Massie: FBI threatened his staff if he didn’t ‘play ball’ over pipe-bomb investigation



Rep. Thomas Massie (R-Ky.) said an FBI official threatened to open a criminal investigation on one of his staff over his persistent investigation and questioning on the Jan. 6 pipe bombs.

An FBI official threatened to open a criminal investigation on one of Massie’s staff “if we didn’t straighten up [and] play ball,” Massie told Blaze News investigative reporter Steve Baker in an interview broadcast on Matt Kibbe’s “Free the People” podcast and posted to X.

‘Even he understood that was not a good look. Probably illegal.’

“I’m going to say this here on camera because it’s important. ... He said ... ‘We’re going to investigate one of your staff for fraud,’” Massie quoted the unnamed FBI official as saying. “And he told another one of my staff this: ‘If you guys don’t straighten up, you know, if you want to play hardball, if this is how you want to play it’ or something like that, ‘this member of your staff is going to get criminally investigated for fraud’ — a very specific threat.”

Massie declined to identify the official he says levied the threat, but said he did complain about it to FBI Deputy Director Dan Bongino.

“I told Bongino, I said, ‘One of your guys is threatening my guys with an FBI investigation if we don’t do what you want.’ And he [Bongino] said, ‘I’ll take care of that.’ ’Cause even he understood that was not a good look. Probably illegal.”

Massie said he later received a “non-apology” text from the official that said, “‘I’m sorry if I hurt your feelings.’”

“He didn’t apologize. He was unrepentant, let's say, really.”

Massie has been the most aggressive member of Congress investigating the pipe bombs found behind the Capitol Hill Club at 12:43 p.m. on Jan. 6 and under a park bench on the southwest side of the Democratic National Committee building 22 minutes later. In the same interview with Baker, Massie also disclosed that recent Blaze News reporting has caused him to be “99% certain” that some U.S. Capitol Police officials had a role in the planting of the pipe bombs found on Capitol Hill on Jan. 6, 2021.

“I went from 90% certain that some Capitol Police were involved in the Jan. 6 pipe bomb to 95% certain, and now I'm at 99% certain after this new story that you put out this week,” Massie told Baker.

“I’m doing this on probability. The probability may even be higher than that.”

His comments reflect Blaze News’ recent reporting on a former Capitol Police officer who was an apparent forensic match to the bomb suspect, follow-up reporting on the manner in which the second device was discovered by plainclothes Capitol Police officers, and the stonewalling the congressman charges that he faced from Capitol Police in the course of his own investigation. Assistant Police Chief Ashan Benedict, whom Massie named as having specifically blocked his investigation, retired last week.

The Kentucky Republican also expressed frustration that FBI Director Kash Patel seems to have made little more progress than his predecessor, Director Christopher Wray. In an interview with Fox News earlier this month, as well as a follow-up with independent reporter Catherine Herridge, Patel promised that major developments are incoming, but was scant on details.

A CBS story published Tuesday cited three unidentified sources stating that the FBI had cleared the police officer who appeared to match a forensic gait analysis of the bomber, citing “an alibi: video of her playing with her puppies at the time the devices were placed.” Blaze News has sought to obtain independent confirmation of the FBI’s clearance based on the alibi.

Blaze News reported Nov. 8 on a forensic match to a former Capitol Police officer, based on a computer analysis of the hoodie-wearing alleged pipe bomber’s manner of walking compared to that of the person. The algorithm rated the person as a 94% match, while the intelligence analyst who ran the study for Blaze News put the match closer to 98%. The person has since denied any allegations, through her attorney.

FBI photos

Blaze News reported Nov. 18 that two Capitol Police counter-surveillance special agents sent out to look for more explosives after the discovery of the Capitol Hill Club device were seen on video going to the DNC building and to a nearby bush on the side of the Congressional Black Caucus Institute building.

Independent video investigator Armitas discovered that the hoodie-wearing suspect identified in 2021 as the pipe bomber stopped at the bush along a sidewalk on the north side of the CBCI building at 7:47 p.m. Jan. 5. The suspect sat cross-legged at the shrub and appeared to rummage through a backpack before leaning into the bush as if attempting to place something underneath.

The bomb suspect then stood up and walked back to the DNC bench, where a pipe bomb was placed at 7:54 p.m., according to choppy video released by the FBI.

‘He had a handler, who would often interrupt and answer questions for him.’

When Capitol Police dispatch warned of the Capitol Hill Club bomb at 12:43 p.m., two plainclothes Capitol Police special agents took a nearly six-minute drive to reach the Capitol Hill South Metro Station, one block from the Capitol Hill Club bomb scene. They then walked to the DNC building, passing the park bench the pipe bomb sat next to.

The agents continued walking until they reached an alley leading to the side of the CBCI building. Their movements were not captured on video because four Capitol Police security cameras that would have shown the DNC crime scene were turned away at key moments or pointed in another direction by default.

Massie’s office released video in July 2023 showing a man in dark clothing and a ball cap approaching a U.S. Secret Service SUV sitting in the driveway of the DNC building as part of Vice President-elect Kamala Harris’ security detail. Harris was inside the building when the pipe bomb was discovered.

Blaze News reported in January 2024 that this man was the plainclothes Capitol Police officer who discovered the pipe bomb under a bush at the foot of a park bench at the DNC building.

Following that story, Massie told Blaze News he was determined to interview the agents, but did not get much cooperation from Capitol Police. Massie referred to the agents as “man-bun guy” and “backpack guy” (the one who discovered the bomb).

‘Weirdest meeting’

The Capitol Police never made “backpack guy” available to the Massie, but on Jan. 30, 2024, they did eventually send his partner, accompanied by his commander, Benedict, to speak with the congressman in a meeting that was not recorded or transcribed.

“So they came over to my office, but not ‘backpack guy,’” Massie said. “’Man-bun guy’ came over, and he had a handler, who would often interrupt and answer questions for him.”

Two congressional investigators sat in on the meeting alongside Benedict, the police officer, and Massie. The congressman later described the interview as the “weirdest meeting in the world.”

Rep. Thomas Massie (R-Ky.) said an FBI official threatened a criminal investigation of his staff if he didn’t “play ball” on the Jan. 6 pipe bomb investigation.Photo courtesy of Free the People

“In the conversation with the counter-surveillance officer in my office, Ashan Benedict would frequently interrupt the officer, answer before the officer could reply, or qualify the officer’s answers,” Massie told Blaze News. “There was an effort by our committee staff to get Benedict to sit for a transcribed interview, but he successfully evaded that effort.”

Massie said he still wants to interview the officer who actually found the bomb, as well as his partner and Benedict. “Those need to be transcribed interviews. They need to be sworn in. I feel very strongly about that,” he said. “But the reality is the FBI should be doing these things.”

Massie said that after he reposted the Blaze News article on the gait analysis, Bongino called him to complain about two early persons of interest mentioned in the piece.

One of those men, named in FBI reports as Person of Interest 3, lived directly next door to the Capitol Police officer who was the subject of the Nov. 8 Blaze News article. The FBI’s Special Operations Group conducted surveillance on Person of Interest 3 in Falls Church, Va., for two days in January 2021, but surveillance was suddenly canceled, before any law enforcement officer ever questioned the man.

Massie said Bongino told him, “‘That’s a dead lead. … We investigated that lead and … there’s nothing there. There’s no there there.’ So that’s why they quit looking at it. … At that point I said, ‘But you guys weren’t — you never did suspect him. The FBI never did suspect him. … His build doesn’t match. There’s no way it could be him. Your guys were looking for somebody else.’”

Whistleblower concerns

A current FBI supervisory special agent on Nov. 10 filed a whistleblower protected disclosure with Massie and U.S. Rep. Barry Loudermilk (R-Ga.), alleging the termination of surveillance at the Falls Church condominium complex was improper and cut off a suggestion by a surveillance team member that Person of Interest 3 be questioned face-to-face at his doorstep.

Person of Interest 3 and Person of Interest 2, his alleged houseguest on Jan. 5 and 6, 2021, had not been questioned by the FBI when surveillance was terminated. Interviews took place six days later, according to FBI reports included in the whistleblower disclosure. An FBI agent pretending to be a Metro Transit police officer interviewed Person of Interest 3 over the phone, a congressional source told Blaze News.

The whistleblower’s “concern was that the investigation that went to Falls Church, Virginia, that got them to the doorstep of the person that [Blaze News] identified through gait analysis as possibly somebody that might have been the person in the hood,” Massie said.

“There were suggestions made to the people in charge of the investigation about how to follow up on those leads,” Massie said. “And it was just dropped after two days of surveillance. And he [the whistleblower] provided supporting documents to that effect.”

Capitol Police block off the intersection of 1st and C streets in response to discovery of a pipe bomb at the Capitol Hill Club in Washington, D.C., on Jan. 6, 2021.U.S. Capitol Police

Massie said Bongino made reference to the FBI conducting a meeting to address the whistleblower disclosure. “He didn’t say, ‘We’re trying to find the whistleblower,’” Massie said. “But my Spidey sense went off, and I almost said to him in that moment, ‘You better not be trying to find the whistleblower, because law protects that individual.’ But I didn’t say it.”

Massie said he thought about this when recalling the threat he said his staff received from the FBI official.

“I have to tell all the listeners this because this is the context in which I'm worried for the whistleblower,” Massie said. “If they're willing to retaliate against a congressional office, which has speech or debate immunity and a lot of other protections, they may be willing to retaliate against the whistleblower.”

The whistleblower’s attorney, Kurt Siuzdak, sent a letter to Massie and Loudermilk on Nov. 13, warning that if the FBI attempted to out the whistleblower, it would violate the supervisory agent’s protections under the law. Massie shared the letter on social media.

“Identifying the whistleblower serves only one purpose,” Siuzdak wrote, “which is to allow FBI management to retaliate.”

In a Nov. 13 post on X, Bongino accused Massie of throwing “BS bombs” and denied that the FBI sought to identify or retaliate against the Nov. 10 whistleblower. A Blaze News request to Bongino for further comment went unanswered.

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Did the FBI SHADOW BAN Charlie Kirk? Censorship EXPOSED



If anyone who questioned the official narrative during the pandemic recalls feeling as if the truth was being rewritten and as if the thoughts they shared via social media on any pressing matters were being throttled by a force greater than just the social media platform — then they’d be right.

In a relentless pursuit of the truth, Matt Kibbe and Matt Taibbi have uncovered blatant collusion between former president Biden’s government and Big Tech during the COVID-19 pandemic to censor the accounts of Americans, including Charlie Kirk, Libs of TikTok, and Dan Bongino, among others.

“The revelation that the FBI and other security agencies were putting direct pressure on social media sites to censor speech was a bombshell. This wasn’t just cowardly CEOs acting on their own,” Kibbe says on “Muckraker,” episode 5 of “The Coverup.” “This was the government clamping down to enforce a narrative in flagrant violation of the First Amendment.”

“And it’s something that’s been going on for years,” he explains, before revealing email proof of the FBI setting up a meeting with Twitter in 2020.


In one email from the FBI, the agency acknowledges the importance of free speech, before asking the social media platform to share any information “indicating malign foreign actors pivoting to any messaging discussing these current events on your platforms.”

“So, they’re basically saying, ‘Yeah, we know speech about the George Floyd stuff is constitutionally protected, but if you think any of it might be, like, Russian influenced or whatever, can you just let us know?’” Taibbi explains.

Taibbi points out that the Global Engagement Center, which was founded via an executive order in Obama’s last year as president, was a counterterrorism organization that initially went after “Arab language tweets” and ISIS recruits.

“After Trump got elected, they started getting interested in all kinds of other topics, and then very soon, they were interested in domestic speech. They’ll deny that. But that’s what they were doing,” Taibbi says.

Taibbi, who published the “Twitter Files,” found that in addition to voices like Charlie Kirk, even Stanford epidemiologist Jay Bhattacharya — who is now the NIH Director — was among those blacklisted and shadow banned.

Taibbi discovered through working alongside a Twitter executive who was ordered by Elon Musk to cooperate with him that Bhattacharya was on a “trends blacklist,” which was visible to some of those who worked for Twitter but not the users themselves.

“It’s sort of like when you’re in Twitter and you want to see a quick summarized readout of what’s going on with an individual customer. Well, they had a thing where you could see the name, and then there would be a bunch of color-coded things on the page,” Taibbi explains.

On Bhattacharya’s page, he recalls that there was a “big box that says, ‘Trends Blacklist.’”

On Kirk’s page, it read, “Do Not Amplify.”

“That was how we discovered that there was indeed shadow banning. What a ‘trends blacklist’ meant was that this account could never trend on Twitter. And it was one of hundreds of things that they could do to your account to deamplify it,” he says.

“The health bureaucracies were involved in content moderation in a pretty intimate way,” he adds.

Tune in to episode 5 of “The CoverUp,” as Kibbe and Taibbi unravel the pandemic industrial complex, exposing how federal health agencies and Big Tech prolonged lockdowns, fueled fear, and hid the government’s role in the creation of the virus.

To watch episode 5 of “The Coverup” or binge the whole series, go to FauciCoverup.com.

BlazeTV's 'The Coverup' reveals how the corporate media became 'proxies for the national security apparatus'



On the latest episode of BlazeTV's "The Coverup," host Matt Kibbe and investigative journalist Matt Taibbi discuss the recent collapse of the corporate media, attributing it to the industry's shift in coverage strategies in response to Donald Trump's first presidential election.

During this time, the press moved in lockstep to promote the Russian collusion allegations against Trump, while simultaneously suppressing the Hunter Biden laptop story. Later, the corporate media also collaborated to stifle COVID-era lockdown skepticism and the lab leak theory.

'You have people coming out of the National Security Council or the FBI, and they go right on air.'

Taibbi, one of the investigative journalists behind the Twitter Files, told Kibbe, "When Trump arrived, there was a belief that the old-school, objective form of journalism, where we tell you the stuff and you do what you want with it — that was the tradition for ages in America — that had to go out the window," Taibbi told Kibbe. "Now, it was too important. Trump was too dangerous."

Taibbi rejected this change, adding that "journalists should have distance from politics, even if we were opinionated." Instead of working in competition with one another, journalists began operating "as a team," he explained.

"It's anathema to how journalism, I think, is supposed to work," he continued. "I quickly found myself on the outs."

Kibbe credited the Twitter Files for revealing that a nonprofit organization had been "groom[ing] reporters to sing from the same song sheet and suppress stories before they even happened."

Taibbi stated that a group of the country's most prominent national security reporters were invited in 2016 to "war game what would happen if a story about Hunter Biden and Burisma and a laptop came out."

"This was months before the story came out," Taibbi said, noting that the reporters agreed to participate in the event off the record.

RELATED: Matt Taibbi looking to make congresswoman pay big-time for repeating her smear online

Matt Kibbe, Matt Taibbi. Image Source: BlazeTV

Kibbe described some reporters as "useful idiots."

"Maybe that's not fair," Kibbe said.

"No, I think it's worse than that," Taibbi remarked. "I think they're essentially proxies for the national security apparatus."

Taibbi stated that there are entire news organizations that have relationships with federal government agents, allowing for "a superhighway of information."

"One is broadcasting PR for the other, and beyond that, they're hiring people," he continued. "You have people coming out of the National Security Council or the FBI, and they go right on air."

Taibbi called it "a complete corruption and a complete breakdown of the system." He explained how the media suppresses stories.

RELATED: The media’s misinformation machine is built to last — here’s why

Matt Taibbi. Image Source: BlazeTV

"If you go to work in these big organizations, it's not like anybody tells you, 'Okay, don't write this story, and do write that story,'" he said. "Over time, the values of the organization, they're sort of suffused through the entire bureaucracy. And even at the very lowest level, as a cub reporter, you learn very quickly what your editors want and what they don't want."

"You just learn, 'Well, this is what's gonna get me promoted. This is what's gonna get me a better gig.' And you start writing those stories," he added.

Taibbi noted that reporters with "difficult personalities wash out eventually."

He concluded that the "corporate media is done now" because "they've now screwed up so many stories."

"Even if they try to reorient themselves in the direction of journalism, they're gonna have to start at square one. And they're gonna be beaten out by all these independent sources that are already way ahead of them," Taibbi said.

Blaze News asked Taibbi how he sees the evolution of America's media landscape over the next decade, considering that corporate outlets are experiencing a significant credibility crisis.

"Obviously independent sources will benefit both from a trust standpoint and in terms of audience as the corporate press deals with fallout from mistakes and politicized coverage," he responded.

"The U.S. has a long history of innovating new journalism forms, and I'm pretty confident something great will emerge. However, the new media landscape still hasn't figured out how to monetize long-form investigative reporting, nor does it have the ability to fund full-time beat writers or foreign bureaus yet," Taibbi stated. "So there are serious gaps."

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BlazeTV's 'The Coverup' exposes how the censorship industrial complex silenced Americans during COVID



The censorship industrial complex went to great lengths to stop Americans from questioning the lockdown measures in reaction to COVID-19 as well as the origins of the virus.

On Episode 5 of BlazeTV's "The Coverup," host Matt Kibbe and investigative journalist Matt Taibbi reveal how the federal government, technology platforms, and nongovernmental organizations worked together to censor dissent.

'This is why I was in a panic in 2024, as a global review system didn’t seem far off.'

Taibbi, who reported on the infamous Twitter Files, mentioned how Europe implemented the Digital Services Act, which "essentially forces private companies to engage in censorship." While he called it "encouraging" that the United States remains the one holdout supporting free speech, he noted that it "will take a prolonged, sustained effort to prevent it from being implemented here."

He explained that the federal government used "a number of Orwellian mechanisms" to communicate with social media platforms, such as Twitter, regarding content.

Kibbe stated that the revelation that the FBI and other government agencies pressure social media platforms to censor their users' speech showed that it "wasn't just cowardly CEOs acting on their own."

"This was the government clamping down to enforce a narrative in flagrant violation of the First Amendment," Kibbe remarked.

The federal government placed gag orders on the social media companies so they could not tell their customers, Taibbi added.

RELATED: Patel's 'breakthrough' in COVID origins probe spells trouble for Fauci — especially if his pardon is voided

Matt Taibbi. Image Source: BlazeTV

Kibbe and Taibbi discussed how the Twitter Files revealed that the company had been shadow-banning users, including Jay Bhattacharya, who is now the director of the National Institutes of Health under the Trump administration.

The Twitter Files also revealed that social media companies were pushed to censor not just alleged false information, but also "mal-information, "or information that is "true, but true in a way that doesn't point in the direction the administration wants you to look," Kibbe stated.

Taibbi explained that even NGOs had requested Facebook suppress posts that suggested the COVID-19 virus leaked from the Wuhan, China, lab or discourse that detracts from the authority of health leaders at the time, such as Anthony Fauci.

RELATED: Biden admin covered up potentially deadly COVID vaccine side effects for months: Senate report

Photo by Andrew Burton/Getty Images)

As far as the government's end goal for the overreach, Taibbi believes the censorship campaign during the COVID era was an attempt to rewire Americans to be more compliant.

"When we looked at these censorship programs, we tried to figure out, what are they doing here? They're not going to just continually censor things over and over again. That's so exhaustive. That's going to take so much energy," he told Kibbe. "Gradually, we realized ... they were trying to re-engineer how people thought generally. They wanted to create a more timorous, obedient kind of person who would just forget to ask questions, who would stop wondering 'why.' And so they're trying to get us to forget we ever had anything to say."

When asked what role independent media could play in countering attempts to implement censorship controls like Europe’s DSA in the U.S., Taibbi told Blaze News that “even high-tech efforts to counter such aggressive platform censorship will hit lots of obstacles.”

“This is why I was in a panic in 2024, as a global review system didn’t seem far off. Independent media is great, but it has limited impact if it’s severely deamplified, which is what already happens in Europe and will happen elsewhere,” he continued.

“Very worried.”

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Inside the pandemic industrial complex: Censorship, coercion, and collusion



Matt Kibbe has remained relentless in his pursuit of the truth about the COVID-19 pandemic. From secretive gain-of-function research to oppressive lockdown policies and aggressive government censorship, Kibbe is diving deep into one of the greatest scandals in our nation’s history — a scandal too many have overlooked.

But the American people deserve clarity on the origins of the virus and why our government responded with lockdowns, coercion, and censorship. Kibbe’s docuseries “The Coverup,” on BlazeTV+, aims to address our long list of unanswered questions.

Episode five — “Muckraker” — drops today. This latest installment follows Kibbe as he teams up with Twitter Files journalist Matt Taibi to discuss how Fauci, Birx, and key health agencies colluded with Big Tech to hide the truth from the public.

“Muckraker” is a plunge into the pandemic industrial complex — an insidious network of health bureaucracies, including the CDC, NIH, FDA, WHO, and several NGOs — that colluded with Big Tech companies to ensure that the COVID-19 narrative, from vaccines to the lab-leak theory and everything in between, was what the government wanted it to be.

In a flagrant violation of the First Amendment, intense pressure coming from both law enforcement and health agencies was directed toward social media companies, which compliantly censored Americans daring to question, theorize, or criticize outside the bounds of what the government deemed appropriate.

This censorship took many different forms. Shadow-banning, for example, was the covert practice used by tech companies to restrict a user's content visibility or reach on a platform without the user's knowledge, often through algorithmic suppression or reduced engagement. Health bureaucracies created and pushed frameworks for content moderation, which social media platforms then adopted. Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg confessed that Biden administration officials were brutal in their demands to kill certain ideas in the public square.

Often the content that demanded moderation was information that the government, including health agencies, knew was true — like adverse vaccine side effects — but it was squashed nonetheless if it opposed the approved narrative.

“They were trying to re-engineer how people thought,” Taibbi says.

But thought control wasn’t their only aim. The simultaneous rise in censorship and bioterrorism research is no coincidence.

Tune in to “The CoverUp” episode 5, as Kibbe and Taibbi unravel the pandemic industrial complex, exposing how federal health agencies and Big Tech prolonged lockdowns, fueled fear, and hid the government’s role in the creation of the virus.

To watch episode 5 of “The Coverup” or binge the whole series, go to FauciCoverup.com. Use the code ORWELL to get $20 off your first year of BlazeTV+.

The Russia hoax and COVID lies share the same deep-state fingerprints



“Conspiracy theory” is the go-to smear against those of us who questioned any aspect of the government’s authoritarian response to the COVID-19 pandemic. But as the great Austrian economist Murray Rothbard once observed, the smear serves one purpose: to divert the public’s attention away from the truth.

“An attack on ‘conspiracy theories,’” Rothbard writes in “The Anatomy of the State,” means that the subjects of a regime “will become more gullible in believing the ‘general welfare’ reasons that are always put forth by the State for engaging in any of its despotic actions.”

The democratization of information means that censorship just doesn’t work as well as it used to.

“A ‘conspiracy theory,’” he continues, “can unsettle the system by causing the public to doubt the state’s ideological propaganda.”

The more I dig into the origins of the COVID pandemic, the more “despotic” our state seems to become — and the more “conspiratorial” I get.

Unsettling the system

I am trying to put together the final pieces of the puzzle of what I consider among the greatest public policy scandals of my lifetime — not only who did it, but more importantly, why would they do it?

A few months ago, I spent a day with Matt Taibbi, the iconoclastic muckraker and “Twitter Files” reporter, for the latest episode of my BlazeTV investigative series, “The Coverup.”

As he dug through the trove of emails and texts, Taibbi discovered the conspiracy to blacklist and silence Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, the subject of the first episode of “The Coverup” and now the head of the National Institutes of Health. Taibbi soon learned that the same tactics and tools — and even many of the very same deep-state actors — have their fingerprints all over both the Russia collusion hoax and the COVID cover-up.

A precedent for censorship

Recently released documents from Director of National Security Tulsi Gabbard reveal that the so-called Russia collusion hoax wasn’t just wrong — it was deliberate. The Obama administration orchestrated the fabrication, pushing U.S. intelligence agencies to leak a report suggesting Vladimir Putin had helped Donald Trump steal the 2016 election.

That leak, repeated endlessly by the press, fueled a national narrative branding Trump’s presidency as illegitimate — despite those same agencies having already dismissed the claim.

This kind of manipulation would be outrageous if it weren’t so familiar.

Five years after the COVID lockdowns stripped millions of Americans of basic liberties, we’re still uncovering how the deep state used propaganda to silence dissent. Throughout the pandemic, scientists and doctors raised alarms about the damage lockdowns would cause — and did cause. Some of the world’s most respected experts signed the Great Barrington Declaration to oppose the government’s heavy-handed response.

But the public never heard from them. Bureaucrats and media allies moved swiftly to smear, suppress, and sideline these voices using one of the oldest authoritarian tactics: control of information.

In fairness, public health agencies didn’t have to twist many arms. The legacy media followed their lead willingly — even when the guidance contradicted itself or defied basic logic.

But unlike the days of Project Mockingbird, when the CIA could shape coverage by nudging the New York Times or CBS, controlling the old guard wasn’t enough. The rise of social media — decentralized, fast-moving, and open to anyone with a computer or phone — posed a new challenge. The administration needed a more aggressive strategy to dominate the narrative.

Strong-arming social media

In episode 5 of “The Coverup,” I ask Taibbi how they pulled it off. As one of the first journalists to dig into the Twitter Files, Taibbi exposed the machinery behind the censorship regime. Americans suspected that platforms like Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube were suppressing dissent during COVID. But the Twitter Files confirmed what many feared: They weren’t acting alone. They took orders from the FBI directly.

And these weren’t polite requests, either. When the government “suggested” something, tech companies treated it as a command.

It all traces back to — surprise, surprise — the Russia hoax.

In 2017, Congress hauled tech executives into hearings and accused them of letting Russian disinformation run wild. Essentially, they were given an offer they couldn’t refuse: Allow the government to play a role in content moderation or prepare to be regulated into submission.

RELATED: On the 9th anniversary of Russiagate, the hoax is finally crumbling

Photo by Alex Wong/Getty Images

Their surrender gave U.S. intelligence agencies de facto control over what Americans could say online. The feds told platforms which posts to delete, which users to silence, and how to suppress the rest. You could post your opinion — as long as no one could see it. “Shadow bans” became the preferred method of censorship: clean, quiet, and deniable.

The silver lining

Thanks to Taibbi — and a handful of journalists who still value truth over access — we now see how the government sold Americans on fiction. Russia hacked the election. COVID came from a bowl of bat soup. Question either and you’d vanish from the digital public square.

Millions believed these lies. And under their influence, they did real damage — locking down schools, closing businesses, and sowing doubt about fair elections.

But truth has a way of leaking out.

It’s taken time, but the lies are unraveling. And that’s the silver lining. In a world where information moves faster than censors can keep up, suppression doesn’t work like it used to. So long as we have truth-tellers willing to dig and defy — like Taibbi — the regime won’t have the last word.

We won’t get fooled again.

Episode 5 of “The Coverup” premieres Thursday, July 31.

Can populism break America’s two-party system?



On a recent episode of “Kibbe on Liberty,” Matt Kibbe sat down with nationally recognized political changemaker Steven Olikara, senior fellow for political transformation at the USC Schwarzenegger Institute and the founder of Millennial Action Project (now Future Caucus), the largest nonpartisan organization of young elected leaders in the U.S.

In their conversation, the two expressed their hopes that populism — a political approach that aims to represent the interests of commoners against a perceived elite or establishment — will eventually conquer the two-party system that crushes the voice of the people.

The current political culture in America, says Olikara, has both Republicans and Democrats saying, “We know what's best for you,” but what they should be saying is, “We want to hear from you.”

Kibbe, a self-described “libertarian populist,” agrees, arguing that populism is "the right side of history because the other side is the machine” — “a collusion of government power and corporate power.”

The question is, can populism garner enough support to break the political establishment?

The answer, says Olikara, is yes. Support for populism is high. The issue is the entrenched elites who rig the system to snuff out any non-establishment opponent.

In his experience campaigning in the 2022 U.S. Senate primary in Wisconsin as a Democrat with a strong bent towards populism, his team would “get the most applause out of all the candidates” at campaign events, and yet they could rarely secure a debate to get their “ideas out to a statewide audience” because “all the other campaigns in the party were making an extra effort to make sure there were no debates.”

On the rare occasion he did secure a debate, he was often declared the winner. However, “just as those sparks were flying, the Democratic establishment effectively ended the race 10 days before the election,” says Olikara. “They said, ‘We don't want to wait to hear what the people have to say. We're going to violate our bylaws and endorse the establishment candidate."’

Despite Olikara’s popularity, Mandela Barnes, a well-known Democrat with strong party support, was endorsed by key figures, making his win in the primary nearly certain.

“I got phone calls from a number of senior Democratic leaders calling to apologize to me why they're not only breaking their bylaws but breaking their promise that they had made to me to be neutral in the primary,” says Olikara, noting that these leaders will admit they’re more concerned about money and control than the people’s voices being heard.

“If you just let ideas breathe a little bit, if you let people express their voices, that's the kind of democracy I believe in,” he says.

Kibbe shares Olikara’s sentiments, comparing the current two-party system to having “Taylor Swift” or “the most obnoxious country musician” as your only options for music. “I like the democracy that is Spotify, where I can listen to my weird, very fringy ... versions of music that I like,” he analogizes.

Unfortunately, for now it’s Swift or honky-tonk. “They make it so that you have to choose their candidate or that really bad guy on the other side,” Kibbe laments. “We go through this cycle every two to four years, and it's pretty disheartening for anybody that imagines that we could give people in democratic America choices that they would actually be proud of.”

However, President Trump’s 2016 rise to power as a system-breaker is proof that populist movements can challenge the two-party establishment.

“He's the first guy to sort of take over a party, at least since maybe since Abe Lincoln,” says Kibbe. “Now he is the party, so it was impossible to run against him in his last primary.” But even though Trump proved the system could be broken, “the Democrats seem still hell-bent on preventing a real primary.”

Olikara is hopeful that in 2028, Democrats will allow “the first truly open democratic primary since 2007 and 2008,” when Barack Obama — “not the establishment candidate” — “emerged and defeated the Clinton machine,” a victory he says is “on par with Trump winning the 2016 Republican primary against the establishment.”

“The moment is perfect for it — like there's clearly no field-clearing candidate. It's wide-open. Democrats are in the wilderness now, which usually means a new voice, a new movement, can emerge,” he says. “It's all set up for them, and yet there's a good chance they still shoot themselves in the foot.”

To hear more of the conversation, watch the episode above.

Want more from Matt Kibbe?

To enjoy more of Matt's liberty-defending stance as he gets in the face of the fake news establishment, subscribe to BlazeTV — the largest multi-platform network of voices who love America, defend the Constitution, and live the American dream.

White House works to send DOGE cuts package to Congress

Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images

"Elon Musk and the entire DOGE team have done INCREDIBLE work exposing waste, fraud, and abuse across the federal government — from the insanity of USAID's spending to finding over 12 million people on Social Security who were over 120 years old," Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) said Wednesday.

"The House is eager and ready to act on DOGE’s findings so we can deliver even more cuts to big government that President Trump wants and the American people demand," Johnson added.

Some of these programs include a $3 million grant to fund Iraqi "Sesame Street" through USAID, as well as another $3 million for circumcisions, vasectomies, and condoms in Zambia and $5.1 million toward the "resilience of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, intersex, and queer global movements" through the United States President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief.

NPR and PBS also become a target of OMB's imminent rescission package because they have functionally served as left-wing outlets subsidized by taxpayers. NPR CEO Katherine Maher has previously referred to Trump as a "fascist" and a "deranged racist," while PBS has featured multiple programs glamorizing transgenderism, including one show about a trans-identifying man who "comes out to her old-school Ohio bowling league."

RELATED: Who is bankrolling the anti-MAHA movement?

Photo by Allison Robbert-Pool/Getty Images

The Trump administration's latest push for Congress to get moving on DOGE cuts comes after Elon Musk himself expressed disappointment with the "big, beautiful bill." Musk cited concerns over spending, saying it "undermines the work that the DOGE team is doing."

Republican lawmakers like Rep. Thomas Massie and Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky also seemed unimpressed by Congress so far. At the same time, BlazeTV host Matt Kibbe told Blaze News that there is still time to preserve the MAGA movement before the midterms.

"Losing Elon Musk and the DOGE wing of the Trump electoral coalition will be devastating to the GOP’s midterm prospects," Kibbe said. "But there’s still time."

"As Senator Rand Paul has been pointing out, all of the proposed DOGE cuts can be accomplished through expedited presidential rescission legislation, only requiring 51 votes in the Senate," Kibbe added. "Why not show us what savings can be accomplished before attempting to pass the 'big, beautiful bill,' which includes a $5 trillion increase in the debt limit and $350 billion in new spending?"

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Did Fauci orchestrate the pandemic? New documentary EXPOSES ALL



A few years ago, Glenn Beck scrutinized all of the evidence related to Anthony Fauci’s gain-of-function research and came to the conclusion that he very well could have contributed to the creation of the COVID-19 pandemic.

But he was always “missing the connecting dot” that would make sense of everything.

BlazeTV host of “Kibbe on Liberty,” Matt Kibbe, who’s been on a mission to break into the COVID secrets vault, believes that we finally have that missing piece — “the smoking gun,” he calls it.

In his docuseries “The Coverup,” Kibbe has been peeling back the layers of COVID lies and fraud and revealing the dark, hidden truths beneath.

In the fourth episode of “The Coverup,” which just dropped yesterday on BlazeTV, Kibbe exposes how Fauci’s sketchy research has weaponized viruses, supposedly in the name of “biosecurity.” He also explains why Biden gave Fauci a blanket pardon going all the way back to 2014, why Fauci was so obsessed with gain-of-function research and “The Science,” and how former NIH director Francis Collins is also involved in this scandal.

Now, Glenn meets with Kibbe to discuss this latest episode that reveals “all of the connecting dots.”

The star of episode four is Richard Ebright, a prominent molecular biologist who was one of the first proponents of the lab-leak theory.

“What Richard Ebright documents in this series is the origins of Fauci’s power, the origins of the money, the origins of this mad science experiment that we were going to sort of weaponize viruses supposedly in the name of biosecurity,” Kibbe tells Glenn, “and it starts with Dick Cheney, who has an obsession about the limits to the government's ability to develop bioweapons agents.”

Kibbe explains that although Richard Nixon signed a treaty outlawing the development of bioweapons, the NIH, USAID, and NIAID “do not have compliance offices.” This allowed for the development of a “money-laundering scheme to do these mad science experiments that they couldn't do legally otherwise.”

“It’s a really evil, arrogant thing that happened,” says Kibbe.

To hear about episode four of “The Coverup,” check out the clip above. To watch the episode, go to FauciCoverup.com. Use the code SMOKINGGUN to get $30 off your first year of BlazeTV+.

'Wuhan, Fauci, and the Smoking Gun’ — ‘The Coverup’ episode 4 drops TODAY



Matt Kibbe’s docuseries “The Coverup” is a deep dive into the egregious fraud and lies of the COVID-19 pandemic to expose the truth U.S. citizens may never hear from their own government.

In episode one, Kibbe partnered with Stanford professor of medicine Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, who, after publishing his research and sharing his professional opinions during the pandemic, was silenced and threatened because these contradicted the government’s narrative.

In episode two, he met with Senator Rand Paul (R-Ky.), the only man in the U.S. Senate who never let the insanity of gain-of-function research or the atrocities committed by Anthony Fauci and obstructive agencies, like the DOD and the NIH, conveniently slip from memory.

In episode three, Kibbe teamed up with Scott Atlas, one of Trump’s coronavirus taskforce advisers, to expose what was going on behind the scenes in Washington while the rest of us were quarantined.

Episodes one, two, and three are all available on YouTube.

The latest installment of “The Coverup” drops today on BlazeTV. In this fourth episode, Kibbe speaks with Dr. Richard Ebright, a prominent molecular biologist who was one of the first proponents of the lab-leak theory. Ebright explains how people like Dick Cheney used the 2001 anthrax attacks to install Anthony Fauci in power and exposes how Fauci’s research into other viruses, like the bird flu, mirror the events of the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic.

Join Matt Kibbe as he reveals the smoking gun that reveals why Anthony Fauci had to be pardoned from 2014 onward.

To watch episode 4 of “The Coverup,” go to FauciCoverup.com. Use the code smokinggun to get $30 off your first year of BlazeTV+.