AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. I’m Amy Goodman.

We’re continuing Part 2 with our conversation with the Oscar-winning director Alex Gibney. He has a new series out called The Dark Money Game. Alex is the award-winning director of Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room, Going Clear: Scientology and the Prison of Belief and the Oscar-winning Taxi to the Dark Side. But tonight, HBO is premiering his two-part series. It’s called The Dark Money Game, and it’s divided in two parts. Tonight is Ohio Confidential. This is a clip.

CALLER 1: I kind of like the word “dark.” “Shadowy,” I don’t know what shadowy is.

CALLER 2: I hear what you’re saying now. My problem with the “dark money” is that nobody really knows that that’s an unreported — you know, contributors don’t have to report their names.

CALLER 1: Secret groups that hide — 

CALLER 2: Secret groups, secret contributors.

CALLER 1: — that hide behind.

CALLER 2: Right.

CALLER 1: Yeah.

CALLER 2: Right, that’s what I’d rather do, is just make sure that people know that there are secret — secret people who we don’t know that are trying to tell us what to do.

AMY GOODMAN: That’s a clip from The Dark Money Game. It’s actually part one, that’s premiering tonight, and that’s called Ohio Confidential.

So, Alex Gibney, lay it out for us, this incredible two-part series that’s based on the book and the investigative reporting of Jane Mayer called Dark Money.

ALEX GIBNEY: Right. So, I was very much inspired by Jane’s work and always wanted to work with her. And so we had an opportunity to do something, in a way to kind of update what she had done as part of Dark Money, though some of the original reporting is in this.

The Ohio Confidential episode, which is the one that airs tonight, is kind of a jaw-dropping case that nobody’s heard of. It’s one of the biggest political corruption cases in American history, certainly in Ohio’s history. And it revolves around a slush fund that an energy company, FirstEnergy, $60 million slush fund, put into a dark money vehicle that was run by an Ohio politician named Larry Householder. He used it to become speaker of the House in Ohio and then paid back FirstEnergy by jamming through a $1.3 billion subsidy for FirstEnergy that was taken, you know, from Ohio citizens, off the backs of the citizens. So it’s really a jaw-dropping case.

But the interesting thing is that those wiretaps, which are FBI wiretaps, the FBI stumbled into this scheme when they were following a sort of a gambling case and they started to hear these lobbyists talk about this pay-to-play scheme. But they were cackling to each other, because they thought, “This is great. We can legally bribe now because of that great Supreme Court ruling called Citizens United.” So, that’s what attracted me to this particular story, because it has a much broader implication, the idea that they caught these people, but this is the kind of thing, since Citizens United, that’s going on all over the country.

AMY GOODMAN: And what were those recorded conversations that we just listened to?

ALEX GIBNEY: They were literally body wires of FBI informants and also phone wiretaps, obtained by warrant by the FBI. And originally, they were looking into — it was a gambling — it was a gambling matter. I can’t remember now. But as they were looking into that matter, they stumbled upon a number of lobbyists and politicians talking about this scheme, this FirstEnergy scheme, to basically defraud the Ohio public, but also to boost the fortunes of a politician in exchange for a huge payback from the public coffers of Ohio. And they began to investigate it.

And ultimately, Larry Householder, who was the Ohio speaker of the House, was convicted of conspiracy. Now, that’s rare. And it was only because they were so exceedingly brash and stupid that they literally laid out quid pro quo bargains in their conversations, because that’s the one thing you can’t do with — in the wake of the Citizens United decision. You know, you’re supposed to be able to funnel all this money into independent groups called super PACs, and you can keep the money dark by using 501(c)(4)s, which can’t be penetrated by public inquiry. So, but it’s supposed to be independent of the candidate. Well, we all know that that’s a sham, that it’s never independent of the candidate. But in this case, because of the wiretaps, you could hear all of the conspirators talk about how it wasn’t independent at all, and they had literally agreed to a deal.

AMY GOODMAN: So, that’s part one, Ohio Confidential, that’s premiering tonight on HBO. Part two is Wealth of the Wicked. And, of course, in this film, which tracks the history of campaign finance, you’re showing, in both cases, how bribery has been virtually legalized in the United States, this on the 15th anniversary of the Supreme Court decision Citizens United. Elaborate on what you found.

ALEX GIBNEY: Well, we went back, you know, to something called the Powell Memo, which was a memo that was drafted by a future Supreme Court justice named Lewis Powell for the American Chamber of Commerce. And the idea was: How do American corporations get back all this power? There are all these terrible laws that are doing things like protecting citizens from pollution or lung cancer from cigarette smoke, or, you know, any number of other things, and we’ve got to eliminate them. And they embark on a plan.

Over time, we see how that plan turned out. And it turned out, to great effect, with a kind of corruption and packing of the Supreme Court, by joining forces first with evangelical Christians, who were motivated by overturning Roe v. Wade, and then, ultimately, by plying Supreme Court justices with money and friends who, over time, sort of influenced them to take a kind of deregulatory posture. So, you see how it moves and how the court moves, not only to overturn Roe v. Wade, as we know, but also to overturn an enormous legacy of government rules and regulations that were designed to protect us as citizens from corporate abuse.

And maybe the thing that’s most jaw-dropping is, at one point, we look at a Supreme Court decision related to an Ohio — sorry, Indiana mayor, in which he had awarded a contract for garbage trucks to the Peterbilt company, and in return, he got a kickback, and he was convicted of bribery. The Supreme Court overturned it, because, in their wisdom, they said, “Well, wait a minute, he didn’t get the money before. He got the money after. So, that’s called a gratuity.” So, as long as you get the money, you get the bribe after the act, it’s OK. That really was a jaw dropper, because it went as far as anything I’ve ever seen to legalizing bribery.

AMY GOODMAN: So, Jane Mayer’s book Dark Money, the subtitle, The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right, it’s amazing it came out at the beginning of the Trump one presidency. Now we’re almost talking, what, nine, 10 years later, and we’re talking about what many people — who many people call President Trump’s co-president, Elon Musk, the richest man in the world. Your next project is, not surprisingly, on Elon Musk. And if you can talk about how that relates to your current series, The Dark Money Game, and what you’re doing? Give us a sneak peek of this next project.

ALEX GIBNEY: Well, that was a project, strangely enough, that I started about two years ago. And now, now already, the people I’m working with on that have decided I need to expand my brief, because, obviously, the story’s gotten a lot bigger.

But you can see how the Elon Musk story relates to the dark money project, and indeed we allude to it in the dark money films. I mean, in the 2024 campaign, he dropped $288 million into a super PAC to support Trump. And also, he is now the bank that keeps the Republican Party in check, lest, you know, one of — you know, lest three or four people defect from the program that the Trump administration has in mind, because if anybody defects, then Elon Musk will drop $50 million or $100 million into your district and primary you and send you packing. So, they’re all so scared of losing power that they’ll do anything to — including watch the end of American democracy, in order to keep being reelected. So, it’s the money that Musk represents that is directly related to dark money.

The Musk story is much bigger than that, and actually relates to the attempt to destroy truth. That’s really what it’s about. And that is sort of chapter one of the authoritarian playbook. If you can eliminate the distinction between fact and fiction, then you’re free to engage in propaganda, and you’ve eliminated the distinction between right and wrong.

AMY GOODMAN: So, as we wrap up, clearly, the problem is bipartisan.

ALEX GIBNEY: Yes.

AMY GOODMAN: Citizens United, you could say, started this 15 years ago. Do you think united citizens and noncitizens can stop it?

ALEX GIBNEY: Yes, we can. It’s up to us. But we’ve got to scream, and we’ve got to scream pretty loud. You are seeing some attempts to stop the influence of money in politics in states. I live a lot of my time in Maine now, and Maine is very good on that. And a number of other states understand it. You know, we don’t want to live by the rules of oligarchs who create a society that’s good for them but not for us. So, yeah, we’ve got to do a lot of screaming. But we’ve got to get it — we better get working, because things are moving pretty fast in the wrong direction.

AMY GOODMAN: Well, I want to thank you so much for spending this time with us, Alex. Alex Gibney is the Academy Award-winning director of the HBO original The Dark Money Game. It’s in two parts. The first airs tonight on HBO, Ohio Confidential, and Wealth of the Wicked airs on Wednesday night. To see Part 1 of our discussion, go to democracynow.org. I’m Amy Goodman. Thanks so much for joining us.