joining us now is journalist and author glenn greenwald. we will be talking about his newest book securing democracy. we are at the libertarian the freedom test festival inin las vegas and you're here. is there an oddity? >> there's definitely an oddity that's obvious that i've been long been perceived associated. there's a lot of people for whom that's true and at the same time very early on when i began writing about politics my focus was concerns over bush and cheney executive power theories and civil liberties and the war on terror. i always had an audience not just on the left but also

libertarians the first i ever did was at the cato institute so that gives you a flavor for how i've managed to have these problems in the audience. >> how do you do that? it's where the left and the right meats. >> there is they on either side likes to admit and the media typicallyti conveys because the standard media attention is when the left and rights are fighting and that is how many they have in common with more agreement than the left and right. it's findingo those areas of agreement and building coalitions and fostering them through the work has been a focal point from the beginning. >> for people tuning in and saying i like that name give us a sense of some of the issues you worked on as a journalist over the years before we get to the book. >> i was a practicing lawyer

focusing on constitutional law and one day hit create a blog on one of the free blog spots to be heard and find an audience and mostly focus on civil liberties issues and guantánamo, georgiame rendition, drones when obama became president. it was a range of issues that had focus and over the years they k began to expand and the reporting for which i became best known for is when edward snowden contacted me in 2012. >> how did he get a hold of you? did you have any previous conversations? >> he had been a reader of mine for years and not so much because of my views on privacy

and surveillance but i had become a media critic and was particularly radical during the bush years to be close to and differential to the security rather than adversarial and he found that at the end of 2012 he e-mailed me out of the blue. i hadd no idea who he was. he knew at the time, both of us did, they were tying off our communications domestically and he contacted me and was reluctant to say much about who he was or what he had so i had complicated encryption technology which at the time very few people were using and it took time to establish our relationship because of that. once i was able to talk to him he told me he was in hong kong with documents he'd taken from the nsa that he believed

revealed illegalities and violations of the constitution and wanted to work with me to reeve report them and i said before you do i need you to prove to me there's a validity and he said i will share with you a tiny portion of the documents. he sent me 20 documents from the secretive agency of the world the first time there had been a leak of any kind from the nsa and i called my editors that night and said i need to get on a plane and fly immediately to hong kong which i did within 36 hours and we started the reporting. did you ever visit with him in russia? >> i did visit him in 2016 so maybe two or three years after the reporting. he never wanted to be in russia.

the obama administration trapped him thereby revoking his passport and bullying the cubans out of rescinding their guarantee of safe passage which he needed to get to latin america so he is been in russia and still hoping to one day be able to leave. right now he is married, they have two children and i think they are kind of building a life there. he still wants to come home but if he can't i think he is content with the life he's chosen. >> there is a role of fate about julian, abba snowden and chelsea manning. he rose surveillance? >> to me there is no debate. one of the things i discovered in my work as a journalist and didn't previously know is the true extente to which virtually everything in washington is done behind a wall of secrecy. almost everybody agrees some news the government does should

be secret if there are movements in a war you have the right to keep itni a secret. a grand jury investigation but by and large we ought to know what the government is doing and they ought to know very little about what we are doing. that's the idea because of this wall of secrecy people are devoted to the idea that in a democracy it's necessary the citizenry learn not everything but the important thing about what the government is doing or how can we have a meaningful election if we are voting for leaders or parties when we don't know anything about what they are actually doing and i think one thing that's been done responsibly and came with clear instructions about making sure we never publish anything that could jeopardize anybody's

lives. early onn people forget he workd with "the new york times," the guardian, the largest papers in the world to protect lives and other legitimate interests of people who as long as it's done responsibly, that to me is heroism. they are risking their life to inform the citizenry about things we ought to know. >> that is some of your american experience but now you've takene your job to brazil. how did you get there? >> i've been visiting in the late '90s and early 2000. just a place i think we all find those plays that resonate with our soul. i was alwaysnt overwhelmed by is beauty but then when i went there and intended to stay seven weeks i met my husband of 17 years andd at the time in the clinton years they had banned couples from getting t green cas

or other immigration rights and brazil being the largestet catholic country in the world nonetheless offered of those rights. we were only able to live in brazil together so we built our life there and have three kids and now an elected member of congress but have kept 1 foot in the united states is well with the work we've been doing. >> the book is securing democracy,y, my fight for press freedom and justice. how did you get in trouble with the q president of brazil? >> i have actually had some clashes prior to his becoming elected. he was a member of congress for 30 years and kind of a kin to say a marjorie taylor green in the sense that he wasn't ever in outhe seat of power but always kind of on the margins but drew a lot of media attention and in a way that drew a lot of attention but it wasn't that theyy the way

normally spoke and ended up gearing him for the presidency much like donald trump and his style of o how rare it was and there was one in particular i thoughts he harbored the sentiment and he made an effort and caused aay whole raucous so we've always had this relationship. my husband is a part of thewi party and they've had their clashes and my husband with him. but it escalated in 2019 on mother's day i was contacted by a woman who was the great presidential nominee that ran against and lost and she told me she had been contacted by a hacker who claimed he had obtained an enormous archive of files that he'd taken from the phones of some of the most powerful judges and prosecutors

revealing the commonalities and wrongdoing and put me in contact with him and it was a similar story that it was an anonymous source and claimed a gigantic archive and we began doing the reporting it caused a lot of destabilization of the government and went about my orientation to explicit threats to imprisonment to the president himself, death threats from the movement, lots of security problems over the course of 18 months or so we became kind of public enemy number one. near the beginning of the presidency when he was at the peak of his power. >> bubbles operation carwash? >> ..

to oversee the case. we're very young they were in their mid to late 30s early 40s and most and they had born into brazilian democracy not into the dictatorship and took seriously the idea that we're supposed to be a country that operates under the rule of law. we're not this banana republic from the 1960s in the middle of the cold war living under a military regime and and so this narrative was very attractive to the to the media that oh these young crusading prosecutors want to clean up their country and you know, they began putting into prison using this original kind of snitch, you know billionaires and some of the most powerful people in in the country and of course brazilians and really everybody was kind of moved to see that like go finally. instead of putting you know, young black drug dealers from

the favelas into jail. we're actually going to get the real criminals to people who steal will not buy the you know, $100 at a time, but by the hundreds of millions of the time those people are going to go to prison and as a result sergio morrow, that was the judge overseeing it and these young prosecutors who became very fanatical. became national heroes in brazil. there was no one more popular than they for at least the next say three to four years from 2014 to 2018. they basically ran the country because no politician could compete with them sergio morrow was internationally celebrated. he was one of time 100 the time 100 in 2016 the only brazilian on the list on the cover of magazines all over the world every weekend in in brazil. so the power that these prosecutors and judges had as they as their anti-corruption probe expanded became larger than any person should have let alone the judge and prosecutors who have been elected and that was when things started to become a bit more controversial there were questions about whether they were selectively prosecuting for ideological and political reasons, and that was

kind of the contacts into which our source came to us and said that was that was that was his phones they had invaded were sergio moros and the prosecutors and said we can prove that they've been corrupt all along and how conducted this investigation. so where is sergio morrow today? well, so one of the most important things that the car wash probe did is that in 2017? as dire bolsonaro was preparing to run for president the main obstacle he had in his path was lula de silva who has kind of legendary status in brazil. he was the two-term president from 2002 to 2010 this kind of center left very charismatic former labor leader who left office with an 86% approval rating just was the beneficiary of massive economic growth lifted millions of people out of poverty, and he was planning to run again in 2017 and paul showed him 15 20 points ahead of us narrow. he ended up not running because sergio moro found him guilty of

multiple charges of corruption and sentenced him to 12 years in prison and made him an ineligible to run which paved the way from bolsonaro's victory the first thing bolsonaro did. upon being elected was turned around and he elevated sergio moro from his role as you know, local judge a federal judge, but at the first level and made him the minister of justice and public security the second most powerful position in brazil. and that was when we began our reporting what sturdio mora was there was a kind of a unity of bolsonaro fans and moral fans morrow ended up leaving the government about a year and a few months after. he joined it and went out shooting claiming that jire bolsonaro himself was completely corrupt that he had tried to criminally interfere in various police investigations aimed at his children who are all adults and elected officials who are charged with corruption. and so he split with the molsonaro movement. he went to the us for a while made a lot of money and came

back to brazil this year announcing he would run for president against both lula and bolsonaro louis now out of prisoners as a result of our reporting and running for president, the presidential candidate was kind of a up. he pulled out before it even began and he's now announcing that he's gonna run for the senate as kind of a critic of both lua who we put in prison in bolsonaro who we originally was aligned with but now is accusing of being corrupt. let's go back to lula de silva in your view and i know you have a connection to him. him. we'll get to that. was he guilty of the corruption that he was put in prison for? the reason it's hard to say is because you never got a fair trial. there's no question that lou was party the workers' party. was involved in all kinds of corruption in louisville himself will admit that if he's pushed and i pushed him an interviews to acknowledge that before because as i said earlier brazil is a country that doesn't have occasional instances of

corruption, but his run systemically uncorruption and the workers party in louisville himself having been in the middle of it in brazilia. there's no way you can get anything done unless you grease the wheels of that corrupt. and pt the workers party unquestionably played that game. question of how much did rule of personally profit from corruption is something we genuinely answer to because the child that he got was a show trial it was it was a trial in which sergio moro along was plotting and secret with the prosecutors, which is what our reporting showed to ensure lula's conviction regardless of the evidence. so i i don't know the answer to that, but i do know that there's no doubt that was government and louisville was party was heavily interacting with and dependent upon the system of corruption that has always run brazilian greenwald. what is your connection to lula? i mean, you know, i interviewed lord for the first time in 2016.

i it was he in prison at the time he was not in prison, but it was it was in the middle. he had hand-picked a woman from his party to be the first female president dylan russo and to by this point she had gotten re-elected barely and she was in the middle of her second term and this economic boom that he benefited from turned into economic collapse and under her presidency. and so there was a serious impeachment effort underway that i was opposed to and when i interviewed him by that point, it was clear that the anti-corruption probe was not just aimed at her but aimed at him. and i interviewed with him, but no one really thought was whenever end up in prison. i mean it would be it's like a country putting their greatest icon in prison. no one thought that was what happened back then but they were trying and so the interview was in that contacts about film is impeachment possibility and people were raising the possibility that he would be prosecuted potentially. and i ironically i had tried to interview lula when he wasn't prison during 2018, but the

supreme court rejected our request. they didn't want willa being heard during the election because they knew that if the public could hear from him his voice he could sway the election. that's how much of a hold he has on the brazilian people. they interviews with everyone only ones bolsonaro was elected in 2018. did they finally grant my requests to interview lua from prison the supreme court granted your report granted my request and the prison authorities had rejected it. so we appealed to the supreme court and so about a week or two after i got contacted by the source the interview with louisville scheduled. it had been scheduled before this source contacted me. so i interviewed lula from prison. i couldn't tell him what we had by that point because we were ready to report it, but he was obviously protesting is innocent and then needless to say once we begin doing a reporting that proved that the judge that had convicted him the prosecutors who had prosecuted him were all along quite corrupt. he was freed from prison three months after we began the reporting. he was very grateful. he i was the first phone call that he made when he got

released in prison when he got home to san paulo calling me to thank me. he publicly was very appreciative, but you know, my my husband belongs to a party, that was born out of opposition to the workers' party. they kind of criticized pt from the left. and so the way you say the green party criticized the democrats. it was a party that protested the workers' parties corruption. so our political connection was never so close. i was never a supporter of the

worker's party, but you know when someone's reporting gets you out of prison and then that reporter is now being threatened with prostitution as a result you obviously are going to your relationship is going to improve and so we had a good relationship for you know a year so once he got out of prison, when is the brazilian presidential election and is lulus still favored? the as we're taping our three

months away or so a little less polls show lula the overwhelming favorite and brazil's electoral system is like francis we as we're taping our three months away or so a little less polls show lula the overwhelming favorite and brazil's electoral system is like francis where multiple candidates run. and if candidates if no candidate gets more than 50% of the vote the two top candidates go to a runoff. it's very possible according to current polo data. that will could actually just win in the first round, which is i believe and i think one of the person has done that but it's very very rare. so he's well ahead at the moment of bolsonaro and every other candidate and clearly the favorite to to win which would be extraordinary given that the last election he was in prison under 10 year prison, sir term and now he's not only out of prison, but poised to return to power glenn greenwald you mentioned that the supreme court of brazil turned down your request to interview. is there a is there a free press in brazil? there is a free press in brazil in the sense that the constitution that brazilian acted when it emerged out of its 21-year military dictatorship was based in part on the us model the constitutional model. they also used european models there is a free press in brazil in the sense that the constitution that brazilian acted when it emerged out of its 21-year military dictatorship was based in part on the us model the constitutional model. they also used european models and there's a more robust. action for press freedom in the brazilian constitution than there is in the us constitution. it includes for example source protection rights than a journalists can't be obliged to disclose the identity of their source. whereas in the us there's long been an attempt to and act as shield law of that kind it never has happened. so on paper there's a very robust free press protection in practice. the problem has been that. because of the grotesque inequality of wealth and income in brazil that has long plague of the country. the media has always been controlled by a tiny handful of industrial oligarchical families that have the same agenda the same ideology the same interest and there's been a lack of pluralism in the brazilian media that is now changing because of the internet the ease with which

to reach our audiences without having to have owner pinching press or a tv network. and so it's it's really improved and when i did the reporting? did and the bolsonaro government attempted to imprison me? they actually indicted me the only reason why i'm able to talk to you now instead of sitting in a prison cell is because the supreme court issued a ruling. basically shielding me from any of these prosecution attempts on the grounds of a free press the issue with lula and not allowing interviews is very similar if you want to go now an interview julian assange and the british prison, you'll notice you haven't heard from julian assange for three years because he's barred from being interviewed. they won't let him be interviewed. they will want to be photograph. and the argument is a pre-tax, which is prison security, but it's one that the west uses just as readily as the brazilians are using it used to back then to bar interviews with with louis. so i know it sounds drastic, but it's something that we have here in the us and the uk as well mr. greenwald is your brazilian

source has he or she ever been identified the federal police? announce that they found the source and arrested a ring of six people they claim or responsible for that hacking. the person they accused of having been my sores has publicly assumed responsibility for that. i've never confirmed your denied it in part because i never knew the identity of my source. i have my suspicions but if the source wants to say that they're the ones who did it. that's their right, but i'm not gonna help the government by saying that i believe it is or is it when you receive those documents in brazil. did it feel like déjà vu all over again from a brazilian perspective completely. i remember i asked when when i was called by congresswoman davila about this issue. i asked whether she would be okay with my husband participating in the college just because it was obviously a call of high intensity and importance my i speak fluent

portuguese, but you want to make sure when it's extra important that you're not missing anything. you're on misunderstanding anything. so he participated in that call and after we hung up. i said to david who helped me a lot in the snowden. nicely detained in london at one point as part of that reporting. i just said to him well look, you know, we've already been through this once before so we're gonna have this advantage that we've gone through this and they haven't and david said no, i think you're really thinking about this incorrectly the last time we did it the people angry at us the government's angry at us were thousands of miles away on the other side of an ocean. whereas this time the government that's going to be angry at us is literally right on the corner and this is gonna be much more dangerous and much more difficult. and much more and much riskier. and at one point even kind of joked and said god can't they get anybody other than you to get these archives? why does it always have to be you because obviously our life was turned upside down during the snowden story any new it was about to be again. so yeah, i definitely for me. it was deja vu but he was, you

know, trying very hard to get me to see that this is gonna be more dangerous. how close did you come to being physically injured or going to? is also from pretty much from the very first moment that we began to reporting. we were getting the kinds of death threats that aren't the sort of death threats that public figures these days often complain about where someone on twitter or in your email says, oh you're gonna get what's coming to you. these are very very detailed death threats, you know, here's your address. here's the front of your house. here's your car. we know where your kids go to school very very alarming sort of in any clearly people who had access to private data and obviously in the government in the security forces, we had to turn our house into basically a fortress we didn't leave our house for two years without arm security and armored vehicles and the like we had a very good friend who was a city councilwoman who's served on the

city council with david. all right, franco who had been murdered assassinated nine months earlier in 2018. and so we took those scratch very seriously whenever i appeared in stream levels of security where necessary one time i went to a book fair and they made me speak in the middle of the water on a boat because they were concerned about my security speaking in land and even there there were a group of bolsonaro followers who were shooting fireworks at the boat trying to set the fire the boat on fire. i was physically assaulted ones by a long time very famous journalist in brazil who became a fanatical bolson artist. tell us that story. i had because you have a picture of it in the book. i had you know, just like i do in the united states where i appear on fox news a lot or left-wing networks as well. i essentially have a philosophy. that is a journalist. you should speak to as many people as you can there's a right-wing network in brazil that has grown very rapidly because it was attached itself

to the most movement joe from pond. they had invited me on several times and i got on and it was in the middle of the reporting. so the tension was at its highest we'll had just been a of jail. so the most was extremely angry in general and particularly with me. and there's this journalist who had been in the mainstream a long time. he was the editor of brazil's largest news met weekly. and about six weeks prior to my going there. he had gone on the air and essentially said that my husband and i should have our children taken away from us that we should be investigated by the adoption agency because how can we take care of our children when i'm working with stolen documents and he's in brazilia, you know kind of very obviously homophobic remarks something you wouldn't say about a heterosexual couple. we're both parties, but i was very personally i mean with people talk about your children. it's kind of should be the the one limit. i know in political warfare and i was extremely angry by that and at the last minute they said, oh we like to put him on the show with you. do you mind? and i said, no, i don't mind

because i wanted to confront him about these comments he had made. and they seated us. you know almost like millimeters away. i mean you couldn't have made a more combustible atmosphere if he tried and he did try. and right when the show began i said look before we begin i'm not going to talk about any music issues. i need to clear the air and i looked at him and i said i demand that you either. you know reaffirm your comments and you believe our children that we adoption should be returned to the shelter where we adopted them from or apologize and retract it. and he instead started essentially attacking me refusing to retract it and the rhetoric escalated from there and you know kind of spontaneously he took his arm and tried to hit my face. i blocked it in the first instance we both then stood up and he kind of pushed my face again. this is live on the air not only on radio but also on television and need us to say the entire internet exploded but the really significant part of was there were the most prominent members

of the most movement members of the senate in congress the president sons not only cheered and supported what he did but said, oh it should have been a chair that you use you're a closed fist. these were these are people who want to introduce violence into political discourse and it kind of gives you a sense of the real tension and danger of that moment for the reporting we were doing and for the country as a whole. glenn greenwald why should we here in the states care about securing democracy? in brazil the 1964 coup that led to the overthrow of its center left government democratically elected government was engineered by the cia in conjunction with right away brazilian generals and the 21 year military dictatorship that followed was supported by the us and that's because brazil is an extremely important country years strategically. it has enormous oil reserves. as the oil reserves in the middle east are being depleted

brazil is discovering vast oil reserves of a kind that is harder to extract but more the exploitable more valuable. it's the sixth largest country in the world. terms of population. it's the second largest country in the hemisphere. it has probably the single most important environmental resource in the amazon. and so if you're somebody who cares about the world at all cares about the united states at all you you really need to care about brazil in terms of the direction in which it's going and influences the region greatly but also brazil is one of the leaders of the developing world it has this alliance called bricks where it's an alliance with china and india and russia and south south america and it's the name bricks that was intended. it is intended to be kind of a counterweight to us and germany in the world. so it's really impossible to overstate brazil's importance politically culturally geos strategically and in general i

think countries are very more connected now than ever before because of the internet and if one country kind of takes an undemocratic path, it's very easy for that to influence other countries to follow. in course the media here in america is trying to figure you out you were called. tucker carlson's mouthpiece by the nation magazine. he's a friend of yours. you're here at libertarian convention. what do you got for us? you're a journalism. and people can't figure out. into which box they should have could place you for me. that's a testament to the fact that you're doing your job. i don't see my role as attaching myself to any particular faction or being an reliable ideological spokesperson if i wanted to do that, i would become a politician or spokesman for a party.

i think it's very difficult to cast me as some kind of fanatical right-wing figure given for example that everything we just talked about involved might confronting one of the most right-wing governments in the world and freeing from prison one of the leftist icons and lula de silva. long been, you know a fan of people like jeremy corbin and jean-luca melanchon and eva morales in in bolivia who i went and interviewed immediately after he was the victim of the coup. i think that what's actually happening. is that left right categories in the united states are eroding very rapidly, you know is the idea of opposing nato in us involvement in the war and ukraine a left or a right wing idea is the idea of opposing gigantic big tech monopolies from censoring the internet a left ring or right-wing idea. i think it's increasingly more difficult to place people in these categories and i think for journalists in particular, it should be very hard and i'm glad that it is this is your what seventh book my sixth book. and where can people read you

today now that you're no longer with the inner circle. so as you know mentioning big tech censorship by there's a kind of area that meet up a sector of the media ecosystem that's devoted to free speech. and that's where i tend to gravitate to so i do my writing on substack, which is a place to guarantee free speech. i do video journalism on a youtube competitor that's growing rapidly called rumble. obviously. i'm on social media. it's just sort of so represent's

great to see you again. it's great to see you and please call me will will. all right, we're talking about your book american reboot an idealist guide to getting big things done. why did you write this book? look, i i wrote this book. well, i didn't think i was gonna write the book. you know, i had someone approached me an agent said have you ever thought about writing a book? i said no, and and he said well if you were gonna write a book with would it be about