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- [00:00]
Andrew Egger
Hey, guys, this is Andrew Egger with the Bulwark. Donald Trump's former Attorney General, William Barr, going through some stuff on the maga. Right. Right now, they all want him to go to prison. They all want him to face justice. It seems to be for completely invented reasons. And, you know, there's a lot of completely invented reasons going around on the right these days, but these stand out even among kind of the normal stuff. So we're going to talk all about it. Here to talk about it is our right wing media correspondent, Will Sommer. Well, how are you doing today?
- [00:29]
Will Sommer
Good. There's a lot to dive into on this one.
- [00:31]
Andrew Egger
I think it's so strange. It is so strange. I was reading your False Flag newsletter today and I knew we had to do a video about it. So tell me, tell me first of all what the nature of the allegations are that, that we will, we will discuss the truthiness or lack thereof of them in a bit. But like, what are these people saying about Donald Trump's first term Attorney General, Bill Barr?
- [00:52]
Will Sommer
Sure. So about starting last week, Project Veritas, which people may remember as James o' Keefe's kind of undercover video out outlet, he hasn't been affiliated with them for a few years. Very ugly breakup, but they're still around. And they started putting out these videos that said, we've got a whistleblower who's gonna reveal all this nasty stuff. Bill Barr, sort of, there's a lot going on. I mean, there's like gold bar bars, there's bribes from Turkey, there's all kind of stuff. But at the core, the claim is that Bill Barr and this conservative commentator and businessman named Armstrong Williams, who's kind of a Beltway DC Creature, and, and Fanny Willis, the, the district attorney in Georgia who charged Trump and a lot of his associates, they all got together and schemed and said, okay, let's charge Trump, let's frame them. And so that is kind of the central claim.
- [01:38]
Andrew Egger
This is essentially saying that Bill Barr was involved in some of like the initial criminal investigations and activity against Trump that Fani Willis was involved with, like, you know, prior to a few years ago. Is the idea.
- [01:49]
Will Sommer
Yeah, basically that Bill Barr is sort of the puppet master behind all of the trouble Trump ran into illegally, that he was like, we should do a RICO case. And then he went down to Georgia and said, okay, Fanny, here's the plan. Why Bill Barr, you know, stay tuned. I think it's explained a little later on, but this is the claim and it's been taken over. I mean, it's been very successful on the right. I mean this is obviously a very busy time in terms of right wing media news, but this is getting a lot of traction. Alex Jones is a big fan. Dinesh d' Souza picked it up. This woman wanted real America's voice, which is like where Steve Bannon does his thing. And obviously Project Veritas still has a big, big voice. And so they put out three, three episodes so far. They say there's much more to come. And so you look at and it's like, wow, this is, this is quite a story. But is it true?
- [02:36]
Andrew Egger
Yeah, so that's, let's go there now because I feel like it would be uncomfortable to like do any more processing of like the thing that's being claimed without getting to the. This is completely psychotic because a lot of the times these, these claims are just, you know, totally unverifiable and kind of like obviously fantastic and somebody just thought them up. But this story stands out because of how just sort of like comedically bad the sourcing is. So, so where these claims come from? Well, let's do, let's do the big reveal about this person.
- [03:06]
Will Sommer
Okay, lift the curtain. So here's so, so the whistleblower. Everything, everything here is based on the word and documents provided by one person, a woman named Patricia Lease. And she is a Brazilian national who came to live in the United States. And so this is who Project Veritas says. You know, she's on the run. Bill Barr sicked the DOJ on her. You know, she, she had to flee the country, all this stuff. But Patricia Lillys has possibly the least credible background of like any person who's like not actively in prison for fraud. She is basically her origin story is that if folks remember like Jacob Wall, the sort of right wing provocateur in America or George Santos, sort of someone who is always, I would say, getting up to skill schemes often which are quickly disproven. So her origin story is that she was in, in Brazilian politics and she was kind of like a. She was supposedly a journalist at some point she ran for congress there. But she was, she frequently accused these politicians on of being. Of assaulting her, sexually assaulting her. And basically like not only were her claims, the police found them unfounded, which obviously happens sometimes they can't bring a case. But in this case they said, yeah, she forged a bunch of text messages and actually we want to indict her. So there's this history of forging. She had a lot of like weird. She's a Big social media personality there. Like, she gets in a lot of YouTube feuds with people, but she also like small things. Like, so she at one point posted a picture on Instagram and said, look, I had a baby. You know, here we are in the hospital doing skin to skin contact. But it was actually a picture she had taken from a Texas family on Instagram and she had. Now this is normal stuff. This is something anyone would do. She had photoshopped her face onto the mother's face, so it's their baby. And then she continued using the bands like, My baby's getting so big. But anyways, she obviously has a lot of people who track her antics in Brazil and they sort of track down the family. But anyways, she moves to America and she starts working for Armstrong Williams, who's like a businessman, kind of a media mogul type in dc. Um, and then from there she claims that's when she was inducted into the conspiracy theory.
- [05:17]
Andrew Egger
Yeah, so, so this is. She does not have like a personal connection to Bill Barr, but like in, in her own apparently entirely invented and fraudulent narrative here. Like she is kind of knifing or whistleblowing. Her. Her boss, Armstrong Williams is, is supposedly part of this conspiracy. Do I have that right?
- [05:33]
Will Sommer
Yeah. So, so basically like the reason people get involved here in this story is because she like has one picture with them so she can say like, I met him. You know, it's. Who's to say I'm lying? And, and so in this case, Bill Barr went on Armstrong Williams show at one point and I think either she took a picture with him or she took a picture of him with Armstrong Williams. And this is kind of the proof. So it's one of these things you can weave if you just have a little bit of truth to it. In the right wing media you can make these like crazy claims. So in the real world, Armstrong Williams claims that she said she was an immigration lawyer and he's got this. He needed some, some friends of his to get legal residency in the United States. The FBI claims that she totally duped these people, stole hundreds of thousands of dollars from them as they. It was supposed to be one of these schemes where if you invest money in the US you get, you get a residency. And so basically she allegedly stole the money. They FBI indicted her, I should say. She also got arrested at one point for shoplifting from Target. So there's a lot of like honesty questions. But she, in January 2024, they indicted her, she fled the country. Armstrong Williams was getting kind of fed up with his employee who was ripping off his friends, allegedly. And now she's hiding out in Mexico. And so that is sort of the, the real world arc here. And so since then she, I think, has this feud with Armstrong because maybe he tipped off the FBI to what she was up to. And so she's constantly trying to involve him in these international intrigues. So in the past she said, well, Armstrong is funneling money to the Venezuelan opposition from Chevron. And, and the Venezuelan state media was like, oh my gosh, that's amazing. And they latched onto this and all the documents were like, the signatures were forged from Wikipedia and stuff. So this is kind of an ongoing thing that she's been up to.
- [07:13]
Andrew Egger
Right, right. So just to make sure I have this clear, this is a person who gets her start in Brazilian politics immediately, is accused of all kinds of fraudulent criminal activity there and basically has to flee to America, at which point she sets up seemingly doing the exact same sort of stuff here and now has been sort of fleeing from like federal charges in America, US Charges as well, supposedly related to false accusations against powerful people, and now is camping out in Mexico. And is the, the source for this story that is taking right wing media by storm. Do I have all that right?
- [07:51]
Will Sommer
That's all correct, yes.
- [07:53]
Andrew Egger
Cool. Very cool. I think my favorite little line from, from your story here is that you could call her the Brazilian Jorge Santos, save for the fact that Santos already.
- [08:02]
Will Sommer
Is Brazilian, which is a good, a good little bit.
- [08:05]
Andrew Egger
Okay.
- [08:06]
Will Sommer
There are so many fun details in this story. So she has a lot of documents and I think that's why a lot of people have believed her. But I should say these documents are almost all handwritten notes she's had from meetings that supposedly took place with Bill Barr and Fanny Willis. And so, for example, she has this Bill Barr enemy list. Here's who we're going to frame for January 6th. And this is what Bill Barr said, and it's in this kind of like people says kind of schoolgirl handwriting. And so it doesn't like, look that sinister. But basically it's people you might think like Rudy Giuliani, okay, Bill Barr really hates Trump. Who does he want to frame? The Proud boys, stuff like that. And then she says, and Brad Raffensperger, the Secretary of State of Georgia, and Ruby Freeman, you know, the election worker who was basically accused by the right of stealing the election falsely. And so it's, it, it's almost as though she's from Brazil and does not understand kind of the intricacies of American, like 2020 election drama. And so she's like, I don't know, I saw that name. And you know, Brad Raffensberger is a Republican, so he's probably on this list. And. But people are seeing this and they're like, oh my gosh, it's Bill Bar's enemies list. I mean, this is playing into real right wing drama. Nick Fuentes, the white nationalist talk show host, he's been accused of being a fed. Check back on earlier false flags for the drama. There's. And basically he's like, he just came out this week and he was like, look, I'm not a fed, man. I'm totally innocent. Here's the Bill Bar enemy list. My name's on it. So this has become this kind of like article of faith. But this woman could not be less believable.
- [09:32]
Andrew Egger
This is one of my favorite things about sort of like the broader moment on sort of the brain dead conspiracy. Brain right, is just like the, the authority that just having documents is supposed to give you. Like, like, well, look, she's got all these documents. Look, look at that. Look at that big pile of documents. You see this, like, this is like a lot of the Obama treason stuff is that like, you know, they, the, the current dni, Tulsi Gabbard will like declassify a bunch of stuff from 2016 and then make a bunch of wild false claims about what is literally in the documents that she herself is declassifying and tell everybody, look, just go read the documents. I'm just inviting everybody to go read the documents. And everyone's just kind of like, wow, you know, would a person who's holding all these documents lie? And I'm getting some, some kind of shades of that here as well. One other, one other element of this that I wanted to kind of talk through, because this is what boggles me about this story is it just seems like it's so low upside to be duped or hoodwinked or even just to go along with this. Like, it's not as though right wing media and even like insane mega right wing media doesn't have like a lot of like internal squabbling. You know, people are knifing each other all the time in there. So you would think that like just sort of thoughtlessly magnifying a completely invented, obviously fabricated story for dummies, like this would be a thing you wouldn't want to just do. Like, it's not clear what the upside is to me. Like, I'm, I'm struggling to wrap my brain around, around this. So why is it that you think this just takes over without, like, without internal pushback and without even like other right wing hosts, like going after these guys for, for amplifying this? What's going on there?
- [11:07]
Will Sommer
Yeah, you know, on one hand, I think it's like a real content machine thing. I think, like, if you can say like whistleblower election scheme, you know, and you have a real person with real documents supposedly, I think that's very appealing. I think also, like, we're seeing it. You mentioned Tulsi Gabbard. I think there's such a reach back now to like the olden days, like earlier Trump terms, earlier Trump sagas, because they want non Epstein content. And so if you have someone who's just like, we're going to like finally figure out what happened with the 2020 election, like, oh my gosh, get her out here. You know, I, I should also say that the, there's a woman named Trevian Kuti. I mean, there's so many fun details here that one of the women who is indicted in, as, as part of the Fanny Willis investigation, she initially was like very into Patricia Louise's story a few months ago when it kind of first started bubbling up and she was just like, you know, maybe I'm gonna get absolved of this alleged crime or whatever. And then she just starts tweeting like, this woman is a pathological liar. Like, you could not trust her, all this stuff. So she turned. And then the other thing here is Armstrong Williams is just completely flummoxed here. I mean, this is like an older guy. He's kind of like operative from like the Bush W. Bush administration days. And he goes on this podcast and he's like, all right, I'm so glad I'm here to set the record straight. And the host goes, and actually, here's Patricia. You guys are going to duke it out. So we have Patricia here. I'm going to bring her up. Oh, no, you're not.
- [12:30]
Andrew Egger
You're not going to bring her up.
- [12:31]
Will Sommer
On there with me. So there's a lot of good drama.
- [12:33]
Andrew Egger
Yeah, that is so. I mean, just such a perfect image of like this guy who like came up in a real different time and thinks he knows how politics operates and just gets completely sandbagged by this, this woman who is very much of our time. Right. She's a fun, she's a present day phenomenon with, with how she's gone about all of this. Yeah, okay, that's, that's, that's plenty on these people. This is a really amazing story. Thanks for writing about it, Will. You should all go read his False Flag newsletter today on the Bulwark.com tell it. Tell all your friends. Tell all your friends to subscribe to Will. It is always a wild and woolly read. Thanks to everybody for watching and we'll see you next time. Sam.