April 24, 2019 • 56 mins
During the hectic news cycle of 2015, numerous stories popped up in headlines, only to disappear as soon as another event (or scandal) came to light. One story in particular remains enigmatic in the modern day: During the investigation into the Clinton email scandal, an FBI report found that "There was a powerful group of very high-ranking State [Department] officials that some referred to as 'The 7th Floor Group' or 'The Shadow Government.'" What exactly did this mean? Was there really a shadow government operating in Washington? Tune in to learn more.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
From UFOs to psychic powers and government conspiracies. History is
riddled with unexplained events. You can turn back now or
learn the stuff they don't want you to know. A
production of I Heart Radios How Stuff Works. Welcome back
(00:24):
to the show. My name is Matt Noel is on
an adventurer. But wait, who are you? That's right? They
call me Ben. We are joined with our super producer
Paul Mission controlled decand most importantly, you are you. You
are here and that makes this stuff they don't want
you to know. This is a weird one, Matt. This
(00:46):
is an episode that a lot of our fellow and
listeners had asked us to cover in years past. Yes,
it's it's a callback. It's a callback, it really is,
and we did. We did an episode related to this
topic way back in what So. Looking back, it's strange
(01:08):
to recall that the teen presidential campaign happened three years ago. Yeah,
it certainly doesn't seem as though that much time has passed,
but in fact it has a three ish years. Yeah,
we're not quite there and we're not quite to November yet,
but still, hey, it's it's crazy that much time has passed,
(01:29):
and you know, elections especially presidential elections in this country.
They bring out the best and the worst of us.
I think. I think that's incredibly optimistic, and I appreciate
that I needed to hear some good news today. Uh,
you're You're absolutely right, my friend. I agree with you.
(01:49):
Way back in ten, when we first did some episodes
on elections, we figured that the most fact based and
the fairest way for us to sum up all the
allegations and conspiratorial accusations that we had we had heard of,
was to do one episode for each of the political
(02:14):
party front runners. So we did one episode on conspiracies
about the Trump campaign, and we did one episode on
conspiracies about the Hillary Clinton campaign. Yes, and Bernie didn't
even make it in there. Actually that's not true. Bernie
made an appearance in the Clinton episode. Oh yeah, yeah,
along with your your pal Wasserman Schultz, right, Oh, everyone's
(02:34):
pal Wasserman Schultz. It was like this. Both of those
episodes together were like this Avengers Infinity War team up
of horrible people doing horrible things. It really was, and
whether we like it or not, we contributed to whatever
it is that we are in right now, whatever this is,
we we just gave a little bit because everyone involved,
(02:58):
like you said, it was all there. But he goes
up to no good and there really wasn't a great choice,
it seemed, at least in my opinion, Yeah, because we
had we had a situation wherein mass media was being
leveraged so effectively. Mass media was around another elections, but
it hadn't quite reached the fever pitch that it reached
(03:20):
in the ten presidential campaign. And like most presidential campaigns
here in the States, the one in sten saw the
rise and fall of multitudes of politicians, as well as
the sudden rise and candidly the disappearance of various scandals,
you know what I mean, astely. So today's story starts
(03:42):
with one of the famous controversies, or should we say
infamous controversies in that election. It's known as the Hillary
Clinton email scandal or email controversy. The word choice there
depends upon which which side of the aisle you fall on.
For a lot of people, how much do you want
to downplay this? Right? Right? So for some people this
(04:04):
was a case study in out of control media grasping
its straws, right, and those were generally people who were
supporters of the Clinton campaign. For others, generally opponents of
that campaign, it was a case study and how the
powerful can sweep their political dirt under the figurative rug.
(04:25):
The reality it was somewhere in the middle, right right, right,
And and nowadays people still use the phrase but the emails.
So first things first, what are we talking about here? Well,
that that a phrase, but the emails it's kind of shorthand,
really and it's a bit of a joke. Uh, and
it's uh, I don't know, it's it's pretty crazy. It
(04:48):
goes back to this series of really security violations that
were undertaken. I don't know how you how you put
that that they were there were violations that the Clinton
campaign did while she was in office as Secretary of State,
and uh, it was it had to do with putting
(05:08):
emails on a private server, or or putting emails that
should not be on a private server on a private
server right in the in the big major scheme of things,
that's what it is. And ultimately you're talking about the
classification of certain email and information within emails that maybe
shouldn't have been on a private server. And I know
(05:30):
that for many of us listening today, this is something
that you may feel that you heard ad nauseum three
years ago. Uh, and you're thinking, well, why should I
said listen this? We have a plot twist coming up
for you. This is not just an episode about emails.
The plot thickens pretty quickly. But to get there, we
need to walk through the email scandal, the email controversy.
(05:54):
It is exactly as you described it, Matt, a series
of security violations. Think of it as um, you know what.
Think of one server as a an old school filing cabinet, right,
and then another server right next to it, another old
school filing cabinet. And in the server to your right,
(06:15):
that's where all the classified stuff goes. What's up with
North Korea? What? What are Iran and various other Middle
Eastern powers angry or cranky about today? That goes into
this one file cabinet, and that file kinet has a
crazy amount of locks on it and biometric scanning in
order to get into it. It's intense stuff. And then
(06:37):
you have the other file cabinet on your left, no locks.
It's kind of a junk drawer there are you know,
they're like old recipes, maybe some Pinterest things in there.
But then one way or another, through accident or through
intentional action. The stuff that's top secret or just secret
ends up there with the recipes and the hey, what
(07:00):
are you doing on Saturday? Let's go to um? What's
a chain restaurant? Oh Charlie's. Oh, Paul's gonna kill us
if we don't shout out sorry, sorry, Paul Applebee's. Jeez,
that was close. Here's another major distinction we have to make. Yes,
the server on your right, the one that has all
those locks on it, with all the Class WIED information,
(07:20):
that one can be seen by the State Department, by
a lot of other intelligence agencies. There's there's uh, there's
accountability on that one right to the government. On the
private one, that one, the one on your left, it's
completely controlled by the Clinton campaign and people who are
contracted to work with the Clinton campaign on that email server.
(07:41):
That's a huge thing that we have to just remember.
Absolutely great point. There is a chain of custody in
theory for everything in that right hand filing cabinet. This
controversy is is a series of security violations. Misfiled emails,
deleted emails, and that's another big thing, deleted deleted emails. Yet,
(08:01):
and this started before Clinton became the Democratic candidate in
the campaign, but it continued during the campaign. This didn't
really become a national story until March of when The
New York Times ran a front page article on the subject.
The article said that the system quote may have violated
(08:24):
federal requirements and was quote alarming unquote to current and
former government archive officials. So that's what that's what the
Clinton campaign was found doing. Clinton was found to have
used her family's private server for official communications instead of
official State Department email accounts. This happens to a lot
(08:45):
of people on a much smaller scale. Let's say that
you have multiple social media accounts. Let's say that, like
our good friend Mission Control, you have one account that's
Paul something or other, and then you have another account
that is Applebee's Facts. Yeah, and you forget that, you know,
(09:07):
you forget to switch your profile over, and so it
sounds were like a Reddit user name, it does. It
sounds like a great Reddit user name. And then uh,
you know, all the sudden things that should be said
by Paul are being said by apple bees facts and
vice versa. That's that's a much smaller level because Applebee's
facts and this is not a knock on Applebee's facts
(09:28):
at all. Usually doesn't deal with things like geo political
tensions in the Middle East yet not yet. I mean
those apps are coming, yeah, or you know, quid quid
pro quo, things having to do with the classification of emails.
Whenever I hear quip pro quote, I cannot help but
think of silence of the Lambs. Oh, really a little
(09:51):
quid pro quotel. What's her name? Which broke quoa claries? Yes? Uh, yeah,
did you know? Completely off topic, matt uh. The renowned
actor Anthony Hopkins, his character Hannibal Lecter that's not a spoiler,
is only actually on camera for like a ridiculously small
amount of time, like fifteen minutes or something. All told, Yeah,
(10:13):
and he won, didn't he win? Oscars glora that year
we in The Monster of the Zodiac Killer. We actually
mentioned that. That year that that movie came out. They
tailored the entire Oscar ceremony around his character essentially in
that movie. It's insane the US does glorify serial killers. Also,
I found another ancient serial killer. I think I'm building
(10:37):
a pretty good argument I'd like to pitch to you later. Well,
I'll do it. Now, why don't we do an episode
on serial killers before uh the eight hundreds or ancient
serial killers who have a treasure trove. Really a lot
that will be new to people. Yeah, documented serial killer. Yeah, Okay,
that sounds like a whole new podcast. We'll see, we'll see,
(10:59):
We'll give it a go. So before we explode the
lives of those ancient serial killers, let's continue exploring this
strange story of emails. Right now, we've outlined the the gist, right,
Bliss walk through a little bit more of it. So
shortly before she was sworn in as Secretary of State
(11:20):
in two thousand nine, Hillary Clinton had set up an
email server at her home in New York. This was
home to an email address h d R twenty two
at clinton email dot com, and this was for all
of her email correspondence work related personal stuff during her
four years in office. She also set up email addresses
(11:42):
on the server for her long time aid State Department
Chief of Staff one Cheryl Mills, as well HM abode
Huma abodeen Yes, yes was the long time made. She
did not use or even activate a state dot gov
email account, which which was a big deal. It would
have been hosted on servers owned and managed by the
(12:02):
US government. The reason that's an important detail. It is
not necessarily because people thought the Secretary of State was
a criminal or doing criminal acts. It's more for operational
security or ops seck, because other other countries, no matter
how friendly they are, would love to know what's going
(12:23):
on in the US when the doors to the halls
of power are closed. Oh of course. And if you're
perhaps someone like Hillary Rodham Clinton, and you stand out
that you know that much as a name, as a
powerful person within within the halls of that power, uh,
your private email server is a major target for anyone
and everyone who may be looking to find some information. Yeah. So,
(12:48):
so the FBI ends up getting involved a little later on,
and what they found was that over a hundred emails
containing some version of classified information were found on her
private servers. There were sixty five emails they were considered
a secret classified secret, twenty two were classified top secret.
And it doesn't get much more secret than that. Another
(13:10):
two thousand, two thousand and ninety three emails were not
initially classified, but then they were retro retroactively classified by
the State Department itself, kind of like upon further consideration.
This is sensitive information and it's important to know that
that is the State Department that is doing that. That
will come into play a little later. And there's a
side note. There are things above top secret, like compartmentalized
(13:36):
access your eyes only, yes, but but that as far
as we know, these emails just went up to top secret,
which is still a big deal. That shouldn't you know,
be sitting around on your your Yahoo account or something.
But you're absolutely right, So something is amiss here. It
(13:57):
doesn't matter where you fall politically. Various critics, including Republican
members of Congress, argued that using a private messaging system
and server violated State Department protocols, and furthermore, they said
this violates federal laws and regulations. The FBI is on
the case. As early as two thousand nine, officials with
(14:18):
the in a r A the National Archives and Records
Administration expressed concerns over these possible violations of the standard
operating procedure of record keeping at the State Department. December
of twenty twelve, near the end of Clinton's tenure Secretary
of State, a nonprofit group with a pretty neat name,
(14:40):
Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington or crew. They
filed a Freedom of Information Act request to get the
records of the departing Secretary of States emails. They received
a response in May that said, no records responsive to
your request. We're located. That's government ease for four oh
(15:04):
four error nothing found. Yeah, and then you, um, you
gotta look at the certain emails that were sent to
that whole Clinton email dot com address, which is terrible
to read, by the way, because it looks like clintone mail.
It just doesn't look great. But they were discovered in
March when a hacker who called himself or herself whoever,
(15:27):
was goos Offer, and they distributed these emails that were
sent to Clinton from Sydney Bloomenthal and uh, this dude
Goosefer obtained them by illegally accessing Bloomenthall's email account. So
this hacker, essentially Goosef broke into Sydney Bluementhall's email found
all of these private Clinton emails. And Goosefer is a
(15:49):
portmanteau of Gucci and Lucifer, so it's Gucci for Gucci.
For excuse, I've always heard Goosever. Yeah, yeah, I just
I like the word play. Guys, criminal though in the
summer of lawyers from the State Department noticed several emails
from Clinton's personal account while reviewing documents requested by the
(16:11):
House Select Committee on Benghazi, which is a whole another
bag of badgers. And then, as we said earlier at
New York Times, piece comes out. It breaks the story
that the Benghazi panel had discovered Clinton exclusively used her
own private server rather than the government issued one, throughout
her time as s o S Secretary of State, and that, furthermore,
(16:34):
her aids took no action to preserve emails that she
sent or received from those personal accounts. The State Department
and the Intelligence Community Inspector General discovered four emails that
had classified information. And this was out of this was
a spot check. It was out of a random sample
of forty and when they saw that, they said, okay,
(16:55):
four out of forty, that's one out of ten. We
need to refer this to the FBI, their counter intelligence office.
And so they alerted the authorities that this classified intel
was kept on the Clinton server and by her lawyer
on a thumb drive. Interesting. Then The New York Times
runs a story on July with the headline criminal enquiry
(17:20):
sought in Clinton's use of email. Yeah, and the lead
sentence from that story was too Inspectors General have asked
the Justice Department to open a criminal investigation into whether
Hillary Rodham Clinton mishandled sensitive government information on a private
email account she used as Secretary of State. Senior government
officials said Thursday, so that's again, that's the New York Times.
(17:44):
You've got them citing senior government officials saying that Hillary
Clinton mishandled sensitive information on her private email. That's really
all you need to know. That's a big deal. Then,
of course you have all of these large U. S.
Organizations who you know, they jump on. They correct, they correct,
The New York Times stating that quote. An important distinction
(18:06):
is that the I C i G. The I C
I G did not make a criminal referral. It was
a security referral made for counterintelligence purposes. So to get
back through that government ease, what they are saying is
that we were not we were not giving an order
(18:28):
to book them Dano. We were saying this could be
leveraged by unfriendly foreign powers. And The Times made to
other corrections right. First, that Clinton was not the specific
target of the referral, and then that it was not
criminal in nature. But the funny thing is with redactions, corrections,
(18:53):
things like that, even in large papers of note, they
legally correct the record, but they do nothing for the
court of public opinion, you know what I mean? Yeah, absolutely,
you remember the first thing, especially the first headline. If
you see Clinton email scandal in a headline somewhere, or
Clinton email referral, or just some other combination in that
(19:14):
where you've got a person, a bad thing and an object. Um,
that's what you remember. It doesn't matter if a week later,
two days later, there's a correction on the original article,
even if they tweet out correction, this was not what
it was. Nobody gives a crap. Yeah. Typically, typically, and
that's not ading on anyone's intelligence. That's just the nature
(19:36):
of psychology for most people. So how did this initial investigation?
How did this all shake out? Will tell you after
a word from our sponsor. Alright, we're back. So let's
jump to July five. There's this gentleman named Comy James Coomey.
(20:01):
He was the director of the FBI. You may remember
this name. I haven't said that name in a long time.
I used to say it a lot um, but he
announced that the FBI completed its investigation, and uh, he
was gonna you know, they were going to talk to
the State Department with a certain recommendation, and that recommendation
was that no charges are appropriate in this case. That's
(20:22):
great news for the Clinton campaign and all of the supporters.
He went on to say that although there is evidence
of potential violations of the statutes regarding the handling of
classified information, our judgment is that no reasonable prosecutor would
bring such a case. Now in this uh, this initial
messaging that's coming from the FBI from Comey the director
(20:43):
again July, Yeah, exactly July. They just it seems like, hey,
this email thing happened. It's a little bit of carelessness.
But you know what, We're okay. Nobody did anything on
purpose to hurt anybody else. It was just they used
a private server. Slap the hand, let's move on, sloppy,
but not sinis the right. So but that changes the
(21:03):
thing is that changes the there's another there's another investigation.
On October, Comy tells Congress that, in connection with an
unrelated case, the FBI has learned of the existence of
emails that appear pertinent to the investigation. Uh, we're going
(21:24):
through a lot of context here, so but we'll get through.
It will be worth it at the end. This unrelated
case to which they referred was the FBI investigation of
the famously and hilariously tragically named Anthony Weener from The
Daily Show. Famously famously from The Daily Show. This guy, uh,
(21:48):
despite you know, his name might make you think he
has a sense of humor, but he got busted sending
sexually explicit text to a child, a fifteen year old girl.
The FBI discovered emails from his estranged wife, who was uh,
what was your name again? The aforementioned Huma Abodeen Huma Aberdeen,
the vice chair of the Clinton presidential campaign, and because
(22:09):
of this, they considered that these emails might be relevant
to the investigation. At the time, Comey said the FBI
would take appropriate investigative steps designed to allow investigators to
review these emails to determine whether they contain classified information
as well as to assess their importance to the investigation. Now,
(22:29):
anytime we talk about government procedure, I know it can
feel increasingly like a snooze fest. Acronyms and initialisms flying
Willy nilly. Everybody is talking like someone from the d
m V wrote their speech. Yeah, it's talking around things
a lot of the time, or of the procedures and
the procedural nature. Yeah, it's pretty crazy. Well, and that's
(22:53):
there's a reason for that, right, because you want to
make sure you get every letter, every syllable. Perfect us
to jump in before we're going this such a good idea.
We were joking as we were going through the whom
Aberdeen stuff with Anthony Weener. Just let's just take a
moment to say, how discussing that is that he was
sending inappropriate pictures to a fifteen year old really awful.
(23:14):
We we we are not making light of that. It
kind of slid past us as we were joking through, right, Okay,
I think, okay, we can move on. So yeah, I
hope that was never a question for anybody. But yes,
just to be crystal clear bolded underline at stamp that
gross perfect. Okay. So on November sixteen, mere days before
(23:42):
the election, Comy sends letter to Congress and he says, look,
we worked around the clock and we're sticking with our
guns from July. Sorry everybody, this was careless, but we
do not believe it was a crime. Literally days before
the election, as you said. And furthermore, despite criticisms that
this was a superbly timed October surprise, one of those
(24:06):
last minute things that can happen that can swing the
needle toward one candidate or another, Comey claimed that both
the investigation and its conclusions were a political and nothing
to do do with politics. Were the FBI. We have a job.
We do our job. Their job is to try to
get elected. Our job is counterintelligence and fighting crime. And
(24:26):
we did it. No surprise spoiler alert for anyone who
hasn't caught up with the news sense. The Clinton campaign
was unsuccessful. Donald Trump became the President of the United States,
and people who opposed the Clinton campaign or thought there
was something um rotten in Washington were not persuaded by
(24:51):
the FBI's two investigations. They said, it was like it's
cover up. It's rotten from its fat cats at the
top all the way to fat cats. Given reports in Congress,
these cats are just obese, too many and too fat,
Too many and too fat, they said, yes, that's a quote.
It seemed that despite despite the FBI's claims that there
(25:17):
were there was nothing wonky about their timing. It seemed
that whomever had managed to orchestrate this story and narrative
of private versus government emails, who had managed to turn
it into a chant and a rallying point for oppositional media,
had done this masterful job. Hillary Clinton herself cited this
(25:40):
as one of the factors in losing the election. I
would a thousand percent agree that this was a huge factor.
Is what everybody was talking about. I mean, it couldn't
have been the only factor, no, but it was still
the thing that if you thought about Hillary Clinton right
around that time, like Otober, late October, early November, it
(26:04):
was Clinton email. It was the you do you mean like?
It was the first key word that popped up in
everybody's mental Google. Yeah. Even if you were a supporter
or something, I guarantee you that was happening, Even if
it was like Clinton, oh gosh, emails, whatever. Well, the
calls for investigation into this matter did not cease. This
(26:24):
association was prominent in people's minds even after the election,
and furthermore, they they felt that justice had not been
done or something was a miss. And these calls for
investigation continued even as the Trump administration floundered several times,
(26:45):
both on the domestic and international stage. The White House
itself increasingly called for more investigation into the Clinton campaign's
classification of emails. They went so far as the fire
James Comby for this, and some other empired theim for
some other reasons which could be episodes all their own
one day. Today, this subject remains a rallying call for
(27:09):
some voters on the right. Foreign intelligence agencies who pretend
to be voters are also very ardent about this, and
politicians who will go on record today saying that they
feel there was a cover up. Now, let's get to
the rumors, right, it's correct. Just like the ongoing arguments
(27:29):
about the release of the Mueller Report, the FBI's conclusion
on the Clinton emails left a lot of people feeling like,
this is not this is the this is the edited version,
the redacted version. I want the director's cut, I want
the theatrical production. Tell me what actually happened. Because for
supporters of the FBI's conclusions, again typically these would be
(27:52):
supporters of the Clinton campaign, this was all pr sound
and fake news, fury smoke, with no fire mirrors, with
no reflection. A man factored crisis that accomplished exactly what
it was created to do to remove Clinton and therefore
the Democratic Party from the election game. Yeah. But of course,
for for the people who are opponents of Hillary um
(28:15):
sometimes generally supporters of the Trump campaign in uh, people
thought that this story was itself swept under the rug
after she lost the election, like perhaps something else should
have happened. We you may remember chance from rallies that
you would see on television of lock her up because
because some people truly believed that there was such a
(28:37):
misshandling of this stuff that it was criminal. Um. You know,
whether they believed that because some pundit was talking about it,
or because you know, some news story came out that
was read incorrectly, who knows, but people certainly felt that way.
But they were and that's because they thought there was
even more to the story than what was being represented
by the FBI's conclusions within the report. They thought that
(29:00):
maybe it was a bigger cover up, cover up of
some bigger thing, of perhaps further corruption than just using
an email server. Perhaps there was something deeper, as in
a deep state within the US government that was operating
outside of the control of elected officials a shadow government.
Here's where it gets crazy. First, let's define what a
(29:24):
shadow government actually is. It's not always bad. In the
world of British politics, there's the shadow cabinet. All that
is is a group of people from the opposition party
who form a different cabinet mirroring or wait for it,
shadowing the positions of each member of the real cabinet.
(29:45):
So there's a there's a person from the opposition side
who will scrutinize the policies and actions of their counterpart
in the real cabinet, and they will present alternatives. Vote
for us, they say, because this is what we would done.
I get it like a Theresa May. And then shadow
Tresa May with a mustache and like a black hat
(30:06):
or something. Yeah, exactly, So you've seen you've seen it.
I've seen it. So in this case people are talking
about the other, the other definition of a shadow government.
It's not near as neat nor as helpful as the
British shadow government. In the US, the term shadow government
refers to two or three things. The first one is
(30:27):
absolutely legal, we need it. It's the continuity of government,
the preplanned order of secession in the event of one
or more deaths in the executive branch and Congress. The
president dies, who's in charge now? Whence the vice president?
The vice president dies, Who's in charge now? And on
and on and on. Uh. And one of the one
(30:48):
of the most interesting questions to me when I was
when I was a kid, it was a very very
strange answer, you know. I asked that question, and children asked, uh,
do you think I could be president? And uh, family member,
I'm not gonna reveal who, and their associates said, well, sure,
you might be president tomorrow. It depends on what happens tonight.
(31:12):
And that's how I learned about the line of succession.
Are you up there? Are you in there? Like thousands?
It would have to be like millions, hundreds of millions
of people would have to die. We got to change that.
We need to get you higher upon that little think.
I don't know, I don't think. I think so. I
appreciate that, but I would nominate you instead. Uh, nope,
(31:36):
all right, Paul, Oh yeah, it's Faul. I see him.
He's nodding. He would take that on. He would take
that on. So that's that's the legal one. But then
there's what you mentioned earlier. Mat the deep state. This
is an entrenched, allegedly entrenched network of unelected bureaucrats. They're
thought to wield the purse strings, the influence and the
power needed to actually run the US and therefore a
(31:58):
lot of the world behind the scenes. So ha ha,
they say, you've been elected for what four years? Yeah,
you are the flicker in the eye of some of
these people. And there really are positions like that that
exist within Washington and the structure. It doesn't necessarily necessarily
mean that they're all working together for one big thing,
(32:20):
but they exist and they are arguably more powerful in
a way than anyone that holds any office for four years.
The president, even in any large organization in the U S.
Government is huge, most governments are. In any large organization,
we see that communication tends to break down and people
(32:40):
become gatekeepers of information. They run their own fiefdoms. Uh So,
the third, just for the sake of argument, that the
third possibility is the massive amount of private influence wielded
by billionaires or other governments or foreign businesses that want
to push their interests domestically, and a broad you know,
like a foreign trade consortium puts in hundreds of millions
(33:05):
of dollars two towards US lobbying to get more favorable
trade arrangements. Right, let's let's kick off the tariffs on
these plush Garfield coozies that are that we're pushing. I
don't know why. Look that's not my best example, but
(33:26):
you know what I'm talking about. An example. Another example
of this on the domestic end would be the Koch brothers,
who have for decades been making in roads to push
the US more towards the kind of governance that they
would like to see, which is alternately described as more
libertarian government and neo feudalism. Yeah, the money, we're really
(33:48):
we're talking about the power if you're talking about the
entrenched deep state, and then with these private influencers, we're
really talking about the money right right, And these things
can all happen concurrently. That's the messed up part. It
gets complicated. But usually when you hear about a shadow
government here in the States, it will come from It
(34:09):
will often come from the political rights. It used to be.
It used to be in times past, a phrase used
by the far far left and the far far right,
who often agree on things, and more so than perhaps
the media would have you believe. Right, But this argument
(34:30):
always hinges on that notion of the deep state for
people who believe in this kind of shadow government. The
Seventh Floor Group was proof positive that something was wrong
in the Beltway. And what the heck is the seventh
Floor Group. Well, we'll talk about it right after a
word from our sponsor. So the Seventh Floor Group or
(34:57):
the shadow government, and we promised that the same else
stuff would pay off. Yeah, and the third the last,
But a lot of the stuff we've been talking about,
really you have to remember that and know that stuff
before we get here. Yes, a bit of a secuitous route,
but we went the most direct way possible. So we
mentioned that the FBI investigation, both of them found what
(35:20):
they saw is no evidence of crime, right, And a
lot of people really took that on the chin because
they were certain that this would be hard evidence, smoking
gun of a crime. However, they did find some stuff
because they dug deep. In October, the FBI released four
sets of documents, including notes and interview summaries, and in
(35:44):
this summary, in the fourth part of the release, they
found a revelation. Okay, so just to said this up
so you understand what it is through the FBI's vault.
The vault, UH, that's you can find these things. However,
they've been removed. These these specific ones relating to the
(36:05):
Hillary Clinton campaign have been removed from the vault the
FBI's website. But if you go to the archive dot
org way back machine and you put in the u
r L, you can find this. It's difficult to find.
There a couple of plays. You can get to it,
but it's called Hillary Are Clinton? Part four of six,
that's what it's called. You can find it. And essentially
(36:28):
these are just as Ben said, UH, summations of interviews
that they that they had with people, just individuals regarding
the Hillary Clinton email campaign scandal or whatever it was,
talking about the private servers, what they knew, when they
knew it, and all of that. And inside here you
find one specific or there are several specific things. But
(36:50):
in one of these, one of the documents came from
an interview with an unidentified person who suggested that the
f o I A the Freedom of Information Act requests
related to a Clinton to Clinton, anything related to Clinton
went through a group that was some kind sometimes referred
to at least internally as the Shadow Government, as literally
the shadow government. So you know, first of all, we
(37:14):
have to say maybe this was maybe that's kind of
an inside joke, right maybe, but but let's keep listening
in here, because according to this anonymous person quote, there
was a powerful group of very high ranking State and
that State Department officials that some referred to as the
Seventh Floor Group or the shadow Government, met every Wednesday
(37:36):
afternoon to discuss the Freedom of Information Act process with
regards to Clinton. We're talking congressional records and everything related
to Clinton and freedom of Information Act and congressional inquiries.
So this group, literally they were the gatekeepers for everything
Clinton related, and they were a they were a powerful filter. Right, yes,
(37:58):
So this, oddly enough, it sounds pretty crazy. Oddly enough,
this was not a primary focus of mainstream media coverage.
It did receive mention across the board, and those opposed
to the Clinton campaign quickly took this and ran with it.
I mean, you can't you can't blame those people, because
if you if you object to a politician or a group,
(38:19):
what a what a gift to have this, to have
somebody and they're foolish enough to call themselves the shadow government.
My very own state Department Shadow Government. That's like like
I I don't care who you are in politics or
who you wish to be. That's up there with opening
a golf club called Illuminati only you know what I mean.
(38:42):
Even if you say it's a joke, no, not everyone
is going to be on board. So here's what we know.
According to the FBI submarine, Again, these are not actual transcripts.
The group argued for a Clinton document release to be
conducted all at once for what they called coordination purposes
instead of on a rolling basis, and that would normally
(39:04):
be the case. That again, to your point, Matt, sounds
like more procedural than than a super big deal. UH.
Spokesperson for the State Department said, we categorically deny this claim,
these related claims that there's a big one coming up.
UH And they said these allegations are inaccurate, they don't
align with the facts. To be clear, the State Department
(39:28):
did upgrade the document at the request of the FBI
when we were released it. He's speaking of a specific document,
will get to but let's look at the players. So
the seventh Floor group was believed to meet on Wednesdays
on the seventh floor right of their building, and the
meetings were attended by some real internal power players, Under
(39:49):
Secretary of State Patrick Kennedy, uh Secretary of State at
that point, John Kerry, Deputy Chief of Staff Jennifer Stout,
Deputy Secretary of State for Management Resources, Assistant Secretary Julia Frifield,
and unnamed members of the Office of the Legal Advisor. Notice.
Notice how the lawyers got away? Uh so yeah, yeah, yeah,
(40:12):
and just it's a bunch of attorneys. Yeah, which, you know,
if we were going to be wildly speculative, can't you
can't you easily imagine someone saying, I'll tell you about
the seventh Floor, but I want full immunity, you know
what I mean. Yeah, I can actually see that very much. So, well,
is it a big deal? What? What? What's the big
(40:34):
deal here? The big deal here is apparently that the
shadow government or the Seventh Floor group asked the FBI
to declassify some emails so they wouldn't be thought of
as security leaks. And the smoking gun for for people
who believe that this was sinister was the alleged action
of Under Secretary of State Patrick Kennedy. According to the
(40:56):
claims in the interview, he contacted the FBI to ask
for the change and classification in exchange for quid pro quote.
Isn't that crazy? An old quid pro quote? Claris? Uh,
And again, this this guy is important. He's also a Kennedy.
Do we know if he's a Kennedy Kennedy, Patrick Kennedy,
(41:18):
I honestly don't know who cares. Check this out. So
if he co probably cares, he probably cares. Okay. So
on page four of that FBI vault document that you
can find on the web dot archive dot org, it
says that there was this big meeting they're talking about
with the State Department with They called it an all
(41:38):
agency meeting, and uh, this person, Patrick Kennedy, that we're
speaking about, he presided over the meeting, and during the conversation,
one of the people specifically asked whether any member of
the emails in question were classified. Making eye contact with redacted,
Kennedy remarked, well, we'll see. And this is apparently while
(42:00):
he was making again making eye contact with somebody as
in like, hey, maybe we'll find out what's going on.
And then he went on to discuss essentially a quid
pro quot about perhaps putting FBI agents in countries where
FBI agents are generally not allowed to be. Like, maybe
if you can change the classification, we'll do something for you,
(42:22):
something beyond what anyone would imagine it would be possible.
Scratch at back, scratch your back, and yeah, we'll get
We'll get FBI agents in this country where they're not
supposed to be. That's a huge deal. Yeah. Yeah, So
the FBI. The FBI said, okay, well, happened was that
you know, what had happened was that the FBI determined
(42:45):
that there was an email. Senior State Department official requested
the FBI to quote, re review this and look at
it again. Just make sure that you know, do your job,
do it again? Is it classified? Are you sure? Yeah?
But you'd have to look at it again to be sure. Right.
That's basically we went down. And then they say that
(43:07):
an FBI official who was not part of the later
Clinton investigation, told the State's department the guy at the
States Department, well, you know now that you mentioned it, uh,
I guess I could look at it again. Um, you
know would really help me look at it if if
(43:30):
if we could maybe also address just while I've got
you on the line here, while I got you on
the line here, pat, if we could also address our
risk that request they keep putting in for space for
additional FBI employees assigned abroad, because you know, I've sent
you several emails and tried to call them multiple times,
and now you answer the phone. Well, you know what,
I think maybe we can take care of it if
(43:51):
some of those emails, you know, ended up being unclassified, right,
that sounds like a pretty good deal to me, sort
of a cool pro quo. I'm hanging up, No, you
hang up? Are you? Are you still there? Going to
(44:15):
hang up? That's how That's how they had this conversation. Surely,
oh man, And they were both recording the whole time,
and they were both recording the whole time. We're being
a little bit lip, but you can see it's it's
somewhat the FBI is making valid distinctions, right, But of
course people would deny this kind of one hand washes
(44:38):
the other sort of stuff. So following this call, the
FBI officials, now retired, got with a senior FBI executive
who was responsible for determining classification, and they decided that
it was in fact classified secret the way it was
supposed to be So FBI guy goes back to the
(44:59):
State Department contact he has and he says, look, it's classified.
We looked at it twice and it's supposed to stay secret,
and we can't change it. And it wasn't changed. It
remains classified today, the FBI concludes, and you can see
this on their own website. Although there was never a
quid pro quo, these allegations were nonetheless referred to the
(45:19):
appropriate officials for review. So they said, look, we know
nothing went down, but just to keep our nose clean,
we asked some other people to look at it, because
with the FBI were a political We do our job,
they do their job. Yeah, And to be fair, there
was no quid pro quo in this instance of these
(45:39):
you know exchanges that we that became public. Being very
careful of that, Matt imired, right, but no, but come on,
that's that's all we've proven, right, at least that's all
the FBI says. Right. There are other alleged activities, other allegations.
This same group, the Seventh Floor Group or quote unquote
shadow government, has been accused of censoring official reports, of
(46:03):
interfering with special investigations, of providing diplomatic security or protection
for certain individuals, shielding them from criminal charges, and a
lot of this, a lot of that stuff. Once you
get into the providing protection and diplomatic security and stuff
for controversial people, often those are going to come from
(46:25):
biased sources. You see the Washington Examiner. Examiner if you wish,
you can find something on that. And if you search
for Hillary's officials cut criticisms out of State Department reports,
you will find it and you can read all about it.
You can also while you're reading those reports, you can
(46:47):
go back to what we have kept going back to,
which is the FBI confirming at least maybe not saying
that they believe this exists, but confirming that they spoke
with people who did think it, who casually mentioned that
it's the seventh Floor group. Oh, it's the shadow government.
It's fine, it's fine. What is he irish? Now? I
(47:09):
don't know what happened. That's what they're talking about. So
this is this is not quite where it ends. But
we do have some conclusions. First, Goosifer, are you speaking
directly to Goosfer Guci for uh, maybe maybe if you
tune into the podcast, you'd love to hear from you.
According to New York Time. The hacker who used this
(47:31):
name Gucci for Uh coined the coined the moniker to
combine the style of Gucci in the light of Lucifer.
He turned out to be a guy named marcel lejal
Lazar Uh, forty three year old former taxi driver, is
at the time unemployed. He did not have expertise in computers.
He didn't have any fancy equipment or tech. He just
(47:54):
had an old Samsung cell phone and an NBC desktop
and all the skills he used in hacking. According to
the official reports, he picked up on the web. So
he was not, as far as we know, some high
level secret state actor. Yeah, according to the official sources.
(48:14):
Well he's not a bot net king or whatever. But
most of the emails providing the impetus for that second
investigation turned out to be duplicates of stuff they found
the first time around, So in that second investigation there
wasn't apparently that much new stuff. And that lends a
little bit of credence to that October surprise theory, because again,
(48:34):
the timing, you couldn't have planned it better, right, But
the group appears to have been disbanded by Donald Trump's
administration the symfamous seventh Floor Shadow Government group. On February seventeen,
CPS reported that much of the seventh Floor staff who
worked for the Deputy Secretary of State for Management and
Resources these titles Man and the Counselor offices were told
(48:59):
today that their services were no longer needed. So you
could read it in other articles of the time where
the headlines something like Rex Tillerson kicks out seventh Floor
group or fires a bunch of diplomats, and the State
Department did encounter a purge at that time. Yeah, but
who knows if they're the the seventh floor group, right,
(49:19):
or we'd maybe the people just met up on the
seventh floor. Maybe they lived on the fourth floor. Right.
It's weird because some of us listening are convinced there's
much more to the stories. Some of us listening are
convinced it's um, it's it's just media theater solely meant
(49:41):
to discredit someone. Right. It was a very divisive issue then,
and to a degree, it's still a divisive issue today.
But oddly enough, several of the original media reports have
been deleted. The FBI vault files literally don't exist unless
you go to the way by machine, right, but not
(50:03):
to be too much of a devil's advocate. But couldn't
the FBI clean out the way back machine if they
wanted to? Maybe, I don't know if the n s
A could do it, probably because Gucci could do Uh.
The Wikipedia page was also scrubbed. If you go into
(50:24):
the talk, there's a really interesting thing about Wikipedia, uh,
which is maybe not so much the articles themselves. But
if you look at Wikipedia, you're gonna see two taps.
We'll see a tab at the top left with the article,
and a tab just to the right of that called
talk right. And talk is where the editors of Wikipedia
and the contributors of Wikipedia argue about whether or not
(50:48):
something should be an article, or something should be included
in that article. Wikipedia is a world at war because
numerous numerous debates, uh, geopolitical sandwiches, uh, you know, tragedies,
all sorts of things are currently being furiously edited by
(51:13):
one person or another with differing views. In the case
of the Wikipedia page, from what we found, the reason
given for its deletion was that there were not multiple
primary sources. So they said, all right, you need you
need more than one source for this to even be
entertained as the truth, but you can still find it
(51:37):
in Matt Frederick's Trust the Wayback Machine. I think that's
a great T shirt idea. By the way, it's not mine,
it's archived at ORC. That's true. That's true. Uh So,
the FBI does appear to confirm the existence of this group,
while not confirming that they cooperated with them. There is
a there was a real shadow government, or at least
(51:58):
a real group referred to is the shadow government, and
they apparently no longer work for the State Department. But
it leads us to the end of today's episode and
a question, a disturbing question. Even if this wasn't that
big of a deal, there's still a group of people
that were not elected officials that were handing the hanging
(52:21):
out in you know, someplace, making decisions about what you
and I and everyone listening as the public get to
hear or know about an elected official. How many other
groups like that exists that are gatekeepers of information for
the public, that are maybe making bigger decisions even than that,
(52:43):
about geopolitics, about foods we eat, about the types of
polyester mixed clothing we get to wear, how much your
dollar is worth? Oh, that's a big one. That's more
important than the type of clothing we get to wear.
I don't know, these all seem pretty important, right, Thank
(53:05):
you so much for checking out this episode. Uh, we
we know this would be a little divisive for people
who have really dug deep into this. We did give
a high level look because we wanted to provide enough
of a view of the forest for us to understand
what the seventh floor group is or why it matters. Again,
(53:29):
why would you why would you call yourself the shadow
government just even for funzies. I don't know that seems
that seems a little dangerou. I mean, I guess we
could do it, but everybody would probably know that we're
not We're not making moves as representatives of Uncle Sam
or a foreign power exactly. And I would say, if
you want to keep going down this rabbit hole, a
(53:51):
great and exciting fun thing to do is to go
to the Wikipedia page for the Hillary Clinton email controversy
and then go all the way down to the bottom
and just you know, after looking at the talk thing
and all the other stuff, go all the way down
the bottom and start clicking through sources down there, because
it's crazy, just the amount of media that was generated
(54:13):
through this scandal, the amount of sourcing that exists on
that one wiki page. Um, it's an intense slog. Good
luck to you. Enjoy yourself, make sure you've got a drink,
and let us know what other examples of shadow governments
you have found, not just here in the US, but
in other countries or in other groups of countries. Right,
(54:36):
we want to hear those stories that you think your
fellow listeners would enjoy about what goes on behind the curtain.
You can tell us about this on Instagram. You can
tell us about this on Facebook. You can tell us
about this on Twitter. We highly recommend you check out
our favorite part of the show your fellow listeners on
our Facebook page. Here's where it gets crazy. But wait,
(54:58):
someone says I hate social media. Then call us. We
are one eight three three s T d W y
t K. Leave us a message. You'll have three minutes. Um.
If you need more time, call back, that's fine. You'll
be greeted with a chilling message from Mr ben Bowling
when you when you call in, you just wait for
(55:19):
the beep or you can turn back. Now. It's really great, Okay,
if you do leave a message, it might get on
the air. Please please please give us just your your ideas,
your thoughts on shadow government, your personal stories about shadow people,
whatever you've got. Just send it our way. We'd love
to hear it. I'm actually taking I've got uh twenty
four more new like brand new messages from the last
(55:41):
week and a half been then I'm going through right now. Yeah,
that's a lot. It's really good too, all right, UM
do that. If you don't want to do that, there's
one last thing you can do. If you want to
reach us, you can send us a good old fashioned email.
We are conspiracy at how stuff Works dot com. M h.
(56:16):
Stuff they Don't Want You to Know is a production
of I Heart Radio's How Stuff Works. For more podcasts
from my heart Radio, visit the i heart Radio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
From UFOs to psychic powers and government conspiracies. History is
riddled with unexplained events. You can turn back now or
learn the stuff they don't want you to know. A
production of I Heart Radios How Stuff Works. Welcome back
(00:24):
to the show. My name is Matt Noel is on
an adventurer. But wait, who are you? That's right? They
call me Ben. We are joined with our super producer
Paul Mission controlled decand most importantly, you are you. You
are here and that makes this stuff they don't want
you to know. This is a weird one, Matt. This
(00:46):
is an episode that a lot of our fellow and
listeners had asked us to cover in years past. Yes,
it's it's a callback. It's a callback, it really is,
and we did. We did an episode related to this
topic way back in what So. Looking back, it's strange
(01:08):
to recall that the teen presidential campaign happened three years ago. Yeah,
it certainly doesn't seem as though that much time has passed,
but in fact it has a three ish years. Yeah,
we're not quite there and we're not quite to November yet,
but still, hey, it's it's crazy that much time has passed,
(01:29):
and you know, elections especially presidential elections in this country.
They bring out the best and the worst of us.
I think. I think that's incredibly optimistic, and I appreciate
that I needed to hear some good news today. Uh,
you're You're absolutely right, my friend. I agree with you.
(01:49):
Way back in ten, when we first did some episodes
on elections, we figured that the most fact based and
the fairest way for us to sum up all the
allegations and conspiratorial accusations that we had we had heard of,
was to do one episode for each of the political
(02:14):
party front runners. So we did one episode on conspiracies
about the Trump campaign, and we did one episode on
conspiracies about the Hillary Clinton campaign. Yes, and Bernie didn't
even make it in there. Actually that's not true. Bernie
made an appearance in the Clinton episode. Oh yeah, yeah,
along with your your pal Wasserman Schultz, right, Oh, everyone's
(02:34):
pal Wasserman Schultz. It was like this. Both of those
episodes together were like this Avengers Infinity War team up
of horrible people doing horrible things. It really was, and
whether we like it or not, we contributed to whatever
it is that we are in right now, whatever this is,
we we just gave a little bit because everyone involved,
(02:58):
like you said, it was all there. But he goes
up to no good and there really wasn't a great choice,
it seemed, at least in my opinion, Yeah, because we
had we had a situation wherein mass media was being
leveraged so effectively. Mass media was around another elections, but
it hadn't quite reached the fever pitch that it reached
(03:20):
in the ten presidential campaign. And like most presidential campaigns
here in the States, the one in sten saw the
rise and fall of multitudes of politicians, as well as
the sudden rise and candidly the disappearance of various scandals,
you know what I mean, astely. So today's story starts
(03:42):
with one of the famous controversies, or should we say
infamous controversies in that election. It's known as the Hillary
Clinton email scandal or email controversy. The word choice there
depends upon which which side of the aisle you fall on.
For a lot of people, how much do you want
to downplay this? Right? Right? So for some people this
(04:04):
was a case study in out of control media grasping
its straws, right, and those were generally people who were
supporters of the Clinton campaign. For others, generally opponents of
that campaign, it was a case study and how the
powerful can sweep their political dirt under the figurative rug.
(04:25):
The reality it was somewhere in the middle, right right, right,
And and nowadays people still use the phrase but the emails.
So first things first, what are we talking about here? Well,
that that a phrase, but the emails it's kind of shorthand,
really and it's a bit of a joke. Uh, and
it's uh, I don't know, it's it's pretty crazy. It
(04:48):
goes back to this series of really security violations that
were undertaken. I don't know how you how you put
that that they were there were violations that the Clinton
campaign did while she was in office as Secretary of State,
and uh, it was it had to do with putting
(05:08):
emails on a private server, or or putting emails that
should not be on a private server on a private
server right in the in the big major scheme of things,
that's what it is. And ultimately you're talking about the
classification of certain email and information within emails that maybe
shouldn't have been on a private server. And I know
(05:30):
that for many of us listening today, this is something
that you may feel that you heard ad nauseum three
years ago. Uh, and you're thinking, well, why should I
said listen this? We have a plot twist coming up
for you. This is not just an episode about emails.
The plot thickens pretty quickly. But to get there, we
need to walk through the email scandal, the email controversy.
(05:54):
It is exactly as you described it, Matt, a series
of security violations. Think of it as um, you know what.
Think of one server as a an old school filing cabinet, right,
and then another server right next to it, another old
school filing cabinet. And in the server to your right,
(06:15):
that's where all the classified stuff goes. What's up with
North Korea? What? What are Iran and various other Middle
Eastern powers angry or cranky about today? That goes into
this one file cabinet, and that file kinet has a
crazy amount of locks on it and biometric scanning in
order to get into it. It's intense stuff. And then
(06:37):
you have the other file cabinet on your left, no locks.
It's kind of a junk drawer there are you know,
they're like old recipes, maybe some Pinterest things in there.
But then one way or another, through accident or through
intentional action. The stuff that's top secret or just secret
ends up there with the recipes and the hey, what
(07:00):
are you doing on Saturday? Let's go to um? What's
a chain restaurant? Oh Charlie's. Oh, Paul's gonna kill us
if we don't shout out sorry, sorry, Paul Applebee's. Jeez,
that was close. Here's another major distinction we have to make. Yes,
the server on your right, the one that has all
those locks on it, with all the Class WIED information,
(07:20):
that one can be seen by the State Department, by
a lot of other intelligence agencies. There's there's uh, there's
accountability on that one right to the government. On the
private one, that one, the one on your left, it's
completely controlled by the Clinton campaign and people who are
contracted to work with the Clinton campaign on that email server.
(07:41):
That's a huge thing that we have to just remember.
Absolutely great point. There is a chain of custody in
theory for everything in that right hand filing cabinet. This
controversy is is a series of security violations. Misfiled emails,
deleted emails, and that's another big thing, deleted deleted emails. Yet,
(08:01):
and this started before Clinton became the Democratic candidate in
the campaign, but it continued during the campaign. This didn't
really become a national story until March of when The
New York Times ran a front page article on the subject.
The article said that the system quote may have violated
(08:24):
federal requirements and was quote alarming unquote to current and
former government archive officials. So that's what that's what the
Clinton campaign was found doing. Clinton was found to have
used her family's private server for official communications instead of
official State Department email accounts. This happens to a lot
(08:45):
of people on a much smaller scale. Let's say that
you have multiple social media accounts. Let's say that, like
our good friend Mission Control, you have one account that's
Paul something or other, and then you have another account
that is Applebee's Facts. Yeah, and you forget that, you know,
(09:07):
you forget to switch your profile over, and so it
sounds were like a Reddit user name, it does. It
sounds like a great Reddit user name. And then uh,
you know, all the sudden things that should be said
by Paul are being said by apple bees facts and
vice versa. That's that's a much smaller level because Applebee's
facts and this is not a knock on Applebee's facts
(09:28):
at all. Usually doesn't deal with things like geo political
tensions in the Middle East yet not yet. I mean
those apps are coming, yeah, or you know, quid quid
pro quo, things having to do with the classification of emails.
Whenever I hear quip pro quote, I cannot help but
think of silence of the Lambs. Oh, really a little
(09:51):
quid pro quotel. What's her name? Which broke quoa claries? Yes? Uh, yeah,
did you know? Completely off topic, matt uh. The renowned
actor Anthony Hopkins, his character Hannibal Lecter that's not a spoiler,
is only actually on camera for like a ridiculously small
amount of time, like fifteen minutes or something. All told, Yeah,
(10:13):
and he won, didn't he win? Oscars glora that year
we in The Monster of the Zodiac Killer. We actually
mentioned that. That year that that movie came out. They
tailored the entire Oscar ceremony around his character essentially in
that movie. It's insane the US does glorify serial killers. Also,
I found another ancient serial killer. I think I'm building
(10:37):
a pretty good argument I'd like to pitch to you later. Well,
I'll do it. Now, why don't we do an episode
on serial killers before uh the eight hundreds or ancient
serial killers who have a treasure trove. Really a lot
that will be new to people. Yeah, documented serial killer. Yeah, Okay,
that sounds like a whole new podcast. We'll see, we'll see,
(10:59):
We'll give it a go. So before we explode the
lives of those ancient serial killers, let's continue exploring this
strange story of emails. Right now, we've outlined the the gist, right,
Bliss walk through a little bit more of it. So
shortly before she was sworn in as Secretary of State
(11:20):
in two thousand nine, Hillary Clinton had set up an
email server at her home in New York. This was
home to an email address h d R twenty two
at clinton email dot com, and this was for all
of her email correspondence work related personal stuff during her
four years in office. She also set up email addresses
(11:42):
on the server for her long time aid State Department
Chief of Staff one Cheryl Mills, as well HM abode
Huma abodeen Yes, yes was the long time made. She
did not use or even activate a state dot gov
email account, which which was a big deal. It would
have been hosted on servers owned and managed by the
(12:02):
US government. The reason that's an important detail. It is
not necessarily because people thought the Secretary of State was
a criminal or doing criminal acts. It's more for operational
security or ops seck, because other other countries, no matter
how friendly they are, would love to know what's going
(12:23):
on in the US when the doors to the halls
of power are closed. Oh of course. And if you're
perhaps someone like Hillary Rodham Clinton, and you stand out
that you know that much as a name, as a
powerful person within within the halls of that power, uh,
your private email server is a major target for anyone
and everyone who may be looking to find some information. Yeah. So,
(12:48):
so the FBI ends up getting involved a little later on,
and what they found was that over a hundred emails
containing some version of classified information were found on her
private servers. There were sixty five emails they were considered
a secret classified secret, twenty two were classified top secret.
And it doesn't get much more secret than that. Another
(13:10):
two thousand, two thousand and ninety three emails were not
initially classified, but then they were retro retroactively classified by
the State Department itself, kind of like upon further consideration.
This is sensitive information and it's important to know that
that is the State Department that is doing that. That
will come into play a little later. And there's a
side note. There are things above top secret, like compartmentalized
(13:36):
access your eyes only, yes, but but that as far
as we know, these emails just went up to top secret,
which is still a big deal. That shouldn't you know,
be sitting around on your your Yahoo account or something.
But you're absolutely right, So something is amiss here. It
(13:57):
doesn't matter where you fall politically. Various critics, including Republican
members of Congress, argued that using a private messaging system
and server violated State Department protocols, and furthermore, they said
this violates federal laws and regulations. The FBI is on
the case. As early as two thousand nine, officials with
(14:18):
the in a r A the National Archives and Records
Administration expressed concerns over these possible violations of the standard
operating procedure of record keeping at the State Department. December
of twenty twelve, near the end of Clinton's tenure Secretary
of State, a nonprofit group with a pretty neat name,
(14:40):
Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington or crew. They
filed a Freedom of Information Act request to get the
records of the departing Secretary of States emails. They received
a response in May that said, no records responsive to
your request. We're located. That's government ease for four oh
(15:04):
four error nothing found. Yeah, and then you, um, you
gotta look at the certain emails that were sent to
that whole Clinton email dot com address, which is terrible
to read, by the way, because it looks like clintone mail.
It just doesn't look great. But they were discovered in
March when a hacker who called himself or herself whoever,
(15:27):
was goos Offer, and they distributed these emails that were
sent to Clinton from Sydney Bloomenthal and uh, this dude
Goosefer obtained them by illegally accessing Bloomenthall's email account. So
this hacker, essentially Goosef broke into Sydney Bluementhall's email found
all of these private Clinton emails. And Goosefer is a
(15:49):
portmanteau of Gucci and Lucifer, so it's Gucci for Gucci.
For excuse, I've always heard Goosever. Yeah, yeah, I just
I like the word play. Guys, criminal though in the
summer of lawyers from the State Department noticed several emails
from Clinton's personal account while reviewing documents requested by the
(16:11):
House Select Committee on Benghazi, which is a whole another
bag of badgers. And then, as we said earlier at
New York Times, piece comes out. It breaks the story
that the Benghazi panel had discovered Clinton exclusively used her
own private server rather than the government issued one, throughout
her time as s o S Secretary of State, and that, furthermore,
(16:34):
her aids took no action to preserve emails that she
sent or received from those personal accounts. The State Department
and the Intelligence Community Inspector General discovered four emails that
had classified information. And this was out of this was
a spot check. It was out of a random sample
of forty and when they saw that, they said, okay,
(16:55):
four out of forty, that's one out of ten. We
need to refer this to the FBI, their counter intelligence office.
And so they alerted the authorities that this classified intel
was kept on the Clinton server and by her lawyer
on a thumb drive. Interesting. Then The New York Times
runs a story on July with the headline criminal enquiry
(17:20):
sought in Clinton's use of email. Yeah, and the lead
sentence from that story was too Inspectors General have asked
the Justice Department to open a criminal investigation into whether
Hillary Rodham Clinton mishandled sensitive government information on a private
email account she used as Secretary of State. Senior government
officials said Thursday, so that's again, that's the New York Times.
(17:44):
You've got them citing senior government officials saying that Hillary
Clinton mishandled sensitive information on her private email. That's really
all you need to know. That's a big deal. Then,
of course you have all of these large U. S.
Organizations who you know, they jump on. They correct, they correct,
The New York Times stating that quote. An important distinction
(18:06):
is that the I C i G. The I C
I G did not make a criminal referral. It was
a security referral made for counterintelligence purposes. So to get
back through that government ease, what they are saying is
that we were not we were not giving an order
(18:28):
to book them Dano. We were saying this could be
leveraged by unfriendly foreign powers. And The Times made to
other corrections right. First, that Clinton was not the specific
target of the referral, and then that it was not
criminal in nature. But the funny thing is with redactions, corrections,
(18:53):
things like that, even in large papers of note, they
legally correct the record, but they do nothing for the
court of public opinion, you know what I mean? Yeah, absolutely,
you remember the first thing, especially the first headline. If
you see Clinton email scandal in a headline somewhere, or
Clinton email referral, or just some other combination in that
(19:14):
where you've got a person, a bad thing and an object. Um,
that's what you remember. It doesn't matter if a week later,
two days later, there's a correction on the original article,
even if they tweet out correction, this was not what
it was. Nobody gives a crap. Yeah. Typically, typically, and
that's not ading on anyone's intelligence. That's just the nature
(19:36):
of psychology for most people. So how did this initial investigation?
How did this all shake out? Will tell you after
a word from our sponsor. Alright, we're back. So let's
jump to July five. There's this gentleman named Comy James Coomey.
(20:01):
He was the director of the FBI. You may remember
this name. I haven't said that name in a long time.
I used to say it a lot um, but he
announced that the FBI completed its investigation, and uh, he
was gonna you know, they were going to talk to
the State Department with a certain recommendation, and that recommendation
was that no charges are appropriate in this case. That's
(20:22):
great news for the Clinton campaign and all of the supporters.
He went on to say that although there is evidence
of potential violations of the statutes regarding the handling of
classified information, our judgment is that no reasonable prosecutor would
bring such a case. Now in this uh, this initial
messaging that's coming from the FBI from Comey the director
(20:43):
again July, Yeah, exactly July. They just it seems like, hey,
this email thing happened. It's a little bit of carelessness.
But you know what, We're okay. Nobody did anything on
purpose to hurt anybody else. It was just they used
a private server. Slap the hand, let's move on, sloppy,
but not sinis the right. So but that changes the
(21:03):
thing is that changes the there's another there's another investigation.
On October, Comy tells Congress that, in connection with an
unrelated case, the FBI has learned of the existence of
emails that appear pertinent to the investigation. Uh, we're going
(21:24):
through a lot of context here, so but we'll get through.
It will be worth it at the end. This unrelated
case to which they referred was the FBI investigation of
the famously and hilariously tragically named Anthony Weener from The
Daily Show. Famously famously from The Daily Show. This guy, uh,
(21:48):
despite you know, his name might make you think he
has a sense of humor, but he got busted sending
sexually explicit text to a child, a fifteen year old girl.
The FBI discovered emails from his estranged wife, who was uh,
what was your name again? The aforementioned Huma Abodeen Huma Aberdeen,
the vice chair of the Clinton presidential campaign, and because
(22:09):
of this, they considered that these emails might be relevant
to the investigation. At the time, Comey said the FBI
would take appropriate investigative steps designed to allow investigators to
review these emails to determine whether they contain classified information
as well as to assess their importance to the investigation. Now,
(22:29):
anytime we talk about government procedure, I know it can
feel increasingly like a snooze fest. Acronyms and initialisms flying
Willy nilly. Everybody is talking like someone from the d
m V wrote their speech. Yeah, it's talking around things
a lot of the time, or of the procedures and
the procedural nature. Yeah, it's pretty crazy. Well, and that's
(22:53):
there's a reason for that, right, because you want to
make sure you get every letter, every syllable. Perfect us
to jump in before we're going this such a good idea.
We were joking as we were going through the whom
Aberdeen stuff with Anthony Weener. Just let's just take a
moment to say, how discussing that is that he was
sending inappropriate pictures to a fifteen year old really awful.
(23:14):
We we we are not making light of that. It
kind of slid past us as we were joking through, right, Okay,
I think, okay, we can move on. So yeah, I
hope that was never a question for anybody. But yes,
just to be crystal clear bolded underline at stamp that
gross perfect. Okay. So on November sixteen, mere days before
(23:42):
the election, Comy sends letter to Congress and he says, look,
we worked around the clock and we're sticking with our
guns from July. Sorry everybody, this was careless, but we
do not believe it was a crime. Literally days before
the election, as you said. And furthermore, despite criticisms that
this was a superbly timed October surprise, one of those
(24:06):
last minute things that can happen that can swing the
needle toward one candidate or another, Comey claimed that both
the investigation and its conclusions were a political and nothing
to do do with politics. Were the FBI. We have a job.
We do our job. Their job is to try to
get elected. Our job is counterintelligence and fighting crime. And
(24:26):
we did it. No surprise spoiler alert for anyone who
hasn't caught up with the news sense. The Clinton campaign
was unsuccessful. Donald Trump became the President of the United States,
and people who opposed the Clinton campaign or thought there
was something um rotten in Washington were not persuaded by
(24:51):
the FBI's two investigations. They said, it was like it's
cover up. It's rotten from its fat cats at the
top all the way to fat cats. Given reports in Congress,
these cats are just obese, too many and too fat,
Too many and too fat, they said, yes, that's a quote.
It seemed that despite despite the FBI's claims that there
(25:17):
were there was nothing wonky about their timing. It seemed
that whomever had managed to orchestrate this story and narrative
of private versus government emails, who had managed to turn
it into a chant and a rallying point for oppositional media,
had done this masterful job. Hillary Clinton herself cited this
(25:40):
as one of the factors in losing the election. I
would a thousand percent agree that this was a huge factor.
Is what everybody was talking about. I mean, it couldn't
have been the only factor, no, but it was still
the thing that if you thought about Hillary Clinton right
around that time, like Otober, late October, early November, it
(26:04):
was Clinton email. It was the you do you mean like?
It was the first key word that popped up in
everybody's mental Google. Yeah. Even if you were a supporter
or something, I guarantee you that was happening, Even if
it was like Clinton, oh gosh, emails, whatever. Well, the
calls for investigation into this matter did not cease. This
(26:24):
association was prominent in people's minds even after the election,
and furthermore, they they felt that justice had not been
done or something was a miss. And these calls for
investigation continued even as the Trump administration floundered several times,
(26:45):
both on the domestic and international stage. The White House
itself increasingly called for more investigation into the Clinton campaign's
classification of emails. They went so far as the fire
James Comby for this, and some other empired theim for
some other reasons which could be episodes all their own
one day. Today, this subject remains a rallying call for
(27:09):
some voters on the right. Foreign intelligence agencies who pretend
to be voters are also very ardent about this, and
politicians who will go on record today saying that they
feel there was a cover up. Now, let's get to
the rumors, right, it's correct. Just like the ongoing arguments
(27:29):
about the release of the Mueller Report, the FBI's conclusion
on the Clinton emails left a lot of people feeling like,
this is not this is the this is the edited version,
the redacted version. I want the director's cut, I want
the theatrical production. Tell me what actually happened. Because for
supporters of the FBI's conclusions, again typically these would be
(27:52):
supporters of the Clinton campaign, this was all pr sound
and fake news, fury smoke, with no fire mirrors, with
no reflection. A man factored crisis that accomplished exactly what
it was created to do to remove Clinton and therefore
the Democratic Party from the election game. Yeah. But of course,
for for the people who are opponents of Hillary um
(28:15):
sometimes generally supporters of the Trump campaign in uh, people
thought that this story was itself swept under the rug
after she lost the election, like perhaps something else should
have happened. We you may remember chance from rallies that
you would see on television of lock her up because
because some people truly believed that there was such a
(28:37):
misshandling of this stuff that it was criminal. Um. You know,
whether they believed that because some pundit was talking about it,
or because you know, some news story came out that
was read incorrectly, who knows, but people certainly felt that way.
But they were and that's because they thought there was
even more to the story than what was being represented
by the FBI's conclusions within the report. They thought that
(29:00):
maybe it was a bigger cover up, cover up of
some bigger thing, of perhaps further corruption than just using
an email server. Perhaps there was something deeper, as in
a deep state within the US government that was operating
outside of the control of elected officials a shadow government.
Here's where it gets crazy. First, let's define what a
(29:24):
shadow government actually is. It's not always bad. In the
world of British politics, there's the shadow cabinet. All that
is is a group of people from the opposition party
who form a different cabinet mirroring or wait for it,
shadowing the positions of each member of the real cabinet.
(29:45):
So there's a there's a person from the opposition side
who will scrutinize the policies and actions of their counterpart
in the real cabinet, and they will present alternatives. Vote
for us, they say, because this is what we would done.
I get it like a Theresa May. And then shadow
Tresa May with a mustache and like a black hat
(30:06):
or something. Yeah, exactly, So you've seen you've seen it.
I've seen it. So in this case people are talking
about the other, the other definition of a shadow government.
It's not near as neat nor as helpful as the
British shadow government. In the US, the term shadow government
refers to two or three things. The first one is
(30:27):
absolutely legal, we need it. It's the continuity of government,
the preplanned order of secession in the event of one
or more deaths in the executive branch and Congress. The
president dies, who's in charge now? Whence the vice president?
The vice president dies, Who's in charge now? And on
and on and on. Uh. And one of the one
(30:48):
of the most interesting questions to me when I was
when I was a kid, it was a very very
strange answer, you know. I asked that question, and children asked, uh,
do you think I could be president? And uh, family member,
I'm not gonna reveal who, and their associates said, well, sure,
you might be president tomorrow. It depends on what happens tonight.
(31:12):
And that's how I learned about the line of succession.
Are you up there? Are you in there? Like thousands?
It would have to be like millions, hundreds of millions
of people would have to die. We got to change that.
We need to get you higher upon that little think.
I don't know, I don't think. I think so. I
appreciate that, but I would nominate you instead. Uh, nope,
(31:36):
all right, Paul, Oh yeah, it's Faul. I see him.
He's nodding. He would take that on. He would take
that on. So that's that's the legal one. But then
there's what you mentioned earlier. Mat the deep state. This
is an entrenched, allegedly entrenched network of unelected bureaucrats. They're
thought to wield the purse strings, the influence and the
power needed to actually run the US and therefore a
(31:58):
lot of the world behind the scenes. So ha ha,
they say, you've been elected for what four years? Yeah,
you are the flicker in the eye of some of
these people. And there really are positions like that that
exist within Washington and the structure. It doesn't necessarily necessarily
mean that they're all working together for one big thing,
(32:20):
but they exist and they are arguably more powerful in
a way than anyone that holds any office for four years.
The president, even in any large organization in the U S.
Government is huge, most governments are. In any large organization,
we see that communication tends to break down and people
(32:40):
become gatekeepers of information. They run their own fiefdoms. Uh So,
the third, just for the sake of argument, that the
third possibility is the massive amount of private influence wielded
by billionaires or other governments or foreign businesses that want
to push their interests domestically, and a broad you know,
like a foreign trade consortium puts in hundreds of millions
(33:05):
of dollars two towards US lobbying to get more favorable
trade arrangements. Right, let's let's kick off the tariffs on
these plush Garfield coozies that are that we're pushing. I
don't know why. Look that's not my best example, but
(33:26):
you know what I'm talking about. An example. Another example
of this on the domestic end would be the Koch brothers,
who have for decades been making in roads to push
the US more towards the kind of governance that they
would like to see, which is alternately described as more
libertarian government and neo feudalism. Yeah, the money, we're really
(33:48):
we're talking about the power if you're talking about the
entrenched deep state, and then with these private influencers, we're
really talking about the money right right, And these things
can all happen concurrently. That's the messed up part. It
gets complicated. But usually when you hear about a shadow
government here in the States, it will come from It
(34:09):
will often come from the political rights. It used to be.
It used to be in times past, a phrase used
by the far far left and the far far right,
who often agree on things, and more so than perhaps
the media would have you believe. Right, But this argument
(34:30):
always hinges on that notion of the deep state for
people who believe in this kind of shadow government. The
Seventh Floor Group was proof positive that something was wrong
in the Beltway. And what the heck is the seventh
Floor Group. Well, we'll talk about it right after a
word from our sponsor. So the Seventh Floor Group or
(34:57):
the shadow government, and we promised that the same else
stuff would pay off. Yeah, and the third the last,
But a lot of the stuff we've been talking about,
really you have to remember that and know that stuff
before we get here. Yes, a bit of a secuitous route,
but we went the most direct way possible. So we
mentioned that the FBI investigation, both of them found what
(35:20):
they saw is no evidence of crime, right, And a
lot of people really took that on the chin because
they were certain that this would be hard evidence, smoking
gun of a crime. However, they did find some stuff
because they dug deep. In October, the FBI released four
sets of documents, including notes and interview summaries, and in
(35:44):
this summary, in the fourth part of the release, they
found a revelation. Okay, so just to said this up
so you understand what it is through the FBI's vault.
The vault, UH, that's you can find these things. However,
they've been removed. These these specific ones relating to the
(36:05):
Hillary Clinton campaign have been removed from the vault the
FBI's website. But if you go to the archive dot
org way back machine and you put in the u
r L, you can find this. It's difficult to find.
There a couple of plays. You can get to it,
but it's called Hillary Are Clinton? Part four of six,
that's what it's called. You can find it. And essentially
(36:28):
these are just as Ben said, UH, summations of interviews
that they that they had with people, just individuals regarding
the Hillary Clinton email campaign scandal or whatever it was,
talking about the private servers, what they knew, when they
knew it, and all of that. And inside here you
find one specific or there are several specific things. But
(36:50):
in one of these, one of the documents came from
an interview with an unidentified person who suggested that the
f o I A the Freedom of Information Act requests
related to a Clinton to Clinton, anything related to Clinton
went through a group that was some kind sometimes referred
to at least internally as the Shadow Government, as literally
the shadow government. So you know, first of all, we
(37:14):
have to say maybe this was maybe that's kind of
an inside joke, right maybe, but but let's keep listening
in here, because according to this anonymous person quote, there
was a powerful group of very high ranking State and
that State Department officials that some referred to as the
Seventh Floor Group or the shadow Government, met every Wednesday
(37:36):
afternoon to discuss the Freedom of Information Act process with
regards to Clinton. We're talking congressional records and everything related
to Clinton and freedom of Information Act and congressional inquiries.
So this group, literally they were the gatekeepers for everything
Clinton related, and they were a they were a powerful filter. Right, yes,
(37:58):
So this, oddly enough, it sounds pretty crazy. Oddly enough,
this was not a primary focus of mainstream media coverage.
It did receive mention across the board, and those opposed
to the Clinton campaign quickly took this and ran with it.
I mean, you can't you can't blame those people, because
if you if you object to a politician or a group,
(38:19):
what a what a gift to have this, to have
somebody and they're foolish enough to call themselves the shadow government.
My very own state Department Shadow Government. That's like like
I I don't care who you are in politics or
who you wish to be. That's up there with opening
a golf club called Illuminati only you know what I mean.
(38:42):
Even if you say it's a joke, no, not everyone
is going to be on board. So here's what we know.
According to the FBI submarine, Again, these are not actual transcripts.
The group argued for a Clinton document release to be
conducted all at once for what they called coordination purposes
instead of on a rolling basis, and that would normally
(39:04):
be the case. That again, to your point, Matt, sounds
like more procedural than than a super big deal. UH.
Spokesperson for the State Department said, we categorically deny this claim,
these related claims that there's a big one coming up.
UH And they said these allegations are inaccurate, they don't
align with the facts. To be clear, the State Department
(39:28):
did upgrade the document at the request of the FBI
when we were released it. He's speaking of a specific document,
will get to but let's look at the players. So
the seventh Floor group was believed to meet on Wednesdays
on the seventh floor right of their building, and the
meetings were attended by some real internal power players, Under
(39:49):
Secretary of State Patrick Kennedy, uh Secretary of State at
that point, John Kerry, Deputy Chief of Staff Jennifer Stout,
Deputy Secretary of State for Management Resources, Assistant Secretary Julia Frifield,
and unnamed members of the Office of the Legal Advisor. Notice.
Notice how the lawyers got away? Uh so yeah, yeah, yeah,
(40:12):
and just it's a bunch of attorneys. Yeah, which, you know,
if we were going to be wildly speculative, can't you
can't you easily imagine someone saying, I'll tell you about
the seventh Floor, but I want full immunity, you know
what I mean. Yeah, I can actually see that very much. So, well,
is it a big deal? What? What? What's the big
(40:34):
deal here? The big deal here is apparently that the
shadow government or the Seventh Floor group asked the FBI
to declassify some emails so they wouldn't be thought of
as security leaks. And the smoking gun for for people
who believe that this was sinister was the alleged action
of Under Secretary of State Patrick Kennedy. According to the
(40:56):
claims in the interview, he contacted the FBI to ask
for the change and classification in exchange for quid pro quote.
Isn't that crazy? An old quid pro quote? Claris? Uh,
And again, this this guy is important. He's also a Kennedy.
Do we know if he's a Kennedy Kennedy, Patrick Kennedy,
(41:18):
I honestly don't know who cares. Check this out. So
if he co probably cares, he probably cares. Okay. So
on page four of that FBI vault document that you
can find on the web dot archive dot org, it
says that there was this big meeting they're talking about
with the State Department with They called it an all
(41:38):
agency meeting, and uh, this person, Patrick Kennedy, that we're
speaking about, he presided over the meeting, and during the conversation,
one of the people specifically asked whether any member of
the emails in question were classified. Making eye contact with redacted,
Kennedy remarked, well, we'll see. And this is apparently while
(42:00):
he was making again making eye contact with somebody as
in like, hey, maybe we'll find out what's going on.
And then he went on to discuss essentially a quid
pro quot about perhaps putting FBI agents in countries where
FBI agents are generally not allowed to be. Like, maybe
if you can change the classification, we'll do something for you,
(42:22):
something beyond what anyone would imagine it would be possible.
Scratch at back, scratch your back, and yeah, we'll get
We'll get FBI agents in this country where they're not
supposed to be. That's a huge deal. Yeah. Yeah, So
the FBI. The FBI said, okay, well, happened was that
you know, what had happened was that the FBI determined
(42:45):
that there was an email. Senior State Department official requested
the FBI to quote, re review this and look at
it again. Just make sure that you know, do your job,
do it again? Is it classified? Are you sure? Yeah?
But you'd have to look at it again to be sure. Right.
That's basically we went down. And then they say that
(43:07):
an FBI official who was not part of the later
Clinton investigation, told the State's department the guy at the
States Department, well, you know now that you mentioned it, uh,
I guess I could look at it again. Um, you
know would really help me look at it if if
(43:30):
if we could maybe also address just while I've got
you on the line here, while I got you on
the line here, pat, if we could also address our
risk that request they keep putting in for space for
additional FBI employees assigned abroad, because you know, I've sent
you several emails and tried to call them multiple times,
and now you answer the phone. Well, you know what,
I think maybe we can take care of it if
(43:51):
some of those emails, you know, ended up being unclassified, right,
that sounds like a pretty good deal to me, sort
of a cool pro quo. I'm hanging up, No, you
hang up? Are you? Are you still there? Going to
(44:15):
hang up? That's how That's how they had this conversation. Surely,
oh man, And they were both recording the whole time,
and they were both recording the whole time. We're being
a little bit lip, but you can see it's it's
somewhat the FBI is making valid distinctions, right, But of
course people would deny this kind of one hand washes
(44:38):
the other sort of stuff. So following this call, the
FBI officials, now retired, got with a senior FBI executive
who was responsible for determining classification, and they decided that
it was in fact classified secret the way it was
supposed to be So FBI guy goes back to the
(44:59):
State Department contact he has and he says, look, it's classified.
We looked at it twice and it's supposed to stay secret,
and we can't change it. And it wasn't changed. It
remains classified today, the FBI concludes, and you can see
this on their own website. Although there was never a
quid pro quo, these allegations were nonetheless referred to the
(45:19):
appropriate officials for review. So they said, look, we know
nothing went down, but just to keep our nose clean,
we asked some other people to look at it, because
with the FBI were a political We do our job,
they do their job. Yeah, And to be fair, there
was no quid pro quo in this instance of these
(45:39):
you know exchanges that we that became public. Being very
careful of that, Matt imired, right, but no, but come on,
that's that's all we've proven, right, at least that's all
the FBI says. Right. There are other alleged activities, other allegations.
This same group, the Seventh Floor Group or quote unquote
shadow government, has been accused of censoring official reports, of
(46:03):
interfering with special investigations, of providing diplomatic security or protection
for certain individuals, shielding them from criminal charges, and a
lot of this, a lot of that stuff. Once you
get into the providing protection and diplomatic security and stuff
for controversial people, often those are going to come from
(46:25):
biased sources. You see the Washington Examiner. Examiner if you wish,
you can find something on that. And if you search
for Hillary's officials cut criticisms out of State Department reports,
you will find it and you can read all about it.
You can also while you're reading those reports, you can
(46:47):
go back to what we have kept going back to,
which is the FBI confirming at least maybe not saying
that they believe this exists, but confirming that they spoke
with people who did think it, who casually mentioned that
it's the seventh Floor group. Oh, it's the shadow government.
It's fine, it's fine. What is he irish? Now? I
(47:09):
don't know what happened. That's what they're talking about. So
this is this is not quite where it ends. But
we do have some conclusions. First, Goosifer, are you speaking
directly to Goosfer Guci for uh, maybe maybe if you
tune into the podcast, you'd love to hear from you.
According to New York Time. The hacker who used this
(47:31):
name Gucci for Uh coined the coined the moniker to
combine the style of Gucci in the light of Lucifer.
He turned out to be a guy named marcel lejal
Lazar Uh, forty three year old former taxi driver, is
at the time unemployed. He did not have expertise in computers.
He didn't have any fancy equipment or tech. He just
(47:54):
had an old Samsung cell phone and an NBC desktop
and all the skills he used in hacking. According to
the official reports, he picked up on the web. So
he was not, as far as we know, some high
level secret state actor. Yeah, according to the official sources.
(48:14):
Well he's not a bot net king or whatever. But
most of the emails providing the impetus for that second
investigation turned out to be duplicates of stuff they found
the first time around, So in that second investigation there
wasn't apparently that much new stuff. And that lends a
little bit of credence to that October surprise theory, because again,
(48:34):
the timing, you couldn't have planned it better, right, But
the group appears to have been disbanded by Donald Trump's
administration the symfamous seventh Floor Shadow Government group. On February seventeen,
CPS reported that much of the seventh Floor staff who
worked for the Deputy Secretary of State for Management and
Resources these titles Man and the Counselor offices were told
(48:59):
today that their services were no longer needed. So you
could read it in other articles of the time where
the headlines something like Rex Tillerson kicks out seventh Floor
group or fires a bunch of diplomats, and the State
Department did encounter a purge at that time. Yeah, but
who knows if they're the the seventh floor group, right,
(49:19):
or we'd maybe the people just met up on the
seventh floor. Maybe they lived on the fourth floor. Right.
It's weird because some of us listening are convinced there's
much more to the stories. Some of us listening are
convinced it's um, it's it's just media theater solely meant
(49:41):
to discredit someone. Right. It was a very divisive issue then,
and to a degree, it's still a divisive issue today.
But oddly enough, several of the original media reports have
been deleted. The FBI vault files literally don't exist unless
you go to the way by machine, right, but not
(50:03):
to be too much of a devil's advocate. But couldn't
the FBI clean out the way back machine if they
wanted to? Maybe, I don't know if the n s
A could do it, probably because Gucci could do Uh.
The Wikipedia page was also scrubbed. If you go into
(50:24):
the talk, there's a really interesting thing about Wikipedia, uh,
which is maybe not so much the articles themselves. But
if you look at Wikipedia, you're gonna see two taps.
We'll see a tab at the top left with the article,
and a tab just to the right of that called
talk right. And talk is where the editors of Wikipedia
and the contributors of Wikipedia argue about whether or not
(50:48):
something should be an article, or something should be included
in that article. Wikipedia is a world at war because
numerous numerous debates, uh, geopolitical sandwiches, uh, you know, tragedies,
all sorts of things are currently being furiously edited by
(51:13):
one person or another with differing views. In the case
of the Wikipedia page, from what we found, the reason
given for its deletion was that there were not multiple
primary sources. So they said, all right, you need you
need more than one source for this to even be
entertained as the truth, but you can still find it
(51:37):
in Matt Frederick's Trust the Wayback Machine. I think that's
a great T shirt idea. By the way, it's not mine,
it's archived at ORC. That's true. That's true. Uh So,
the FBI does appear to confirm the existence of this group,
while not confirming that they cooperated with them. There is
a there was a real shadow government, or at least
(51:58):
a real group referred to is the shadow government, and
they apparently no longer work for the State Department. But
it leads us to the end of today's episode and
a question, a disturbing question. Even if this wasn't that
big of a deal, there's still a group of people
that were not elected officials that were handing the hanging
(52:21):
out in you know, someplace, making decisions about what you
and I and everyone listening as the public get to
hear or know about an elected official. How many other
groups like that exists that are gatekeepers of information for
the public, that are maybe making bigger decisions even than that,
(52:43):
about geopolitics, about foods we eat, about the types of
polyester mixed clothing we get to wear, how much your
dollar is worth? Oh, that's a big one. That's more
important than the type of clothing we get to wear.
I don't know, these all seem pretty important, right, Thank
(53:05):
you so much for checking out this episode. Uh, we
we know this would be a little divisive for people
who have really dug deep into this. We did give
a high level look because we wanted to provide enough
of a view of the forest for us to understand
what the seventh floor group is or why it matters. Again,
(53:29):
why would you why would you call yourself the shadow
government just even for funzies. I don't know that seems
that seems a little dangerou. I mean, I guess we
could do it, but everybody would probably know that we're
not We're not making moves as representatives of Uncle Sam
or a foreign power exactly. And I would say, if
you want to keep going down this rabbit hole, a
(53:51):
great and exciting fun thing to do is to go
to the Wikipedia page for the Hillary Clinton email controversy
and then go all the way down to the bottom
and just you know, after looking at the talk thing
and all the other stuff, go all the way down
the bottom and start clicking through sources down there, because
it's crazy, just the amount of media that was generated
(54:13):
through this scandal, the amount of sourcing that exists on
that one wiki page. Um, it's an intense slog. Good
luck to you. Enjoy yourself, make sure you've got a drink,
and let us know what other examples of shadow governments
you have found, not just here in the US, but
in other countries or in other groups of countries. Right,
(54:36):
we want to hear those stories that you think your
fellow listeners would enjoy about what goes on behind the curtain.
You can tell us about this on Instagram. You can
tell us about this on Facebook. You can tell us
about this on Twitter. We highly recommend you check out
our favorite part of the show your fellow listeners on
our Facebook page. Here's where it gets crazy. But wait,
(54:58):
someone says I hate social media. Then call us. We
are one eight three three s T d W y
t K. Leave us a message. You'll have three minutes. Um.
If you need more time, call back, that's fine. You'll
be greeted with a chilling message from Mr ben Bowling
when you when you call in, you just wait for
(55:19):
the beep or you can turn back. Now. It's really great, Okay,
if you do leave a message, it might get on
the air. Please please please give us just your your ideas,
your thoughts on shadow government, your personal stories about shadow people,
whatever you've got. Just send it our way. We'd love
to hear it. I'm actually taking I've got uh twenty
four more new like brand new messages from the last
(55:41):
week and a half been then I'm going through right now. Yeah,
that's a lot. It's really good too, all right, UM
do that. If you don't want to do that, there's
one last thing you can do. If you want to
reach us, you can send us a good old fashioned email.
We are conspiracy at how stuff Works dot com. M h.
(56:16):
Stuff they Don't Want You to Know is a production
of I Heart Radio's How Stuff Works. For more podcasts
from my heart Radio, visit the i heart Radio app,
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