]
Andrea Chalupa: Or “DeJoy Act”. Very well done, Democrats in the House. We give you points when you earn the points, and you've been awarded some now for this.
Andrea Chalupa: So the bottom line is that DeJoy represents the handmaiden of kleptocracy. You've got to stop those guys, you've got to contain them, or it's just going to spiral out of control and get worse. Then you have a bunch of disaster capitalists cloistered and profiting off the ashes of your country as it's being hit by climate change.
Andrea Chalupa: This is not unique to the United States. You have the new health minister in the UK who has a six-figure consulting deal with JP Morgan, a bank that would very much like to privatize UK healthcare. So the UK is struggling with this presently as well in the midst of a pandemic.
Andrea Chalupa: They do not care. As we repeat often on this show, from the phrase I heard back in Kyiv when I was living there in 2005, guys like DeJoy, they see the people as the shit they grow their money in. Human life means nothing to them.
Andrea Chalupa: That is why we need strong governments. We need strong regulations. We need accountability. We need to do everything we can now to roll back the Reagan revolution that has allowed guys like DeJoy to run amok and created a culture where it's absolutely fine to exploit human life for profit. And they worship not a Christian God, as they might think, but they worship a free market ideology first and foremost. That is what this is about.
Sarah Kendzior: Yep, absolutely. On that note, on the kind of elite criminal impunity that makes this spread of kleptocracy possible regardless who is actually in power, I think we can move along to the Trump Organization corruption investigation, which is making all sorts of headlines this week and has over the last month. A lot of rumors, a lot of speculation, a lot of bullshit.
Sarah Kendzior: I'm just going to read a little summary of the situation from Rolling Stone. Maybe by some sort of miracle, by the time this episode airs, the situation will have changed with some actual indictments. I tend to doubt it. But anyway, this is a one-paragraph summary.
Sarah Kendzior: "In May, a grand jury convened to hear evidence from prosecutors, a signal that the investigation of the Trump Organization could be entering its final stages. The DA's office ... ,"—that would be Cyrus Vance who we've mentioned many times on this show, who is best known for letting criminal elites off the hook.
Sarah Kendzior: "The DA's office is reportedly zeroing in on longtime Trump Organization CFO Allen Weisselberg, probing, whether he failed to pay taxes on fringe benefits he received from Trump, including cars, apartments, and private school tuition for his grandchild. The DA's office has reportedly seized Weisselberg's personal financial records and he could be facing charges as soon as the summer, according to The New York Times. Prosecutors are also investigating whether Trump Organization COO Matthew Calamari enjoyed similar tax-free benefits, indicating the alleged illicit activity could be a company-wide issue."
Sarah Kendzior: Gee, do you think so?! I mean, one of the reasons I resorted to reading that paragraph is I had to remind myself what is actually being litigated, because what is behind this story? This does not even remotely scratch the surface of what the Trump Organization has been doing for 40 years, which is the time that Weisselberg has basically been working there, the crimes they carried out, the front companies they operated, the endemic corruption. Michael Cohen gave probably the biggest public view of this when he testified in Congressional hearings in February 2019.
Sarah Kendzior: Trump is a career criminal. These are his lackeys. These are his front people. A lot of folks seem to want to view this as a sort of Al Capone on taxes situation. I don't think that that is appropriate for what Trump has done in executive office or beforehand. I think he's more dangerous and I think his abuses in the capacity as president fall into a different category.
Sarah Kendzior: It's not even quite appropriate for Weisselberg because he's unlikely to actually face prison time or substantial charges. The same is true of Calamari. What is maybe most likely to happen here is the Trump Organization folding, going bankrupt. But again, this is not new for Trump. In the late 1980s/early 1990s, Trump had a number of bankruptcies. This is, as we've said before, how the Russian mafia entered his orbit in a more severe way. They were the people who bailed him out. They were the people who rebuilt these properties.
Sarah Kendzior: And so, we have a lot of shifting goalposts here from the justice porn crowd who are pinning all of their hopes on individuals, unable to see the forest for the trees in here. What we have is a multi-decade criminal plot that a bankruptcy is not going to deter at this point because Trump is now operating with special status as a malevolent post-presidential demagogue, who has basically been declared above the law by Merrick Garland.
Sarah Kendzior: We did an episode on him where we went through the many unprecedented ways that Merrick Garland, in his capacity as the attorney general, is acting just as Bill Barr did, as Trump's personal attorney, making him immune from prosecution, making him immune from personal lawsuits like the one brought forward by E. Jean Carroll, who says she has proof that Trump raped her. Sarah Kendzior: This is the situation we're in. It's sprawling. It entangles corporate corruption with state crimes. This is not an end with organized crime. This is also not a new phenomenon. As we've mentioned before, Mueller himself, Robert Mueller, warned about this in a speech in 2011, labeling these three interlocking phenomena the Iron Triangles.
Sarah Kendzior: What we have are the Iron Triangles acting as bars over the process of justice itself. We have a virtuoso in the position of DA. We have Cyrus Vance, who is retiring, sitting there and making the decision about how far this investigation is going to go, how deep the prosecutions, if there are any, will be.
Sarah Kendzior: And he has a history. He let Don Jr. and Ivanka off the hook 10 years ago. Imagine if they hadn't been. This is for financial corruption deals involving Trump's SoHo. We wouldn't have had them in the White House. We possibly wouldn't have had Donald Trump in the White House if he had done his job then. He also let off Jeffrey Epstein, Harvey Weinstein, Dominique Strauss-Kahn. There's a long pattern and the pattern is elite criminal impunity.
Sarah Kendzior: Obviously, we want this to change. Once again, just like with the Louis DeJoy situation, we have an opportunity for change. We don't have Trump as the president. We don't have Bill Barr as the attorney general. We have a number of new individuals who, if they were acting in what is in the best interest of justice, the best interest in this country's national security and sovereignty, they would be prosecuting these individuals to the fullest extent possible.
Sarah Kendzior: It's not personal, it's not about revenge. It's about the fact that this is organized crime infiltrating every major institution and body of this country. And it's not just Trump. You could look at the Epstein-Maxwell operation and you can see similar patterns. You see these tentacles reaching out in multiple directions through Big Tech, through universities, through research institutes and so on. But it needs to be vigorously and quickly investigated and prosecuted.
Sarah Kendzior: They had decades to do this. They had decades to stop this monster from growing. Now that they have really the best opportunity possible, being that Trump is out of power, being that the Democrats hold majorities and so forth, this is the time to do it. As much as I would love to see this happen—and again, I really hope I'm wrong—I think it's unlikely.
Sarah Kendzior: I don't know, Andrea. What are your thoughts? Is this going anywhere or is this another Matt Gaetz, Jared Kushner, Paul Manafort, Mike Flynn, Roger Stone type situation?
Andrea Chalupa: So if you ever talked to any of the fantasy football league legal announcers on cable news and you see these guys privately, and you're like, "What the hell, man? Where's the accountability? Where's the indictments? Where's the prison sentence?" what they'll say to you privately, and I'm sure they say this as they get excited about every little new headline that Cy Vance produces, they like to point out that the justice system takes time. It takes time. Everybody has the right to a fair trial. Everyone has the right to legal counsel.
Andrea Chalupa: So let me respond to that very measured approach. We are in a society now where Citizens United has unleashed a massive steroid-infused legal system for the very, very, very rich in this country, worse than anything we had before, that just stomps on anybody else who just simply doesn't have as much money to compete.
Andrea Chalupa: Rich people can sue you. Rich people can drag it out in the courts. So if you try to hold rich people accountable, they will just have their lawyers just drag it out and drag it out. They will be doing this now through courts that have been packed by Mitch McConnell and Donald Trump with far-right ideological judges. 30% of the courts are now Trump judges. These were dirty, dirty, dirty people, ideologically speaking, who were selected because they knew full well why they're being selected. The judiciary are the cage bars on authoritarianism, on the closing in on a democracy, on rising kleptocracy.
Andrea Chalupa: That's what we have now. So if you want to trust this legal system where Citizens United and 30% of our courts packed by a Russian asset corrupt mob boss are what we're relying on to see any justice, you would understand why Sarah and I keep this show going, even though we're called all sorts of things like despair trolls or whatever.
Andrea Chalupa: America is on a cliff right now, we're teetering, and the justice we do have is grassroots justice, is calling this out by ... We're putting pressure. We name and shame. That's the justice that's remaining, that's left to us. That is a powerful justice and that does matter. We cannot let up because it can get so much worse than this.
Andrea Chalupa: By calling Biden by name, by calling Ron Bloom by name and saying, “This is on you, those lives out in rural America that are dependent on the mail for their checks, for their medicine, those lives are on you. That's blood on your hands so you could enrich DeJoy's cronies.”
Andrea Chalupa: And so DeJoy can run his time at the USPS and retire raking in cushy consulting deals and all those things. That's what you're setting up. You're paying for that with innocent lives. And you're going to be paying for that at the ballot box because that's on you. DeJoy is now the Democrat's brand of utter lack of accountability and justice.
Andrea Chalupa: So where the courts are compromised because of Trump and Mitch McConnell's court-packing, where American justice is generally compromised because of Citizens United and all the dark money that's allowed to flow and all the oligarchs like Bezos and Bill Gates and Warren Buffett tax dodging and relying on the rest of us to pay our taxes so that roads get paved and teachers get paid. All of that tax dodging by American oligarchs are allowing the income inequality crisis to continue to get worse. We're already at historic levels.
Andrea Chalupa: So what I'm telling you is that America has become an oligarchy. It's growing into a kleptocracy where the very rich, the very cloistered, are enjoying a very different legal system than the rest of us. That gives them all types of comfort and peace of mind and stability because they can just drag things out in the courts.
Andrea Chalupa: And so, what you're seeing with Cy Vance's investigations, all of that, it's just cable news fodder. The real justice is on the Gaslit Nation Action Guide on gaslitnationpod.com. That's what it comes down to.
Andrea Chalupa: Why do we know that? Because when you're up against such large forces, what can rebalance the scales? Smart organizing and smart community building. That's what the civil rights movement was. Why do you think we opened the Gaslit Nation Action Guide with a memoir, a case study written by Martin Luther King, on how he as a young man organized the Montgomery bus boycott? That was organization against powerful financial forces. They stood up to it and they were able to sustain it and grow it to something much larger that inspired the world.
Andrea Chalupa: So, yes, the odds are very stacked against us, but, yes, the power is in our hands to take back our country. We do have that in us. We do have a very long, strong legacy to stand on. And that legacy, I want to point out, was largely driven and built by Black and Brown people on this soil.
Andrea Chalupa: And so, when you talk about critical race theory, which is essential if you want to understand how we got into this situation in the first place, because it's the study of authoritarianism and how America was built, came out of authoritarianism and how we're still plagued by the forces of that currently, our whole hope lies in understanding that it's our turn now in America's long history in confronting these authoritarian forces.
Andrea Chalupa: It's our turn now in confronting America's proud heritage of exploiting bodies for profit. It's our turn now to do this work. It's our turn out to be abolitionists. It's our turn now to understand liberation, what it means, who needs it, who's most vulnerable now, who are they coming after, because they're going to go after the most vulnerable like they always do; the marginalized community, the Black and Brown people, the LGBTQ communities, and so forth.
Andrea Chalupa: But they'll always come after you next, even if you're someone of privilege. They're coming after your water, they're coming after the quality of your air. They're coming after your mail. Literally, right before our eyes, they're coming after you next. None of us are safe.
Andrea Chalupa: The only way to protect ourselves is to accept the power that we have within us and accept the power of community and accept the power of smart grassroots organizing, because it does matter. If it didn't matter, they wouldn't be trying so hard to steal our vote. They wouldn't be trying so hard to consolidate power. They wouldn't be trying so hard to pack the courts.
Andrea Chalupa: They're scared of us, first and foremost, or they wouldn't be doing all this corruption aggressively. It's on us now to do what we can to own our power, claim our power, and never lose sight of that.
Sarah Kendzior: These excuses that people offer of, "Just wait, look for the Savior. Justice is coming. The wheels of justice grind slow, but grind fine," it's like, the wheels of justice are running you over in the road like roadkill and you're getting scooped up by Republicans who are feasting off the corpse. I don't know what else to say. So, yes, grassroots power at least as a dependable power in the sense that it is yours. You're not asking for permission. You are making demands.
Sarah Kendzior: Andrea, I know you had some words to say about a certain individual in the media and their representation of all of these corrupt situations. I just want to briefly preface this by again encouraging people not to fall for the illusion of justice being served, to actually look for hard evidence. If that evidence is there, then that's fantastic and we're all cheering in unison together that the tide has indeed finally turned. That hasn't happened yet.
Sarah Kendzior: There was a story last week that occurred, that got people briefly excited, which is that Rudy Giuliani had lost his license to practice law in New York. This is long overdue. It should have happened ages ago.
Sarah Kendzior: It's obviously good, I suppose, that it happened now since he shouldn't be practicing law anywhere. But again, this is another one of those stories where folks get real amped up and they kind of miss the point. The point of this particular case is that a Trump lawyer is not there to practice law. They are never there to practice law. They are there to be a fixer and a threatener, which is what Giuliani was. And that was following a well-trod path led by Roy Cohn and Michael Cohen, who incidentally were both also disbarred after serving as Trump's lawyer.
Sarah Kendzior: The entire time that Giuliani was acting as Trump's "lawyer" as Trump was the president, Giuliani was not actually licensed to practice law in Washington, DC. Everything he was doing, all of those press conferences, were for spectacle, and the media rewarded Giuliani with a perch to spew propaganda because they wanted access. Sarah Kendzior: You would think that, you know, perhaps given the massive death toll from a preventable global plague or the violent, seditious attack on the Capitol, that the media would learn to not promote people like Giuliani and to not rehabilitate people like Bill Barr and Jared Kushner, who are currently profiting off of their crime sprees in the forms of books and interviews and pseudo-tell-alls that basically are just scandal covering crime yet again, a media culpa, like a fake apology, if there even is an apology tour, or the confession of something that can't be prosecutable in order to cover up the absolute atrocities and illegalities that they committed.
Sarah Kendzior: And there are a lot of journalists who went along for this ride during the Trump administration and still don't seem to have learned their lesson. At this point, I'm going to turn it over to you, Andrea, because I know you had a lot prepared here.
Andrea Chalupa: Yes. So an important focus of Gaslit Nation is to be a time capsule, where we remind people of even recent history to ground ourselves in this deliberately chaotic news cycle. It's as Sarah said, they cover up crimes with scandal and they do that very, very well, and they're still doing it. So we like to stay grounded in the history, even the recent history, so folks understand how we got here and how widespread the rot is.
Andrea Chalupa: So that brings us to our old friend, Ken Vogel of The New York Times. So he's back at it, as they say. We all know the whole story of Paul Manafort. We've documented Putin's Darth Vader many times on this show. Anybody who followed Ukraine for a very long time knew that Paul Manafort coming over and managing Donald Trump's campaign for president meant the Kremlin was here because Paul Manafort openly worked for Kremlin interests in Ukraine for a decade before coming over to the US to run Trump's election.
Andrea Chalupa: His longtime client, Yanukovych, Putin's puppet in Ukraine, stole an estimated $40 billion to $100 billion dollars—that's billion with a B—from the Ukrainian state, from taxpayers, and used that stolen money to enrich himself and his family and their cronies.
Andrea Chalupa: So what this comes down to is that my sister, as we've also documented on this show, the former contractor for the DNC who risked her life and career to warn both Democrats and Republicans that Paul Manafort running Trump's campaign meant that there was a Kremlin connection. This again was very obvious.
Andrea Chalupa: My sister warning people about this in 2016 was not the story. The fact that the intelligence community, the FBI that was invited by Ukraine to come in to find the tens of billions of dollars that Yanukovych stole, the FBI knew who Paul Manafort was. That's the story, that the intelligence community and the officials that are charged with protecting us failed to stop Paul Manafort from getting anywhere near a US presidential race and allowing Trump to come, with his Kremlin connections and dependence on dirty Russian money was able to come to power in the first place.
Andrea Chalupa: That's the story, not what my sister did in trying to warn everybody. What she did was patriotic, and she paid a great price for it, she and her family.
Andrea Chalupa: So my sister went out of her way in 2016 to warn everybody and, as we talked about in the show, was getting death threats. There was an attempted break-in on her home. Her phone was hacked. Her Gmail was hacked. It was just a very… There's that song, that threatening song, that was appearing on her phone. Listen to the first three episodes to see the hell that she was put through, all for pointing out the obvious that Putin's Darth Vader was now in the US.
Andrea Chalupa: We looked into personal security, private security, which was very expensive. Instead, to protect her, we wanted to raise her profile. That's one way of doing it. If you don't have the money for a bodyguard, you raise your profile so you become a name, a voice, so that they have a harder time making you disappear. And so, she was talking to press a lot for that reason and, of course, especially to get the truth out. During this time, when it became too late, when Trump was elected, she got a warning from a friend that the Trump transition team was asking around about her, trying to dig up dirt on her to try to hurt her.
Andrea Chalupa: Around this time, she met a reporter at Politico by the name of Ken Vogel who wanted to speak with her. And so, they did some interviews. A couple of months later, Ken Vogel came out with a Kremlin disinformation hit piece on my sister, painting her and Ukraine as meddling in the 2016 election to hurt Trump and help Hillary. His big source for this piece—this hit piece—was a Ukrainian who, in my opinion, gives off very strong Tony Soprano vibes, by the name of Andriy Telizhenko. This was the big source. We'll get back to Telizhenko later and what happened to him.
Andrea Chalupa: And so, Ken Vogel announces this big hit piece on my sister on Twitter by saying something to the effect of, "There is no proof that Russia meddled in the election, but there is proof that Ukraine meddled." Then he goes on to grab photos from my sister's Facebook page, including a photo of her at a social event for women at the Ukrainian embassy, where she's with other members of the Ukrainian diaspora, just a bunch of women hanging out, friends of hers.
Andrea Chalupa: Ken Vogel was putting that on Twitter as part of his big claim that my sister was essentially doing for Ukraine what Paul Manafort was doing for Russia. So this was a master projection, as these guys are good at.
Andrea Chalupa: So Ken Vogel's disinformation hit piece comes out in Politico and no one really notices it other than the far-right, because the day before, Buzzfeed publishes the Steele dossier and that's when all hell really broke loose, when people were finally catching up to me, Sarah, and my sister that, “Oh, wow, Trump really does have all these Kremlin connections.”
Andrea Chalupa: So Ken Vogel's Kremlin hit piece gets eclipsed by that big, damning, juicy credible report by the former spy who ran the Russia desk for the British government, Christopher Steele. The Kremlin fights back against the Steele dossier, which alleges, based on several sources, that the Kremlin cultivated Trump as their asset, including holding kompromat over him.
Andrea Chalupa: How does the Kremlin fight back? Putin's chief propagandist, Putin's Sean Hannity, a xenophobe by the name of Dmitry Kiselyov, who once declared in a broadcast that, "Russia remains the only country in the world capable of turning the USA into radioactive ash."
Andrea Chalupa: So Putin's Sean Hannity did an entire segment claiming that the Russiagate scandal in the US was invented by my sister with my help. I make a cameo appearance and we're like the Ukrainian Illuminati because Ukraine, of course, with all its struggles and near-annihilation under Stalin is oh so powerful and pulling all the puppet strings and my sister and I are like the Ukrainian George Soros or something.
Andrea Chalupa: That's the Kremlin's line of attack and it's on mainstream Russian propaganda. It's on their main TV network. This narrative builds on Ken Vogel's Kremlin disinformation hit piece in Politico. It's all snowballing and the Kremlin and the Republican Party fan the flames of these attacks against my sister, pushing this throughout Trump's entire time in power as his defense, trying to turn the tables by accusing her of what they themselves were doing.
Andrea Chalupa: They did this to escape accountability. They did this to harass my sister and try to ruin her, to silence her, to punish her. It was a relentless attack by the Republican Party in a foreign hostile state against an American mother of three. Our Ukrainian heritage, which we were raised to be proud of, was weaponized against us.
Andrea Chalupa: Sean Hannity at Fox News pushes this nonsense. Senator Lindsey Graham asked Christopher Wray during his confirmation hearing to be FBI director whether he will investigate my sister. Devin Nunes, a proud attack dog for both Trump and, by extension, the Kremlin, relentlessly went after my sister throughout the impeachment hearings, saying her name so many times that we ran a montage of it on this show.
Andrea Chalupa: Trump himself, of course, tweeted about this, as did his idiot son, Junior. Rudy Giuliani, in his demented quest to force Ukraine to invent investigations into Trump's political opponents, which Trump himself drove personally in his extortion of the present Ukraine, relentlessly went after my sister. Here's audio of Giuliani in 2019 pressuring Ukrainian officials to investigate her. Rudy Giuliani: Let me tell you just briefly what my areas of concern were, then we can discuss it in more detail. My involvement in this came about because way back last November, I got information from a reliable investigator, an international investigator, that there was a certain amount of activity in Ukraine during the 2016 election that involved Ukrainian officials and Ukrainian ... Mostly officials being asked by our embassy and possibly by other American officials...
Rudy Giuliani: Basically, the statement was, to produce dirt on then-candidate Trump and Paul Manafort, and that, just to shorten a big, long thing, over a course of about four or five months, it did produce information about Manafort and about the Trump campaign and even possibly about Trump, and that it was the most prominent thing being this black ledger of Manafort's, which was found on the doorstep of a parliamentarian, I think, and then delivered to the embassy, the FBI, I think the Ukrainian inspector general, and also given to the press, and given to an operative of the Democratic National Committee, a woman named Chalupa.
Andrea Chalupa: So what happened to Ken Vogel's original source who launched this Kremlin hit piece? Needless to say, he goes on to be sanctioned for being part of the Kremlin's disinformation campaign to try to help Trump steal yet another presidential election in 2020. He's banned from entering the United States.
Andrea Chalupa: This was Ken Vogel's source. It turned out a guy who gives off Ukrainian Tony Soprano vibes can't be trusted. Any credible reporter would have seen through Telizhenko, but Ken Vogel is not a credible reporter. He may be seen as one by the cloistered world of Washington, DC, by people who don't dare step out of line or dare risk their precious "credibility" to scream about the Kremlin's attack on our country as it was happening. Ken Vogel is a credible journalist to those who do not have to live with the impact of Trump's destruction and the destruction of those who failed to hold him and his family and their cronies accountable.
Andrea Chalupa: So Ken Vogel's infamous Kremlin hit piece was so infamous that The Washington Post wrote an article about it, listing all the credible people who discounted the narrative and pointing out that Politico's own reporting contradicted it.
Andrea Chalupa: So why would Ken Vogel do such a thing? Ken Vogel also tried to invent a similar scandal early in the 2020 presidential election, that Joe Biden as President tried to get Ukraine's attorney general fired, the same attorney general who had investigated a company that had the President's son, Hunter Biden, on its board.
Andrea Chalupa: Well, that investigation took place even before Hunter Biden joined the board, yet Ken Vogel blew that story up into another breathless scoop. Ukraine watchers like myself and many others pointed out that everyone who cared about fighting corruption in Ukraine wanted that chief prosecutor sacked because the guy was corrupt. He was a fox guarding the henhouse.
Andrea Chalupa: Why are we talking about all this now? Because on the day of the Biden-Putin summit, the Federal Election Commission (the FEC) decided to announce that a rare bipartisan decision had been reached to dismiss a case brought by Trump's former attorney general, Matthew Whitaker.
Andrea Chalupa: Whitaker took the sensationalized claims from Ken Vogel's Kremlin disinformation hit piece and tried to turn it into yet another costly investigation harassing my sister. The FEC dismissed it. Who in The New York Times announces the news recently that the FEC dismissed this case? None other than Ken Vogel.
Andrea Chalupa: Ken Vogel writes an article linking to his original Politico Kremlin hit piece against my sister, failing to disclose that he was the one who wrote it. It was so bizarre. It's like this guy helps invent the news and then quickly breathlessly reports on the shit disturbance he just caused and created.
Andrea Chalupa: Is this what it takes to be a reporter today as hedge funds gobble up newsrooms and lay off journalists, creating a serious shortage of newsroom jobs? Do journalists today need to peddle in sensationalism, even if it means trying to destroy innocent lives in the process?
Andrea Chalupa: Ken Vogel is no better than any boardroom executive who wants to burn a forest in the Amazon so it'll make room for cattle grazing, or hide a climate change report so it'll protect big oil. Ken Vogel should not be normalized. Ken Vogel should not be imitated. Ken Vogel is an extremely troubling sign.
Andrea Chalupa: We need less Ken Vogels in the world and more public servants in journalism who understand the true meaning of the profession and what it takes. Aligning yourself with power to help them further their agendas, which include an illegal power grab and consolidation of power, intimidating witnesses, obstructing justice, threatening judges, dangling pardons, and getting away with mass murder and a violent attempt at coup. That's who Ken Vogel was aiding with when he was furthering his career with what's known as win-the-day journalism, reporters so sociopathically ambitious, they want to grab your attention with a big, juicy sensationalized story with zero concern for who it will hurt or how it will set our democracy back. Who cares as long as it goes viral?
Andrea Chalupa: To be clear, America's problems are homegrown, but the Kremlin's aiding of the worst of America is like providing a massive dose of steroids. You know how the Kremlin doped up its athletes at the Olympics and a bunch of other competitions? The Kremlin also doped up the Republican Party, and they were happy to take that help.
Andrea Chalupa: That's what we're up against and we're still up against it because too many people, including some of Ken Vogel's sources, should be in prison and instead are walking free. We have to leave a record of this and put it in the time capsule because future historians have to understand who aided this mess, who helped create it.
Andrea Chalupa: They need a name to the journalist that lost their way, and Ken Vogel is one of those names that, in any objective retelling of this history, should be immortalized along with Walter Duranty, the Moscow bureau chief for The New York Times during Stalin's 1933 famine in Ukraine who wrote, as people died from man-made starvation at the highest numbers, wrote in The New York Times, "There is no famine."
Andrea Chalupa: We wanted to use that article in the film, Mr. Jones, directed by Agnieszka Holland, who herself had survived Soviet repression and time in prison. The woman is a legend, but The New York Times said no. It was like The New York Times rejected holding Walter Duranty accountable, and it all makes sense now because they clearly refuse to hold Ken Vogel accountable for the damage he's done by letting Ken Vogel write the article about an investigation that his Kremlin disinformation hit piece helped launch and normalized Ken Vogel's recklessness.
Andrea Chalupa: If The New York Times refuses to learn from its own history, The New York Times is doomed to repeat that history. Expect more Ken Vogels if they're allowed to hurt innocent people this way.
Outro Music:
“I Can’t Change” by Danny Golden: https://open.spotify.com/track/62Y5aVtY4DCjus0ynnIRDg
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 GLAAD, an organization on the frontlines of fighting for the rights of LGBTQ people at a time when they, especially trans people, are under attack by repressive and harmful Republican legal warfare. Support their critical work at GLAAD, glaad.org.
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. And if you want to help critically endangered orangutans already under pressure from the palm oil industry, donate to the Orangutan Project at the 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. 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 and our Patreon-exclusive content is edited by Karlyn Daigle.
Andrea Chalupa: Original music in Gaslit Nation is produced by David Whitehead, Martin Vissenberg, Nik 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...