Morning Wire XX
[0] Congressman Jim Jordan has been leading the charge against corruption in Washington as head of the House Judiciary Committee.
[1] This week, his team presented a number of explosive allegations.
[2] In this episode, we talk with the congressmen about evidence his committees have uncovered that they say points to antitrust law violations, targeting conservative voices, and government collusion to promote then -candidate Joe Biden in the 2020 election.
[3] I'm Daily Wire, editor -in -chief John Bickley with Georgia Howe.
[4] It's Saturday, May 13th, and this is an extra edition of Morning Wire.
[5] Joining us to discuss some new evidence uncovered by the House Judiciary Committee and the Select Subcommittee on the weaponization of the federal government is Ohio Congressman Jim Jordan.
[6] So, Congressman, the Judiciary Committee, which you lead, has presented evidence this week that GARM, the Global Alliance for Responsible Media, was facilitating coordination by its members in a manner that may violate U .S. antitrust law.
[7] Can you unpack what you found there?
[8] Well, we're nervous about this organization, them and the World Federation of Advertisers, the WFA, that they are working together, and the end goal may be that they are going to target sites, not based on anything other than they don't like the content, so it'd be driven by politics.
[9] And if they're working together with these advertisers, many times blue chip advertisers, that's a problem.
[10] You know, it's almost like part of this broader what some of the folks who authored the Twitter files called the censorship industrial complex where you have the cancel culture working now through this organization that has the fancy title, the Global Alliance for Responsible Media.
[11] So that is our concern.
[12] That's why we want to see what's going on there.
[13] We've written them asking for them to preserve and send documents to us, and we're still waiting for that.
[14] And who exactly is behind Garm?
[15] Who created it?
[16] It was the WFA that founded and put this together, but they only started in 2019.
[17] So this is a relatively new phenomena.
[18] Our concern with them is what I said before, that they're going to target folks, folks like you guys potentially.
[19] What's their form?
[20] If someone talks about the Second Amendment, does that give them a bad mark against them?
[21] If they talk about pro -life issues, does that give them a mark against them?
[22] That is the kind of concern we have.
[23] We think there's potential for real harm there, and that's where we're investigating.
[24] And it's part of our broader investigation where we see this attack on the First Amendment.
[25] Now, we've also been tracking the use of these Garm standards on supposed misinformation.
[26] There's a couple of entities that have openly stated that they're working to demonetize news sources that they say don't meet these standards.
[27] GDI, the Global Disinformation Index, and NewsGuard are two of these organizations, and both of those have actually received massive funds from the federal government.
[28] How are all these entities connected?
[29] Yeah, using your tax dollars to censor you such a deal.
[30] It's federal tax dollars going to these, you know, NGOs or these quasi -public entities who then fund these other organizations all designed to censor you based on someone's definition of misinformation.
[31] That to me is what is frightening because government's definition of misinformation is typically not accurate.
[32] We've seen that play out time and time again, and it's totally against the First Amendment.
[33] The idea that government's going to decide what speech is appropriate, what speech isn't, what kind of content is okay for advertising what kind of content isn't is as wrong as you can be and again it's this web i like the term that mr taibi and mr schellenberger have put out there which is this censorship industrial complex or as jonathan turley has pointed out censorship by surrogate where it's the government telling someone else these other entities and then they're actually doing the censorship and that's what we're trying to untangle and get a grasp of so that we can stop it and it won't be targeting folks like you based on politics.
[34] Now you've cited US antitrust law as being potentially violated here.
[35] Can you explain that in layman's terms for us?
[36] What does antitrust law protect against?
[37] So if big companies are colluding and they're working with these advertisers in a way that says we're going to work together to limit certain advertisers go in certain places and limit content, limit competition, then that is a potential violation of antitrust law.
[38] And so that is the fundamental.
[39] focus here, the Judiciary Committee has jurisdiction in that area.
[40] And so it's part of our broader investigation into how government working with these outside organizations, how they've been weaponized to go against the American people, and how they've been put into a focus on politics versus just letting the marketplace work.
[41] Now, another investigation you guys are involved in is looking at the CIA's potential involvement in the infamous Hunter Biden laptop letter.
[42] That was the letter signed by 51 intelligence officials claiming that the New York Post story on the laptop was actually just Russian misinformation.
[43] Can you tell us about what you guys found?
[44] Yeah, this was put together in many ways with coordination from the Biden campaign.
[45] So we had a transcribed interview with Mike Morrell, who was the primary guy who organized this letter of 51 former Intel officials.
[46] Mr. Morrell told us in the deposition that he first gets a call from Anthony Blinken on October 17th, 2020, just days before the final debate, weeks before the presidential election.
[47] And Mr. Blinken says, hey, what about this New York Post story?
[48] And, you know, do you think this could be a Russian misinformation operation?
[49] So they started talking, that prompts, it's according to Morel.
[50] This is what he said in his deposition.
[51] That prompts Morel to begin working on this, researching this, and then he goes out and recruits 50 other people to sign this letter.
[52] And he signs the letter.
[53] We've got one email where Mr. Morel says, the Biden campaign wants us to share this letter first with the Washington Post.
[54] then other news outlets, so there was that kind of coordination, where they were going to shop it around to mainstream media.
[55] Mike Morel said in the interview, he said, I did it because I wanted Biden to have something to push back on President Trump in the last debate because I knew President Trump would bring it up, and I wanted Joe Biden to win the election.
[56] So he was just up front about what it was all political.
[57] And of course, Biden brings it up.
[58] And after the debate, Mike Morel gets a call from Steve Rochetti, who's the chairman of the Biden campaign, and he thanks Mike Morel for doing it.
[59] and then there's a couple other key facts that we uncovered in this deposition as well are in our investigation and that is one of the individuals who signed the letter had another publication a book pending in front of the publication review board at the CIA so this is active people in the CIA who review anything written by a former CIA member or former CIA employee I should say they review those things the publication review board calls him in this same time frame and they said hey we've approved your book and oh by the way we have this letter, according to this individual who sent us this email, who actually signed the letter.
[60] He said, the CIA said, we have this letter that they read to him, and he agreed to sign it.
[61] So you had what looks like someone to CIA actively soliciting and recruiting people to sign on to the letter.
[62] And understand this letter was part of this overall effort to suppress the whole laptop story.
[63] Remember that mainstream media was saying it was a Russian information operation, a hack and leak operation.
[64] Big tech was censoring and scaling back the ability to share and link to this story.
[65] And then this letter from these former intel officials was sort of the final step.
[66] So we uncovered all that in our investigation and just issued the report, an interim report two days ago.
[67] So what are the next steps?
[68] Is there a way to hold people accountable for this?
[69] It's tough because this is First Amendment activity.
[70] They're allowed to.
[71] But I think it just illustrates again the political nature and this idea of how coordinated this was.
[72] Because remember, when Joe Biden used this in the debate, he presented it, this letter, the idea that 51 former intel officials had signed this, he presented it as if it was organic, as if it just sprung out of nowhere, and they were just doing the Lord's work, when in fact, it was done in conjunction with the campaign.
[73] Oh, the other interesting thing we got from the interview with Mr. Morrell is the day this letter came out, October 19th, 2020, that very morning, John Ratcliffe, who was the current, Director international intelligence in the Trump administration, Mr. Ratcliffe was on TV and he said that the laptop was not, was not part of a Russian disinformation operation.
[74] And I asked Mr. Murat, I said, what did you think of that?
[75] And he says, we just disagreed.
[76] I thought he was wrong.
[77] And I'm like, so the guy in the government who's getting the intelligence in real time is wrong and the guy out of the government and 50 other people out of the government are smarter and they know what's better.
[78] And they presented as if they were the experts.
[79] And sort of the fundamental of course is they were wrong.
[80] It wasn't a Russian information operation.
[81] The emails and the material on the laptop were in fact authentic.
[82] So it's a frustrating thing for the American people.
[83] All we can do in this situation, I think, is get the facts out there.
[84] Now, the person who looks like at the CIA was actively soliciting recruiting people to sign on, that's a different issue because that is not supposed to happen.
[85] That is wrong.
[86] And we're trying to figure out that issue as well.
[87] Important questions to answer.
[88] Congressman, thank you so much for talking with us.
[89] Good to talk to you again.
[90] Take care, guys.
[91] That was Congressman Jim Jordan, and this has been an extra edition of Morning Wire.