Alright y'all, here's how to support the show.
First of all, sign up for the RSS feeds so that you don't miss a show.
Libertarianinstitute.org or scotthorton.org for those.
Also, subscribe on YouTube, youtube.com slash scotthortonshow.
And sign up at Patreon.
Anybody who donates a dollar or more per interview at patreon.com, you get two free audiobooks, and that can be including my book, narrated by me, Fool's Errand, Time to End the War in Afghanistan.
So help support that way.
Sign up at patreon.com slash scotthortonshow.
And send in 50 bucks at scotthorton.org slash donate.
You get a signed copy of the book Fool's Errand, of the paperback there.
And anybody who donates $100, it used to be it takes two.
Now, for any donation of $100, you get a lifetime subscription to Listen and Think Libertarian audiobooks.
And there's already a whole bunch of them, and there will be more.
A lifetime subscription for any $100 donation to The Scott Horton Show from Listen and Think Audio.
Or, you can get a silver QR code commodity disc, which is a really cool currency.
A silver one ounce disc with a QR code tells you the instant spot price on there.
Just go to scotthorton.org slash donate.
There's also PayPal for single donations, or you can sign up to do monthly donations on PayPal, as well.
Take all different kinds of digital currencies, especially Zencash.
Zensystem.io for Zencash.
And of course, all the different kinds of bitcoins, etc.
Like that.
So check all that out at scotthorton.org slash donate.
And hey, by the way, if you like this show, review it for me on iTunes, Stitcher, etc.
If you like the audiobook, it's now available on iTunes, as well as audible.com.
So leave a good review on there if you like that, and help get that out.
Thanks.
Sorry, I'm late.
I had to stop by the wax museum again and get the finger that 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, he died.
We ain't killing they army, but we killing them.
We be on CNN like they 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, it's the great Ray McGovern on the line with us here.
As you know, former CIA analyst for 27 years, co-founder of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity, and a great peace activist this whole century long.
And we republished pretty much everything he writes, I think, at antiwar.com.
And that's whether it's VIPS memos or Ray's own articles.
And we have here, did Senator Warner and Comey collude on Russiagate, which is an important question, but I don't care about that because instead, what we really have here to talk about, most important first, at least, is Ray's letter to the editor in the Washington Post, published today.
Trimming military exercises in Europe would get support.
Ah, support from who?
The enemy, Vladimir Putin, I bet.
You traitor.
Welcome back to the show, former chief of the CIA Soviet division.
Well, that's what the Washington Post said today.
It really is bizarre, Scott.
The big lead editorial, this is by the editorial board, of course, is titled Kowtowing to the Kremlin.
Okay.
This all has to do with how President Trump is about to sell out to the Russians.
And it's actually, if it weren't so serious here, if I didn't recall the heated debates about Joe McCarthy in my living room when I was a little kid, I would be able to laugh this off.
But let me just give you a little preview by telling you how this editorial article ends.
Okay.
It says Trump is unwilling or unable to stand up to Russian misbehavior.
We're on dangerous ground.
Either Mr. Trump has lost touch with essential U.S. interests, or there is some other explanation for his kowtowing that is yet unknown.
Oh, for God's sake, these people, huh?
Isn't that something?
Yeah.
So, you know, he, you know what?
It's funny because the level of panic isn't quite the same, but the level of absolute straight faced BS from these people really is at 2002 levels right now.
This is really getting out of control here.
Yeah, 2002 before the...
Yeah, in the run-up to the Iraq war, and they're trying to keep you panicky after 9-11 era.
Well, you see, all hell is breaking loose from their point of view, because Russiagate, upon which they pin so many hopes, has turned into FBIgate.
And if people are unwilling to see that, well, just keep reading the New York Times, and don't read anything else.
It's real easy.
Yeah, it'll still come through, even though it's counter their narrative.
All right, but no, so we'll get to that, but let's stick with this for a minute here.
Trump is going to meet with Putin, and that's the kind of thing where all other things being equal, everyone on earth, like all seven and a half billion of us, ought to be in favor of that.
America and Russia and their executive leaders meeting and shaking hands and getting along.
Isn't that what we all want?
You're telling me, Ray, that somebody wants something else than that?
Well, Scott, you're real good with your census figures.
It is seven and a half billion, but it's minus the military, industrial, congressional, intelligence, media complex.
Now, Ike, of course, talked about the military industrial complex.
He wanted to talk about the military industrial congressional complex, and he was dissuaded.
That would be too much, Ike.
He knew then that the defense contractors were making lots of money and putting a lot of money in the pockets of congressmen and senators, and this was really, really a foul way to run an organization.
Now we have the intelligence, security, or what we call a deep state actors, and most of all, and most important of all, in my view, is the fact that, well, we no longer have, in any real sense, a free media.
That's something I've observed since my time here in Washington began in 55 years ago, believe it or not.
This is big.
So in this case, the media is completely in line with the deep state, as they were before the attack on Iraq, and this time, there are a few people in congress who are taking their constitutional responsibility seriously.
Now, I find this odd that I would be praising them, but, you know, I took just one oath, Scott, and that was to support and defend the constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic.
That's the only thing that matters.
I'm independent.
I grew up as a Democrat because my father loved FDR.
He bailed us out then.
Now it's very different.
I don't love the Democrats one wish, okay?
So what we're talking about here is a fellow like Devin Nunes.
Now, who is he?
He's a, I don't want to say simple, he's clever as can be, but he's a farmer from the Central Valley around Visalia in Central Valley, California.
Now, why do I mention him?
Well, because he is acting in a very extraordinary manner.
For the first time in decades, he is acting as chief of the intelligence committee in the House, as though he should really oversee what's going on and not just overlook it.
That's different.
His counterpart in the Senate is just the opposite.
He, Senator Burr from North Carolina, and his co-chair, Mark Warner, who I regret to say is one of my senators here in Virginia, are giving the deep state a free pass.
Why?
Because they are totally complicit in approving, you know, torture and approving, wiretapping, approving all the abuses that have already happened.
Devin Nunes is not susceptible to blackmail on that score.
Anyhow, Nunes is saying, look, if you don't give us the documents that we've requested on FBIgate, we're going to subpoena them.
And if you don't comply then, well, we have measures, legal measures under the Constitution to either get them or to impeach you, Rod Rosenstein.
And Nunes is not alone.
He's got two other committee chairs equally intent on exercising their constitutional responsibilities.
So what happens here?
Well, unlike Watergate, the media is no ally to the Constitution.
Unlike Watergate, the media is in bed with this Russia hacking or Russian interference story.
And it's going to be very, very difficult for Nunes or anybody else to prevail.
The more so, because we're talking about top people here.
We're talking about Comey.
We're talking about Loretta Lynch, the attorney general.
We're talking about the top layer of the Department of Justice, which approved these warrants, these FISA warrants, with no due cause, with no defensible cause.
We're talking about Comey and McCabe, his deputy.
And you know, Bob Mueller.
People say, oh, Mueller is universally respected.
Well, people who know about Mueller, like Colleen Rowley, who worked for Mueller and then for Comey for several decades, knows Mueller.
And she's pointed out that far from being the universally respected person, there is lots in his record that makes him a very, very distrusted person from her point of view.
You can read what she says.
So this is just preface to saying, this is why it's so important.
The New York Times is way out on a limb, and so are most of the muckety-mucks, as my Irish grandmother used to call them, the head types of the DOJ, of justice, and the FBI.
And also the CIA.
John Brennan is in this up to his neck.
And NSA, that general, that admiral always goes along.
They're all in it.
And this is a big, this is a formidable foe to be fighting.
The jury is out.
We'll see if the Constitution and the Senate and House overseers prevail, or whether, as usual, the deep state prevails.
I got to tell you, that's really interesting what you say there about the etymology of muckety-muck.
That's an Irish phrase, huh?
Well, that's what my grandmother used to do.
She worked for the muckety-muck.
She was a seamstress and worked for a very, very wealthy lady and traveled the known world at the time.
South Queen Victoria, and so forth.
So yeah, muckety-mucks.
Don't know if it's Irish or not, but we know what it means, right?
She also had this phrase, Raymond, you're going out to work on the golf course now for Howard Dean and Jack Chrysler and Bill Ford.
You have to know what the upper crust is.
I know, Grandma, I know.
She said, I don't know.
Sit you down and I'll tell you.
She says, the upper crust is a bunch of crumbs held together by a lot of dough.
Now, I took that on, all right?
That really helped.
That really helped.
And it's helped today because the muckety-mucks running around here are not above us holding them accountable.
It's an uphill struggle.
They're the very worst of us.
Hey, listen, so for people who don't know you, you sound like a Trump partisan.
Boy, have you made up your mind about how innocent your great overlord Trump is.
So I don't mean to put you on the spot like, oh, you have to disclaim, but I really don't want people to misunderstand.
And I know your politics are very different than Donald Trump's.
So you can talk about that for a second, at least, if you want.
Yeah, that's just it.
It's sort of a disconnect, Scott.
And I'm glad you raised it.
I worked at a place, the analysis division of CIA, from John Kennedy to the first George Bush.
Now, Truman set us up, and we were his primary purpose in setting up the CIA, not overthrowing governments or torturing people.
He set us up so we had one place to go for a straight answer.
He said, look, the Pentagon's telling us the Russians are 15 feet tall.
I know they're not that tall.
The State Department's always, it's forever defending its policies.
I know some of them are in defense.
Look, I want to know what you guys really think.
And that's the way, that's what attracted me down under John Kennedy, that we could tell the truth.
Now, Wengel, you're in Washington, right?
You say, I work for a place that had no political agenda.
Again, I'm talking about the analysis directorate, okay?
People's eyes glaze over, and they say, right.
It's no such thing here in this town without a political agenda.
Well, I guess I just have to ask your listeners to believe me, we're able to tell it like it was, or like it is.
Most of the time, there were exceptions, and there were bad exceptions, but that's what kept us going.
So we're in a sort of a kind of gray area now when we say, look, that's what we do.
It doesn't matter whether Republican or Democrat or Independent.
I voted for Jill Stein.
I was very happy to vote for Jill Stein, make no secret of that.
Now, the sinister thing is when people like James Risen, whom I used to really respect, found out that Bill Binney, my colleague, who works on the technical end of things like the hacking, the Russian hacking, so-called, into the DNC, when Risen found out that Binney voted for Trump, he put it in his article.
Now, Risen knows enough about intelligence officers to know that doesn't matter.
That was dirty pool, okay?
Binney was saying things like I do, that to outward appearances seem to seem to be the Trump line.
Well, we don't give the rat's patootie if it's the Trump line.
It's the truth.
This Russiagate is a hoax, and the fact that Trump says it's a hoax, that's coincidental.
We happen to agree with him on that, and maybe one or two other things, like forming a decent relationship with Russia.
Now, maybe we'll get, well, so yeah, so just to finish this up, when we issued our findings, based on forensic research, Bill Binney used to be technical director of NSA.
Ed Loomis, another one of our veteran intelligence professionals for sanity, also a previous, a former technical director at NSA.
They poured over the metadata that we had on one of these so-called Russian hacks.
We found out it couldn't have been a hack.
It had to be a leak.
It had to be a copy onto a thumb drive.
That's a long story, but we found that out.
We published it, and we ran into all kinds of trouble because people thought we were aligning ourselves with Trump.
And no, there are plenty of reasons I think Trump is the worst president we ever had.
I'm on record as having said that.
But if we're going to get rid of him, how many more reasons do we need for God's sake?
We don't need to get rid of him on, pardon the pun, trumped up charges.
Okay.
So, Ray, what is up for discussion at the talks between Trump and Putin?
Which, you know, my thing is, and I said this then, this should have been the very first thing he did as soon as he took the oath of office, his aides arrange a meeting with Putin and just shove it right down the Democrats' throats.
Take this whole fake scandal by the horns from the very get-go and just, you know, present them with a fait accompli, a great deal to reduce some nuclear weapons.
We got 7,000-something each.
You could cut that in half and still have far more than enough to kill us all.
So he could have done something like that and just, art of the deal, man.
He would already won this whole thing.
Mueller be damned.
But anyway, and, you know, I know my goals are not necessarily the same as Donald Trump's, but what do you think is really going to be at issue at these talks and what can be done about any of the major issues outstanding here?
Well, Scott, let me just put in a plug for a book written by a good friend of mine named Daniel Ellsberg.
It's called The Doomsday Machine, and it is truly frightening.
It is a miracle that we have escaped so far blowing the planet up.
One has to read what Ellsberg writes in The Doomsday Machine to get any tangible feel for how close we have come and how labile, how delicate, you know, how itsy-bitsy the situation is now.
Now, I don't think that there's going to be any grand agreements on strategic weapons, but we have to chip away at this thing, as we did way back in the 70s, when we had—I was in Moscow at the time—when we concluded the ABM Treaty.
We also did an partial or interim agreement, we called it, on limiting offensive arms, and we had the Incidents at Sea Treaty.
We had all kinds of other little things.
So we need to work on all these things, and there are working groups that are really able and willing to do that.
As far as concrete suggestions for this first one, well, let me explain how this letter to the editor got into The Washington Post today.
It's quite amazing, because this only happens to me once every three years, okay?
What happened was this.
A former U.S. ambassador to Russia, his name is Alexander Vershbow, 2001 to 2005, I think, of his years in Moscow.
So he writes this big editorial, which takes up most of the op-ed page in The Washington Post about a week ago, okay?
And the headline is, You Can't Have a Grand Bargain with Putin.
So I said, oh, God, well, I should read this.
So I read it, and the first part was destroying this, knocking down this straw man.
Who thinks there's a grand bargain possible with Putin?
Not now, in the political considerations here in this country.
So I read on, and lo and behold, well, maybe somebody else wrote the second half.
But he's got some constructive suggestions, the first of which was this.
We should have an agreement on trimming the size of military exercises in Europe.
Whoa.
Well, doesn't that make sense?
Seems to me that makes sense.
And it reminded me that two days after Trump was elected, guess what happened?
Putin sent his spokesman, his very close aide, Dmitry Peskov, to New York.
And in New York, he was to ostensibly attend a world championship chess match, right?
But he goes right to AP, and he says, look, here's a good idea.
Let's slow down, or let's withdraw NATO's military capability on our borders.
NATO's muscles are getting bigger and bigger, and NATO is getting closer and closer to our borders.
There's no need for this.
Let's do, quote, confidence-building measures, end quote.
Let's limit the military capability on our borders.
Whoa.
Did that hit the New York Times?
Not very much.
Washington Post?
Do you remember that?
No, nobody remembers that.
So I put that in this thing, and then I finished up with a vignette.
I go to Germany almost every year, and I'm pretty well plugged in with some of the top German officials in the Bundestag.
By a stroke of luck, I had a prearranged, pre-scheduled meeting with the head of the Bundestag Defense Committee.
So that's John McCain's opposite number.
His name was, well, was, he lost his re-election, Wolfgang Helmich.
Okay.
Now we're sitting there, and it happens to be the morning, the very morning, that Operation Anaconda, 2016, the largest war game since the end of the Cold War.
31,000 NATO troops from 24 countries.
It began that morning.
Now, he wasn't going to raise that, but I did.
I said, Herr Helmich, was denken, I said, brauchen Sie von, what do you think of the exercise?
And he says, it is not a NATO exercise.
I said, it's not, well, a NATO country, the Bundeswehr is taking part?
He says, yes, but it's not a NATO exercise.
He was really angry about the whole thing.
Okay.
So I tucked that into the end of this, this little letter to the editor and said, you know, I felt, I left with the strong impression that the chairman of the Bundestag Defense Committee was in complete agreement with the suggestion that former U.S. Ambassador Vershbow and Peskov, the spokesman for Putin, had made.
And of course, then I agree with you begin with these things, limit this stuff.
Does anyone think, I mean, who in their right mind thinks?
Wait, stop for a second.
So just to make sure here, what you're talking about here, this is the chairman basically of the Armed Services Committee equivalent in Germany.
And by saying this is not a NATO exercise, what he's saying is America's doing this against Germany's will.
Is that your point?
Well, yeah, he's, he's very upset about it.
He's not one of the most conservatives.
He's from the SPD, the Social Democrats, but he is head of the Defense Committee.
And he was really angry that I should call it a NATO exercise because by some alchemy, the Germans had succeeded in preventing it from being called a NATO exercise, but they couldn't prevent the participation of the Bundeswehr, the German Armed Forces.
So he was in a very awkward position.
He was dead set against this stuff, but it went on and he was helpless to prevent it.
So he made it very clear to me that he found all this business about needing to stoke up tensions.
I remember now 31,000 NATO troops, thousands of vehicles, tanks and so forth, and 24 NATO countries hard on the Russian border in Poland, at the very place where, where the Bundeswehr went into, went into Poland to start to, to, to attack Poland and Russia in 41.
So, and where the Nazis of course came in.
So what we're talking about here is, is a historic memory that they have, we don't have.
Yeah.
Well, and you know, I got one.
What about Minsk and Minsk II, or I guess, especially Minsk II, the agreement that at least, I guess it didn't completely end the war in Eastern Ukraine, but turn the heat on it way, way down.
That was the Germans and the French coming and saying, Hey, America, we are turning down the heat on your policy right now.
And really insisted on that right back in, it was 2015, right?
That's exactly right.
The only problem is that to get the, get Poroshenko, the Ukrainian leader to cooperate, the US has to put the screws to him and they have not.
So we're still, we have this, this administration, Trump agreeing to provide lethal weaponry, anti-tank weapons and so forth, just as we did to the Afghan quote, freedom fighters to shoot down Russian planes way back when.
Yeah, but there were no consequences from that.
So it should be fine.
The Minsk was a good idea.
It would be a really good idea if it were implemented.
Now, the other thing that I'd suggest here, and this came to light with my veteran intelligence professional colleagues just now, the, the agreement on intermediate nuclear forces, INF agreement, that was a miracle.
You know, I worked long and hard on strategic weapons agreements, but I never thought that the Russians would destroy a whole class of intermediate range ballistic missiles they had trained on Western Europe, SS-20s they were called.
They destroyed them all in an agreement where we destroyed the Pershing missiles, the Pershing-2s that we were about to employ or in place in Western Europe.
Now that is coming to an end now.
And so the other suggestion we veteran intelligence professionals have is simply, hey, get inspectors, get inspectors from, from the UN, from the US, from, from Russia, get them into these INF sites, these places where people are thinking that the INF agreement will be violated as soon as it expires.
Get them in there to prove that they are or they are not being violated.
That's a very constructive suggestion.
So what we're trying to do is play our part here.
We're not trying to say, oh, kowtowing to the Kremlin, for God's sake.
Yeah, that is so otherworldly.
I mean, they're, they have this, let me put it this way.
People say, well, why is, why is the New York Times, why is the Deep State so much against a modus vivendi?
I won't even say, you know, rapprochement or detente, just a way to live peacefully with Russia.
Well, again, I mentioned the military, industrial, congressional, intelligence, media complex.
There's so much dough at stake here, so much money.
Now, one thing that's come to my attention this morning is that yesterday, Putin made a big speech before the graduating seniors of some military academies.
And he advertised, as he did on the 1st of March, the availability now, and most of them are coming online quickly, of these incredible supersonic weapons that make anti-ballistic missile systems ineffectual.
Okay.
Now, why was it that McGovern and everybody else who tries to follow this closely was completely unaware of these new classes of strategic weapons, offensive weapons, weapons that could go around the South Pole and maneuver.
And so why would, well, the congressional briefings that are conducted yearly, they call them the worldwide threat briefings, we never saw anything in those.
And so could it be that our former colleagues in the analysis part of the CIA have missed this?
Could it be that they're so busy targeting drones, that they're so busy trying to find evidence of Russia-Trump collusion?
Did they miss this?
My God, did they miss this?
There is absolutely no excuse for them having missed it.
Well, anyhow, here's Trump, here's Putin yesterday, advertising this.
Now, I asked myself, why is it?
Why is it that the Times reported this very meagerly this morning, but didn't put any context around it?
You know, this may be a little cynical, but the Times is in bed with all those people like Raytheon and Lockheed that are building anti-ballistic missile systems, the greatest welfare system ever devised by Wall Street.
They're building all this stuff, and as soon as they acknowledge that none of them are going to work, which we could have told them decades ago, well, then the rationale for building these things sort of dissipates.
And that goes for building THAAD, these other anti-ballistic missile systems in the Far East.
So you've got them in Eastern Europe, what used to be Eastern Europe, you've got Poland, Romania, you've got them in the Black Sea, you've got them in the Baltic Sea.
You've got people really worried about that, because Putin is now saying, look, we told you we're gonna do something different.
And now they have.
And the play on this in the media is negligible, if at all, because these are major developments.
And if Putin kind of, well, you know, Trump himself, when he congratulated Putin against the wishes of his high advisors, do not congratulate, all caps, right?
When he congratulated Putin on his re-election victory, what happened?
Well, he said at the end, you know, we really should get together quickly to talk about arms control, because the arms race is getting out of hand.
Trump's words, my God, well, it is.
And why do they hate him?
Well, you know, a seventh grader could answer that one.
Those who want the arms race to continue, those who profiteer on increased tension with our main rivals, Russia, China, and the others, well, they're going to lose big if there's peace.
Peace is not good for that kind of business.
Tension, very, very good.
All right.
Hang on just one second.
Hey, guys, here's who sponsors this show.
Mike Swanson and his great investment advice at wallstreetwindow.com.
He's actually posting some stuff at the Libertarian Institute website now.
Really great stuff.
The great Mike Swanson.
And he's also the author of the book, The War State, which is a really great history of the rise of the new right, military-industrial complex, after World War II, in the Truman, Eisenhower, and Kennedy eras.
You'll really want to look at it.
The War State by Mike Swanson.
Also, Roberts & Roberts Brokerage, Inc.
If you listen to Mike, you'll be buying some medals.
You'll want to buy them from Roberts & Roberts.
They've been around as long as I've been alive.
They've got a great reputation.
They take the very smallest premium possible in order to help arrange the very best sales for you of platinum, palladium, gold, silver, of course.
And no premium at all if you buy with Bitcoin.
They're at Roberts & Roberts.
That's rrbi.co. rrbi.co for your precious medals.
They're, as I mentioned before, Zencash.
Zensystem.io to learn all about this great new currency, which is also a secure messaging application and document transfer device, and all the rest there.
Learn all about it at zensystem.io.
And read the book.
It's by Hussein Badakchani.
It's How to Run Your Tech Business Like a Libertarian.
That's not the title.
The title is No Dev, No Ops, No IT.
Those are all one word each, if you take my meaning.
No Dev, No Ops, No IT by Hussein Badakchani.
It's really great.
Check out LibertyStickers.com for all your anti-government propaganda.
I made up most of them.
That didn't work out with the new website I kept promising you, but now, supposedly, someone else is promising one, so I guess we'll see if we ever get a new website.
But there's still a lot of great anti-government propaganda, and you can buy it at LibertyStickers.com.
Now, one more thing.
Check out ScottHorton.org.
We've been having some server problems, but otherwise, ScottHorton.org is a great-looking new website, as you can tell.
If you want a good 2018 model website for your business or for whatever you're doing, your opinions, check out ExpandDesigns.com, the great Harley Abbott over there.
If you go to ExpandDesigns.com slash Scott, you'll save $500.
And unfortunately, a lot of it has to do with Victoria Newell and Robert Kagan's wife and all of her negative influence here.
But it's a history.
It's a history.
It's not yours.
But it's a history of the post-Cold War thinking in U.S. policy circles on what to do about Russia and that kind of thing.
So, Strobe Talbot, who we all know played such a major role, Bill Clinton's former college roommate and then his national security advisor and major booster of the NATO expansion policy in the 1990s, when confronted by this author about, come on, man, be honest about the consequences of what you've done here.
He says this, Ray.
He says, we do what we can in our own interest.
And he says, if any national security advisor ever recommended anything less, they'd be canned.
So simple as that.
But then he admits, he asks rhetorically, and I just think this is so funny.
Should we have had a higher, wiser concept of our real interests that would require us to hold back on what many people would say is our own current interest?
In other words, should we think about what might happen a few weeks out from the thing we're doing today at all, when that could cost us our job?
And that's literally how he frames the issue.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Well, they're all in it together, you know.
You talk about Strobe Talbot, you know, it's really sad.
He was a bright guy.
And when I was bridge chief there at Soviet foreign policy at Langley, he wrote a book and it was called Khrushchev Remembers.
He interviewed Khrushchev at length, many, many times.
It was an incredible book.
It was, you know, it was pure, original source stuff.
And we learned a lot from it.
And then he gets back with the muckety mucks here in the upper crust here in Washington.
And he falls for this, you know, working with the think tanks and so forth.
One colleague of his, Bill Burns, not a bad guy.
He was our ambassador in Moscow.
Now, the year is 2008, right?
And lots of rumors are going around that we, we, the United States, want to get Ukraine and Georgia into NATO.
Okay.
Now, there was a new Russian foreign minister named Sergei Lavrov.
He's still in power.
Okay.
He's still there.
He calls Ambassador Burns into the foreign ministry on the 1st of February, 2008.
And he says, Mr. Burns, do you know what net means?
Yeah, I know.
He says, well, net means net.
We hear all these rumors that you're going to incorporate Ukraine and Georgia into NATO.
If that happens, we will be confronted with a decision as to whether we need to invade Ukraine.
You need to know some history, Mr. Burns.
We will not tolerate that.
Will you tell the Secretary of State that?
He says, yes, I will.
Now, to his credit, he did.
How do we know this?
WikiLeaks.
Manning.
Manning.
We have the cable.
If I've seen one of these cable from Moscow, from my embassy in Moscow, I've seen about 2,000.
Okay.
So there it is.
Now, what happens?
Burns reports it matter-of-factly, again, to his credit.
Condoleezza Rice, I guess, was—no, who was it?
Yeah, right.
She was the Secretary of State.
Whether, whether she acted or she even thought about it didn't matter.
Two months later, on 3rd of April, NATO at a summit in Bucharest decides Ukraine and Georgia will become members of NATO, quote, end quote.
Now, so fast forward, 2008.
Now we're in 2014.
We, I'm talking about Victoria, Victoria Nuland, who you just mentioned, orchestrate a putsch, a coup, led by fascists that we and the Poles and others had trained in Kiev, the capital of Ukraine.
It's the 22nd of February.
A new government is created.
It's a pro-fascist government.
First thing they say, we're going to ban Russia as a, Russian as a official language.
We're going to join NATO.
And now you're Mr. Putin, right?
You're in Sochi.
You're wrapping up the Winter Olympics, and you're looking at this, you say, my God.
So that, that telephone call that was on YouTube, YouTube, two weeks ago is true.
What do I refer to?
I refer to an intercepted, en clas, not encrypted, message between Victoria Nuland, who was Assistant Secretary of State at the time, and the ambassador in Kiev, our ambassador, Geoffrey Pyatt.
What does she say?
Well, we're all set now.
We've got it all, we're all, all glued together now.
Yats is the guy.
You tell the other people to wait in the wings.
They have to cooperate with Yats, but Yats is the guy.
And we'll have this all glued.
And if we need, with the vice president ready to come down, just, just wait.
Okay.
Now that was the 3rd of February, 2014.
Now, I knew this fellow, Yatsenyuk.
I knew who he was.
I knew he was a big contender to be a politician in Ukraine sometime.
But, you know, I actually felt sorry for him.
I said, oh, poor Yatsenyuk.
He's blown.
I mean, if they had in mind making him the prime minister, yeah, I almost feel sorry for the poor guy.
Well, what happens?
Two weeks later, there's the coup, and whose name?
It's Yats.
It's Yatsenyuk.
They went ahead and did it anyway.
Yeah.
So, you know, if, if the experts, if the strobe tablets, you know, if the, if the other creme de la creme diplomats that you just described so well, the buckety mucks, if they didn't realize that Vladimir Putin was not going to let Crimea, his only all year round ice free naval base, go to NATO, well, they were just completely naive.
And one could even suggest that they wanted the Russians to react strongly so that they could blacken them, so that they could blame them for various other things and get the Europeans, mind you, with sanctions against Russia, which hurt the Europeans much greater than they hurt us.
Now, that's all coming home to roost now.
That was 14.
So that's four years ago.
Things have changed.
And that change has got to be shaped in a salutary way.
And one of the ways that will happen is at the summit from the 11th and 12th in Brussels next, next month, then we have the summit between Putin and Trump.
You know, I saw a tweet this morning that was quoting Trump saying he hopes for a big deal with Russia that could include a quote, I think swift or quick end to the war in, or the American role in Syria.
Now that's just too good to be true, Ray, right?
Come on.
Well, it's treason to them, but it's my greatest hope.
The question really, Scott, as you know, is whether Trump can make this happen.
You know, if I was the president, I could, I know that.
Well, yeah, if you were the president, you could, right?
Isn't that really the deal?
That's why we all hate Obama so much is because we know he knows better.
And we know that he really does have the power to force his way and do the right thing.
And yet never did.
Well, he was afraid.
I mean, you know, there's precedent for this.
You don't have to go back as far as Sean Kennedy, but I do go back that far.
Presidents are afraid.
Trump is afraid.
There are lots of things he wanted to do that he hasn't, look what, you know, about eight months ago, when by law, he had to release the rest of the materials in CIA and FBI on the Kennedy assassination.
In the morning, he said, they're all going to be released.
I'm very proud of this.
In the afternoon, he said, and I quote, the FBI and the CIA won't let me release these because they still need to be redacted.
Well, we'll revisit it in six months, six months.
That was April.
Do you remember that?
No.
Why?
Because the press didn't remember it.
The mainstream press is part of this whole cabal.
And the New York Times doesn't do much without checking with the White House first before they publish something of any sensitivity to all except the leaks that come from the White House and from the CIA.
Yeah.
Bad news all around.
I'll tell you what there.
You know what though?
I mean, that's no excuse being afraid.
If you have the chance to actually be the president, then you're already risking everything.
You might get shot anyway, not by the secret real power, but just by some nut.
I mean, you're already taking that risk.
You might as well do the right thing, you know, but they never do.
But of course, that's how they get the opportunity to be the president.
They're not the kind of people who ever would do the right thing in the first place.
Well, Scott, you know, that was my view, especially with Obama, you know.
He actually, I have a secondhand report that if, well, he had dinner with about 12 big financial supporters and they were progressives.
And some of them were kind of saying, look, Mr. President, you're in power now.
How come you're not doing progressive things?
To oversimplify it.
Well, he listened to this for a while.
And then before he put his fork to his dessert, he stood up and he said, look, don't you guys remember what happened to Dr. King?
And he left.
Now, my attitude, as I said, then when I heard that was, isn't that really sad?
He should never have tried to become president if that's the way he was going to act.
So please don't misunderstand.
People get shot all the time and because of him.
So I'd say this is just to explain what I'm talking about.
It's not to excuse it.
I like you think you can act like that if you can be formed by those fears.
You should never try to be president.
I don't know about Trump.
He's not been able to work his will on the deep state very, very much.
And it'd be very interesting to see now whether Syria really does end because there are a lot of forces there.
Well, and also how weakly the Mueller investigation falls apart.
I mean, they can try to make as much hay as they want about Manafort's money laundering from six years ago or whatever their problem is.
But without a case on Russia and Trump really coming true, that's going to hand him the election, I think, right there.
I mean, all of the things being equal, they won't be, I guess.
Well, you know, Scott, we were talking a little bit earlier about the latest evidence that Mark Warner, for example, my senator in Virginia and his boss there, the co-chair Richard Burr from North Carolina, that they are hell bent on making sure that nobody finds out from Julian Assange how he got those emails on the DNC.
Yeah, that's an important article.
Let me mention the title here.
It's Did Senator Warner and Comey Collude on Russiagate?
You're turning the whole conspiracy upside down.
So what's the deal?
Well, at turn of the year, the CIA learned that someone had leaked a treasure trove of documents having to do with cyber offensive tools.
Okay.
It was called Vault 7.
Assange had them.
He described them as more important in depth than all the stuff that Ed Snowden brought out into Hong Kong.
Wow.
People might remember that.
They even had, they put out a picture of this giant vault that's been built in Norway or something, this library built to survive a H-bomb war or something like that.
Remember that, everyone?
Okay, go ahead.
Yeah.
Well, what happened was this.
The CIA was really hell bent and determined that this not be exposed.
So they approach Julian Assange, would you be willing to mitigate?
Would you be willing to take some of the names out?
There are some really bad things here.
Would you be willing to?
And Assange says, yes, I'm willing to talk about this.
Okay.
Now, he's got this pro bono attorney.
He's not got a lot of money, right?
So this fellow named Adam Waldman starts negotiating with an opposite number for the government acting on behalf of the CIA.
His name is David Laufman.
And they're negotiating this thing.
And it looks like Julian Assange might get limited immunity and safe passage to discuss this stuff.
And what happens?
Well, not all lawyers are really bright.
This guy Waldman was working for Assange.
He says, hey, you know, Mark Warner, the senator in Virginia, he's interested in this.
Maybe I'll get in touch with him and see if he wants to talk to Assange.
Well, of course, that's the last thing Warner wants to do, talk to Assange.
But he finds out about this deal.
He calls Comey and says, put the kibosh on this deal, because Assange has said he's going to give technical evidence that it wasn't the Russians.
Okay.
And so what happens?
Comey says, yes, spike it.
Waldman calls Laufman, the former president, the guy who's negotiating on behalf of the CIA, says the deal is off, spike it.
They say, hell no, we're not going to spike it.
Then Julian Assange learns about this, feels that they're acting in bad faith, and releases, starting on March 7th of last year, this treasure trove.
First little tool?
Well, a tool that can take control of your computerized car and make it go 120 miles an hour and no brakes, right?
That's neat.
Next one?
A TV that ostensibly is turned off is monitoring everything that goes on in your bedroom.
And then the third one.
The third one was called Marble.
And that was the one that enables the CIA to hack into a computer system and disguise who hacked in and leave little telltale signs like, oh, Cyrillic, Russian, that kind of thing, and make believe it was the Russians.
Now, that's what the CIA was hellbent and determined to prevent for obvious reasons.
And he let that out on the 31st of March.
And two weeks later, Pompeo, then head of the CIA, Mike Pompeo, got up before this think tank, and he said, Julian Assange is a demon.
Now, bear in mind, Pompeo is evangelical, I guess, believes in demons.
He's a demon, and he's running a hostile non-state intelligence service.
We've got to get him.
Well, there you go.
Now, what did they do?
They leaned all over the Ecuadorians, who have the embassy in which they've given Julian Assange asylum.
Almost 100 days ago, the Ecuadorians agreed to cut Assange off.
He's incommunicado from that period of time.
He sees no visitors except once in a while, one of his lawyers.
I mean, the guy's in solitary, okay?
Who cares?
Well, Pompeo cares.
He wants to get rid of this guy, and so does Sessions, so does the Eastern District of Virginia, which has a grand jury and panel to do Assange in.
For what?
For publishing documents, none of which have been seen to be erroneous or adulterated in any way.
He's a publisher.
And none of them came from Russia either.
So listen, though, how come and why didn't, or did they, did the CIA get revenge against Comey?
Shouldn't they crucify him upside down somewhere?
And don't they have the power to do that for effing them over that bad?
Because they don't give a damn about prosecuting Assange if they could have kept those leaks from coming out, right?
That malware stuff.
Well, Comey and Brennan, Brennan, the former head of the CIA, are all in this together.
I guess it's the rank and file who'd be more mad.
Yeah, together with James Clapper.
Now, Clapper, of course, is on record as saying- So they're willing to sacrifice.
I mean, that's like some Family Jewels level stuff there, right, or better.
These hacking tools and all this stuff, as you say, it casts major doubt on the entire Russia thing right there, where here's our program for making it look like somebody else hacked your thing.
For example, you can make it look like the Russians did it, you know, this kind of stuff.
That's the cynical part of this, because that deal was three days from fruition.
We have the text of the deal.
John Solomon, a very good investigative reporter, got this for the Hill newspaper.
So they were very close to it.
And what happened, of course, was that Warner had intervened, got Comey to intervene.
Why?
Because they didn't want Assange to give proof that it wasn't the Russians.
They wanted to keep this thing going.
And what was the price to be paid?
Well, CIA agents, CIA people involved in these cyber tools, the programs themselves, which cost billions, and I use the term advisedly B, billions of dollars, just to make sure that they preserve this legend that the Russians hacked into the DNC, which, as you know, our technical people prove it was not a hack, that the Russians were not involved, that WikiLeaks were quite capable of getting leaks, and that's precisely what they had.
And once that is proven, well, of course, the egg on Senator Warner and Senator Burr and all these other people, and the media, the egg on their face is considerable.
That's why I see a major Donnybrook shaping up.
Within the next couple of weeks, Scott, we're going to know whether the people that are supposed to be following the Constitution have the guts and the wherewithal to make sure they get the documents that would actually convene a grand jury and indict some of the people, the high mookity mooks, not the rank and file, the Brennan's, the Comey's, the McCabe's, and I dare say, the Loretta Lynch's who were responsible for deliberately trying to swing the election, and when they couldn't do that, make sure that the current president was incapable of reigning.
Well, you know, two years ago, I said, this Russia stuff is going nowhere, because even though the USSR is gone, basically, it's the same old smear, you work for the Kremlin kind of thing.
And we're talking about the Republican, not the Democrat.
And we're talking about Donald freaking Trump for crying out loud, which to you and me, his patriotism is pretty damn phony.
But he's committed to that phony patriotism.
And we all know it, right?
This is a guy who, you know, he gets up there and hugs the flag, wraps the flag in himself.
Um, he wouldn't sell out America to some foreign power.
You know, he's a son of a bitch in 100 ways.
But I thought that this won't really go anywhere.
And in fact, he still won anyway, right?
It didn't stick.
She brought this up, Hillary brought it up over and over in the debates and this kind of thing.
And people just didn't believe it.
But then they ended up really turning it into a criminal investigation and with Sessions recusal, a special counsel and all this.
And it's kind of unbelievable two years of this level of, I mean, at least it's not a pretext for war.
It's just a pretext for persecuting a president.
So I can't say I really hate it that much other than it is really a pretext for worse conflict with Russia.
That's true.
But, um, you know, it's, it's really equivalent to the, I'm repeating myself now.
It really is equivalent to the case against Iraq in 2002, where it's really just like a peer pressure game by media people that this is the thing we all believe in and make fun of everyone who doesn't write everybody.
Okay, guys.
It took a very courageous journalist.
I'm thinking of Robert Perry with whom I worked very closely to say, uh, 18 months ago, there doesn't seem to be any there, there.
Right.
And then the last piece that he wrote before he had his first stroke, it was December of last year.
Okay.
And he called me up and he said, Ray, these, these text messages between this Peter Strzok and Lisa Page, my God, do you see that as, as, as important as I do?
And I said, yeah, sure do Bob.
And then I was going to volunteer.
I knew he wasn't feeling so good.
I said, Bob, do you want me to write this up?
But I knew, I knew that he wanted to do it.
He put it out and he said, you know, Russia gate has become FBI gate.
That was December of last year.
Now, just now, what are we, June?
What is it?
A half year later?
Are we getting the rest of the text messages, including the one where Strzok says, don't worry, Lisa, I'm going to prevent, I can stop Trump from becoming president.
Well, if you want to call that non-biased, well, you can, but you're living in a dream world.
Yeah.
All right.
Well, listen thanks for coming back on the show and talking about all this important stuff with us.
You know, the fake Russia thing the fake Russia scandal is important for all its implications as fake as it is.
So we got to keep track of that.
And then of course the real question, America's actual, the U S government's actual relationship with Russia's government and whether Trump can actually prove as you said, this is one of his few opinions that sound is why would we not want to get along with Russia?
And anybody can come up with that unless you really have a vested interest, not to, and apparently he's not very impressed by those arguments.
So thank God for that.
Well, I guess we'll see how it goes.
Even a broken clock is right.
I think it's twice a day, right?
He's right on Russian and he's right on Russia gate.
The rest of it really, really bad.
Yeah.
You know, by the way, I just was talking with Charmaine Narwani from the American conservative magazine who writes for them regularly there.
And she was saying, you know, the Jordanian support room that they've run with the CIA all the time for backing al-Nusra and the FSA armies there in Southwest Syria is still open for business.
And she couldn't testify directly to the level of American support, or I guess even the exact existence of American support on this date.
But she was saying, you know, this is certainly where the CIA has run the war in the South all along, and it's still going on if not for, you know, vouching for who all is in the room running it now.
But at the very least our allies, the Saudis must be there and the Jordanians who are American sock puppets anyway.
So maybe a year ago when the Washington post said in a move sure to please his master, Vladimir Putin, Donald Trump treacherously and traitorously ceases CIA support for al-Qaeda in Syria.
Maybe that was wrong.
Maybe it's really still been going on all along.
Well, he'd like to, I think, but there are deep state actors here are very important, not the least of which, of course, is Bibi Netanyahu.
More than 50% of the motivation behind US policy in Syria is directly traceable back to the Israelis.
And you can see that on the front page of the New York Times, if you look on September 6th, 2013.
Yeah.
All you have to do is Google Israel, Syria, hemorrhage, and you'll find it.
We just want to see all sides hemorrhaged to death.
They're talking about real humans there, of course, you know, how it goes.
All right.
Listen, well, thanks for coming back on the show, Ray.
Really appreciate talking to you as always.
My pleasure, Scott.
All right.
Take care.
That's the great Ray McGovern, everybody.
Check him out at raymcgovern.com, at consortiumnews.com, and of course, at antiwar.com.
And he's got a letter to the editor in the Washington Post today calling them out on their BS.
And he's got this one at antiwar.com.
Did Senator Warner and Comey collude on Russiagate?
Yeah.
All right, you guys, and that's the show.
You Know Me, scotthorton.org, youtube.com slash scotthortonshow, libertarianinstitute.org, and buy my book, and it's now available in audiobook as well, Fool's Errand, Time to End the War in Afghanistan.
Hey, it's endorsed by Ron Paul and Daniel Ellsberg and Stephen Walt and Peter Van Buren and Matthew Ho and Daniel Davis and Anand Gopal and Patrick Coburn and Eric Margulies.
You'll like it.
Fool's Errand, Time to End the War in Afghanistan.
And follow me on Twitter, scotthortonshow.
Thanks, guys.
