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Okay, guys, introducing Aaron Maté, he writes for the nation magazine and is a host at the Real News, the realnews.com, and he's got a couple of important ones here to discuss hyping the Mueller indictment.
And before that, what we've learned in year one of Russiagate.
Welcome to the show.
How you doing, Aaron?
Hey, Scott, how you doing?
I'm doing good.
Appreciate you joining us here today.
So, you know, I like to attack the right from the right and the left from the left if I can.
And, you know, I'm a libertarian.
I've always hated Trump.
Well, I don't know, hated, but certainly never liked him ever since the 1980s when I was a little kid.
And I remember being happy when his businesses went bankrupt in the early nineties and stuff like that.
So that's my overall take on the guy.
Never supported him in any way.
Certainly not for the presidency.
And I know you're, would you say a leftist or a progressive or something along those lines?
Definitely a leftist progressive.
Let me say, you know, when Trump used to host a WrestleMania, like he, I think he hosted WrestleMania four and five at the Trump Casino in Atlantic City.
I thought he was cool then when I was a kid.
OK, yeah.
So other than that, I wasn't a big fan.
Yeah.
So now that's important, right?
Because especially on issues like this, it's such a partisan thing that people always want to presume where you're coming from.
You trash Hillary Clinton on any issue and then people immediately start making up that you're a Bernie partisan or a Trump partisan or a Putin partisan or whoever, because that's the only explanation for you not liking who they like and this kind of thing.
And everybody's like that.
So it's worthwhile, I think, to disclaim a little bit.
I mean, for me, seriously, I say catapult him into the sun with no trial.
I don't care what happens to him at all.
So that's just my own personal thing.
He's a war criminal, just like the rest of them.
However, that doesn't make this Russia stuff true.
And it sure seems to me like it's not.
And you have this great article, this what we've learned in year one of Russiagate.
And you know what?
It reminds me of something my friend Tim said back before Iraq War two, that we hear all these accusations and yet it seems like 10 times zero is still zero.
You know, even if these things were true, they don't really amount to the narrative that we're hearing, that Saddam is this threat and he's going to use al-Qaeda to attack us if we don't attack him first and this kind of thing.
Even if the individual accusations were accurate, they still didn't really add up to that case at all.
And it seems here like, OK, so Sessions met with an ambassador here and Flynn, you know, stepped into a perjury trap on the telephone somewhere or something.
But even if all the accusations are true, well, we'll get to the WikiLeaks in a second.
It sure seems like most of this is actually even the meeting in Trump Tower would actually, if everything the accusers say is right, would tend to indicate that Putin did not control Trump.
And if he had to go through these channels to send these people to make these requests when they would already know what their marching orders would be at that point, this kind of thing.
Is that your take here?
Yeah, I mean, there's one glaring contradiction in, I mean, there's many glaring contradictions in the Russiagate narrative, but you've pointed to one of them, which is that.
So first of all, you know, a big precedent for this whole Russiagate investigation was in large part that the Steele dossier, this research document that was put together by former British spy Christopher Steele, paid for by the DNC and the Hillary Clinton campaign, we later found out.
And Steele, you know, we now know made warnings to the FBI and there's debate over whether Steele was like the defining spark for the investigation and, you know, or not.
Certainly he played some prominent role because he was talking to the FBI very early on.
And so his the basis for his memo for for his for his whole thing is that Putin and Trump that the Kremlin and Trump have a conspiracy or a a relationship at minimum that goes back many, many years.
And there is what Steele calls a conspiracy of cooperation in which the Kremlin has been assisting Trump for many years.
And in return, Trump has been supplying information on Russian oligarchs in the U.S.
And so they've been working together as part of this plot to to advance their mutual interests.
So Steele says that there's a that there's a conspiracy of coordination.
So you have this meeting, though, in June 2016, where a music publicist who knows Donald Trump Jr.writes them and says that I'm writing on behalf of a Russian lawyer who has compromising information on Hillary Clinton and her dealings with the Russian government that could help the Trump campaign.
And Donald Trump Jr.says, great, if this is what you say, then I love it.
And you also have a few weeks before that, you had this guy, George Papadopoulos, who's a low level Trump campaign aide, and he supposedly meets in London with a professor named Joseph Massoud, who promises him that the Russians have compromising information on Hillary Clinton.
So the question is, if Trump and the Kremlin had a conspiracy that goes back years, according to Steele, why then are the Russians now going through these two like weird characters, these low level people like the music publicist Rob Goldstone or this supposed professor Joseph Massoud through another low level Trump aide, George Papadopoulos, to offer them information?
I mean, if they already had a conspiracy, then it should have just been going right from Trump Tower to the Kremlin, not through these like low level operatives who appear out of nowhere.
Well, and you know, the thing, too, about Michael Flynn letting the Russians know that, hey, don't react, don't overreact to Barack Obama's new sanctions because he's a lame duck.
We're going to be in there in six weeks and we want to have detente here again.
And so and then the Russians, of course, didn't react.
They invited all the American diplomats to Christmas parties and this kind of thing.
And and yet again, that sure sounds like him letting them know something rather than receiving his marching orders, which that was part of the plot, part of the theory.
They made it sound like, you know, Flynn himself was compromised by the Russians that he had interactions with when it's clear that just because he was the former head of the DIA and the former head of intelligence for JSOC, that he had these long term relationships with these Russian generals because they do all these liaison type things over the years.
And so he knew who to talk to and that kind of deal.
That was why he was the go to guy for Trump to make the call.
But it was the most obvious thing in the world.
If you go back actually to the to December of 2016, that, you know, this is pretty much all above board.
Everybody could tell what was going on there, if not necessarily Flynn's phone call, that the Trump administration, the incoming administration was signaling to the Russians that we still want to be friends.
So don't overreact to what Obama's doing here.
It was as overt as it was covert.
And again, it shows the opposite case from them receiving marching orders from the Kremlin.
Yeah, there's a few things there.
First of all, I mean, it's clear that Flynn and Trump sort of did interfere with the outgoing administration's policy.
I mean, that's true.
And we can discuss whether or not that's that's legitimate or not.
I mean, we should note, though, that it happens all the time.
I mean, plenty of incoming administrations have have messed with the incumbent's policy.
You know, there's there's Reagan apparently delaying the release of the American hostages to to boost his own chances at winning.
Sure.
And look, he had campaigned on this.
So, you know, to say when Nixon campaigned on his secret plan to end the war, that wasn't I mean, that that part wasn't interfering in LBJ's policy, the Anna Chenault thing to the side.
But just having a different foreign policy is not intervening.
He'd won on shouldn't we get along with Russia?
So, yeah.
And and the fact is, the sanctions that Flynn was telling Kislyak, the Russian ambassador, not to respond to were directly about the campaign, because in imposing those sanctions, Obama was endorsing the view that it was the Russians who had interfered interfered massively, which was being used by Democrats already to try to taint Trump's victory.
So if you're the Trump team, you know, it's it's understandable to me why you would say, you know what, we don't even accept this whole charge against you anyway, because we're you know, because we because it taints our it taints our victory.
And we think there's possibly that political motive behind this.
I mean, I could see them thinking that.
And so that's why it's all the more reason for you not to react strongly, because as was our policy anyway during the campaign, we're going to have improved relations.
So don't.
And he didn't even say, you know, don't do anything.
He just said, don't escalate the situation.
And Russia said, yeah, sure.
Why not?
Now, of course, after Trump gets into office, relations have plunged anyway.
And Trump later on, after Russia ordered the cutting of diplomatic, the U.S. diplomatic personnel in the U.S. in response to initial U.S. actions against it, then then Trump also closed down consulates in in the U.S. as well or consular offices.
So, I mean, it's not as if even Trump has been doing by any stretch Putin's bidding.
And also and by the way, on the issue of Flynn, there's like it's important to remember that that was not the only Trump Obama administration policy that Flynn tried to undermine during the transition.
There also was the fact that at the request of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Flynn and the rest of the Trump team launched a major lobbying effort trying to stop the Obama administration from letting pass a U.N. Security Council resolution criticizing Israeli settlements.
And Flynn called the Russian ambassador and called other other ambassadors trying to get them to vote no.
But everybody, including the Russian ambassador, rejected that effort, which has two things.
One, if Trump and Russia were so in league, then the very first thing they tried to they communicated on that we know about after the election was about this Israel vote.
And Russia said no.
And actually they supported the resolution, which was, again, criticizing Israeli settlements.
And we don't hear anybody upset over the fact that Israel with Trump team collusion tried to undermine.
The existing Obama administration policy at the at the highest international body, the U.N. Security Council, which shows the double standard at play here.
Right.
When it comes to don't worry about the sanctions, it's all of a sudden the Logan Act, the Logan Act, you know, which has never been prosecuted and again, certainly cannot apply, you know, even from the very beginning with the Flynn phone calls here.
And, you know, on the Israel thing, I certainly have a bone to pick on the policy.
But whether they were in their rights to try to do that or not, I don't know.
We're talking about the newly elected incoming government.
This is not private citizen Mike Flynn.
This was the designated incoming national security adviser and, you know, designated agent of the incoming duly elected president.
And so, you know, exactly where the line is, I'm not sure.
I certainly supported Obama's abstention.
He should have voted for that resolution as far as that goes.
But and then, yeah, again, the more important point being, where's the collusion with Russia on that?
When he asked the Russians, hey, we need you to do this for us.
And they said no.
Exactly.
Yeah.
And where's the collusion is a is a question worth asking for everything, because if you actually look at Trump's policies on Russia so far, it's been even more hawkish on Russia than Obama was.
I mean, Trump is sending weapons to Ukraine to fight the separatists there who are backed by Russia.
That's a move that Obama resisted because he didn't want to further escalate that situation after arguably already causing it when he backed the initial coup in Ukraine in February 2014.
Trump has ramped up the NATO military presence on Russia's border, prompting Russia to position nuclear capable missiles on its side of the border in response.
Trump has admitted and has pushed for the membership of a new NATO member, Montenegro, over Russian objections.
Trump is staying in Syria to curb the presence of Iran, which I don't think Russia particularly likes, given Russia's heavy investment in Syria and it's the position it's taken in supporting Assad.
So there's all these areas where in the real world Trump is actually escalating tensions with Russia.
Oh, and one more thing, if you read his new his recent nuclear posture review, it's incredibly scary.
And he cites Russia.
The review cites Russia as the main threat to counter.
And Trump is calling for a developing whole a whole new range of so-called low yield weapons directly in response to Russia to send the message to them that the U.S. will use them, all of which gets ignored.
Because our media and political culture, for the most part, is more concerned about this proving this Trump-Russia conspiracy than it is with looking at Trump-Russia reality, what is actually going on between these two countries, which is extremely dangerous.
Right.
And when, of course, politically speaking, Mr.
Art of the Deal is completely blowing this opportunity to outflank all of his accusers.
The most obvious thing, and I'm sorry because I know I'm repeating myself, audience, but the most obvious thing in the world is to invite Putin to D.C. for a week.
Let him sleep in the Lincoln bedroom.
Take him to the opera and whatever the hell culture type people do and sign a massive new arms reduction treaty and tell the left, suck on that.
How do you like that?
Or not the left, the liberals and the left will cheer for it because the left has principles and not all of which I agree with.
But they're good on thermonuclear weapons.
And in fact, the entire American population would be for that.
You call me a Russian agent, huh?
I'll tell you what we're going to do.
We're going to reduce the size of our Navy.
Right.
That's what to do.
But he doesn't have the courage or the insight, I guess, to even do it for his own sake.
Yeah, he has no interest in that.
I don't think I think that's clear.
I think it's clear that all this anti-interventionist talk that he pushed during the campaign was a con.
And certainly whatever his intentions are, he's totally boxed in right now by the culture in Washington, which makes any kind of cooperation with Russia suspicious, even though I mean, you know, I'm a leftist.
I don't like Putin very much.
I certainly don't like Trump, but I think cooperation between the world's two biggest nuclear powers would be a good thing.
We should be reducing these horrible arsenals.
But instead, any chance of that and whatever chances there were of that before have been pretty much thrown out the window because instead it's now politically expedient for both Democrats and Republicans to be confrontational towards Russia and hawkish.
And the consequences are for the rest for the rest of us to suffer.
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Well, I think it's a bad calculation on Trump's part.
I mean, obviously the entire rest of the establishment don't want to hear it.
But just for his own selfish political interest, he would be better to go ahead and take this bull by the horns and say, you know what?
I'm not friends with Vladimir Putin, but I want to be.
And go ahead and go for it.
You know what?
I bet you Putin probably wants us to pull our troops out of the Baltics.
And you know what?
That's what I want to do, because that's what stupid dopey loser Obama thought was a good idea.
And I don't.
And then pull them out of the Baltics.
And then seriously, what are the Democrats going to say?
Let them scream about it.
The American people would support that.
He just doesn't have the, you know, D.C. certainly wouldn't support it.
But the American people don't care about all this Russia BS anyway, because after all, he's a skyscraper tycoon from Manhattan.
And to say he's controlled by the Kremlin.
I mean, obviously, you know, Soviet communism has been gone for 25 years.
But still, it it's just so counterintuitive to think that a right wing, you know, capitalist tycoon would be a sellout to a foreign power like this.
If you're a hardcore Hillary partisan, this all makes sense.
But everybody else is just scratching their head saying that doesn't really seem right.
Especially somebody like Donald Trump, who only cares about himself.
What does he care about Russia?
He cares about himself far more than America or any other thing.
So how's he going to put the interests of a foreign power first?
That just doesn't make sense on the face of it.
It's a conspiracy theory.
And so far, the only sort of claims adduced for it are this Steele dossier, which is such a joke on the face of it, this claim about a pee tape and all this other stuff that gets wrong.
What I think the Steele dossier is, is basically whoever steals, quote unquote, sources were basically everything that the document that every claim that the that the dossier makes, it has a predicate that has already come out in some public form.
So basically, for example, after we learned in July 2016 that there was like a small change to the Republican platform, then Steele wrote a memo saying that the quid pro quo in the campaign for the Russians to release the WikiLeaks emails is that Trump changed the platform at the GOP convention.
And that was after it came out.
So basically everything that Steele writes about basically appears in the media first.
And then whoever what were his source was gave him some like twisted explanation for why that proves some kind of Russia conspiracy.
It's like it's pretty transparent.
Yeah.
And the you know, and then there's the fact that they claim that Russians have laundered money through Trump properties.
All right, great.
I mean, like you think that you think because like some Russian people park their money into Trump real estate, that means he's going to take part in an international conspiracy to like be a Kremlin, Manchurian candidate.
Like it just even if it's all true, it just makes it makes absolutely no sense.
And what is it?
Yeah, I mean, I know I know you're very familiar with this on Twitter.
The liberal argument is not indictments.
Look at all these indictments.
Explain all that away if you can.
Well, it's it's pretty easy.
None of the indictments have anything to do with the campaign except for, you know, last month we had this indictment of these 13 agencies of a Russian clickbait troll farm operation, the Internet Research Agency.
But the details on that have been known for years.
And in fact, if you read the indictment, a lot of it is just cribbed from an article that appeared in the Russian media last year, an outlet called RBC.
And what it is, it's like a clickbait operation where they they run, you know, they create fake identities and they try to try to generate followers.
And they you know, part of the way they do that is to, you know, like try to target political audiences with, you know, weird divisive messages like the ones that the troll farm was pushed.
And then with their followers, they use those accounts to then sell space to vendors who get who pay them a fee for retweets for retweets and ads, you know.
So it's like it's at least partially a commercial operation.
And yeah, maybe the people who ran it preferred Trump.
I mean, they seem to be more anti Hillary than they were pro Trump.
But regardless, the idea that that had some kind of impact on the U.S. electorate, if you look at these ads, they're a joke.
They're in bad English.
They're crude.
There was like hardly anybody saw them.
And there's been this huge effort to portray this as sowing division in the U.S. society and inflaming tensions.
But I don't think anybody beyond, you know, Beltway media and political class takes that seriously.
I just it's an it's an insult to everybody's intelligence.
Yeah, exactly.
I mean, seriously, even, you know, they tried at first with just the fake news overall, which then even the New York Times, etc.traced to people had no conceivable connection to Russian intelligence in any way who were just making money.
But they had stuff like the pope endorses Donald Trump.
Well, look, only someone who's already a Trump voter could possibly believe that.
Anyone could tell that that's a hoax or an Onion article or something along those lines, unless someone who is clearly already going to vote for Trump anyway.
You know, come on.
Like that.
That was the that was the swing vote.
That was the margin of error.
You know, Hillary Clinton said, how come I'm not ahead by 50 points?
I have no idea.
Well, you know, I guess it was just because of some Facebook ads.
And it seems like do you read this the same way that they're just really moving the goal posts when they go, well, you know, they were just trying to sow chaos in our democracy and destabilize us in this kind of thing is because they kind of had to change the name of it from just putting Trump in there to, well, you know, disrupting us and making race an issue in America when everyone knows that that was totally solved before.
The goalposts have changed so many times.
First, it was, you know, Trump and Russia working together in this conspiracy, and then, you know, that like that's kind of fizzled out, although some people are still keeping hope alive on that one.
And then it became Russia tried to intervene to elect Donald Trump.
And then, well, then the ads are not even mostly about Donald Trump or about Hillary Clinton.
But they're about like exactly like they're about like Black Lives Matter or they're about they're trying to like appeal to Islamophobes or, you know, like whatever it is.
So then it's yes.
Now, Russia is trying to inflame society.
And it's it's like as if the U.S. does not inflamed on its own and as if these crude, dumb little social media ads could really do anything.
I mean, like the most concrete case of anything happening is that, yes, there was a couple of rallies in Florida.
But if you look at the videos for them, there's like eight people there that like apparently was organized by by the Russian troll farm.
So it's like it like the contempt, the contempt that this whole campaign shows for average people is really striking.
It shows that a that we can believe that all the stuff really is is serious and that we can believe it and that Russian clickbait ads could have the could have the the power and the sway to convince voters to vote either way in an election or to like or to like, you know, take the streets for a political cause.
It's just like it requires a really contemptuous view of average people.
And no surprising that it's being pushed by elites in Washington and the U.S. political and media culture.
Yeah, you know, it really is sort of the mirror image of the birther movement.
And so then in terms of just how disconnected from reality is and it is and the level of contempt showed by shown by the leaders for their followers, this time on the left side.
But and then, of course, the ultimate irony there is Trump was the number one and most important promoter of all that birtherism in basically saying that Obama had usurped John McCain's rightful throne when, in fact, even if he had been born in Kenya, which was pretty apparently ridiculous from the beginning, even to the Fox News guys and all that, that he still had a white mom from Kansas who was a natural born American citizen.
And so he was a U.S. person anyway.
It didn't matter.
He he was within the law to be a presidential candidate and winner anyway.
So the whole thing was moot.
And so if anybody deserves this, it's Donald Trump, that scumbag.
You know, Barack Obama is a horrible president.
I don't even think we should have presidents.
But he won that election fair and square.
And to say like, oh, this guy's way too black to be the president of America.
He must be a foreign, you know, conspiracy usurper, this kind of thing.
If anybody deserves for this to happen to them, it's Donald Trump.
And yet it's not the expense of poor Kenya, which really didn't even have to take very hard of a lump.
It's at the expense of the sort of Damocles hanging over the head of all of humanity here in terms of America's relationship with Russia, which is being worsened to nth degrees in all kinds of directions that we can't even really anticipate all the consequences yet of how bad this is going to be.
I mean, I think I'm sure there must have been times where you see these kooks on Twitter talking about this, these very centrist establishment Democrat types where they are so up to their eyeballs in this.
They're never coming back down again.
I mean, they're going to hate Russia forever and ever for this.
Yeah.
And as they do that, meanwhile, what about the voters who actually decisively put Trump in the White House?
Who made the difference?
Like, are any I mean, while it's, you know, it's true, like, I think it's fair to say that misogyny and maybe in racism certainly motivated some voters who who voted for Trump.
The fact is, there are a lot of Obama voters who switch sides and went over to Trump because he was he was claiming to be a champion of the working class.
I mean, it may have been a total con and a fraud, but that's what he was doing.
Whereas Hillary Clinton was like deliberately avoiding Michigan because her people found that the more attention that they placed on Hillary there, the worse that they would do are doing in the polls.
So their strategy was basically to, like, minimize her presence there because they didn't want to, like, galvanize like opponents of hers to come out and vote.
So which is a weird way to campaign by basically avoiding the constituents.
And so instead of trying to reach those people with a new message saying, oh, you know, listen, we've heard your concerns.
We're going to address the economic disparities in this country and support infrastructure programs and get people jobs again.
The Democratic strategy has been to blame Russia for their loss.
And what like what do they expect voters in these states to do?
Like, is anybody in Michigan or Wisconsin or Pennsylvania who voted for Trump or simply just didn't vote?
Are any of them going to be motivated to come to the polls by this like ridiculous conspiracy theory that the reason why Hillary Clinton lost is because it's not because of any of their of these voters concerns, but because of a foreign power?
It's just it's it's self-defeating and it's it's just embarrassing.
Yeah.
Well, and especially when, you know, I'm sure you probably saw this piece by Matt Taibbi in Rolling Stone here, and he's been pretty good on this issue and and sort of the extraneous issues such as the marginalizing of all dissent.
And I saw I forgot who put it very well yesterday about conflating ridiculous conspiracy kookery with things like, yeah, the CIA sells dope and stuff where, you know, and just good revisionist takes on what's really going on around here and blurring all these lines together.
And then you have Facebook and Twitter, which I guess especially Facebook, which helps to determine so much of how people consume news and what news they consume that where they're deliberately turning down and Google to turning down search results for people who, you know, I guess ultimately we're all being smeared as Sandy Hook deniers or or, you know, outright pro-Russian trolls or this or that.
But you're talking about ConsortiumNews.com and Antiwar.com and a lot of good folks in between.
And but meanwhile, like you're saying, too, the consequences for these guys, because this is a real head in the sand moment for them when you have, you know, basically Brexit breaking out all over the world and, you know, right wing reaction to the severe mismanagement of America's neoliberal empire in the 21st century.
And they keep you know, they tried outright to foist a choice between a Clinton and a Bush on the American people.
And Trump was smart enough to exploit that and say, you know, this is not what the people want.
I bet you now's my chance that I could actually get in there if they're going to be so blind as to try to foist this on the American people.
And it worked for him.
And now they're saying, oh, yeah, it's all a Russian plot.
And they're ignoring the fact that, you know, there are a lot of people who preferred Ron Paul and who preferred Bernie Sanders and who preferred, you know, at this point would probably vote for Ralph Nader or God knows who, anybody but those that they want to foist on us.
And yet I already know, I'm sure you already know this, that the Democratic Party leadership, they're like, yeah, Kamala Harris, yeah, we'll have her and Joe Biden and Elizabeth Warren run and they're going to lose.
I mean, they could get Donald Trump reelected at this point, I think, with those takes.
You know, I, Elizabeth Warren, I have some fondness for when it comes to some of her domestic policies.
I know on foreign policy, she's not that much different than anybody else.
So, you know, I don't I don't lump them.
I don't think the entire Democratic pool is totally monolithic.
I do see some difference between her and some of the others.
But yeah, they're obviously there's a huge effort right now amongst the Democratic leadership to marginalize progressive candidates.
We're seeing that at the local level right now.
I mean, like where you are in Texas, I believe that's where you are.
Right, Scott?
Yeah.
Yeah.
So, you know, Laura Moser just ran in Houston.
She's a progressive candidate for a House primary seat.
And the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee came out not just not endorsing her, but actually telling voters not to vote for her because they're, you know, because they're saying that they don't think that she can win.
But really, it's there's a real aversion amongst leadership to anybody progressive, which was laid bare by the Bernie Sanders campaign.
So it's a really dark time for the Democratic Party.
And this Russiagate effort is, for them, a large part to entrench their position to instead of learning the lessons that one should take from losing to Donald J.
Trump, the one of the worst candidates in American history, they're doubling down on their privilege and their stature by blaming anybody but themselves.
And it's sad to see.
Yeah, well, and, you know, back to the real point I should have made there with that whole giant rant was about alternative media really getting the brunt of this and the corporations like Google and Facebook going along with the narrative that, yeah, well, I guess the New York Times has got to decide what's fake news and what's not.
Yeah.
And and really like they're just deferring to them.
And I think that was the statement by the guy from Facebook was that, yeah, we really are going to.
And he cited them by name in the Wall Street Journal and said, these are the people who we know know what they're doing and are professionals.
And what your uncle Bob sends you is no more, no longer to be considered legitimate in their algorithms here.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Or meanwhile, and, you know, we often forget that in terms of like what what media played a vital role in Trump's victory, it was the corporate media.
I mean, the endless coverage that it gave to Donald Trump, you know, billions of dollars worth of free advertising.
And we know actually from the Podesta emails, right, that this was at the Clinton campaign's request.
The Pied Piper strategy.
Yes, they the Clinton campaign wanted to promote Donald Trump because they were so excited to run against him.
They thought it'd be a they thought it'd be a cakewalk.
There's even reports that Bill Clinton encouraged Trump to run to run in the beginning because in part because they thought he'd be such a easy nominee for Hillary to take on.
So the but all this gets ignored and instead we're talking about a Russian clickbait troll farm that can barely read English.
Yeah.
And by the way, I'm sorry, you know, this is really my fault here.
I had it in my notes and we just skipped right over it.
But and I know I catch over time.
So if you need to go, go.
But I wanted to ask you about the actual WikiLeaks themselves and the DNC hack and then the Podesta thing, because I guess I have seen people say that, well, the DNC thing is is harder to prove.
But the Podesta phishing, that was definitely the Russians.
Do you have an opinion about that?
I don't.
You know, I really don't.
I mean, I have no doubt the Russian government could be capable of something like that.
But I just haven't seen any convincing evidence for it.
And the instead of just taking the intelligence community's word, which I don't understand how anybody can argue that we should based on, you know, just recent history, namely the Iraq war, but other cases as well, that we should just wait for evidence.
I don't rule out that the Russians could have done it, that they have the capability to carry out the hack and even the motive if they wanted to promote Trump and discredit Hillary Clinton.
It's certainly possible to me, but I haven't seen the convincing evidence for it.
And I just think we should wait to see that the U.S. intelligence community says it's Kim or analysts in the U.S. intelligence community say they're convinced it was the Russian government.
So let's wait for the evidence for that.
You know, people like Ray McGovern and Bill and Bill Binney argue that it was not even a hack, but it was a leak.
I don't know enough about computers to say whether their take is is credible, but certainly Bill Binney is someone who is an expert on this stuff.
And he was at the NSA for years.
And Bill Binney also says that if any agency could determine who actually carried out this this operation, it would be it would be the NSA, because they can monitor all Internet traffic in and out of the country.
So they should be able to present us with evidence of it, that it comes from the Russian government.
But so far they haven't.
Right.
I mean, he said that on this show, that it's even a matter of proving the negative, basically, that if they can't prove it, that means it didn't happen because if it did, they could prove it.
And then it was on that specific point where the NSA said, well, we only have moderate confidence, but I guess we'll defer to our friends at CIA and FBI on this question when that was the one that was right in their ballpark.
That's a very good point that it was the unlike the analysts from the CIA and the FBI, NSA said they had moderate confidence in the conclusions that Russia was trying to interfere, which is very significant because they are indeed the best placed agency to determine that.
All right.
Well, listen, man, I really appreciate the work that you're doing here.
And just keeping your eye on the ball and on the truth and and on the most important issue of all, America's relationship with Russia, no matter what you think of Russia, the country or Russia, the nation state or Vladimir Putin, the evil villain dictator over there or whatever it is.
Hey, we've got to get along with the Russians.
It's simple as that.
It's the only thing that really matters in the whole world compared to everything else.
I mean, even if we had a nuclear war with China, if Russia stayed out of it, humanity would survive.
It'd be horrible.
But a nuclear war with Russia would be, well, be the end of human civilization in a lot of ways for a very long time.
So I think it's got to get that, you know, seven thousand H-bombs on each side.
That's a hell of a lot of them.
I hope they do.
And let me say, I mean, you know, Putin is such a a major figure in American politics right now.
He's discussed constantly as this like mastermind of evil.
You know, people ask me what I think about Putin.
I kind of don't really care, to be honest with you.
I mean, I you know, it's like I wouldn't vote for him if I lived in Russia because I don't favor his policies.
But that's for Russians to decide.
It's not up for us here to decide what what like whether Putin should be in power or not.
It's for Russians to decide.
And as it is right now, I mean, a lot of Russians do support Putin and we should respect their sovereignty just as, you know, Russia should respect everyone else's sovereignty, too.
So we should apply to everyone the same standards that we that we demand for ourselves.
Yeah.
All right.
Listen, I'll let you go now.
But thank you very much again, Aaron.
Appreciate it.
Thanks, Scott.
All right, you guys.
That is Aaron Maté.
He hosts The Real News.
Oh, hey, are you still there?
Yeah.
Hey, is Paul Jay still part of that?
Paul Jay is the is the CEO and senior editor here.
Yes, he's.
I'm not a regular watcher, but I do sometimes.
And I'm a fan of his.
He does a great show.
He does a great show called Reality Asserts Itself, where he sits down with a guest nearly every week.
And it's really good.
I recommend it.
OK, great.
All right.
Thanks again.
Thanks, Scott.
All right, you guys.
Aaron Maté, The Real News and The Nation.
What we've learned in year one of Russiagate, it's a really good one.
And hyping the Mueller indictment after that.
And so, you know me.
I'm at ScottHorton.org, YouTube.com slash Scott Horton Show for those interview archives as well.iTunes, Stitcher and all of that.
FoolsAaron.us for my book, Fool's Errand, Time to End the War in Afghanistan.
I'm the editor of Antiwar.com, the opinion editor, and oh, and I'm the managing director of the Libertarian Institute.
Me and Jerry LaBelle and Sheldon Richmond over there at the Libertarian Institute, LibertarianInstitute.org.
Follow me on Twitter at Scott Horton Show.
Thanks.
