Hey y'all, Scott here.
Here's how to support the show.
Sign up for the RSS feeds at scotthorton.org, iTunes, Stitcher, all those kinds of things.
You can donate per interview at patreon.com or just go to scotthorton.org slash donate.
There's all the ways to donate there.
Buy my book, Fool's Errand, Time to End the War in Afghanistan.
Go to foolserrand.us or look for it on amazon.com.
Shop amazon.com via my link scotthorton.org slash amazon should forward you there.
Give me a good review on iTunes or Stitcher.
How about that?
Hey, and check out the new and improved show notes on the page at libertarianinstitute.org and scotthorton.org slash interviews.
Sorry I'm late.
I had to stop by the museum again and give the finger to FDR.
We know Al-Qaeda, Zawahiri is supporting the opposition in Syria.
Are we supporting Al-Qaeda in Syria?
It's a proud day for America.
And by God, we've kicked Vietnam syndrome once and for all.
Thank you very, very much.
I say it, I say it again.
You've been had.
You've been took.
You've been hoodwinked.
These witnesses are trying to simply deny things that just about everybody else accepts as fact.
He came, he saw us, he died.
We ain't killing their army, but we killing them.
We be on CNN like Say Our Name been saying, say it three times.
The meeting of the largest armies in the history of the world.
Then there's going to be an invasion.
All right, you guys, welcome to the show.
I'm Scott Horton, author of Fool's Errand, Time to End the War in Afghanistan, available at foolserrand.us and at amazon.com.
Yes, it's out, really.
That book, I really did write one and it's done and it's for sale.
Check it out, Fool's Errand.
You can also find it at the Libertarian Institute website and all of that.
Follow me on Twitter at scotthortonshow, etc.
All right, on the line, it's Phil Giraldi.
He gave me a great blurb for the book, actually.
Thanks, Phil.
Welcome back to the show.
How are you doing?
I'm fine.
How about you?
I'm doing great.
Really appreciate you joining me today.
Of course, you guys know Phil.
He's the executive director of the Council for the National Interest in Washington, D.C.
He's a former CIA and DIA officer, writes for unz.com and the American Conservative Magazine.
That's where we start this interview.
Hack or leak, who really stole the DNC files?
I wish I knew the answer to that question.
Why don't you do your best to try to answer it for us here, Phil?
What do you think?
Well, unfortunately, I don't give an answer.
I kind of conclude that nobody knows or nobody knows at this point.
This article sort of was born out of the fact that there's a really hot dispute in the alternative media about whether this was, quote, a hack, as the U.S. government seems to be implying, without providing any evidence, or was it a leak based on the technical features of a computer and how much information it can download and what kind of time and so on and so forth.
So this article, this dispute has been going back and forth.
So I figured, well, let me take a look at all the different possibilities here.
And I go through them in the article.
There are about five different, you know, basic configurations that could explain how this information got out of the DNC computer and wound up at WikiLeaks.
And I go through them.
And when I did that, I realized, hey, nobody's actually, apart from the allegations about Russia, I mean, nobody really even seems to be concerned about who actually did this.
And so I explore that.
I say, essentially, if the FBI had been doing a proper investigation back over a year ago, they would have confiscated that server immediately.
They would have had their own analysts going over it, and they would have sucked out all the information on who was logging in, who had access to which files, and so on and so forth.
They didn't do any of that.
And since that, in the years since, as far as I can tell, they haven't even talked to a single person who might have had access to that computer and who might have leaked the information.
Yeah.
So can we start then with what everybody knows?
Russia did it.
Or at least everybody knows that that's what John Brennan's said.
So is that not a proven fact then?
Well, clearly it's not.
I mean, the thing is, was it January 6th or 7th when they came out with that silly report that Brennan had signed off on, and I think, I guess, Clapper signed off on it, and the head of the NSA signed off on it, Rogers.
They all agreed that Russia was behind this, but they provided no evidence.
And the interesting thing was, of course, that the NSA, which would have been the lead agency on investigating this kind of thing, in, you know, hacking into a computer and taking out the information and being able to track where it went and how it went and so on and so forth, they only had moderate confidence that Russia was involved.
So we have this kind of situation where any thinking observer would be quite skeptical of what this narrative is saying.
And since it has, it involves Russia and has major foreign policy and national security consequences, it's quite amazing that they're not really looking more deeply into alternatives.
Yeah.
Well, you know, I've got to say, it's a little bit of speculation and assumption and what have you, but, I mean, this really reminds me of ninth grade and Sherlock Holmes, the dog that didn't bark, and it took Holmes to notice that, hey, man, but doesn't that dog bark all the time whenever something's going on around here, but this time it didn't, maybe something wasn't going on.
The National Security Agency, you know, the guys with the digital digits and everything, they're the ones who have moderate confidence while the CIA and the FBI are apparently, Phil, I don't know how else to interpret it, willing to go out on a limb here when you would think, and maybe this is assuming too much, what am I, stupid?
I don't know.
You would think that the CIA and the FBI would have to base their conclusions on what the NSA was telling them, right?
Yeah, that's exactly the point.
I mean, the fact is, if there's, a couple of times in the article, I use the expression, the legal expression, chain of evidence, because this is critical to making a judgment that somebody did something.
You have to show that something happened in the beginning, and that there was a chain of evidence where this, whatever was stolen or taken, made its way, and then wound up at wherever it wound up.
You have to be able to demonstrate that, and I believe that the U.S. government has no evidence whatsoever to connect the dots.
I mean, they're claiming there was a Romanian hacker that may have been involved in this, working for the Russians, which he's denied, and then they're also claiming there were Russian fingerprints, but then we, in what they call the hack, and then we discover that, hey, the CIA has all kinds of software that, that's exactly what it does.
It fakes this electronic fingerprints of foreign countries, of foreign intelligence services, so that nobody will know that it was the CIA that was doing the snooping.
So there's so many things that pop out in this narrative that don't make sense, and I'm asking the question, I said, well, why the hell are the FBI really digging to find out who exactly did this and how they did it, and if we get an answer that, hey, it wasn't Russia, then hopefully we can make this whole Russiagate thing go away.
Well, you know, I mean, even the whole thing about the CIA could have, and we know now from their hacking tools that they could have set the Russians up in terms of some of the metadata that they embedded in there and Cyrillic and, and quoting Iron, you know, citing Iron Felix or whatever this guy from the NKVD from back when, but then it doesn't even seem like you would need that, right?
Like I keep reading, in fact, there's, I think I saw someone mocking the New York Times today as saying, oh yeah, those sneaky Russians, you know what they did?
They used black market malware.
The GRU, they just bought some malware from some hacker out there in order to do this.
From Ukraine.
From Ukraine.
It was a story.
Totally ridiculous.
Yeah, yeah.
And, and yeah, and another point I make in the article is I'm not defending Russia on this, you know, Russia might've done it, and I said, well, even if there was what they're calling a leak and that somebody stuck a thumb drive into the main computer and sucked out this information, that doesn't leave Russia out.
I mean, intelligence organizations, sophisticated intelligence, this is precisely what they do.
They recruit somebody.
Yeah, in fact, I told you before, I said, well, Craig Murray said to me that not that he received the leak personally, but he said he met in the woods with the source who leaked it and that he's telling you it wasn't the Russians and it wasn't hacked by, you know, some far away government or something.
It was a leak and, and, uh, he knew that much.
And your first response to me was, of course, that could still be the Russians too.
Uh, you know.
Sure.
Sure.
But it certainly is a different narrative than the one that our government is pushing right now, which by the way, I left this out a minute ago, but I meant to have this as a preface to the, the previous point there about just how far the agencies are willing to go there.
Where last fall before the, the, the January one, the initial one, they were, I mean, I was actually surprised like, why not lie?
Right.
They went ahead and they think, I think they said Homeland Security and the FBI, they said, well, you know, these are sort of the kinds of methods and ways and means of things that remind us of some things that we think might've been the Russians from a different time.
What?
And that was, that was as far as they were willing to go themselves.
Yeah.
That's it.
That's an amazing document.
It's only one page long and, and I would recommend very much to listeners.
It's linked to on my article and to go and read it.
It's the most astonishing document in the world.
It basically says, we think the Russians did it because this is the way they behave.
Yeah.
All right.
Now, so as far as, you know, sure.
The Russians could recruit an American to infiltrate the DNC and get a thumb drive full of data.
That's easy.
All you got to do is threaten them or bribe them or something, right?
You're a spy.
How's that work?
Well, that's exactly how it works.
I mean, you, you either find a guy who really gambles and needs money and, and you find somebody to do it.
And I would even cite an example of where this was, it was done by either CIA or Mossad with the Stuxnet virus that infected the, the Iranian computer systems.
They actually recruited a technician, an Iranian technician who went in, had to insert a thumb drive with this virus in it to make it work.
And so, yeah, it's done all the time.
I mean, intelligence agencies are in business because they, they corrupt people and then they get them to do things that normally they wouldn't do.
I mean, that there's no reason why somebody, there were probably a lot of people who had access to this DNC computer and all you have to do is find one of them.
Right.
And now, so what's important there is, you know, it's clear, look, you're a conservative, right?
For the American conservative, you're a former CIA officer, you're an American Patriot.
You're not willing to sit here and defend the foreign state.
It sounds to me like you're perfectly happy to accuse Russia of doing it.
If you think there's actual reason to.
Yeah, I actually, I am.
I mean, if, if Russia actually did this, then we should know it.
But the fact is that the story is just so paper thin right now.
And it's clear.
I mean, it's been a long, long time and we've had no elaboration on the alleged intelligence that tells these people in power that the Russians did it.
So I don't think we're ever going to get anything.
And I think it's clear to me that they're not even investigating the other side that, as I say, they haven't interviewed anybody.
As far as I know, they have had no access to the actual computer, which probably has been screwed up royally by the DNC, you know, since that time to make sure that nothing would come out of it.
But, you know, this thing should have been the first hour.
They should have confiscated that that server and turned it over to their technicians.
All right.
Hang on just one second.
Hey, guys, I got a new sponsor.
No dev, no ops, no I.T. principles governing the ideology, methodology and praxeology of informed I.T. decision making.
It's by Hussain Bhadrak Chani.
And it's really great business advice for those of you in Internet technology fields, especially you libertarians.
You'll really get a lot out of it.
I've read about half of it so far and it's far out of my field, but I can tell that it's really great stuff.
So, again, it's no dev, no ops, no I.T. by Hussain Bhadrak Chani on Amazon.com.
Also, of course, check out the War State Roberts and Roberts Brokerage Inc. for your medals, Liberty Stickers for your propaganda, 3T Editing for your writing.
And now back to this interview.
All right.
Now, so the article doesn't reflect this, but I don't know exactly when you wrote it.
Have you heard the audio of Seymour Hersh that was leaked talking about the Seth Rich case?
Yeah, I have.
So for people who haven't heard it, you know, it's easy enough to find.
You just type in Hersh and Seth Rich there.
And apparently he was recorded unwittingly.
It sounds almost like an interview answer, but I guess he thought he was talking with this guy off the record and was saying he has a source in the FBI who basically read him the whole 302 about it, I guess, or the whole kind of file on it.
And that what he said was, no, it really was just a botched robbery, which has been going on a lot in D.C. lately.
And he did live in a tough neighborhood.
And, you know, that's the most likely explanation for that, or at least that's the FBI's explanation for that.
But then he went, you know, much further on all the rest of the issue and said that, yes, indeed, that Rich was the source for WikiLeaks.
And then but now since then, he sort of denied that he said that.
And so, well, I only said a little bit of a thing.
And this guy kind of took it out of context.
I don't know.
I heard the context.
But so what do you think of all that?
You think Seth Rich was the leaker here?
Yeah, I do.
But I got to say I love Seymour Hersh.
And I if Seymour Hersh says that he has an FBI source at a high level who will basically go and read documents to him off the shelf or whatever, I believe that I don't think that he's a liar when he says stuff like that.
And he could be lied to.
And it is a single source kind of thing.
But then again, he's no dum-dum.
Well, in his defense, I would say basically the fact that he's waffling indicates that what he probably he didn't know the first time around that he was going to be quoted.
And I think that probably his source alerted him to the fact that there is a file on Seth Rich and that there is a strong suspicion that he was probably the guy.
But I bet they don't have anything solid.
And that's, I think, probably what was reflected inside Hersh.
Same thing with me.
I mean, I put what I think are the pieces that I've seen together.
For example, Craig Murray, in some of his comments, not with you, but other comments has virtually kind of said it was Seth Rich or something like that.
And also, of course, there was the fact that that Wikileaks put up a $25,000 reward almost immediately for catching the person who killed Seth Rich.
Now, why did they do that?
I wish I'd asked more directly about that when I did interview him.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
OK.
So but anyway, I suspect that for various reasons, obviously, Wikileaks doesn't reveal the sources.
Craig Murray was working for Wikileaks and still is, as far as I know.
So he's not going to come out and say it directly.
But I think some of his comments have have verged on, you know, this is the kind of leak it was.
And Seth Rich seems to be the obvious candidate.
So I think it was Seth Rich, but I don't have any solid evidence for that.
Well, there's such a thing as coincidences.
But on the other hand, I guess if he was murdered by some hitman, then the FBI might not want to even look at that direction.
I mean, although what Hearst says is, come on, it was two shots from a 22 and whatever.
You know, this was like clearly some stupid kids in the neighborhood and not a hit kind of thing.
But, you know, I don't know.
Again, that's just what they're saying.
Why did they rob him?
Why did they take his watch and wallet?
Well, maybe I guess the way he said it was they just panicked and ran off because he fought back.
Basically, he wasn't supposed to fight back and it escalated.
Which makes sense.
Yeah.
But on the other hand, then again, it makes sense that someone would hire somebody to kill him, too, huh?
Right.
That's it.
I'm not endorsing that somebody would assassinate him for what he allegedly or he may have done.
I think that story is ridiculous.
But the fact is, you know, there is a certain mystery involving this murder.
But I think I think Seth Rich is a is certainly if I had to make a list of candidates, separate should be very high on it.
If I were doing a list of candidates and I were FBI, I'd be interviewing a whole lot of people at the end to see to find out who the ones that had access to this war and they haven't done it.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I mean, and really, there's a big discrepancy about.
Well, in other words, I guess what I should say is, according to Hearst's story, his laptop has some stuff on it and this could be verified.
Right.
We're back to Iran smoking laptop.
Oh, yeah.
Let's see the laptop then.
What's on there?
This is all can be factually verified.
Right.
Right.
And also, as I say, if people have to get into the server, they have to have a password.
They have to log in.
So there should be evidence there as to who was going into these files, the ones that disappeared.
And so, you know, there are a lot of link linkages.
And also, I've seen the story that on Seth Rich's laptop, there were there were communications with WikiLeaks.
I don't know if that's true or not, but that that certainly is one of the stories that's circulating.
Well, it's been very clear all along, really, since last summer, since before the election, that the Democrats wanted to blame Russia no matter what.
And I guess it's reported that right after the loss, they held a little Hillary team meeting where they said, listen, everybody, your talking point is Russia, Russia, Russia.
And they clearly have the cart before the horse and begging the question and all of these things here.
So, you know, again, I agree with you that, you know, it's not like the GRU are a bunch of cute little puppies or whatever.
Certainly they do work and people ought to be aware of them or whatever.
Right.
There's no reason to live in a fantasy world about that.
Certainly not.
But it's pretty obvious to see here that this is basically, well, you know what?
It's birtherism and it serves Donald Trump right.
In fact, you know, he he was the foremost person in our society claiming that Barack Obama wasn't really the duly elected president of the United States of America by the law, that, no, he was some Muslim Kenyan Islamic usurper of McCain's rightful throne and all of this.
And so screw him really like karma is some pitch, but that's basically the exact same thing that's going on here is conclusion first cherry pick evidence in order to make the case that he's not the legitimate president.
And so, yeah, karma is a bastard in Donald Trump's life this week.
Anyway, you know, sure.
Seems like, yeah, well, I mean, to a certain extent, we all do that.
We all have preconceptions about political situations and everything.
And we like those preconceptions to be supported.
So we're we're always kind of selective in how we choose to look at the evidence.
But what I tried to do in this article was look at all the different options and say, well, why isn't this being done and why isn't this being done?
And because, you know, I really would like to know who did this.
And I think the American people would actually like to know.
And it would be beneficial if indeed we could clarify the issue of whether a foreign government did it or not.
And, you know, but it's like they don't really want to know what the answer is.
Right.
Yeah, that's the whole thing.
They they already know what the answer they want is.
And that's the that's the real danger here, right, is if they were just blaming the Irish or whatever, who cares?
But it's the Russians.
And in a huge way, it's not even about Donald Trump.
It's about Vladimir Putin and trying to figure out a way to make all Americans hate Russia forever, because at the end of the day, the business of the U.S. government is in buying big ticket items like aircraft carriers and long range bombers.
Mm hmm.
Mm hmm.
That's right.
Yeah.
I mean, it's always this, you know, hyping of fear.
There has to be an enemy that is a dangerous enemy.
You can't just have, you know, like you say, Ireland or something being mad at us.
You know, you've got to be somebody who's threatening because that keeps the money falling.
And and all of the people in the White House, you know, there's so many generals.
They're all into this game.
And it's it it it gives them status.
It gives them influence.
It makes them important people.
There are a whole lot of ego things that go into it, too.
But it's a very scary situation, because when you start accusing a government that actually can strike back, you know, you're playing you're playing with fire.
Yeah.
Well, in this case, fusion, the hottest of fires.
That's right.
Yeah.
All right.
So and I mean, it hotter than the sun hot.
Right.
OK.
Yeah.
All right.
Listen, now, I'm sorry.
We have very little time to talk about this other article.
But before we even get into it, I have to say this is very important that the Rompel Institute is holding a peace conference in Washington, D.C.
It's Phil Gerald, the headline in the thing with Jesslyn Raddick, the great civil liberties lawyer, Thomas Drake, the National Security Agency whistleblower, John Kiriakou, the CIA whistleblower and Peter Van Buren, the State Department whistleblower.
And so this is a huge thing.
And the only problem is I don't have the date off the top of my head.
Can you give us for people who live on the East Coast and can get there the information they need, Phil?
Yeah, it's it's on September 9th, which is a Saturday, and it's being held where the last event of this type was a year ago at Dulles Airport, Marriott Hotel in their large ballroom.
And I understand that that ticket sales are going pretty well.
So if you're interested in going, it would be advisable to to sign up right away.
And Scott Ritter is going to be speaking, too.
It's quite a lineup.
I mean, I'm not not not praising myself, but I mean, the other guys are just these are incredible.
It's an incredible group of people.
And of course, Ron Paul will be speaking and Lou Rockwell will be speaking.
It's it's it's going to be well worth it for people who can make it.
Man, sure sounds like it.
September 9th at the Dulles Marriott.
And yeah, they that's convenient to just fly right into the airport and right there and all of that.
No trouble.
So good deal.
September 9th.
Again, Ron Paul, Lou Jesslyn, Raddick, Thomas Drake, Giraldi, Kiriakou, Peter Van Buren and Scott Ritter as well.
And so you got to go right.
I got two minutes left with you here.
You got two minutes.
But after that, I have another interview coming up.
All right.
So what proportion of the U.S. Congress is in Israel right now, Phil?
I think it's about it works out to about 14 percent, something like that.
And just how bad anti-Semites are H.R. McMaster and Rex Tillerson?
Well, apparently they're they're they're really bad anti-Semites because they got rid of some of these these crazy people that General Flynn had brought in with him.
And the people that Flynn had brought in with him were rabid Iran phobes who were just waiting for the opportunity to start a war with Iran.
And McMaster apparently has gone head to head with them.
He's no friend of Iran by any means.
But his philosophy seems to be that, well, let's sit back and let the Iranians make mistakes and then we'll see where we go from there.
But these other guys wanted us to break the relationship with Iran, to break the treaty, the nuclear treaty, and basically do whatever steps were required to go to war.
So he got rid of them.
And because of that, some commentators from Israel and the United States are claiming that he's he's an anti-Semite and for this reason, and he's friendly to Iran and so on and so forth.
So and Tillerson is in the same situation.
He basically favors letting Iran make the mistakes rather than us making the mistakes for a change.
And his State Department put out a statement saying that there's such a thing as the Palestinians and that they're suffering under the Israeli occupation.
What's up with that?
Yeah, well, that's it.
They have the annual country's report on terrorism and it was it's usually a milquetoast type document.
But this time, even though it was very strong on Israel and Israel's security needs, it had two sentences at the end that said that the Palestinians did indeed have some grievances and the grievances were exacerbated by Israeli policies.
And of course, this said this impacts on the United States.
So, yeah, that's that's the obvious statement of an anti-Semite.
Yeah, what a what a horrible person to state an obvious truth there.
And, you know, it is interesting, right, because he's the CEO of Exxon and that ain't nobody to just push around.
It's fun to see a little bit of the clash of titans there in terms of the just as the criminology of it to see who's pushing around up there and all that, you know, interesting stuff.
Well, there's a lot of this out and depending on who survives for the next month of the Trump administration, I think, yeah, I think we'll have a better idea of where it's actually going to go.
Yes, certainly.
No predicting beyond one month from now.
Right.
Not even that would be on one week.
All right.
Listen, thanks very much, Phil.
I sure appreciate your time again.
OK, Scott, take care.
All right.
Bye bye.
All right.
You guys, that's Phil Giraldi.
Israel's chorus sings again at UNZ.com and hack or leak.
Who really stole the DNC files?
That's at the American Conservative Magazine.
And of course, he's at the Council for the National Interest, a council for the national interest dot org.
Check out the book, guys.
It's done.
Fool's errand.
Time to end the war in Afghanistan.
Available on Amazon dot com right now or just check out Fool's errand dot US.
