The US State Department is responsible for the arrest of Telegram CEO Pavel Durov in France, according to Mike Benz.
Benz released a five-minute video on Twitter on Saturday detailing why he believes the US State Department played a hand in the arrest of Durov.
He believes the State Department want to exert pressure on Telegram, not in order to destroy the platform, but to bend it to their will and control it. Benz notes how Telegram has been used in US-backed “color revolutions,” including in Belarus and Russia.
“Telegram played a major role in the State Department’s fomenting of the color 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.”
Benz goes on to compare the situation with Telegram to what happened to Wikileaks, which the US government “wanted to kill”, and WhatsApp, which they wanted to control.
“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, 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 for 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 WhatsApp’s back.”
“They didn’t want to shut down WhatsApp,” Benz continues.
“Whatsapp is used by everybody in Latin America and South America, and half in India. They [the State Department] 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.”
Pavel Durov was arrested in Paris on Saturday, on charges related to the spread of illicit material via Telegram. He was arrested after arriving at Le Bourget Airport on a private plane from Azerbaijan.
In a statement on Telegram on Sunday, the company said, “Telegram abides by EU laws,” adding, “Telegram’s CEO Pavel Durov has nothing to hide.”