Extremely Offline: Glenn Greenwald and David Klion on the Mueller Report — Russiagate Part 2

The Backchannel

This episode began with a spat on Twitter. Glenn Greenwald, the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and co-founder of The Intercept, is famous for his deep, long-standing skepticism of Russiagate. After Attorney General Barr’s summary of the Mueller Report came out, announcing to the world that the special prosecutor had found no basis for bringing charges against the President for collusion in Russia’s 2016 election interference, Glenn was not shy in pointing out that for two years, the media had hyped what amounted to, in his words, a “conspiracy theory,” while maligning its skeptics, including himself.

David Klion, a freelance journalist, took issue with Glenn’s pronouncements. In Mother Jones, he admonished what he referred to as “a clutch of noisy Russiagate skeptics in the media,” focusing on Greenwald and Rolling Stone’s Matt Taibbi in particular. Glenn and David mixed it up a little bit on Twitter, before Glenn invited David to discuss it in a more productive venue — our podcast. David graciously accepted, and here we are.

What none of us could have anticipated was that 18 minutes in, the website we use to record our podcasts, Zencastr, would let us down. The better part of an hour of David’s audio was never recorded, thanks to some technical failure by Zencastr. On every other episode of this show, we’ve had our guests make backup recordings of their audio locally. But for complicated reasons that are entirely the fault of Zaid and me, this was the one episode where that didn’t happen. So, 18 minutes in, Zaid and I take the baton and continue the conversation on Russiagate. We’re very, very sorry to disappoint our listeners, but we hope you enjoy the episode nonetheless.