Transcript - America This Week, August 1, 2025: "Durham Declassified: History's Stupidest Political Conspiracy Unmasked"

Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, the FBI, the CIA, and the news media are exposed as a conspiracy of dunces in another document release. Also, "Candide" by Voltaire

Matt Taibbi: All right. Welcome to America This Week. I’m Matt Taibbi.

Walter Kirn: Hey, Matt. I’m Walter Kim.

Matt Taibbi: America This Week comes out on Friday, usually at around 9:00 A.M., but we tape it usually at 10:00 A.M. on Thursday. So what happened at 10 A.M. on Thursday this week, just as we were about to do our normal show, about a bunch of stuff, including a new whistleblower statement released by Tulsi Gabbard, the long-awaited classified annex to special counsel John Durham’s report, there was a-

Walter Kirn: Supposedly found in a burn bag in a secret office inside the FBI, correct?

Matt Taibbi: Right, yes. The burn bag stuff. Look, we have to dig into what this material really is. But we found out about 20 minutes before 10:00, thanks to a note from Senator Grassley’s office telling us that the material was embargoed until 10:00, so the whole world just got stuff as we’re taping the show. We haven’t read it yet. We don’t know what’s in it. But we’re going to look, because in the frantic few minutes we had before getting ready to tape, we saw a few bits and pieces that are pretty explosive, so we’re just going to go through it. What’s the term, Walter? Without fear or favor? Without? What’s the-

Walter Kirn: Without fear or favor, yes. You got that right.

Matt Taibbi: Without fear or favor.

Walter Kirn: Yeah.

Matt Taibbi: Okay. The significance of all this stuff, and for those who don’t remember, John Durham was a Special Prosecutor, I guess we call them a Special Counsel now, who was detailed to investigate the origins of the Trump-Russia scandal. I’d actually be curious to see how they even described the assignment, because I don’t remember it. But most people remember it for not ending with fireworks. There was one prosecution involving an FBI lawyer named Kevin Clinesmith, who got dinged for leaving some stuff out in the warrant application about Carter Page.

But, this stuff, and you may remember, I think last week we talked about our unified field theory about Russiagate and how it probably all in some way comes back to this quote-unquote “trove of information” that the Russians supposedly had. We know they had it, because James Comey even testified that he announced the end of the email investigation early, because of fears of what might come out in this material. But we never heard anything about this stuff existing or being discussed before July of 2016, and we never got too many specifics about what was in that material.

Now, we find out that it started way before July of 2016, that the FBI personnel, including Andrew McCabe, got a bunch of intelligence. I’m just going to read out how this is described in Grassley’s letter, which is not on screen right now. I’m looking at it, but just hang on folks.

“In 2016, the Obama administration obtained intelligence information from a source contained in two separate memoranda, one memorandum from January 2016 and another from March 2016. The two memoranda ‘describe confidential conversations’ between then-Democratic National Committee Chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz and two individuals at the Open Society Foundations named Leonard Bernardo and Jeffrey Goldstein.”

Now, the bullet points of the Grassley memo say, “The January 2016 memorandum noted, in part, that President Barack Obama intended to scuttle the FBI’s investigation into Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server and mishandling of highly classified information during her time as Secretary of State.” That’s supposedly on page three of this memorandum of the stuff here. What do we see, Mystery Producer, on page three? Walter, do you want to read any of that stuff?

Walter Kirn: Well, you mean from the redacted paragraph or the underlying?

Matt Taibbi: Let’s see. Yeah, just start with the redacted paragraph, I think. I think we have to explain what this is. This is the United States. This is Durham describing and characterizing intelligence that apparently they got from a source, I think.

Walter Kirn: Right. “These reports referenced purported communications of Bernardo and others. In particular,” redacted, “2016, T1 provided the U.S government with two,” redacted, “memoranda that described ‘confidential conversations’ between then-Democratic National Committee Chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz and two individuals at the Open Society Foundation (referred to in the memoranda as the Soros Foundation, i.e. (i) Bernardo and Jeffrey Goldstein, who according to public sources, was senior policy advisor for Eurasia at the Open Society Foundation. The January 2016 memorandum, which was in Russian,” redacted, “stated in relevant part: On January 12th of this year, during a confidential discussion with Jeffrey Goldstein, a representative of the Soros Foundation on Eurasia, Democratic National Committee Chairman Debbie Wasserman Schultz characterized the situation in her party in light of the growing scandal surrounding Hillary Clinton as follows: Information released to the media in the last few days about FBI investigating possible corruption relating to Department of State under the leadership of Clinton, preferential treatment of donors of the Clinton Foundation caused a significant negative reaction inside the party. At the same time, the leadership of the Democratic Party had known about the information since June of 2015. According to Wasserman Schultz, FBI, so far, does not have persuasive evidence against Hillary Clinton because of the timely deletion of relevant data from mail servers.

Obama has no intention to darken the final part of his presidency and ‘legacy’ by the scandal surrounding the main contender from the Democratic Party. To solve the problem, the President puts pressure on FBI Director James Comey through Attorney General Lynch, however, so far without concrete results.

Comey gravitates toward Republicans and apparently intends to prolong the investigation, so the scandal would keep going until the presidential election to jeopardize the chances of the Democratic Party to win the presidential race.”

Matt Taibbi: All right, and so just so everyone’s clear on what this is, this is a human source giving material that appears to, it’s a Russian analysis of conversations between Debbie Wasserman Schultz and a pair of people from the Open Society Foundation. Now, later on, Durham, apparently, at one point in the memo, there’s an assessment of the veracity of the communications, but we have to remember what we just read there, Walter, what you just read there, I think it’s a Russian analysis of real communications. But, already, not good. Already, there’s some stunning stuff just on the face of it. The fact that this comes from January 2016, they had this, is pretty stunning, isn’t it?

Walter Kirn: It is. What’s interesting about it is, of course, we didn’t know Donald Trump would be the nominee in January 2016, did we?

Matt Taibbi: No.

Walter Kirn: So the thought that the guy who we’re going to find out, or they’re going to allege is the Russian patsy or stooge, which is what they’re going to allege, would win, while they have knowledge of the fact that their own communications have been intercepted by the Russians, is a little convenient. It would suggest that anyone who got the nomination might end up getting accused of being a Russian stooge. If this is a save Hillary and not darken Obama’s legacy campaign that we’re seeing the beginnings of, who will be the foil in this? Any Republican nominee, or just Donald Trump by some accident? Had someone else won, had Ted Cruz won, would he have been a Russian spy?