The Problem With Jon Stewart - The Problem Isn’t Biden or Trump. It’s How America Keeps Secrets.

Episode Date: January 25, 2023

The media is chasing the classified documents fiasco like it’s spy vs. spy, Trump vs. Biden. But on this week’s episode, we’re breaking down the absurdity of a national security system that makes it so darn easy to hoard classified documents. We’re joined by Matthew Connelly, professor of history at Columbia and author of The Declassification Engine: What History Reveals About America’s Top Secrets. He gives us the inside scoop on how unwieldy our system for keeping state secrets has become, who it’s really designed to protect, and how we might revamp it so that it can actually, you know, keep a secret. Plus, writers Jay Jurden and Robby Slowik run through the documents the FBI found at Pence’s house—and why they’re going to make Mother very angry. Season 2 is now streaming on Apple TV+.CREDITS
Hosted by: Jon Stewart Featuring, in order of appearance: Robby Slowik, Jay Jurden, Matthew Connelly Executive Produced by Jon Stewart, Brinda Adhikari, James Dixon, Chris McShane, and Richard PleplerLead Producer: Sophie EricksonProducers: Zach Goldbaum, Caity GrayAssoc. Producer: Andrea Betanzos Sound Engineer: Miguel CarrascalSenior Digital Producer: Freddie MorganDigital Producer: Cassie MurdochDigital Coordinator: Norma HernandezSupervising Producer: Lorrie BaranekHead Writer: Kris AcimovicElements Producer: Kenneth HullClearances Producer: Daniella PhilipsonSenior Talent Producer: Brittany MehmedovicTalent Manager: Marjorie McCurryTalent Coordinator: Lukas ThimmSenior Research Producer: Susan Helvenston Theme Music by: Gary Clark Jr.The Problem with Jon Stewart podcast is an Apple TV+ podcast, produced by Busboy Productions. https://apple.co/-JonStewart

I want Robby to say the thing he was scared to say. Robby, what did you actually want to say? Just that the only way this could be better for the Republicans, if it ends up, there's video of Hunter Biden fucking the document. You know? Boy, howdy. All right, everybody, welcome back to the podcast,

The Problem with John Stuart, The Problem. Don't forget to watch the Apple TV Plus show. More episodes are coming. We're currently making them. I shouldn't even be saying that. That's a state secret. That's redacted, which brings us to today's podcast. Classified documents.

It is all the rage. Who is worse? Trump or Biden? How could this be that one is refusing to cooperate and give back the boxes he took from his office, whereas the other one just fucking throws it by the car in his garage? We're going to be talking to Matthew Connelly,

who's a professor of international global history at Columbia University. He has written a book called The Declassification Engine, what history reveals about America's top secrets. And he is about to make bank. He couldn't have written a more apropos and timely book. I think it comes out real soon. But first, we're going to talk to Robby Slowick and Jay Jordan,

our fabulous writers. Hello. Hey, everybody. Are you just a flutter over the news of classified documents? I went in for a colonoscopy this weekend. I have top secret. Apparently what they found, no polyps. Inside.

Inside. I didn't even know I had it. Top secret. You're going to have to hand those over to the FBI, John. They're in there right now. John, I have bad news. If they found them in there, that's not a top secret. That's a bottom secret.

Jay, beautifully done. Well done. This is now Mike Pence apparently has classified information. It is house. The Mike Pence information, the classified docs were just ladies in suggestive dress. I think that's what they found. I think a woman was wearing, she shaved above the knee.

And I think he's in big trouble. He is not allowed to read documents unless his wife is present. Please, please don't show mother my phone. Can I ask, have either of you ever been fired? Ooh. I've had a company close and I was one of the people who was let go, but I've never been fired, fired. Wait a second, John, why are you saying this today

on the podcast this way? Let me explain. OK. Yes. I've been fired a lot. I've been canceled. I've had a show with my name on it where they called down and go, get the fuck out of the building.

And we're changing the locks. And I never took shit that later on I'd be like, oh, I shouldn't have taken that shit. Like, I've had to evacuate in the manner that is like, the place is on fire, get out. And I never took shit that wasn't mine. These guys, you lose in November. You don't leave until January.

You're telling me, and all the shit that you're not supposed to take has giant letters on it that say, don't take this. How the fuck does this happen? I'm going to play double to advocate for these guys here. Please. They live there. How many times have you moved?

A bunch of shit you didn't expect to take makes it over to the next place. You show a find a team building shirt from an event in 97. You're like, this should have gone in the trash. But it was mine. That's true. It wasn't. I don't find Viacom and MTV folders or their property,

especially if it says that. Like, this is crazy. In Trump's defense, he wasn't planning to leave on the day he had to leave. That guy packed in a hurry. So here's was more a case of just emotional denial and upset. Yes. But can I tell you why I think this

is why it's hard for me to care is because we just overclassify. That's what this guy's going to talk about today, is that the whole system is utterly busted. Like some classified stuff is so kind of like tangential or circumstantial. They're like, well, the reason we can't keep this napkin is because now we're going to know what restaurant we can never go back.

You know, it's like, oh, yeah, no, it's all it's it's a web. And I'm sure. Listen, if there's a little note that's like men, I've killed while president. OK, I'll give you that. But I will say I loved I love the Biden slow drip here. He's like a magician just pulling the handkerchief constantly, but it's just classified documents.

Like every time you think it's done. Only a slow drip. Yeah, because the media is broken. Yes. Yeah, it's broken. Nobody has any idea of the context of this. And all they're doing now is talking about. They're trying to one up.

Trump had them in a storage facility. Biden had them by his car. Trump had them in a toaster oven. He was giving them out like mints at the end of a meal at a diner. Like or or they're talking about like, does this make the 2024 match up more even? Yes, like they're fucking broken. But it's also like I don't want to minimize this,

but you're telling me a 70 or a year old and an 80 year old to have stuff at the old house. I believe it. I believe there. I also expect Biden to be like and also could you check in the check in the fridge in the garage? I think it's some good deer meat in there. It's not going to go bad.

Try that. That's such a great defense that it was in the garage with the Corvette. No one goes in there besides my mechanic, Sergeyev, you know? That guy can do an oil change with just a document scanner. It's amazing. I think the best defense that I've heard so far is the one Jay just proffered, which is, I'm old. Yeah.

I don't know. Yeah. Some of it could easily be like his grandkids birthday cards. Like there's so much stuff sometimes that when they keep finding stuff, they're like six items, but they haven't specified. So like here's the difference for me is that Trump was like, hey, take a look. Have y'all seen these? And Biden was like, hey, someone look.

Have y'all seen these? Here's the part I can't get over. It's all fucking stamped. It's all stamped classified. So if anybody in any way is sorting this shit, it feels like you would take that stuff and put it to one side. And it just speaks to me of the entitlement that comes from that position, that that position is, we all like to point at Nixon and say, when he says it's not

illegal if the president does it. But the truth is they all fucking think that way, every single one of them. Do you think that it's like kind of unspoken rules? Do you think it's malevolence? I don't think it's malevolence. I think it is the entitlement that comes in. It's like this. And the only other business that I've ever been around that's like this is show business.

Have you ever been to a premiere and you see, and there's some seats, even in the heightened world of show business, that are taped off. And that's where Scott Rudin's going to sit. But if somebody tries to sit there, everybody who's all dressed in black and wearing their headsets fucking goes bananas. And because security has been breached, this artificial bar that should never have been set in the first place because it's just set based on entitlement and ego. And if you breach this clearance that's arbitrary, the whole place goes bananas.

That's what I think it is. I don't think it's malevolence. I think it's a manner of being accustomed to a position where if you press a button, they have to bring you a diet coke. This is like what you talk about. This is like orthodoxy. These are rules that we've ingrained where we go, oh, we can't do anything different ever. I think they also know, but they know they've seen the unredacted docs.

They know it's bullshit. So they're not as careful as they should be because they know it's just newspaper articles and open source intelligence half the time. So they're careless with them. This guy, we're going to get to the bottom of all of your questions there. We're going to talk to our guest. He is Matthew Connolly, a professor of history, and he's written a book about this. So we're going to get to him now, guys, and we'll figure it all out.

Okay, we are talking to our guest, Matthew Connolly. He's a professor of international and global history, which feels redundant to me, but this is Columbia University, and they know what they're doing for God's sakes. He is the author of, it's called The Declassification Engine, What History Reveals About America's Top Secrets, and it may be the most presciently timed book ever written. Matthew Connolly, welcome to the problem.

Good to be here, John. How long were you working on this book about America's classification system? I've been working on the book for about seven years, but the research goes back a decade. I started out all the way back in 2013, but even before then, for decades, I've been working on declassified documents and kind of driving myself crazy with them. Now, when the Donald Trump case about classified documents came up,

and then obviously the Biden case about classified documents came up, how often did you walk around your apartment shouting Ka-ching, and just making it rain around Columbia University and generally Morningside Heights? Yeah, well, I don't normally thank former President Trump, but he really did me a solid in this case. Now, having said that, we've had scandals, maybe not of this magnitude, but for sure, if you think about whether it was the Republican National Committee email

or the IRS not being able to find their email, I mean, those are cases where either they were producing lots of information they didn't want anybody else to look at, or when somebody wanted to look at it, they somehow found that it couldn't be found. And so the most famous maybe even before the whole Trump affair was Hillary Clinton and her email. So we've seen a lot of these scandals, and it's just, if anything, it's just accelerating. Now, in terms of scandal, and I'll take everybody's word for it that these are scandals rather than just interesting narratives for the media to focus on or hyper-focus on,

and watching them draw distinctions between Trump and Biden, and watching them explain why this is the most important thing that's happened to the country. The thing I can't figure out is the Barack Obama administration, they prosecuted more people under the Espionage Act than anybody in history, maybe even cumulatively. Edward Snowden had to flee to Russia. What is the difference? I don't understand what keeping a classified document in your corvette or in your, let's say, walled fortress of a country club. Why are we even wringing our hands about this?

Well, I mean, for sure, I think there's special treatment, right? And there has been for a long time. If you look, for instance, let's take the example of when people write their memoirs, right? And when they're really important people, maybe they were senior officials, they had access to lots of secrets. So what do they do? They go out and they talk to their agent, they talk to their publishers, and they drum up big advances because they're telling us that they're going to tell all, right? They're going to tell us things we didn't know before. Secrets. Because these were secrets, right? Because otherwise, like, is it their writing talent?

Usually not. Oh, I don't know if you've read my Pompeo's. I've not yet had the pleasure. I don't want to say Tolstoy, yes. Yeah, but just think of it, there are lots of people. There's 1.3 million people in America now have a top secret security clearance. Wait, how many? 1.3 million, a top secret security clearance.

Tops can see anything. Well, anything that's classified top secret where they are determined to have a need to know. Let's walk back. What are America's classification categories? Okay, so I'll give you the rundown. So there's top secret. That is the top. It's the top of the top secret. It's got the word top in it. There are people who will say that, oh, this was sensitive compartmentalized information.

That means it was even more top secret than top secret. What? And this is just an example of this whole culture of secrecy. These people really get into this stuff, telling you about all the gradations and the special access programs. But the way to think of it, to the extent that's possible with something as complicated as this, is that it's a little bit like a matrix. So there are levels of secrecy. There's top secret. There's secret. There's confidential. There's controlled, unclassified information. So there are these different levels. But then there are also these silos.

So there are all these different programs, many of them special access programs where you have to be read in. You have to have what they call a need to know to have access to the secrets that are in that silo. And apparently just telling people that we have those programs can get you sent to Russia or can make you live in an embassy somewhere in, you know, it's wild. If you're one of those people who's been read in and you had access to that information and then you go out and you tell somebody we have this program and you tell them what it is, then for sure you can be prosecuted under the Espionage Act. So what's been happening,

like you said, is in recent years, more and more people are getting prosecuted under the Espionage Act. And you're absolutely right. Under Barack Obama, there are more prosecutions under the Espionage Act than in all previous administrations combined. Combined? Yes. Oh, so I thought I made that up, but no, it's true. Now I feel, now, I mean, you have, Chelsea Manning was sentenced to 30 some years under the Espionage Act for passing things to WikiLeaks. And now Assange himself is under threat of prosecution. And if you believe that he's a

journalist, and many people do, he's the first journalist now to be threatened with prosecution under the Espionage Act. So not just the sources. But didn't I, I thought that the Obama administration also threatened journalists with prosecution. You're right. There, there were threats, but it's a follow-through. But they didn't go through with it. Yes. And most of the things that we learn from, from all this are things we already know. They're generally, they are not particularly exposing of state secrets. So is it merely the act of showing it to somebody or having it in your possession?

Well, when you read in the law, you know, there's language like, you know, to, you know, further the interests of a foreign power, right? And that can be important. So, you know, like, let's say if somebody accidentally disclosed something, or they, in the case, you know, many people think with President Biden, they think he mishandled classified information. So that's a different matter. And typically it's a much less serious offense. So mishandling is, would be considered a misdemeanor in the world of classification, passing that so that the public finds out this information, whether a whistleblower or otherwise, that's considered the felony. Well, this is the time I say that I am not a lawyer.

So you don't want to get your legal advice from me. I have an honorary doctorate, so I'm just going to say that I'm, that I'm correct. Yeah, but, you know, working in this space, I have, you know, had the experience, you know, reading legal briefs, you know, about what it is you can get prosecuted for. You know, so for an example, when I first started out, I mentioned how it was about 10 years ago, I got together with some colleagues in the statistics department and computer science. And we had this idea, hey, you know, there's all the secrecy. And there are millions now, millions of declassified documents. And who knows how many still classified billions, probably. And we thought, you know, why don't

we begin using like these data science tools to get to the bottom of this? Like what, let's start figuring out like what is like an actual top secret? And what is really something that's already in the public domains, people, you know, things that people should already know. And what we found is that there are lawyers out there, you know, former government lawyers, you know, one of them was the general counsel at the NSA. Another one was they had a major crimes at the southern district. These lawyers told us that we could get prosecuted under the espionage act just for analyzing declassified documents. You know, so it's not just like, yes, I keep you down in God's name, you can be prosecuted for espionage by analyzing declassified information.

That's the theory. That doesn't make any sense. If you go to a very fancy law school, it's got to be a fancy one. It has to be fancy. And you get paid $1,000 an hour. You can come up with all kinds of theories, right? And these are the same institutions that are hoovering up every piece of information that you have in your life. In other words, after the Patriot Act, Americans have no privacy. There is nothing classified in terms of information for Americans. The government is welcome to suck it up into giant tubes and wherever it is that they store it in windowless buildings in the desert. But if you even read the things that they've declassified, they will fuck you up. Yeah. I mean, in this case, the argument was that we were using new

technology, which is true. And we had access to vastly more data than anyone did before. And that's true too. But their argument was that this really, that quantitative change as great as it is brings a qualitative difference. But at the end of the day, they even agreed that really, it would be an overzealous, maybe overambitious prosecutor who would try to bring such a case. Because luckily, in America, we have this thing called the First Amendment. And luckily, No, I'm not. I haven't read up on this. So you're going to have to. It's the first one, John. Come on. You don't have to get, just read. Yeah. So anyway, the other I'm actually getting through the preamble right now. So that's this year's.

Yeah, it goes on, right? Yeah. But anyway, so there's also legal precedent that academics, and luckily I am one, journalists too, we're allowed to seek out the truth. And we're even allowed to take certain chances, take risks in trying to discover things, create new knowledge. And so luckily, the Supreme Court a long time ago agreed that you have to let academics do this. Because if you're not even going to let professors look around and try to find stuff. Then why did reality winner go to jail? All she did was she told us about a program that the Russians had. It wasn't even an American program. It was that the Russians were interfering with our elections. Right. Well, in her case, the sad thing is that when she signed up to work in that position

and have access to government documents, secret documents, she had to pledge to protect that information. And it's part of the whole culture, right? Is when you're inducted into this world, you know, the secret world. Yes, the secret, cloistered world of 1.4 million Americans, this vast, it's like not to get to the last of us, but it's like the mycelium, the threads of the espionage and declassification and classification world that are, this is a vast network of vascularity. Right. And, you know, when you think of it, it sounds implausible, right? And there are millions more, by the way, millions more who have other levels of security clearance, whether it's for secret or confidential. There are more people who have security clearances

even at the top secret level than live in the District of Columbia. Who decides? Who decides that something is top secret? How much clearance is that the grand pooba of clearances that then can look? Who decides? All right. You ready to go into the strange world with me? Oh, okay. Matt, you finally, you bring it, baby. All right. So, John, let's say that you would like a job, you know, in the Biden administration, right? And you might even want to work, you know, in the Pentagon say, why not, right? So, what you have to find out is if you're going to be able to get your security clearance. So, first, you know, they have to want you for the job, and then you have to go through this long ordeal. You have to fill out a form. Last I checked, I think it's

138 pages long. You have to fill out this. A security clearance form is 138 pages long. Yeah. And your friends and family are going to get interviewed by the FBI. Typically, you're going to have to do a long face-to-face interview, talk about all of your gambling, John, all of your substance abuse issues, and everything that could potentially... Good thing I don't want to work there. I know, right? Me neither. But yes, they're trying to find all these ways in which you could potentially, you know, be vulnerable to blackmail. But it has the effect at the same time. Like, I don't know if you've ever belonged, you know, to any kind of... You wouldn't tell me, right? But any kind of

secret society or fraternity... Oh, sure. No, I'm in a ton of those. Right? Too many. But they have their rituals, right? And one of the first things they want is for you to give up your secrets, right? So it has this effect of like making people feel like... I think that's... Isn't that how Scientology works? I think that's kind of the whole game. So wait, they want to know everything about you. I mean, in the old days, you know, look, people that were gay weren't allowed to have security clearance. You know, obviously, it was a ridiculous bar of entry for that. But what makes them think that using drugs ever makes you vulnerable to blackmail or you're a security risk?

Well, this is an example of how it reflects a certain kind of culture. When you think of it, this whole system was created in the 1940s and 50s, right? And so the people in charge of the system, they had a certain sense of what does a loyal American look like? You know, what do they talk like? And surprise, surprise. But it turns out that, you know, people who were alcoholics, you know, back in the day, people used to call them womanizers, like people would have serial affairs and so on. You know, these people didn't seem to have problems. It was all fine. Yeah. Was this based on communism? Was this whole idea based on sort of anarchists and communists and trying to weed out the Reds in our government or the undesirables?

The way it worked, it was especially difficult for people who were, say, second-generation immigrants, right? Now, that's not to say that plenty of second-generation immigrants didn't get security clearance. It's like J. Robert Oppenheimer is a famous example. Well, sure. He went to the right schools, you know. And he was making the right thing. Right. He was making the top, and you needed guys like that, right? That's right. So they would have meetings and be like, you know, this guy's Irish. I don't know how we, I don't know if we can trust this Irish fella. They put all the Irish in the FBI. Interesting. Who designed this classification and clearance regime? Is it designed by Hoover?

Was it designed by who made it? Yeah. So there were a lot of cooks in the kitchen. But in terms of like the whole system and how it first got worked out, you know, in terms of levels of clearance and also like the silos of information and the way you had to get these FBI interviews and clearance checks and the rest of it, all that started with the Manhattan project. Oh, wow. And so the Manhattan project was like the prototype. And then that system propagated itself until eventually it took over, you know, much of our government. Let me just tell you one other thing about Oppenheimer, though. So just recently, the Department of Energy, a little late, but they decided that they're going to void the revocation of

J. Robert Oppenheimer's security clearance. Because many years ago, I think it was 1954, Oppenheimer fell out of step with the rest of the National Security Establishment. He didn't want to build hydrogen bombs, right? He thought that the U.S. had to share nuclear technology in order to prevent nuclear war. And so they found ways to drive him out. And the way they did it was by stripping him of his security clearance. Now, the interesting thing is that, you know, they pointed out how he had relatives, you know, who were communists in some cases and other cases, just for civil libertarians. But, you know, one of the people they put on the three-man, and they're all men, of course, you know, one of the men they put on this three-panel jury.

Well, you know why? The ladies gab. I don't know who that. Back in the 40s and 50s, the ladies would gab. Oh, don't get me started, John. But one of the three, he said, you know, in my experience, security risks tend to be Jews, right? Before I know anything about them, I know they're likely to be Jewish. Wow. Yes. And that's why they picked them. They put that guy on the jury so that he could judge Oppenheimer. A three-person jury who decided, well, that guy is Jewish, and they're like, you know, he's Jewish enough that he can design the bomb, but he's a little too Jewish to keep going. So this is how we end up with this national security establishment where, you know, don't believe what you see on TV, okay? Like, if you watch TV, you think, oh my god,

all the leaders of the CIA are African-American, right? And they have all these interests. You don't know. Sadly, I'm sorry to tell you, but... What? Yeah. Systematically, for decades, it's been particularly difficult for people who are not white straight men to get security clearances. And here's the crazy part. Were there people in the Trump administration who failed their security clearance test? And then ultimately, the administration was like, yeah, fuck it. It's fine. He can go to the meeting. Well, it's an example of how, you know, this is one true thing that Trump said is that a president is sovereign over secrecy. The president ultimately controls, like, how this information is defined, who gets access to it.

And so if he decides, like, well, my no good son-in-law, I don't care what you say about him, I'm still going to let him have access to top secrets. At the end of the day, you know, he's the one... You know, if he doesn't like the way the regulations are written, he can rewrite them. All these executive orders are executive orders by the president. So we have this enormous regime. We have a regime of secrecy. We have a regime of classification. It is millions of people deep. There are juries that decide what gets classified and what doesn't. And then there's the top secret. And then of course, there's the skiff. This stuff is so hot to the... It's so juicy that you can only... If you take it with you,

it is like the monkey's paw. It will curse you. You must only look at it in the skiff. But the truth is, this is an arbitrary administrative bureaucracy based on trying to keep the bomb out of Russia's hands. And, you know, John, it's like the best-kept secret in Washington. You know, there's this aura, right, around the whole national secrecy complex. We all know it's, oh, it's so complicated and they have to be so careful and they have to get clearances and everything has to be stamped, has to be inside envelopes and other envelopes. And it's true. There are all these rules and regulations. But the fact is, that's not the way it actually works on the inside. What you find inside is a system out of control, right?

They just can't agree among themselves on what secrets they actually have to protect. And as a result, you know, huge amounts of information are protected at the highest level. It's got to be at the highest level. It's got to be at the skiff. At the highest level. They probably decided in a skiff. Yeah. And one of the reasons for that, you know, it's basic human nature. And psychologists have studied this. If you take random pieces of paper and you stamp some of them secret, those are the pieces of paper that people think are important and valuable.

So it's a very human need as well. Let me give you a different human need that I have found in generally in administrative states and bureaucracies. And that is the need to cover your heini. How much of this is ass covering so that future administrations, when they come in, don't reveal what a bonehead you were when you made certain decisions about drones and wars and all kinds of other things that would embarrass you for your incompetence. So a lot of this stuff, it's just what you said. There's no incentive to declassify stuff. All the incentives are to mark things as secret or top secret because otherwise people won't think

that information is important so that your boss might not pay attention to it. Or like you said, maybe you would have disclosed something that you weren't meant to. And the people who live in this world, they are lifers, most of them. Like they spent decades working inside this national secrecy complex. And so sometimes they don't even know what's publicly known because pretty much everything they read is classified. So after a while, they don't actually know what the rest of the world knows. So even like senior CIA officials have commented on this kind of problem and they call them innocents. They say there are all too many of these people in government, these people who don't actually know the public already knows much of what they

think is secret. The thing that I don't understand is, and then you have those, you know, they'll talk about, for instance, the Kennedy assassination. After 25 years, we will declassify all the materials from the Warren Report and the Kennedy assassination. And we will finally, and 25 years passes and they're like 40 years. After 50 years, we will, and then they declassify it, but they actually don't declassify everything. And then they redact the shit out of all these other things. And it's an incomprehensible jumble. And some of the things that they have classified are like newspaper reports. Yes. So newspaper reports, that is a good example, because that's one way that Hillary Clinton got in trouble is that she and her aides would pass

between them things that they read about in the newspaper. And Hillary, I guess, had trouble with her printers. It was like, print this, print this. But in other cases, clearly she's sharing media reports with her aides. And the issue, though, is that in some cases, these are reports about programs that were still classified, right? So to take like a common example, the drone program, where they're killing, you know, people in Pakistan. So the US government, even though they're running these missions for years and killing like hundreds of Pakistani citizens, the public position is, you know, we can either confirm or deny. And so one reason for that as absurd as it may seem is that if they did acknowledge that program, and believe it or not, even the declassification

of a communication between a secretary of state and her aides about the program could be seen in this weird world, could be seen as an acknowledgement, that could create a diplomatic incident. Then the Pakistani government has to explain an answer for itself. Like, so why is it that you're letting the US, you know, kill our citizens? Why is it that they're flying their aircraft overhead? As long as everybody pretends it's not happening, nobody has to take a position on it. But everybody knows it's happening. And there've been news reports that it's been happening. And so much of this, the only thing that's ever revealed, like the one thing I thought WikiLeaks was really amazing at revealing is how much of a fear based industry it is.

Oh, yeah. That it is people covering their asses and not wanting to take responsibility for decisions. Well, you know, journalists have a role in this as well, you know, I have to say, and even some academics. That is, you know, when we work on this subject, we want everyone to know how exciting it is, right? And it is like, there are really appalling secrets. Like, there are things that I discovered in doing my research writing my book that I was amazed by. Don't tell me because I don't want to go to jail. Can't tell you. I can neither confirm nor deny. But like you said, when you look at the,

you know, even a fraction of a quarter of a million cables that came out because of WikiLeaks, right, that Chelsea Manning gave to Julian Assange that were then published for the world, it led to a whole series of stories in the media, right, dozens of them, where they were talking about the revelations of WikiLeaks. When you track those stories down, in most cases, you find that these are things that are already well known in public. It just so happened that they found a document that was secret that said the same thing. That was stamped. That was it. It had the stamp. So now the journalists are interested in it. If it didn't have the stamp,

they probably would have ignored it. We know this country has pulled a multitude of coups. We know this country has used all kinds of manner of propaganda and manipulation, especially when it comes to getting us into wars or keeping us into wars. We know all of these things. So why are we pretending? Well, for a few reasons. I mean, one, it's how you get paid. I mean, this government spends over $18 billion a year on classifying and protecting information. Wait, what? Over $18 billion a year. This is bigger than the budget of the US Treasury, right? So this would

be one of those larger departments in our government if all the spending on secrecy was in one place. Well, then how does this stuff end up in boxes in people's? You would think for $18 billion, somebody would have gone and said, hey, man, I think we're missing. It's the volume. It's the volume. That's the other thing. The system can no longer cope with the sheer volume of so-called secret information. So back when they were trying to track this, the government used to put out an annual report. They still do, but they've basically given up on what they used to do, which is they tried to count how many times every year some government official classified something as secret. So in 2012, they said it was over 90 million times.

So that's three times every second. Three times every second. Somebody is saying this is classified. Right. And just the other day, I was looking at a document from the Carter administration. Back in 1977, they were trying to do something about this impossible problem. And the NSA, the National Security Agency, the people who spy on everyone and surveil us, they tried to get exempted entirely from the whole system for trying to review and release information. And one argument they made is that- Was that request classified? Was that a top secret request? It was in the Carter library for decades before we found this document with a bunch of other documents. So the figure they gave is they said, how are we supposed to declassify stuff?

We produce 10,000 secret reports a day. So this is back in 1977. Can you imagine what the volume is now? It's estimated the State Department, even, I think it was like eight or 10 years ago, the State Department's producing 2 billion email a day. So how are you going to control and protect all of those secrets? And the crazy part is it doesn't feel as though journalists have any sense of how to put any of this into context. Right now, they are chasing something that they believe is spy versus spy, Trump v. Biden, when they're not looking at the broader absurdity of the entire national security state. Right. It's like every year or so, we're still playing the same games, but the sides switch uniforms. So if you remember during the Hillary Clinton email

affair, we had a lot of Democrats saying, oh, a lot of this stuff isn't even secret. Who cares? This is like a bunch of bureaucrats coming after Hillary for their own self-interested reasons. When it happened with Trump and Mar-a-Lago, it's as if they all switched sides. And now it was the Republicans saying basically the same thing. The Democrats are saying that he's in danger in national security. Now, I'm not saying that they're wrong. Right. I think it's entirely possible that some of the things that Trump took, he took because these really were explosive secrets. Like these could be deeply incriminating. And that's probably why we're going to talk about it endlessly. Right. And with Biden too. But the problem is we don't have a sense of what's actually

deeply incriminating or what's actually deeply secret or what it is they're protecting. And by the by, these guys can just call up somebody. I mean, we just had this case now of the FBI agent, I think his name is McGonagall, who is was looking into the information that Reality Winner had put out that the Russians were interfering with the election system. Well, it turns out now he is being accused of colluding with Daripaska, who is the Russian interloper who was there trying to interfere. Like this whole thing is so deeply fucked. And it's even more fucked than we realized because the vast majority of us, like whether we're playing on one side or the other, we think what we're fighting about is secrecy. But actually,

what bothers me is that whether we're talking about Joe Biden or Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump or the Republican National Committee or what have you, what's at stake here is our history, because what in every case they have done, even leaving aside the question of whether they engage your national security, they were stealing property, right? Those documents don't belong to them. They belong to you and me. This is our heritage. Yeah, but you're appealing though, to our higher aspirations as a country. You're not thinking about this in the sun's sue sense, which is everything is information to be weaponized. What has happened now to the information state is it is viewed in the same way that DARPA would view a new advance in technology

is how do I, and by the way, I don't think that's new. I think weaponization of whatever weapons you have at your disposal to attack your enemies has always been done, even domestically with politics, but it's really sophisticated now. Well, to quote another sage, Dr. Phil, I would ask the question, how's that working out for you? I would say that to quote another Dr. Phil guest, cash me outside. How about that? It's a little bit like, okay, so you took up this cudgel, and you're beating the crap out of the other guy, because he was found to have these secret documents. Right. And obviously, because he's Trump, he won't cooperate. He's above the law, because he's a man of no accountability and all entitlement. We know that. Right. And don't get

me wrong. I would join you. I would pick up another cudgel, and I would continue beating him. But I might be beating him for other reasons, because my grievance with Donald Trump is not only is he like the crappy roommate who moved out and took a bunch of your stuff. He's claiming it was his all along. Right. Because he's the president. Right. And so obviously, that's different than Joe Biden, that kind of, at least so far anyway, we think he's probably more of the absent minded roommate. And he was throwing everything in trash bags. And he ended up taking a few things that are yours. And then he apologized and he said, Hey, can I buy you a coffee? You know. Dear God. Right. But doesn't it show that in this country, when you're on the inside,

you don't in any way abide by these norms and regulations that we all talk about. See, that's what, when we talked about that, that belongs to the people. Right. You know, it's that same stuff I have with the Hatch Act, where, you know, you can't from the podium of the White House, try and, you know, utilize the bully pulpit for personal gain. And you're like, do you have any idea what branding is? Like that's, of course, you're using it for personal gain. But it's, I think it's the condescension and the high mindedness of what they say they're doing versus the fact that like, if you went there, they're probably using classified shit as coasters. Like there isn't this treating of it with the solemnity that they say there is.

Right. Yeah. I think that's part of Hillary Clinton's problem with the email affair is that many people thought, Oh, this is just another example, how the rest of us have to follow these rules. And we're going to get in a lot of trouble. We might even get prosecuted if we don't. Whereas, you know, Hillary Clinton decided that it would be more convenient for her. I mean, she actually used to work convenient. It would be convenient for her to disregard these rules, these laws actually, which they all do, because it is a city that runs on entitlement. And where did she get this idea from? Colin Powell. Colin Powell told her, don't use that State Department email system. Don't worry about it. It's a pain.

Yeah. You could use your own email. And by the way, we don't know everything that was said between them, but I have yet to hear a good explanation for why this was not about trying to avoid having any of these records released to the public. Because if you're creating public records, as even Hillary eventually found out, then they are subject to the Freedom of Information Act. So journalists and historians will come after you and ask for those records and you might even have to produce them. Yeah. But how long, if you're classifying three things every second, what good is FOIA? What good is the Freedom of Information Act? Because the bureaucratic delay to even get a hold of the information. And if there's that much information, it's the oldest

trick in any law docus drama that you would see. Just, oh, you want the disclosure evidence? And then they send over 18 semi trucks filled with boxes. They'll just flood the zone with bullshit. Oh, yeah. I filed the equivalent of FOIAs at several presidential libraries when I first started out like seven years ago. I have not gotten anything from any of them. Now, one reason for this, the one reason why the whole FOIA system has become dysfunctional is because the vast majority of people who submit FOIAs are not historians. They're not journalists. They're not even the people want to know about the UFOs at Roswell. The people who submit FOIAs by and large, these are commercial entities. They're private firms, information

brokers that are seeking commercial intelligence that they can store in databases and sell to customers. And they are using like more than 90% of the FOIAs filed are ones that are filed by these information brokers like Thompson Reuters. They're data mining. They're basically data mining. Absolutely, yeah. And then they're reselling this public information to private parties that are able to pay their subscription fees. See, I don't understand why you're not on every one of these 24-hour news networks explaining just how broken this whole security apparatus and classification system is rather than everybody going, who is more culpable in American secrets, Trump or Biden, like nobody is looking at

the macro of a system that's utterly broken. I'd like to think that people are beginning to realize like I noticed like I'm one of these people not just like reading the New York Times, but I like to read what their readers say and the most popular comments. And when the Biden story first broke, the first dozen or so are people saying this is nothing, this is a nothing burger. And then the next one, the one after that. And finally, by the time you got to like, oh, and then there were the ones next to his Corvette, then people are like, wait a minute here, there's something wrong with this whole system. That's right. So that's me. I'm the guy. But unfortunately, apparently I have a phase for radio. So you may not be

not true, my friend. Not true. Handsome is the day is long. I say that. I know you're probably listening to this in your car, but he's dead on wrong. Very tall too. Very tall. Very handsome. In terms of what's really going on with the security state and all the redactions. And you know, when we saw that in the Mueller report and they made such a big deal of everybody had to go to the skiff and then the Republicans tried to storm the skiff and get into the skiff and then the redactions and you know, there was a breathless coverage of it on the day they released the report and then everybody forgot about it because nobody goes through and tries to discern what these redactions really mean. So isn't that just another layer of obfuscation

that the government can control to keep whatever embarrassment they don't want out into the public sphere? Yeah, I remember years ago when I first started, you know, working with data scientists, like one thing I found is like their students are much more forthright than the ones you find and say, our history department here, they will, if they think you're an idiot, they will tell you. So they had all kinds of reactions when we first started working with these declassified documents and all their markings and all their redactions and such. And one of them, God bless her, she said, she talked about this as censorship. And I said, no, no, no, no, no, this isn't censorship. You know, this is, you know, these were meant to be public documents,

at least not originally, you know, they're meant to be redacting things that might jeopardize national security. But as the years have gone by, and I see like working with data scientists when we can, you know, train algorithms to start finding like what exactly they typically redact, I began to realize it is censorship. It's absolutely censorship. They're trying to redact the historical record to provide a certain version of what happened, which is the one they think is safe to share with the rest of us. Everybody learned from Nixon, like you really shouldn't, if you don't have a recording, I'm just going to put this black ink mark over it, and no one's going to be able to discern what it is that we were talking about.

John, did you know that the Joint Chiefs of Staff, they destroyed all the records or almost all the records of all their meetings back in the early 70s? As soon as they thought somebody might file a Freedom of Information Act request or some other way it might get out, they destroyed all their records, and then they stopped taking records. It's like a numbers racket. They decided, you know, they should just not commit anything to paper. And that's what, that was the whole thing with the Trumpet movement. And then anything that was on paper, he would chew up and throw in the toilet. The whole thing is Michigan. How do you rein it in and how do you gain any kind of control? Now, you talk about AI, but I think, boy, if

there's anything that's going to lend itself to conspiracy theory, it's allowing chat GPT to be in charge of our national security state and decide what we need to know and what we don't. Yeah. So we are going to have to use technology because to a large extent, especially in more recent years, a lot of what's happening, it's just the exponential growth of information generally. And also, it's not just documents, of course, like more and more of it, it's video, it's audio, you know, it's Zoom calls and spreadsheets and all the rest of it. So you just can't continue this system where they have about 2000 people in the government and the entire government, there are 2000 people doing this, going through documents deciding what can be released to the

public. You know, not when the State Department is producing 2 billion email a year, let alone everything the NSA and everyone else is doing. So we are, I'm sorry to break it to you, but we are going to have to use like machine learning algorithms to begin sorting through all this and prioritizing the information that really does have to be protected most closely. Now, it's not just me. There is this thing, I hope more people start hearing about it, it's called the Public Interest Declassification Board. And this was created by Congress and the White House in order to make sure the public is represented in these kinds of discussions. Now, unfortunately, the PIDB is largely powerless. They have almost no staff.

So there's an $18 billion security in Cosmic Interest, and then there's a board of Public Interest civilians, doesn't have any money, unpaid, and nobody really uses it. Okay. Yeah, it makes sense. They're unpaid, they're volunteers, they have no staff, virtually no staff, they're tucked away in the National Archives, right? But you know, this is supposed to be the voice, you know, of the people, right? We're supposed to be speaking out. And for 10 years, what they've been saying is we have to begin working with data scientists, developing tools that's going to allow us to get on top of this whole mess. So they're right. They're absolutely right. And the work I've been doing with colleagues, even with declassified data, even with the small

budget we have from grants here and there, we've been able to learn a lot, right? And it's entirely feasible. You could build systems, yes, with classified information, within protected systems that could begin to rank order those records that really have to be studied closely and accelerate the release of everything else. And maybe begin to narrow this regime to actually things that would be in a national security interest. Absolutely, because this system, it would detect outliers, right? So you would be able to see which officials tend to classify everything top secret. Or on the other hand, which official, you know, maybe is not classifying something that probably ought to be classified. Think of your spam filter. Spam filters have

gotten really good, right? I don't know if you go through what they collect, but, you know, 99% of the cases, it's spam. I mean, I mostly, I take that off because sometimes I feel lonely. So it helps me feel more popular. But so I'm going to ask you that, and maybe this is, it's something that's unknowable. In your research, as you look through it, how much of it is malevolence? How much of it is bureaucracy and incompetence? And how much of it is malevolence taking advantage of administration and incompetence? Well, if this was the first anyone heard about these kinds of problems, you know, then maybe I'd say, yeah, you know, they've screwed up, right? And we should try to fix it. But if you go back

through the history as I have, if you like dig into the archives and you read, you know, the records, you know, going all the way back to FDR, what you find is from the very outset, they knew that they were building a system where it was all about secrecy and they did not create any systems to guarantee transparency and accountability. And by the early 1950s, they already realized that overclassification was an enormous and growing problem. And year after year after year, you had committees and commissions in the Pentagon, you know, in the White House. I mean, these were all themselves like national security experts saying like something has to be done. And every single administration but one, every administration issued a new executive order that was supposed to fix the

system. But what happened in every single instance is that what were supposed to be reforms, the reality is they were trying to concentrate power over the system in the White House and among the presidents and pointies. So that's why I say this isn't just incompetence. There is plenty of incompetence. This is an intentionally designed labyrinth that no one can negotiate, not necessarily just to protect American security, but to protect the administration. Yeah, because whoever occupies the White House has sovereign control over what's secret. They can send people to prison for revealing secrets that they define as national security information. Which they've done. And they'll keep doing it, right? So that's why I think ultimately this is about power. You know,

this is about the only kind of sovereign power that exists in our political system, the way that presidents get to decide what the rest of us are allowed to know. Last question, and this would be most shocking revelation in your mind as you went through this. Was there anything that shocked your conscience? You know, some of what I studied were things I think a lot of us have heard about like the experimentation, radiological experimentation on American servicemen. Some of us might have even heard about the way they experimented on children, like children who they said were terminally ill, but turned out not to be. They experimented on the elderly, homeless people.

But in a way, what was most shocking was when I found the document where they said, you know, if this gets out, some of us might be liable for prosecution. So we have to make sure that we classify all of this so that nobody ever sees it. To me, even I was a little taken it back. They knew what they were doing. One other reason we know they were doing this and how they knew they were doing it was because it was at the same time the Nuremberg Tribunal was in session. And the very day, the very day that doctors, American doctors came up with standards for how you should conduct experiments, right? And make sure that people knew what they were signing up for. That was the day they decided that, in fact, all of this had to be kept secret.

So that's that intentionality that they knew they're engaged in criminal behavior, knowing that they were going to be likened to Nazi doctors, but then they decided they could use secrecy to shield themselves. Even I was a little taken aback by that. And you know, I think after all these years, the only thing they probably learned is don't commit that intention in writing. That now that you know that whatever you put in writing is the historical record, make that up. And it almost sounds like the Mafia where they just go, let's just use phone booths or let's never use anything that can be tracked or traced to express our intention. It's so crazy. And who is it in there that killed John F. Kennedy?

And what's his name? We all did, John. We all did. Perfect. Matthew Connelly, professor of international and global history at Columbia University, author of The Declassification Engine, what history reveals about America's top secrets. It's coming out in Valentine's Day. You know what? There's no more romantic gift you can give. There's a love story about FDR in there. So it's safe to give for Valentine's Day, I guarantee it. Now I'm a married man. It's a love story between America and its secrets. Please check it out. It's wonderful. Matthew, thank you so much for joining us. Thank you, John.

What the ever-loving fuck. John, what are we allowed to say? Whatever you want. 1.3 million people. 18 billion dollars. 18 billion dollars. John, before I came out, 1.3 million people knew I was queer. That's not a secret anymore. That's not a secret. That whole system, it feels so weirdly flirty, like, okay, this is just secret. You can tell your wife, but this is top secret. Don't tell anyone.

And then he was like, and then there's the top secret that's categorized. They were like, then there's some compartmentalization and that stuff, which didn't sound scarier. But my God, my God, the amount of just shit, we will classify anything just to kind of be like, oh no, now it's over here. We'll never have to talk about it. We never have to deal with it. Now it's over here. Yeah. But don't you now see, though, why Snowden, why Assange, why Reality Winner, why Chelsea Men were so dangerous to them? I mean, like WikiLeaks is just basically like, hey, somebody sent us a bunch of shit and we're just putting it out there.

But the others just exposed programs. These are programs. There's this program that's sucking up everything you've ever thought. And the government is doing it. By the way, to protect you, don't worry about it. If you're not doing anything wrong, nothing's and they had to get sent away. That's how pernicious this system. I'm going to put on my tinfoil hat. See, that's why- Do it. Bring it. Come on, baby. Black conspiracy theories are just shit that white folks haven't learned about yet. I'm telling you. All this shit. Because I have like three uncles who worked in military. It was like,

you know, they're working on some shit, right? And I was like, okay, uncle RJ, he's like, okay, they're just working on some shit. Or even anyone who said, you know them folks listen and you go, who? Them folks. Anything that we talk about that is shocking to us, like, you know, they experimented on people and black people are like, yeah. Yeah, yeah. You talk about, I can call my granddad. You mean Tuskegee. Yeah. It's such a weird like moment as a viewer to see a person talk about trying to get information that's old and that's out and that's declassified and them even being threatened.

And you're on the other side like, well, what, what, what can I even look at? Yeah, being threatened for, that's what he said, being threatened for going through declassified information. And that, by the way, and that's the shit they declassified, which you know, they're never going to declassify anything that may cast a bad light on the way that this all operates. And even when they say like, we'll declassify it in 30 years, even then they arbitrarily decide, well, not this stuff. This stuff is so sensitive as to be, it would be detrimental to the national security. I was shocked that this all started during the Manhattan Project. That blew my fucking mind.

It was all connected to the nuclear core. There was like a nuclear core to all of this, where it was like, well, it's actually so that like you said, like atomic secrets never get out. So we need to have an entire system, basically a system of secrecy and it creates, it technically creates the deep state that people who are on like that conspiracy side of things, believes in because you go, what if I told you there are 1.3 million people with secret security clearance who know things that no one else knows and they were working in the government? Yeah. And the crazy thing is you keep thinking, oh, they must really know some shit.

But probably 1.2 999 million of them. It's all just like fucking, somebody's got to make sure that on Mondays, the refrigerator gets cleaned out because somebody's leaving a yogurt drink in there. Stinks up the whole breaker. Josh, you're talking about the White House Slack, where it's like, take out the food this Friday. We will not have food in the fridge this weekend. And then you just get a redacted document that just says out like a preposition peep show, just like black bars and two or three words. And you just have to infer what that could be. You know what I always find interesting though is the more you dig into like the 30s, the more

you realize like the progressive hero that was Franklin Delano Roosevelt, he had some dark shit going on. I mean, forget about like the stuff that we all know, you know, interning of the Japanese, but like he was designing a, you know, talk about breaking democratic norms. Roosevelt's the guy was like two terms, fuck that. Like all those different things. And that's really where this new security state arose. And I thought it was so stunning when he was saying, you know, it was right after the Nuremberg trials that the American medical establishment within the security zone or the military medical were like, oh, those experiments you're saying that's a crime against humanity. That's the wild part after they've like basically like had a vivis

section and like open, they experimented on kids and old people and GIs with radiology. And then they were like, oh, that's bad. Should we not have offered Dr. Mengele a job? The wrong thing to do. Well, I want to ask you two when they, when, here we go. I have to ask. We have nothing to do with that. Oh my God. Well, now at least I'll get some free Nets merch. Okay. So my question truly is that when he said, well, you know, like during this whole thing, if you were anything but a white Christian male who was also straight, like they were like, well, you know, juice spill secrets too. Like that's an insane level of like you, that's when you make

the bar of entry so high, then you're like, of course, of course. But isn't that, that's, isn't that voting? Isn't that poll taxes? Isn't that it's so whatever we need to do to perpetrate, power doesn't seed itself. So whatever system we need to design, Jews are short. What if we make it so that to work in the government, you have to be able to dump. You know what I mean? Like that's, the systems are designed to perpetuate power always. It was fascinating also to hear him talk about this in a way that was so much bigger and so much more helpful than what we're hearing now. Cause what I saw yesterday is John Bolton saying, this is a problem for Biden. What I saw yesterday was Joe Manchin being like, I have some concerns.

Like, but this was like, this was actually, it was fruitful. There was something to this that wasn't just like, and another point for this side. I thought it was also interesting that like, this is that when you're talking classified documents, that like deep state type of thing can really come up. And he really counteracted that with like the, the Kushner thing of like, it's basically the deep state being like, this guy should not have clearance. And the president can say, well, fuck you, deep state. I'm the president. I'm just doing it. Right. And the deep state is, is like the Borg. I think what I, if I was to say, there's anything that is intentional and designed about this, it would be that in an effort to protect the truly despicable

and shocking, we are going to cover you in an avalanche of the banal. And they just, so the classification system is just, it's, it's make anything trying to find a pony in a landfill with a, you know, a CM manure, a needle in a haystack. And that's, that's the design of it that that seems purposeful. But it's fascinating. And could a guy come out with a book at a more opportune time? He's like, Valentine's Day. I mean, I've been working on this for 10 years. Honestly, John, a little suspicious if you have me. He didn't seem Jewish. I can end this with, I think what will be my last words anyway, which is at least AI will save us. And on that note, we here at the problem are signing off once again for the week. Thank you

so much. For this, I want to thank Matthew Connelly for joining us. And of course, Robby and Jay. Fantastic. Check out the problem airing on Apple TV Plus. And we'll see you guys next week. Bye. Later, everybody. The problem with John Stewart podcast is an Apple TV Plus podcast and a joint bus boy production.