12/13/16 – Craig Murray: DNC, Podesta emails leaked by Americans, not hacked by Russia – The Scott Horton Show

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Introducing Craig Murray.
He is the former British ambassador to Uzbekistan and famously a whistleblower on America's extraordinary rendition program with that torture dictatorship back when.
And now he's got this very important piece at craigmurray.org.uk.
It's called The CIA's Absence of Conviction.
Welcome to the show.
How are you doing, Craig?
Very well, thank you, Scott.
Very well.
Good, good.
I really appreciate you joining us on the show today.
And this is a very important thing that you've written here.
The context is, of course, the CIA's claim to the Washington Post that the Russians ran an op to hack the Democrats' emails.
I guess that goes for the DNC and the Podesta emails to leak them to WikiLeaks in order to help Donald Trump win the election.
And to a degree that I think is actually sort of surprising to me.
This story seems to really have legs in there.
Even the Electoral College is now saying they won a briefing.
I don't think they really would dare to try to overturn the results of the election, but they're at least trying to use this to hem in Trump on his Russia policy, as Greg Sargent reported in The Washington Post.
And yet what you've written here and what you told The Guardian was, hold it right there, this isn't right at all.
But how can you know?
Well, it's not really new.
I mean, the people who are in a position to know are WikiLeaks and the people who work with WikiLeaks, of which I am one.
And Julian Assange has said very plainly that the information does not come from Russia.
He's said that straight out.
And I have first-hand knowledge that the source of the leaks was not Russian and was not any kind of proxy for the Russian government.
It's an American source.
So really, the CIA, who have offered no evidence whatsoever for this anonymously-beat claim, the CIA just talking complete and utter nonsense.
Just to assert that what they say is not true.
Okay, well now, first of all, can you explain what exactly is your role with WikiLeaks?
Oh, well, I'm not, I should say, I'm not a member of WikiLeaks staff.
They have staff, they have directors.
I'm not any of those.
But I'm a member of Sam Adams Associates and other whistleblower organizations which work very closely with WikiLeaks.
And I've been close to Julian for a number of years.
And I'm one of the people who was able to visit him in the Ecuadorian embassy and speak with him and discuss strategies and help move things along.
So I cooperate with WikiLeaks without being a formal member of the structure.
I see.
And then, can you tell us how it is that you know who the source is?
Is it just that Assange told you or you have more direct information yourself?
No, I have rather more direct information than that, which relates to a visit I paid to Washington in September of this year, when I, and I should be plain that the Podesta emails and the DNC emails, of course, two separate things.
And you shouldn't conclude that both have the same source.
But in both cases, we're talking of a leak, not a hack, in that the person who, you know, the person who was responsible for getting the information out had legal access to that information.
And then a trip to Washington, are you saying that you were the recipient of at least one of these leaks?
No, the material was already, I think, safely with WikiLeaks before I got there in September.
I had a small role to play, which I hope you'll understand if I don't expand on it too much.
Sure.
No, I do understand.
I hope you understand if I keep trying to push a little bit to try to understand what's going on here.
I read a post by my friend George Washington over there, George Washington's blog, and he put two and two together in a couple of statements and said, and I guess comparing your statements with those of the famous NSA whistleblower, William Binney, that when you say this was a leak, I think George Washington's blog's conclusion there was that that meant a leak from the inside of the American intelligence community.
Although I guess the way I read your statement, it possibly could just be a Democrat or a member of the Democratic National Committee or someone who had access through that route.
And again, I'm not exactly sure whether we're talking about the Podesta or the DNC leak or one or both here.
As you say, they are at least presumably separate.
But can you give us any insight on whether, for example, you can confirm Binney's claim that this comes from inside American police and intelligence rather than inside the political apparatus like the DNC?
Well, I think, again, the key point to remember in answering that question is that the DNC leak and the Podesta leak are two different things, and the answer is very probably not going to be the same in both cases.
I also want you to consider that John Podesta was a paid lobbyist for the Saudi government.
That's open and declared.
It's not a secret or a leak in a sense.
John Podesta was paid a very substantial sum every month by the Saudi government to lobby for their interest in Washington.
And if the American security services were not watching the communications of the Saudi government's paid lobbyist, then the American intelligence services would not be doing their job.
And of course, it's also true that the Saudis man, the Saudis lobbyist in Washington, his communications are going to be of interest to a great many other intelligence services as well.
Isn't that interesting?
So, sorry, I hope I'm not being too annoying here.
I'm trying to read between the lines.
It sounded like your first answer was, well, maybe one is one and the other is the other, meaning one came from inside the intelligence services and the other maybe came from a political source.
And then your illusion, I think, was to, well, geez, the NSA and then must have been looking at what Panetta was doing since he was operating as a registered agent of a foreign power.
Is it fair to say that you're saying that the Podesta leak came from inside the intelligence services, NSA or another agency?
I think what I said was certainly compatible with that kind of interpretation.
Yeah.
Thank you very much.
You're very polite.
I appreciate that.
All right.
And now, so is it the case that you can you can say, you know, in terms of the DNC leak as well?
It's the case.
I mean, what I can say to you is that I know what Wikileaks have.
You know, I know what I know from Wikileaks on the DNC case.
And I believe Julian, who I've known for many, many years, and he flat out says it's nothing to do with the Russians.
So that's, but I have never, you know, I don't have direct personal access to the source or anything like that.
I wouldn't like to pretend that I did.
But in both of these cases, you're saying that this is these are leaks from Americans, too.
I saw this as part of what you said to The Guardian was if these people were acting as Russian agents, they'd be in jail right now.
Yeah, exactly.
In both cases, they are leaks by Americans.
Now, it's perfectly possible that Wikileaks themselves don't know precisely what is what is going on.
I mean, one thing which I'm sure everybody noticed was that Julian Assange took very close interest in the death of Seth Ditch, the Democratic staff member and Wikileaks offered a 20,000 reward for information leading to the capture of his killers.
So obviously, there's suspicions there about what's happening and things are somewhat murky.
I'm not saying, don't get me wrong, I'm not saying that he was the source of the leaks.
What I'm saying is that it's probably not an unfair indication to draw that Wikileaks believe that he may have been killed by someone who thought he was the source of the leaks.
Hmm.
Whether correctly or incorrectly?
Whether correctly or incorrectly.
But are you saying that Assange says that he is not the source, but that maybe someone mistook him for the source, or he just is not saying either way?
No, Assange has not clarified that either way.
But, you know, obviously, the fear that he may have been killed has something to do with these leaks, possibly by someone who thought he was the source, is a motivation.
Yeah.
Well, I think that occurred to a lot of people, but of course, it's the kind of thing that is easily dismissed as conspiracism as well.
That's also true.
But people do die over this sort of stuff.
You have to remember that there were billions of dollars, literally billions of dollars, behind Hillary Clinton's election campaign.
Those people have lost their money.
And you have also to remember that there's a big financial interest, to give them the armaments industry, in a bad American relationship with Russia.
And the worse the relationship with Russia is, the larger contracts the armaments industry can expect, especially in the most high tech, high profit side of fighter jets and missiles, and that kind of thing.
And Trump has actually already indicated he's looking to make savings on the defense budget, particularly in things like fighter projects.
So there are people standing to lose billions of dollars.
And anybody who thinks in that situation, bad things don't happen to people.
It's very naive.
Well, you know, if we can go off on this tangent for a second, would you like to comment on the relative danger of the new Cold War with Russia at this point, Craig?
Yeah, I mean, I find it very worrying, frankly, that people want to get into a a new Cold War with Russia.
I am no fan of Putin.
And I'm a critic of Putin's internal policy, I think his control of the media and the shutting down of a lot of independent media in Russia has really undermined the sort of the start of democracy, which we've seen in that country.
And so I'm not a big fan of Putin.
I don't like the oligarch system where wealth is even more concentrated in Russia than it is in the West.
But the idea that we want to go back into a system where we regard Russia as an enemy, and we have these fantasies about a war with Russia is absolutely crazy.
There's no way that Russia is ever going to attack the United States or the United Kingdom.
Russia's got no interest whatsoever in doing that.
Where Putin has shown some foreign policy adventurism is in bringing back into Russia, parts of the former Soviet Union, which have a majority Russian ethnic population.
That's not a name I support.
I think that's been dangerous and disruptive.
But he's almost finished that.
And there aren't really any more, very few more parts of the former Soviet Union with a majority ethnic population.
He's essentially achieved what he wanted to achieve.
There's no evidence that he's looking for further land acquisition for Russia.
And in Syria, frankly, his policy appears more sensible than the Western policy where the West is promoting, you know, jihadists who support the Saudi exported Wahhabist doctrine.
So I just don't see that we have this profound conflict of interest with Russia, which necessitates a new Cold War and a new arms race.
I'm sorry, that was rather a long answer to give you.
Yeah, no, that's kind of what I was looking for.
Because, well, I'm glad you brought up the question about the minority Russian speaking populations in the Baltic states, for example, and that kind of thing.
Because, I mean, you know, people do seem to think that that's a real problem.
But you're saying that the threat of any real conflict there that the Russians are going to try to redraw those borders or something like that, that, that basically, this is all negotiable, and it's already been negotiated.
Yeah, I think that's, that's true.
And the places where Putin has taken action, like an enclave in Georgia and in the Crimea, are places which have a majority Russian population, not a minority Russian population.
There's no evidence that he's daft enough to try to move into areas which only have a minority Russian population.
And he's not mad enough to attack the European Union.
You know, that's, that's definitely not going to happen on or to attack NATO.
So an awful lot of this saber rattling is much ado about nothing.
But as I say, it's extremely possible for the armaments industry.
Right.
Yeah, well, no question about that.
All right.
So now, well, what do you make of all the CIA claims about, well, you have Guccifer here, GRU and FSB, and they're hacking here, and they're fishing there, and that they've traced all of this stuff?
Is this all just made up out of whole cloth, do you think?
Well, I think the Guccifer thing is, is hilarious.
I mean, Guccifer is not the source for WikiLeaks.
And the idea that the Russian FSB would, you know, carefully hack these emails, and then have this vainglorious weirdo personality boasting about it all over the internet and using specific script is just not at all probable when you think about it.
The Russians are a great deal more professional than that.
Yes, of course, the Russians spy on the United States.
The United States spies on the Russians.
The United States spies on the British and the Germans as well.
That's part of the game of international politics and international diplomacy.
Nobody's saying that the Russians don't spy on the United States.
They do.
It's an ongoing mutual game that's always been part of human history, I suppose.
But it so happens that they are not the people who hacked this particular material and passed it on to WikiLeaks.
And then, well, so what about, you know, all the stuff about the GRU phishing email and all of that?
Is that just something that happened, but is unconnected to the leaks themselves, is what you're saying?
Well, a phishing email happened when it was definitely from the GRU.
I have my doubts, but it's not the source of the leak.
Gotcha.
All right.
Well, you know, I wish I was a little bit more proficient on the technical aspects of all this kind of stuff so I could try to come up with some better questions to ask along those lines.
But it sounds like, well, really what you're saying, certainly on at least half of what's at issue here, that you personally know one, and on the second, you know what Assange told you.
And in that case, you certainly believe him.
And in both cases, the DNC leak and the Podesta leak, you're saying both sources are not hacks, but insider leaks and Americans in both cases.
Yeah.
If you're looking for the source of all this, you have to look to Americans.
And it's, you know, it's worth saying that if Hillary Clinton hadn't connived with the DNC to fix the primary schedule in order to disadvantage Bernie Sanders, if she hadn't accepted questions in advance of televised debates against Bernie in order to give her an unfair advantage, if the Clinton Foundation hadn't accepted donors from all kinds of dictators in exchange for access to meetings in the State Department or foreign policy decisions or purchase of uranium or whatever else they wanted in exchange, if all that hadn't happened, then we wouldn't be talking about any of this.
One of the very peculiar things is that the mainstream media is still completely in denial about all those stories I just told you, which mostly weren't much featured in the mainstream media.
And yet at the same time, they're saying that these emails, which were Russian, affected the election.
It's quite strange.
The emails can't be totally unimportant and meaningless, and at the same time have affected the election.
Right.
Yeah, all they did was show how business is done on a daily basis inside the Democratic Party and the Clinton campaign.
You know, why would that do anything but help Hillary Clinton's chances?
Right?
Well, exactly.
I think a lot of people were surprised by, for example, the extent of media collusion, which wouldn't be on the course of journalists to keep up their contacts and that kind of thing.
But discussing, you know, how to present stories to best political advantage of a political candidate and that kind of thing is is outwith ethical journalism.
I think those emails are an absolutely fascinating glance into the way politics operates in Washington.
I think it's not very pity.
And I actually think it says a very great deal for the sophistication of the American voter that they did have such a profound effect on so many people.
And people are capable of understanding and analyzing what's going on and reacting to it.
Mm hmm.
All right.
So now, because of this whole controversy, I mean, they're really trying to, in a sense, as I was saying at the introduction here, they're trying to really undermine the incoming presidency of Donald Trump.
I mean, Hillary has said she concedes we have to accept the result.
But at the same time, she's saying, oh, yeah, she supports the CIA giving a briefing to the Electoral College, I guess, just trying to cause trouble, that kind of thing.
But so it raises the question of whether the source one or both sources might just as well come forward at this point and say it was me, not them.
It wasn't the Russians.
I'm not a Russian.
I did this because I'm a Bernie fan or whatever it was.
Do you think that there's any chance of that at this point, that the sources source or sources might change their mind and come forward?
Well, I can't I can't know.
But the whole Obama Clinton attitude to whistleblowers, you know, the way that very good patriotic Americans like Thomas Drake and William Binney and John Kiriakou have been have been treated the way that Chelsea Manning is treated, the way that Edward Snowden is still in exile, doesn't actually encourage anybody to come forward.
And the doubt hovering around the death of Seth Rich doesn't encourage anybody to come forward either.
So I wouldn't myself lean on anyone to come out because I know as a whistleblower myself that the consequences for you and your family are extreme.
So I think that's a decision people have to be left to make privately.
Yeah.
All right.
Well, listen, thank you very much for coming on the show, Craig.
I really appreciate it a lot.
Thank you.
It's always good to talk.
All right.
So that is Craig Murray, formerly the ambassador, the British ambassador to Uzbekistan and a whistleblower in his own right.
And now, as he says, he works on a somewhat sort of consulting basis with WikiLeaks.
And he writes at CraigMurray.org.uk, CraigMurray.org.uk.
This one is called The CIA's Absence of Conviction.
And we're running about half of it, a little splash page thing today at the Libertarian Institute as well, if you want to find it there.
But the original, again, is CraigMurray.org.uk.
That's the show.
Thanks, everybody, for listening.
Appreciate it.
See you next time.
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