From Russia With Love (and a Lot of Rubles)

Tom Church: Welcome back to The Libertarian podcast from the Hoover Institution. I am your host, Tom Church, joined as always by the Libertarian professor Richard Epstein. Richard is the Peter and Kirsten Bedford Senior Fellow at Hoover Institution. He's the Laurence A Tisch Professor of Law at NYU and is a senior lecturer at the University of Chicago.

Today we're talking about Russian influence operations in the United States and why you should always ask where the money is coming from, especially if your politics is aligned with Vladimir Putin. Hello, Richard. How are you today?

Richard Epstein: Well, I'm, shall we say, somewhat disillusioned. I feel like that might be our default position recently.

Tom Church: So, Richard, news this week from the Justice Department, which just indicted two employees of RT, it's Russia Today, formerly Russia Today, for covert funding and directing a Tennessee-based online content creation company to spread Russian propaganda and influence public opinion. So, Richard, people quickly figured out that the company is Tenant Media.

It's run by Lauren Chen and Liam Donovan, who famously hosts content for Tim Pool of the Poolcast, Dave Rubin, and several other right-wing online influencers, basically, a big YouTube and TikTok online influencing channel. So the Russians spent almost $10 million supporting tenant media. It represented 90% of their revenue and paid, for example, $100,000 for each video that Tim Pool produced on Ukraine.

There's a clip going around of Pool from maybe a year ago calling Ukraine one of America's greatest enemies. Pool and Rubin have been very loud voices on the neo-isolationist right since the invasion of Ukraine, and I think that makes a lot of sense now. But Pool and Rubin, speaking in their defense, say they had no idea where the money was coming from.

It was Chen and Donovan running the company who I think made this arrangement and then tried to bring on content creators to promote these visions. First off, tell me, Richard, how much trouble are Chen and Donovan going to be in, and what's likely to happen with Pool and Rubin or other content creators who have this layer of legal defense in the way?

Richard Epstein: Well, there are two kinds of trouble, and they're both going to be here. One is the simple revelation that these kinds of activities have taken place will have a huge reputational hit on these people. Folks may listen to them, but they won't be persuaded by them. And so what's going to happen is the fees that you would be prepared to pay, even in the absence of an indictment, would start to go down.

It's frightening to me. I regard myself as a kind of conservative libertarian thing. I've never heard of any of these people that you talk about, and I have no idea what they say or what.

Tom Church: You're not very online, Richard, that's the thing.

Richard Epstein: And by the way, there's a point about that.

I mean, I don't want to be exposed to these people for fear that they're going to goad me. And so what you try to do is to go back to primary documents yourself and not go back to pieces that turn out to be, shall we say, suspected. The second point that you start to mention is where did the money come from?

Well, there's the following kind of basic rule that you make in all these cases. Which is, do you use the amount of money that's received to give you some kind of an inference as to whether or not the transaction from which it's a part is tainted?

And so when you start seeing fences, taking stolen goods and so forth, and it turns out they pay premium prices to various individuals, you may not know who it is that's funding the operation, but you are pretty confident that there's something about this which is not wholly appropriate.

That's true with stolen goods, and it's also true with stolen information and influence peddling as well. And so I think the way in which you would describe the legal situation is it's not enough to say, quote, I didn't know, which may or may not be true, but you would be on what lawyers like to call constructive or inquiry notice.

And that term means that when the information on the strength that you already have, independent of any investigation that you've undertaken, gives you enough knowledge that you're now under a duty to investigate further. And I think that's a very powerful doctrine, and I think that that's exactly the doctrine that has to go into this case.

You don't ask people to say where the money comes from if you don't get any money. But essentially, if it's that kind of money, for that kind of stuff, you sort of have to know who's giving it to you in one way or the other, particularly since the sources are covert.

It's a very difficult question. Then, of course, the indictment. Registering for a foreign agent is a very powerful kind of issue. This was a statute that was introduced after there were similar scandals of non-registration, and I don't remember what all of them were. But the moment you realize that essentially there is somebody out there who's a foreign government who might want to influence what's going on in your politics, you then start to think about ways in which we think about this.

The usual rule is that foreigners are not particularly welcome into American precincts to make American decisions on the choice of an American official. There's nothing you can do to stop them from speaking. But if, in fact, what they do is they pretend to have independence, which they do not have, then it's a fraud on the rest of the public with respect to really major institutions and these things you have to worry about.

And it's not just worrying about foreign agency disinformation campaign. We think that there is all the signs that Hunter Biden's laptop was tampered with by the Russians. That's a different form of misrepresentation, but it's every bit as deadly. And so what we see now in the United States is our defenses against conduct of this particular sort are relatively weak and disorganized.

And the gains that other people have from engaging in this sort of conduct turn out to be just enormous. And so what happens is you're going to start to see more influencing taking place one way or another. And that's also true with respect to the situation, with respect to Max Boot's wife.

I mean, you know, why do you start writing columns about Trump being an agent or anything like that? It's just very, very difficult. I have no idea who Sue Mi Terry is, except that she's married to Max. Max has been a long controversialist, and has very strong opinion, and to somebody who's a columnist for a publication as prestigious as the Washington Post, to get involved in this kind of stuff is a disaster.

And, I mean, I gather he's still writing for the Washington Post. I think he has to resign because this is too much of a taint. Whether or not it turns out he's indicted, the indictment is a much closer case. I mean, of course. I mean, obviously his wife was the prime mover.

He sure has some knowledge of what's going on under these circumstances, but we do not know exactly what it is. If I were in the office, I would investigate further, and pretty hard investigation. I think you'd probably come up with enough that an indictment would be warranted under these kinds of circumstances, which then puts everybody under this terrible kind of pall.

So there's no good news about all of this. And then the question is, does it influence policy? This is my attitude. You don't make statements like this unless you think they are going to influence policy. And you are very knowledgeable about what's going on. So chances are you're right about what is happening in these cases.

And the idea that somehow or other, Russia was a great nation when it invaded Ukraine in this particular fashion, is just a monstrosity. You recall, maybe back in early 2022 before the invasion started to take place, the argument was that, well, the Russians are going to have to do something to neutralize Ukrainians, because otherwise they may join NATO and be a force on their southern border.

Well, they managed to level the country, and that certainly was enough to suggest that Ukraine would not be in a position to invade Russia. What's happened now is that the Russians turn out to be such utter incompetence with respect to their military strategies that they're running out of manpower.

And it turns out the Ukrainians are now in Kurtz. I mean, the reason why they're there is they basically flipped the bird to the Biden administration, who urged them not to escalate the situation. But the Biden administration on all of these issues is utterly incompetent. If somebody says to you, you can defend against their bows in a boxing match, but you can't punch back, sooner or later they're gonna hit you.

And so what the Ukrainians said, if they're gonna punch us, we have to punch them, they wanna invade our territory, we go after them. And they have a very simple rule that they can follow which will make sure that it's legitimate. Namely, the rule is, you show me where their military support and material comes from, those are the places that we will bomb.

We will not do any indiscriminate bombing of civilians. We'll find these isolated plans and we'll take them out of existence, which is what they did the other day. And that's exactly what they should do, it's exactly what the Israelis should do to Hamas, and that's what should be done to the Houthis.

But the Biden administration is all defense, which is an open invitation to escalate up to a certain point and then keep it going indefinitely. So if you start seeing the Ukrainians being dashed in the press, what you're doing, in effect, is telling us that their behavior is illegitimate, and it's not illegitimate.

So I think, in effect, that these kinds of scandals, and I think you probably would agree with me on this, basically, they call into question not only the particular people who make these statements but the entire news-making apparatus. And the lack of confidence in public institutions is, I think, a really dangerous source.

Legitimacy is a fragile commodity in this country. And it's quite clear with the attacks on all sorts of established institutions coming in this way by foreign funds or by other people who are genuinely deranged, we are taking a real hit. This is a genuine threat to democracy, to use the current phrase.

Tom Church: Richard, on that theme, I wanna know how to inoculate people against supporting authoritarians like Putin. There's been many of us worried for large parts of the GOP has been, you know, mainlining some pro-Russian propaganda for a while. I've been just astonished at the level of isolationism from the party that used to be against the Soviets, against that side.

I mean, in a separate indictment, sorry, it's in a separate affidavit this week, the FBI said that the Russians maintain an active list of 2,800 influencers, 600 of whom are in the US. There have to be more US citizens being paid to show pro-Russian propaganda. So what can people do to kind of look for this or defend themselves from these ideas and not get swayed?

Richard Epstein: Well, I mean, look, I'm not an expert on this, but the first point that you make is whenever you see somebody whom you know to be a scoundrel, as Putin is, don't believe anything that any of us sympathizes say. What you have to do is develop a steely kind of skepticism about what's going on.

But the other thing is there are organizations that do investigations of these kinds of people, and they have to upset them. The anti-defamation League has always been very hard on trying to find anti-Israeli propaganda and see whether it's paid for by foreign Palestinian sources. And in the United States, we need a whole variety of other institutions to come forward and engage in that same kind of counterintelligence with respect to the way in which these things go.

The thing you're always worried about is the counterintelligence intelligence guys then get themselves into some extreme position. And so you have two organizations that are vaguely rogue instead of just one. I'm willing to take that chance, but I do think if you want to talk about a role for the media, how much are they going to expose?

What are they gonna say about the Boo Terry situation? What are they gonna say about Tucker Paulson, who seems to be taking these more and more grotesque positions, almost vaguely neo-Nazi? You have to be very, very hard on them. And I hope that people will just turn off whatever they say.

There was an interesting piece by David Brooks, our skeptical cultural historian, about everything being degraded by having all these terrible Internet situations. And I agree it's a real problem, but this is my attitude. Just as I don't know anything about these various right-wing organizations you mentioned about, I don't spend any time on TikTok.

I mean, what you have to do is discipline yourself not to be essentially anesthetized and seduced into using corrupt kinds of media. It's the role of parents and the role of people to themselves. But if you turn that stuff off, it's not gonna take your life over.

And I think one of the essential roles about parenting is to make sure that your children are engaged in active constructive activities, whether it's playing on a soccer team, running a newspaper, acting in a play, doing dance, or whatever it is. So that they're engaged with other individuals of their own age in constructive enterprises, which require them to develop two things, specific skills on the one hand.

And a general character that makes you reliable, willing to do work, being able to cooperate with other individuals, being able to show up on time, and so forth. There was a nice column by Jason Riley, I think it was in the Wall Street Journal about working for McDonald's.

And the thing that he said that rang exactly true is maybe learning how to flip burgers is not your future, but learning how to come to work on time, how to dress presentably, how to behave decently with other people. Those are relationship skills that matter everywhere and every time.

And that's the thing that we have to start to cultivate in this particular country. I do think American morality has gone down, and I think that the incessant political divisions that we started to see and the hyperbole is basically wearing people out and creating a general attitude of cynicism.

If cynicism leads to correction of the vices, so much the better, but if cynicism says it's so terrible, I just might as well withdraw and ignore it all, which is some of my attitudes, then it's not so good. I mean, it takes a certain amount of willingness to be subject to abuse to start to speak out on shows like this one.

But I think, in effect, remaining silent is very, very dangerous in the face of these kinds of perils. So there's no legal duty that anybody has to speak out against anybody, but I do think there are moral considerations that should sway people to take harsh stance against this stuff and hopefully to set it off in a way that it will be discredited.

I mean, Putin is the worst leader in Europe that one could imagine, the amount of deaths that he has caused, and the amount of destruction that he's responsible for, puts him up there with Stalin and Hitler. The only difference between them is he doesn't have quite the strength and power to do what those guys did.

But it isn't for want of trying, it's for the fact that Russia is half the size that it was years ago. And in fact, it's a country with a falling birth rate, there are so many internal problems to it that he can't project the kind of force that he would like to do if we were better able.

So the great danger of Putin is he'll form a deal with the Chinese, with the Iranians, and with the North Koreans, and backed by them, he can fight not only in the Ukraine but perhaps take on other people as well. And so we have to be aware of these foreign alliances.

All this is a bit of a ramble, I think, but the kind of questions you ask, I think, invite rambling. But the answer is, there's no good news that comes out of these stories. And the only question is how we develop effective countermeasures. And the first thing that has to happen is people who engage in that activity once, are not given a second chance.

Tom Church: Well, you mentioned Tucker Carlson, I wanna follow up on that, it's not related to the Russia stuff. But he did have that ridiculous visit to Moscow where he fawned over grocery prices and was just completely taken in. I'll note that apparently one Tenet employee didn't want to link to Tucker's visit because it felt like overt shilling, but was told to do so.

Tucker has not been linked to this case with Tenet Media. He just has his own terrible judgment, I think, which I think he hides behind. That's just a guess, I'm going from there. But, Richard, this week, he hosted a podcast with Darryl Cooper, host of the Martyr Made podcast.

And Cooper, I mean, played the part of a Nazi sympathizer. He claimed the Holocaust was not a premeditated genocide, and he cast Winston Churchill as the chief villain of World War II. In his introduction, Tucker called Cooper maybe the best and most honest popular historian in the United States.

Richard, I realize I'm asking the libertarian about foreign policy, but-

Richard Epstein: That's fine, I study foreign policy.

Tom Church: Yeah, I know you do, just, what's going on with this level of right-wing foreign policy? Where would you like it to go? What would you like it to look at?

Richard Epstein: I would like it to cease. I mean, I've read a number of books, Andrew Roberts. I'm reading a very fine biography, a really good biography of Truman. It was written by David McCullough, all of which, of course, concentrate on the same period. And when you knew what the Nazis did and whom they buried and how many people they murdered, to start to say that this was essentially a random event because they couldn't handle the population, no.

They met in Wannsee in early 1942, and they planned for the Final Solution. And the thing that is so striking, if you actually look at the camps, is the meticulous records of the Germans in capturing every person whom they captured, where they sent them, and how they were killed.

They did this, I mean, Anne Frank, they have all the data about where she was when she died in Bergen-Belsen and so forth. No, it is absolutely preposterous. It's like the attacks that were done on Deborah Lipstadt, right? I can't remember the name of the crazy man who did it and the defamation suit that started to take place.

This is really dangerous kind of crank stuff, because what it's gonna start to do is to give license to people who already think they're despised groups. Think about Hamas and its supporters in the way in which they act to Judaism. They want to basically kill everybody from the river to the sea.

I mean, they don't care whether they're expelled or whether they're murdered. They just want them out of there. It's the kind of a frightening statement. And you read stuff, it gets sanitized. Take somebody whom I regard as a useful idiot, a man named Thomas Friedman, who writes for the New York Times.

He's trying to figure out how to dispose of our good friend Netanyahu because he regards him as improper. And when he starts to talk about the events, he does not say they began on October 7th with a massacre by Hamas. He simply says, after the events of October 7th, in a kind of neutral tone.

And you can't do that, you have to be aware of evil. And what you cannot do once it's been identified, is to assume that the party who's trying to resist it is as evil as the party who's trying to do it. And that's the way the Hamas game is being played out in the United States.

And it's being played out that way by Joe Biden, by Kamala Harris, and this poor, misbegotten Thomas Friedman. The difficulty that all of them have is they don't understand the difference between good and evil. And so when one of these conflicts comes up, they support evil. And that's the way Tucker Carlson has got.

He used to be a kind of an interesting, hard-hitting commentator. But ever since he's left Fox News, I think there's a screw loose in his head and he's somebody to be avoided, not somebody to be understood - yuck.

Tom Church: Maybe we'll end it there. You've been listening to The Libertarian podcast with Richard Epstein.

As always, you can learn more if you read Richard's column, The Libertarian, which we publish on Defining Ideas at hoover.org. If you found this conversation thought-provoking, please share it with your friends and rate the show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you're tuning in so that others can find it. For Richard Epstein, I'm Tom Church, we'll talk to you next time.

Presenter: This podcast is a production of the Hoover Institution, where we advance ideas that define a free society and improve the human condition. For more information about our work or to listen to more of our podcasts or watch our videos, please visit hoover.org.