Transcript - America This Week, Feb 21, 2025: "Looking Back on Trump's First Month"

With video appearances by Jon Stewart, Jen Psaki, an EPA official caught on tape, and a 990 form or two. Which set of lawbreakers is ahead? Plus, "The Fatalist," by Mikhail Lermontov

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

Walter Kirn: And I’m Walter Kirn.

Matt Taibbi: Walter, how you feeling? Any better?

Walter Kirn: Well, yeah, I’m recovering from my mystery respiratory ailment, but it has caused me to have to live in a large Las Vegas hotel casino for a week as I pamper myself and recover my breath. And I think this morning when I went down at 6:45 AM to get a cup of coffee in the lobby or in the casino, I realized that I was going crazy. It’s a little bit like being on a spaceship. A hamburger costs about 50 bucks, and the rituals and cycles of the Las Vegas casino world are not those of ordinary middle class life in America.

So, for example, this morning, the ladies of the evening we’re streaming out in their morning wear, which is the same as their evening wear, as I got my cup of coffee. They looked good. Not any of the worst for wear, going home to wherever they go to before they come back out at 1:00 in the morning, or night. And I just-

Matt Taibbi: More like probably 7:00 in the evening, I would think. But, yeah, go ahead.

Walter Kirn: Yeah, 7:00 in the evening, whenever. My mom was a night nurse, and it’s a lot like being a night nurse in a major hospital, except the hospital is that of white businessmen in their 60s who attend the-

Matt Taibbi: Touchy white businessmen.

Walter Kirn: ... yeah, the conventions and gatherings of Las Vegas. But anyway, having been saturated by this atmosphere for over a week while being in my room taking strong antibiotics, I’m now officially insane. Much more than you usually catch me on the show. And it’s 7:00 in the morning here, so let’s rock and roll.

Matt Taibbi: Yeah. Well, look, casinos are designed to disorient you so that you don’t know that it’s time to step away from the table and go to sleep or feed your children, or whatever it’s you’re supposed to be doing. You’re not supposed to see the windows.

Walter Kirn: Yeah.

Matt Taibbi: So, the desired effect has been produced. So, yay casino.

Walter Kirn: Yeah.

Matt Taibbi: All right. It’s been yet another avalanche of stuff just pouring out this week. We did a show on Monday that was largely in reaction to the confrontation over Europe and JD Vance’s speech.

Walter Kirn: Right. Right.

Matt Taibbi: And then the 60 minutes lunacy afterwards. We missed a few things, apparently, from that show it turns out because there was some other weirdness that went on there. But the headline right now continues to be just this avalanche of stuff that’s coming out about how government operates. Now, there’s two different... There’s a couple of quick stories that we should probably get to before we get into the meat of the matter.

One, there was a story that came out actually last week about the UK demanding that Apple give it backdoor access to personal information. And interestingly enough, the Washington Post broke this story. And not only did they break the story, but Ron Wyden of the Democrats asked that the United States stand up to the UK and ask that Tulsi Gabbard stand up to these requests. There was also, I believe it was Amnesty International did a press release about this.

So, a lot of these organizations and people who haven’t been there through a lot of these international censorship/surveillance controversies are suddenly showing up, which is interesting. Here’s Amnesty’s, “Encryption order threatens global privacy rights.” They’ve been okay on this issue, but not great.

So, just so that people know, the law that’s being invoked by the British here is called the Investigatory Powers Act, and it’s a real thing. We encountered it in the Twitter files. Oddly enough, through a series of communications about UK’s football policing unit, Britain wanted backdoor information about soccer hooligans. And there was a big internal discussion in Twitter about it. And then there was another discussion when Australia was thinking about pushing a similar law to this Investigatory Powers Act, which is like the template for how you get the super private encrypted information. So, this is a real thing.

But what’s interesting, Walter, is the whole idea that Vance speech was the United States standing up to these repressive, intrusive laws that are designed to either censor material or conduct surveillance or make blacklists or break encryption, right? That’s what the whole arrest of Pavel Durov was about, right? The telegram, CEO in France. That was considered somehow a partisan thing at the time. So, what do you think? I mean, is there a sea change? Are Americans suddenly deciding to stand up for privacy again?

Walter Kirn: Well, Vance has made it an issue, and I think he did so without partisan considerations, but also because it makes him distinctive. And I think he sees that things are going to get worse and have already gotten terrible. I’m cheered that Ron Wyden, who I saw at the Kennedy RFK hearings being extremely partisan, is able to find common cause that makes me happy. But whether or not we push back in general, I’m still worried we won’t. The security forces that come up behind these issues usually have gotten their way-

Matt Taibbi: They have. Yep.

Walter Kirn: ... and have they been disempowered in some fundamental way? I’m not sure, but I will be optimistic for the moment. Britain seems to be the worst offender, almost, in this regard. And they’re so close to us that I sometimes wonder if their intrusions and their surveillance capabilities are shared. This Five Eyes is still a murky matter for me. And when I realized how it actually works, that there are terminals, say, in Washington that the British are allowed to access that we aren’t. In other words, there’s a legal fiction by which they can stand near something that Americans aren’t allowed to inspect and inspect it themselves as though they won’t turn around and give it to us.

Matt Taibbi: And then pass it on to us.

Walter Kirn: Yeah.

Matt Taibbi: I mean, that’s another way around the whole jurisdictional issue with FISA and some of the other laws, right? But same thing with this stuff.

Walter Kirn: So, I guess what I’m saying is that I worry that it’s you lock the door and it comes in through the window, and that the confrontations we’re having, I’m hoping, are fundamental and substantial rather than a theatrical cover for an ongoing kind of cooperation that really nullifies any advantage you might have in any one country from more strict policies and so on.

Matt Taibbi: Yeah, and we talked about this on Monday. The gist of Vance’s speech was not only that Europe had to stop doing this stuff, but whoever was sponsoring these European programs. And if you look at a lot of the censorship laws, the de-encryption laws, the surveillance laws, the anti-terrorist speech laws, the design of the common databases of what they call cross-digital transparency acts, where they’re trying to have basically a shit list for people who misbehave on one list so that they don’t go to another place, they call that platform migration. The design is suspiciously consistent across all of these countries, and especially the ones that are allied with us. So, one begins to wonder, did we have a role or do we have a role in some of these types of laws or requests and that sort of thing, right? So that would require somebody from within the intelligence community to actually stand up to requests from UK’s investigatory powers, authority.

Walter Kirn: What I’m not clear here is this left to Apple’s discretion to some degree, whether or not they cooperate?

Matt Taibbi: No.

Walter Kirn: They have no choice, right?

Matt Taibbi: They have no choice. They have to cooperate. And, again, we saw communications where Twitter had to cooperate. They were talking about, “Did they have any room to not cooperate?” And they came to the conclusion in a couple of cases that they could not cooperate. They could decide not to send information if, for instance, the user did not reside in the UK, but if they did, they had to.

Walter Kirn: And has Apple shown a tendency to be aggressive in this cooperation or reluctant? In other words, do they just open a door and flip a switch or do they retain any discretion?

Matt Taibbi: I don’t know. I haven’t seen... Apple has not been a leader in demanding that people get off their back.

Walter Kirn: Right.

Matt Taibbi: Not that I’ve seen. It’s possible that they have, but they aren’t even in this case, really, or they’re not in the front of this whole business. They have other politicians.

Walter Kirn: So, who is Wyden asking to stand up? Who can stand up? Who is able to?

Matt Taibbi: So, let’s look at the quote from Wyden. Wyden and Biggs, and Andy Biggs, the Arizona Republican senator, and they co-wrote a letter essentially on behalf of Apple. “If Apple is forced to build a back door in its products, that back door will end up in American’s phones, tablets, and computers, undermining the security of American’s data as well as of the countless federal, state and local government agencies that entrust sensitive data to Apple products,” the men wrote.

And again, it’s just an interesting development. I mean, I guess they’re saying Wyden has been a leading voice against this. Maybe he has, I don’t remember it, but this fight over what they call transparency and access, this has been going on for years. It was the subtext of that whole Taylor Lorenz thing about Clubhouse. If you remember, we can’t have these places that can’t be instantly searched by algorithms. So, that means podcasts and encrypted platforms and that sort of thing.

Walter Kirn: That’s right. Yeah. Yeah.

Matt Taibbi: So, it would be a welcome development if we actually stood up in this case.

Walter Kirn: Well, as a political phenomena, Vance really, in a front-facing way, is trying to own the issue. It would be my suggestion to Democrats that they might want to reclaim at low cost, their traditional concern for American civil liberties. And this might be one way for them to come back from the absolute value of despond that they now find themselves in. I’d like to see that because I’d like to see these issues addressed robustly. And I don’t see how they can be without some bipartisan support, ultimately, because even though Vance was issuing a warning to Europe and to the American deep state, unless this becomes a point of solidarity between the parties, it’s always going to be a problem. That the Democrats abandoned it is shameful, shocking, and I would think that they could climb back into some sort of respectability by being aggressive again on the matter.

Matt Taibbi: Yeah. Who’s better at triangulating than Clintonian Democrats, right?

Walter Kirn: Yeah.

Matt Taibbi: And all you have to do is put a picture of Keir Starmer on the other side of it, and people will throw tomatoes at it. If you tell them that he’s asking for access to your iPhone, yeah, sorry.

Walter Kirn: Yeah.

Matt Taibbi: Anyway, interesting development. Okay, so in other news last week I did a story about this weird caper involving the EPA moving 20 billion to Citibank, ultimately. There was a whole back story to this, which is crazy. I didn’t break the story that they did. Lee Zeldin is the new EPA chief put out a video basically talking about how he was outraged. Now, the whole back story is necessary to explain the new developments and it’s also funny. So, if we could just show the... This all started, believe it or not, with a Project Veritas video involving a Biden official, EPA official named Brent Efron, and he is sitting here holding a tangerine colored cocktail and discussing the problem of what are we going to do with all this money we haven’t spent yet.