Transcript - America This Week, Jul 25, 2025: "The Unified Field Theory of American Corruption"

New document releases lift a veil, but also point to the unreported origin story of two major American scandals

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

Walter Kirn: And I’m Walter Kirn.

Matt Taibbi: Walter, this is going to be a fun one.

Walter Kirn: Yay. They’ve all been fun, and they’re getting funner.

Matt Taibbi: Yeah, this is the fun part. This is the comeuppance part. This is the revenge is a dish best served cold part, and I don’t know where it’s going to go exactly, but it sure is amusing in the meantime. So...

Walter Kirn: If it were a stock, if it were a stock, if I was looking at a technical chart of the stock called Disclosure, I would guess that we are at the beginning of a rally, a big rally.

Matt Taibbi: Right. Yeah. Yeah. I think the bulls are out. Let’s put it that way. So, before we get to all the stuff that happened this week and happened a little bit over last weekend, let’s go back in time. Let’s do our Austin Powers, or what is it? It’s Wayne’s World thing, right?

Walter Kirn: I can do it. Whoa.

Matt Taibbi: Yeah. Let’s go back in time to October of 2019, when a still viable presidential candidate named Tulsi Gabbard was suddenly blindsided with a Ronnie Lott style hit to the thorax by a former presidential candidate.

Norah O’Donnell: Now to an extraordinary development in the presidential campaign. Hillary Clinton, the 2016 nominee, called Tulsi Gabbard, one of the current candidates, “The favorite of the Russians.” Nancy Cordes is following this, and Nancy, what are we to make about all this?

Nancy Cordes: Well, Norah, Hillary Clinton did not mention Tulsi Gabbard by name, but an aide confirms that that’s who she was talking about when she made this stunning claim that the Russians had already hit on a way to meddle in the 2020 election, much in the same way they meddled in her election in 2016. On a podcast interview, Clinton said, “They’re grooming her to be the third party candidate. She’s the favorite of the Russians. They have a bunch of sites and bots and other ways of supporting her so far.” Clinton was referring to the fact that the Hawaii congresswoman gets a lot of attention from Kremlin linked media, just as Green Party candidate. Jill Stein did back-

Matt Taibbi: Russian asset. Yeah, yeah. And then there was a whole debate about what does asset mean, is that... It was just a weaselly enough word to avoid the accusation that we were saying, “Oh, you’re a Russian agent,” or something like that. But that was actually fast-forwarding a little bit. If we go back a little bit farther, to February, earlier that year, the day before Hillary... Sorry, the day before Tulsi is about to formally announce the running of her campaign, NBC came out with a gigantic hit piece on Tulsi Gabbard.

So here’s the story. “Russia’s propaganda machine discovers 2020 Democratic candidate, Tulsi Gabbard. Experts who track websites and social media linked to Russia have seen stirrings of a possible campaign of support for Hawaii Democrat Tulsi Gabbard.” If you sneak all the way down to the bottom of that story, you’ll find the name Clint Watts. Clint Watts was the front man for Hamilton 68. Walter, would you remember Hamilton 68?

Walter Kirn: Oh, I remember it all, man.

Matt Taibbi: Yeah.

Walter Kirn: I remember it all, like I do the abuse by my uncle. No, I’m just kidding. But it was, yeah, I have total traumatic recall because I remember Hamilton 68. I remember Prop or Not, I mean, I remember all of the attempt to screen us from this terrible Russian interference that had soaked into everybody Hillary Clinton didn’t like.

Matt Taibbi: So it says, “Watts and Alex Stamos,” remember Alex Stamos from Facebook? “I think the Russians may be gravitating to Gabbard, not because they think she can win, but because her positions, often in line with those of the Kremlin, will become part of the Democratic primary debates. ‘They probably just spotted her and figured this is someone to promote,’ Said Watts, who is also an NBC news analyst.”

Walter Kirn: Right.

Matt Taibbi: So this is... This...

Walter Kirn: Dude, dude, I mean, come on. The lack of evidence, the lack of even an attempt to give trimmings of credibility to this? He just... Whatever comes through Watts head is apparently worthy of complete credibility on the part of NBC. This is probably what they did.

Matt Taibbi: And remember, Watts was running an operation that was using a dashboard, a phony dashboard called Hamilton 68, that was designed to make it appear that Russian bots were supporting X, or Y, or Z figure.

Walter Kirn: Right.

Matt Taibbi: Really, inside that box, it turned out to be a whole bunch of ordinary people, largely conservatives, but people on the left as well, who were just simply interested in certain topics, and this was presented as Russian bots support this, Russian bots support that. Watts was the front man. One of the people who designed that dashboard was a guy named Jonathon Morgan, who was the CEO of a company called New Knowledge. Now, if you search for new knowledge, you’ll find also quoted in this piece. There it is, “Analyst at New Knowledge.”

Walter Kirn: I remember them too, and they’re still on our case, basically. Not in the form of New Knowledge, but in the form of former New Knowledge people.

Matt Taibbi: Former New Knowledge people whose names and -- we don’t want to go into all of them, because some of them deny they were ever part of this. “Within a few days of Gabbard announcing her presidential bid, Disinfo 2018, part of the cybersecurity firm New Knowledge, found that three of the top 15 URLs shared by the 800 social media accounts affiliated with known and suspected Russian propaganda operations directed at US Citizens were about Gabbard. So analysts at New Knowledge told NBC News, they’ve spotted chatter related to Gabbard and anonymous online message boards.” So this is a full-blown NBC hit piece.

Walter Kirn: This is Joe McCarthy’s sealed envelope. “Inside this computer, I have a network of spies, and you can all come out and identify yourself or I will at some future point.” I mean, one thing, Matt, just as an aside, the language of network computing, bots, putting cyber in front of things, all of that had a lot more impact back when they were doing this, and they really peppered their food heavily with it.

Matt Taibbi: Oh, I know. I know. There was as much sort of bullshit seasoning as they could was applied to this whole thing. So, all that happened, and you’re right, it was exactly like McCarthy. Remember the Manchurian candidate, its version of McCarthy, Senator Iceland, who couldn’t remember how many communists there were supposed to be in the envelope. So, his wife assigned him the number 57 because that was... He used Heinz 57 sauce. So, “There are 57 known communists.” That’s how many Russians were in the bot group, whatever. So they smeared the hell out of Tulsi Gabbard. They essentially destroyed her career. They booted her out of the Democratic Party. This was no joke.

Walter Kirn: And why?

Matt Taibbi: I mean, at the time, I think it was for a variety of reasons. I think she did not fall into the normal party line of a Democrat who is very strong on the expansionist national security front. She had friends in the wrong countries overseas. She wasn’t heavily into the Syrian engagement. There were other excuses, but mainly I think it was a personal animus thing, really.