On Saturday, the CEO of the popular messaging app Telegram was arrested at Le Bourget airport in France for refusing to comply with the country’s censorship laws.
Pavel Durov, 39, was arrested on the tarmac as he got off his private jet from Azerbaijan.
On Saturday evening Mike Benz, the founder and Executive Director of the Foundation for Freedom Online released a video explaining who he believes is behind this arrest – The US State Department.
Benz is an authority of the Deep State and the US government operations in Europe and abroad.
Mike Benz: I’m here in the airport in Austin, and was just on this space with Mario and Andrew Tate and kim. Com and a bunch of people. I wanted to make a point, but I think they booted me before I could say anything, so I’m just going to make it here. On the news of Pavel’s arrest, the founder of Telegram, this is something that I see going up to the US State Department. Wow, surprise, surprise, that’s my take, but that’s what it is.
One of the things they’re talking about in the space right now is what can be done. The fact is, the House Foreign Affairs Committee could subpoena or could demand as part of its oversight all communications between the US Embassy in Paris, that is the State Department’s branch in France, for their communications with prosecutors or government officials about Havel’s arrest prior to the arrest.
Because I believe the State Department is, at the very least, if not outright pushing, participating in this political prosecution. The State Department has been going after Telegram. Now, they don’t want to shut Telegram down. Let me explain this. Telegram is a double-edged sword for the State Department.
Telegram played a major role in the State Department’s fomenting of the Colour Revolution in Belarus in the summer of 2020. The National Endowment for Democracy, the US State Department, and USAID were all funding the major organisers of the street riots in Belarus and using Telegram as the main channel to organise those street riots because Telegram has such ubiquitous use in Eastern Europe, also in Russia, also in Ukraine. So they loved Telegram as a way to organise, rent a riots, to destabilise Lukashenko’s government.
And I bet that they would do the same if they didn’t. I’m not aware of it just because I haven’t looked into it. But I bet that when Alexei Navalny was deployed against Russia from his right wing flank in organising peaceful protests in Russia. I bet Telegram was used by the State Department as the coordination then because I know that it was in Belarus. Now, on the other hand, the State Department pressured actually astrtufed with tens of millions of dollars, the government of Brazil, to bring Telegram to its knees. Brazil passed a ban, actually made it a crime to access Telegram for several weeks in 2022 until Telegram agreed to the new counter-misinformation laws that were lobbied for by the US State Department’s NGO Soft Power Swarm.
So what they want to do is not kill Telegram like they wanted to kill Wikileaks. They want to control it. And the problem was, is they didn’t have the ability to put sufficient pressure on Pavel to break his will. So he was living in Dubai. Now they have leverage. I believe that’s the purpose of this prosecution, not to establish a legal precedent that every encrypted chat app, its founder, is personally responsible for all illegal conversations or transactions on the platform, but rather to force Telegram to become WhatsApp.
This is what they did to WhatsApp, by the way. Through this regulatory pressure, WhatsApp is owned by Facebook. They broke WhatsApps back. Now, this is why I always say, don’t say anything on WhatsApp that you don’t want put on a Times Square Jumbotron, because the whole thing is fed f*cking central. They broke it.
I watched that happen, by the way. The Atlantic Council played a huge role in that with seven CIA directors on its board and annual funding from the Pentagon, the State Department, and CIA cutouts like the NED. Sorry, I’m just in the airport, so I’m looking around.
They didn’t want to shut down WhatsApp. Whatsapp is used by everybody in Latin America and South America, and half in India. They want to control it, to be able to have their own personnel in place to install and oversee the policies in every country on Earth in order to shape the political outcomes from the inside of every country on Earth to determine their elections. This is what they did to WhatsApp and Telegram in Brazil.
When I say they, I don’t mean the government of Brazil. I mean the US State Department, the US Embassy, the US-funded institutions like the Atlantic Council, the Wilson Centre, the God, there’s a million of them. The National Democratic Institute, the International Republican Institute, the NED. Thousands of these, at least hundreds that I’ve documented, were all capacity-built. Then there’s The whole government programme, SETs, which you’re going to be learning a lot more about in the months ahead. The $150 annual budget and $40 million of it was in Brazil to lobby for these censorship laws. I believe that they thought that they needed leverage against Telegram to finally be able to bring it under their control.
Remember, this is very important in the State Department and the Pentagon’s view for winning the war against Russia via Ukraine, because all the Russians use Telegram chats for the ability to have a backdoor to access.
Here is the video, via Mike Benz.
Just got booted from the @MarioNawfal space so I’m gonna speak my peace here: what’s behind today’s arrest of Telegram founder Pavel Durov pic.twitter.com/FexLvJZK92
— Mike Benz (@MikeBenzCyber) August 25, 2024
Mike Benz also pointed out that a CIA cut-out is bragging about the utility of arresting Pavel Durov and its significance in winning the globalist’s military war against Russia.
CIA cut-out rep from Bellingcat bragging about the utility of arresting Telegram’s founder for being able to control Telegram’s use to win the military war on Russia and you’re telling me you don’t think The Blob (State + Pentagon + CIA) backchanneled Pavel’s arrest pic.twitter.com/MhRTWE5Kcs
— Mike Benz (@MikeBenzCyber) August 25, 2024
The post Mike Benz: US State Department Is Behind the Arrest of Telegram CEO in France – “I Believe the State Dept., at the Very Least, – Is Participating in this Political Prosecution” (VIDEO) appeared first on The Gateway Pundit.