drawn into the conflict, just a reminder, back in june, the coalition government collapsed after losing a vote of confidence there. we spoke to turman of the bulgarian national peace concert or another party in the nation, not coast the fall of. he believes that political crisis was caused by a failure to listen to what the public are saying the. so let me submit this. you said a so called palmetto to democracy in bulgaria is very far from what is possible to shape people democracy in we'll get in puddle med you to it was created to show gold grow, you know, a bloody girl made door unity among the most of the biggest parties in bulgarian parliament veteran now struggling to receive the support from u. s. u. s. u v. stuck between bed. this is the problem, the most of bulgaria else. supporting cause of peace breed you can't in

russia and better against vis. sandy. gov. i mean, you should of diesel over bethel and so on, don't you, can you see? so it's a big difference between this officer position and the position of common people in bulgaria. the people don't believe in vis parties. and because that, that is a big strike between when they comped create a government. now, as mentioned earlier, next we go to not fit time between former cia whistleblower john curry, aka. and one of the leading figures behind the twitter filed scandal journalist muttered tiny bee. it's a fascinating discussion and it does get going in moment i

i'm willing to do it, you know cranium, tv, toys, shooting, id, she ship, dr. lee that ship for a control in particular bought. so we ship, shield the tv at the mo, border political system. really be me out of it. not sing the anthem blue city. yeah. with us actually it's a little dish but i live by your name. oh, crazy that to where you store lot of date my subway. but just dory. yes or no. i live here. believe get us but we ship it with them. so just take a look. you know what of them? i need a you paying squirrels with that for a one. they each the one that or up with

with global i'm saying we have about i few book. busy on these to put up here for a few. if you take a picture, i'll go double play. you go so good. i'm up with ah, big corporations, especially the big social media sites, have a great deal of control over what the rest of us are able to see about what news we read and about what we think about the major issues of the day. certainly, governments try to regulate them, at least they're supposed to. but what happens when that regulation is a lie? what happens when the government that supposed to protect our freedom, to free speech and a free press is instead working to sensor the news? i'm john curry. aku and you're watching the whistle blowers ah.

2 twitter is one of the most popular and most used social media platforms in the world. hundreds of millions of people use twitter as a source for news. news that we may not get into mainstream media. and users rely on the openness of the site to be able to exchange information that in some cases the government doesn't want us to exchange. at least that's the way it's supposed to work. last year, billionaire ilan mosque famously purchased twitter mosque had spoken a great deal about the need for transparency and information. and he promised that twitter would truly become that social media site where transparency and the free exchange of information would reign supreme. so far he's been true to his word, must made available to investigative journalists, matt toby and barry wice, all of the internal communications amongst twitters executives. before he bought the company, as well as all communication between twitter executives and us governmental agencies, particularly the f b i. what they found was explosive,

using primary source documentation. they found that twitter had colluded with the f, b i. and with the american intelligence community to suppress news that those agencies did not want the american people to see. this wasn't just about a 100 biden's laptop. it went even deeper than that. it included details about banning president donald trump from twitter, about shadow banning some twitter users because of the information they were sharing and about pressure that the f b i put on twitter to take action against several users for allegedly sharing election misinformation. we are honored today to be joined by one of those investigative journalists mat. tybee mats, contribution to the twitter files can be found, of course, on twitter and his other work can be found on sub stack. he's a former investigative journalist with rolling stone and is a winner of the national magazine award among other prestigious prizes. welcome to

the show that it's great to have. good, good to talk to you again. good to see you. now, you've become one of the most important investigative journalists in america. it's kind of that proverbial overnight success that you've been working towards since 1991. tell us how ilan must reached out to you to break the story of the twitter files. was it that he was a fan of your work or did you approach him with an idea for a story? well, some of that is things that i can't talk about because it's a deal that i made in terms of the attribution for the story. sure. but what i can say, what i can say is that this wasn't something that i pitched i think the, the idea came basically from him. i think as you can see, he's been anxious to get news out. he has a number of journalists that he likes, and that he pays attention to. and you know,

those folks for some of those folks are brought in for this project. the 1st 2 were myself and barry wice and it's been and it's been amazing. it's been quite a ride. i'll put it that way. it has to be great. and you must have gone through a mountain of information so far. when did it become clear to you that there were several major stories in these documents? and how did you hone your focus, where you primarily interested in the beginning in 100 buying laptop story or is that just what happened to come up 1st? no, i wasn't. i wasn't very interested in that story, per se. at all. really. my suspicion and the thing that the question i was really interested in answering if these files were really truly going to be open was what level of communication and coordination exists between a company like twitter and federal law enforcement. and perhaps even agencies,

you know, beyond say the f b i or the department of homeland security or the white house. i mean that, that's what i really wanted to know is, is, is it truly just private censorship or is, or is there some other kind of relationship going on. one of the reasons that the 100 by the story was picked as the 1st thing that we looked at is because i had a suspicion that we, if such a thing existed, we might see it there. and as a result, you know, the, that search turned out to be flawed. it was bedded as, as we learn later by a former f b. i general counsel. and then jim baker and we ended up finding some things that gave indications of government interference. and that in that particular episode, but we found much more broad evidence in other areas i'm,

i'm going to ask you if in a few minutes about some of these governmental agencies, i think this is so important, but i want to start with the 100 biden laptop story, the new york post had broken the story that 100 biden had left his laptop at a repair shop in new jersey and then just apparently abandoned it. the owner of the repair shop saw some of the things that were on the hard drive. and he contacted the f b i and apparently the f. b. i wasn't interested. he then contacted rudy giuliani, the former new york mare and friend, an attorney to president trump, but twitter and facebook for that matter, killed the story. how and why was that decision made it twitter? why did they decide that this should not be a story that, that people could share? so internally, the, the excuse for stopping that story was that had violated the quote hacked materials policy, which is a policy that they do have. they had invoked it a couple of times, in fact they had done it that summer. unfortunately,

executives that the company pretty quickly came to the realization that that is not that excuse me, i'm not going to stand up. there was this material, it was not hacked. as you know, it's even if it was stolen, which there's no indication that it was you know, that's legal to do, right. journalist. there's a supreme court case, part nicky, v. bopper that allows you to publish stolen material. there was no indication that this is an old gentleman news story and as we see there were a number of executives you said something like, you know, to the, to the effective can we justify this according the policy? you know, the answer being no, but a number of executives advocated kind of watch and wait attitude. and as a result, they not only blocked that story for at least the day,

but they locked the new york post out of its own account for to watch. i think wow, the response to your twitter files reporting on the 100 by and laptop story was dramatic, and many americans were chomping at the bit to see what else you were in. the process of coming up with your next installment was about twitters decision to ban donald trump from the platform. what did you find there? so again, i made that decision, not because i was really interested in the relative justice or injustice of the decision to ban donald trump. but because i thought that in the back and forth about that decision, if there was some kind of government relationship with twitter that we would see it there. and we didn't see if, when we looked back, we started to see during that process during the process of looking at how they came to the trump position. slack chaps heading into the election in 2020,

where you would see little indentation of the, at the top of the messages that said, this is flag by d h s. this is like by the f b i. and then you would see a whole list of accounts and you know that and that right away told us something very significant that, you know, the, essentially, the twitter was in the business of processing requests that came from federal law enforcement agencies. now we didn't know a whole lot about that, but that was our 1st hand that we had to start looking more in that direction and trying to understand what that relationship was better. because clearly that was something there. we also learned in the process of, of looking at the trump decision a lot about shadow banning. i think the ordinary person, you know, when they think of that term, imagines that these companies have the ability to kind of dial up or dial down the,

you know, how much any account can be seen. well, that does exist. we found that out concretely, we were told by the people who actually run that function in the company. and they call it visibility filtering at twitter. and they have an extraordinary tool box of stuff that they can do to any, to completely control how visible one account is versus another. interestingly, donald trump, there were numerous visibility filtering tools that had been applied to him before the election of 2020 like what? before he was removed from the platform. wow, let me ask you, follow up about that to like, like many big companies, especially tech companies. you end up with a lot of people formerly from the cia or the f, b i or n s, a taking jobs in security or tech, or in the case of twitter as,

as general counsel. so have you been able to find whether or not these people were largely acting on their own because of their backgrounds or if they were being asked to take these decisions by their former organizations. so that's, that's a really good question. i don't have unfortunately, i don't have a great answer for you on that one, but i have my suspicions. let's put it that way. there's a key moment in the mail record. i've already published it where twitter for a while was trying to say no to the state department. the state department was selling them lists of accounts that they wanted flag does chinese or russian or any of this information. and essentially, there were some of the people at twitter were saying, no, we don't, we don't trust this. our, of the state department,

it's called the global engagement center. it's like a fledgling would be intel arm of state. and there's a moment where an employee at twitter says, yes, their conclusions are of the sort that i would normally say, let's just wait and wait for more evidence. but our window on that is closing and our government partners are becoming more aggressive. now. the executive who said that happens to have a background is, is one of i would say the 10 most prominent twitter executives and, and that decision was significant because it was the, it was one of the moments when twitter basically realized we can't say no anymore. right. and the fact that that came from a person with a ca background, who by the way, is not listed as having a ca, back or background. but it was, it was a joke that was sort of known in the company that and,

and referred to constantly. i thought that was pretty interesting, right? like, you know, you don't see the, the other communications and he's obviously not going to comment on it, but i thought it was interesting. agreed. we are speaking with investigative journalist, matt, tell me about the twitter files. you are watching whistleblowers, stay tuned. we have a lot more coming up the. 2 2 2 2 ah, ah, is your media a reflection of reality? in the world transformed what will make you feel safer?

isolation for community. are you going the right way or are you being that somewhere? direct? what is true? what is great? in the world corrupted, you need to descend a join us in the depths or remain in the shallow with the, with the clinician with no go. you have to be on

with mom. i spoke with order last was seeing the flash from. yeah, cuz i thought that was good enough. i just wondered, was it for a little record what's in which it is work for those who will do it? don't good with feet low on something more that will be less you would you do bye. ah, welcome back to the whistle blowers. i'm john carrie aka were speaking with investigative journalist matt t b who has broken several of these very important stories coming out of the twitter files. thanks again for being with us, matt. nick, you're having a young man. i believe that one of the most important things that you've uncovered

in your reporting is the level of cooperation between twitter executives and the f b i. the f. b. i reported several accounts to twitters trust and safety team for allegedly spreading election disinformation. many of those accounts had very few followers and so were influencing nobody and many were satirical in nature. these weren't propaganda sources for people. this contact between twitter and the f b, i was quite common with the f. b, i frequently making requests of twitter executives and twitter employees. after you reported on the relationship the f. b, i issued a statement in its own defense. but what do you believe was this relationship proper and appropriate? and even if it was, why was there so much secrecy surrounding it? i don't believe it was appropriate if, if it hadn't been appropriate, they would. they wouldn't have covered it up so much. you mentioned several

accounts. it wasn't several, it was thousands and thousands of requests and that came every day and it didn't just come from the f. b, i came from every when, when the government i saw requests ranging from, you know, everyone from the asia, just the treasury to the state, to the ca, to the essay, to the deal. you know, there's other wing to the d o d. and then every state government was also making requests through a different portal through the d h a through g h s, called the h s. i. and there were so many requests that they got one batch one day. and when they completed it, there was a sort of round of applause in the chat. twitter saying thanks everybody for completing this monumental undertaking. one of the other reporters, michael schellenberg, are found an email that where they talk about being twitter being paid 3400000

dollars one year for quote, processing requests. that seems like they were massively underpaid. and these people were basically morning tonight, in some cases, doing nothing but processing government requests. and they came from all over again . the, the foreign ones, the ones that i suspect came from, from quote unquote, on other government agencies. and these are just excel spreadsheets with, with thousands of names on them. and yeah, so it's amazing math. you've taken a lot of heat from the political left for your reporting. this has struck me. it's very odd because you're a lifelong progressive. but many in the democratic party in the u. s. have kind of a year with us, or you're with them attitude, they've accused you. and barry wice and glen greenwald, and others of jumping into bed with donald trump and the republicans,

just because you're reporting facts that are inconvenient for them. how have you felt about this? have you been surprised by some of the reactions? i'm in the, i mean, the degree of viciousness and dishonesty has been a little surprising. you know, the washington post came out and they actually had the temerity, they call me a, a conservative journalists. they tried to slide that in. not that, not that that's offensive, but it's certainly not an accurate description of me. the new york times basically said that mice, the problem with me is that my fan base had changed. i had not got along with narratives about trump's cooperation with russia. all of this stuff, both the personal attacks on me and the refusal of these companies to cover what is

clearly an important story is you know, they think they think they're doing something that hurts me. it hurts the media. it really just imputes their credibility and it adds to the snowballing phenomenon of loss of audience, which i think they all recognize, even before they started the i think you're right. hey, just as an aside on my radio show on sputnik, i often talk about criminal justice issues and a reporter at the washington post. listen to the show one day and wrote an article about sputnik and singled me out saying that by talking about these criminal justice issues, crooked judges, crooked cops, stuff like that, that i was weakening our democracy. i still am just amazed that they would say such a thing, but that's what we're up against. they think like that. yeah, they do really believe it. i think that's an indication of how,

how journalists today. thank. i mean, as you may know, i grew up in a family of journalists and once upon a time, the idea of telling everybody in your audience what the bad stuff was is part of your job like that is your job at a job is, is to tell people, when things are not going right. and only this new breed of journalist that imagines itself to be part of the group, the socially, the same people as the people they're covering. and so they feel it kind of kinship . that is defensive when, when there is an attack on, let's just say something like an improper relationship between the f b i and the n s a. and, you know, twitter 30 years ago you would never heard a journalist say that's not a story, but now they're like, oh my goodness, you can't tell people that ab, which is, you know, yep. it's, it's not, it's not,

i can't believe we gotten, we've gotten ourselves to this point. what else should we expect to see coming out of the twitter files? are there more big stories on the way? i hope so. i mean, we have a lot of stuff to go through. it's funny, it's not an easy process. we're, we're, we're doing this through a search process that's a little bit cumbersome, and time consuming, we have to read everything obviously. so that's tens of thousands of emails. but i think as we go, we're, we're regularly finding pieces to the puzzle that tell us a lot more about the nature of the relationship, not only between twitter and the government, but between other companies like states book and google and the government. we know how they're meeting, we know when they're meeting, we know what, what systems they're using to communicate and we know what they're talking about at

those meetings. finally, man, i have a personal question for you. you have a background that is unlike any other journalist i've ever known. you studied russian literature in russia. you lived in it was becky's done just after the fall of the soviet union, you even played professional baseball in russia and will basketball in mongolia. so how did you end up? not just in investigative journalism, but arguably at the top of your field. well, i don't know about that but, but look at again, my father was a reporter. i grew up around that he was, he was only 20 when i was born, so i got to see him through the prime of his career and you know i was, i went to newsrooms and i was a kid. so this, this business is always been in my blood. i love it. my, my father is very much an old school kind of reporter. you know, the stories,

the boss, he used to say in other words, like it doesn't matter where the facts point to whatever they are, you just run it right. and i, i believe very strongly in that i have kind of a soft spot for this business. and it's a wonderful thing to be part of if you, if you really put your all into it because you get to see the world and you get to be in the middle of all these events. and so yeah, it's gotten, it's allowed me to do everything from play basketball to clean elephant cages to work and mine, and work in a monastery to now what, you know, read the waterfalls. it's great and i strongly recommend it as a profession. if you approach it right away, yes indeed. see the world have a fun time. that's all we have for you today. i want to thank our guests, matt, tell you b for his generosity. and i want to thank you. are viewers for tuning in?

i'll leave you with a quote from another investigative journalist, glen greenwald. he said, secrecy is the linchpin of abuse of power. it's enabling force. transparency is the only real antidote. thanks again for joining us. i'm john curiosity and this has been the whistleblowers. ah. 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 i a joggers archipelago home at the jo, san diego garcia, the largest island in the archipelago is now the location of a very large u. s. military base. you get given med, dees, i, to the u. s. government to make the military base and just deported all of douglas and people from their country. so they called return back on the island. no,

but we are fighting. that's why i'm real fighting for the right. so i, we do not consider that the right to self determination actually applies to the trickle. since i don't the question of self determination, the legal advice we have received is actually the trickle. since we're not, i'm not a people for me, it's time to move on and see what we can do for the child. the said community to return back home knowledge support from the united nation. i commission, african united nish. i don't care about checklist and people a will not be forced to work on. we will not be on any kind of privilege of power ever seeing there for that not you have to think that by force

a body so that you can in your state of the international system. and i'm only happy hunting for case of a germany. he's vice chancellor accuses lot of you're not causing the energy crisis raging in europe, but critics claim for a lens only got itself to blame. a senior indian government minister accuses us for my join to pfizer, of having attempted to build a new delhi and providing legal protection from any side effects of its coven vaccine. also ahead on the program, a desk worker russian game along.