Sorry, I'm late.
I had to stop by the Whites 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, 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, introducing the legendary James Bamford.
He wrote The Puzzle Palace and Body of Secrets, as well as The Shadow Factory.
All three of those about the National Security Agency.
Really impressive work.
Top of the line stuff, of course, broke so many important stories.
And then also, as discussed earlier on the show with Dan McAdams, a pretext for war.
9-11, Iraq, and the abuse of America's intelligence agencies.
I remember it like it was yesterday, came out in 2004.
And as Dan McAdams was saying, it was the audio book version of that book that changed the mind of the great Walter Jones.
And turned him into a peacenik and an anti-Iraq and Iran and Libya and Syria war advocate in Washington, D.C.
From that moment on, I don't know if you already knew that, Jim, but...
Oh, yeah, yeah.
Yeah, I was really sad to hear Walter Jones died a couple of days ago.
It was really a shock to me.
I had no idea until about two weeks before that he was even sick.
And I had heard that he had gone into a hospice and was really shocked.
So I'm really sad that, especially when he was working hard on trying to end the war in Yemen and so forth.
Right.
Well, George O'Neill has an article.
George O'Neill, who's featured in your article we're about to talk about.
He has an article himself at the American Conservative today, really saying, you know, that it was Walter Jones who was responsible for this Yemen resolution that just passed.
The War Powers Act resolution that just passed the House of Representatives just a couple of days after he died.
But he'd really done the work to push that thing with a lot of other people as well, of course.
But he had a lot of courage.
I mean, he originally was the person who was pushing for the war.
So much so that he wanted to change the name of French Fries to Freedom Fries because the French weren't helping us in the war.
And then, as you mentioned, he read my book, A Pretext for War.
And suddenly he listened to the audio tape of it and he suddenly completely reversed course and became very much opposed to the war.
And that was very hazardous for a congressman from a district that is in North Carolina that's represented by a lot of military.
Yeah.
And as we talked about with Dan earlier, he was reelected time and again after that, too.
They appreciated his stance and they knew that he was sticking up for them.
He wasn't opposing them.
He was trying to save their lives and they knew it and appreciated it.
Which, as Dan was saying, is very contrary to the narrative of what you're told you should expect in a situation like that.
And maybe contrary to what he expected.
Exactly.
Yeah.
But he was a man of courage and honor and one of the very few that I've met on Capitol Hill.
And by the way, you know, it is such a great book, A Pretext for War.
And for people who maybe want to not read 25 different articles, but sit down and read one book pretty much about how they lied us into war in 2002 and 2003, that's the book for you right there.
Better than any I can think of along those lines.
Well, thanks, Scott.
I appreciate it.
Yeah, absolutely.
I forget the page number now.
I used to know it, but you even got a treatment in there about the Israelis manufacturing fake intelligence in English, like Bob Dreyfuss and Julian Borger reported.
Ariel Sharon's office participating in that thing.
Very few people elaborated on that point, but a few of you did.
Yeah, well, it was a hard book to write because a lot of people wouldn't talk to you.
It was a time when everybody was pro-war and it was a very difficult time to write about the war being a total mistake.
Yeah.
Well, and, you know, I mean, we're just talking with Gareth on the show here about part of this is how much this Russian narrative currently is like Iraq, where it's 100 accusations, but none of them hold up.
But boy, together, they make for a very scary case about the terrible Russian plot against all our bodily fluids and all these things.
And you have what I think should be an absolute blockbuster.
I don't know how much response you've gotten from it, but it's an incredible report.
And it's hugely important, this story at the New Republic, the spy who wasn't.
And this is about the case of Maria Butina.
So go ahead and tell us, who is she?
Well, Maria Butina was a graduate student.
She had just graduated from American University with a straight A average last June.
She was about to start a new job as a consultant in the cyber crypto currency industry, which was pretty much what she studied in grad school.
And she was heading for South Dakota where she was going to live for a while while working as a consultant.
And then on July 15th, just as she was about to leave Washington to go to South Dakota with her boyfriend, Paul Erickson, she was arrested.
A dozen or so FBI agents went to her apartment, knocked on her door, went in and then arrested her, put her in handcuffs, took her to one of the most horrible places for incarceration you can get.
It's called CCD, Central Criminal Detention Center, and held there for a while.
Then she was indicted for what's known as 18 U.S.C.
7951, which is being an agent of a foreign government.
And she faced 15 years in prison.
And then ever since that day she's been in jail, almost four months in solitary confinement until she finally signed a plea agreement where they dropped the main charge and just made a conspiracy count against her.
But this is after she'd been in solitary confinement for four months and they didn't let her out until after she signed the agreement.
I mean, you know, this is something you kind of expect at a gulag where you're held in solitary confinement until you agree to sign a piece of paper.
Well, you show in your article that her treatment is a perfect reflection of the lack of a case against her, and pretty obvious.
I don't know if anyone will ever have a direct quote where they admit this part, but it's pretty clear that that's why they had her in solitary was just to punish her pretrial, to force her to go ahead and give in and say that they were right.
Well, I think that's true, and that's what I wrote in the article.
The pressure, you put enough pressure on somebody, they'll sign anything.
And four months in solitary confinement, and the United Nations declares solitary confinement torture.
The Obama administration did what they could to, they couldn't eliminate it, but they reduced it greatly, federal prisons.
She was kept in a county jail, the Alexander's Detention Center, so it didn't have to abide by those rules put there by the U.S. marshals on order from the court.
But the basis for her charges was largely lies that were told by the prosecutor.
She was charged with being an agent of Russia, and she was arrested at a time when it would be maximum publicity.
The Friday before her arrest, the special prosecutor's office had come down with 12 or 13 indictments of Russians in Russia for hacking the DNC.
And then she was arrested on a Sunday, and then on the Monday was the Putin-Trump summit in Helsinki.
So it was the perfect time for publicity, and they made it sound in the press like they arrested her just in time because she was about to flee.
Well, she was about to flee with a U-Haul truck going to South Dakota, but everybody assumed that what they meant was that she was about to flee to Moscow.
So the whole thing here has always been prosecution trying to get the press to see this as a spy case, a Red Sparrow case.
And because it was a mundane case, it was a case involving a grad student who was born in Siberia, grew up in Russia, in Siberia, moved to Moscow, started a gun rights organization because that's what she had done where she was living in Siberia after graduating from the university in Russia with two master's degrees.
So she started a gun rights organization there, and it was sort of natural that she would get interest from the NRA.
And the NRA came and visited her, gave a talk at one of her organizations, meetings, or second annual conference, and then they invited her to come to NRA conferences in the U.S.
So she would go back and forth.
It just happened to be at a time when the candidates, because the election coming up, were giving talks at these NRA conferences.
So she would go up and shake somebody's hand or chat with them briefly.
And all that was looked at by the FBI through this lens of suspicion of her being – she's got to be a Russian agent because she shakes hands with candidate Walker or has her picture taken with him.
And because she's hanging out with Republicans, well, that's pretty much most of what NRA is, is Republicans.
So if she gets invited to the NRA, she's going to be with Republicans.
And so they're following her, taking pictures, and building up this sort of crazy conspiracy.
And then they arrest her.
They don't have much of a case, so they have to jazz it up somehow.
They have to sex the case up, and that's exactly what they did.
The prosecutor lied.
He said that she exchanged sex for power, sex for a position of influence in an organization and sort of left it at that.
And so everybody assumed that she exchanged sex for a position within the NRA or some organization like that, when in reality what it was was some text message she had sent three years earlier that they dug out of her computer to one of her employees, the public relations guy for her gun rights organization.
Joking about how he sent her an email saying, well, I spent all day getting insurance for your car.
You owe me something for this.
And she said, well, sex.
I have no money, and put a smiley face at the end of it.
And he said, I don't want to sex with you.
I need something better than that, and with a smiley face.
And then she knows his wife and kid.
It was just a joke.
So the prosecutor, without telling that background, just saying that she had tried to exchange sex for power, got the press to write all these enormous headlines about how Maria Putina was this sex-driven red sparrow sent by Russia to seduce Republicans and get Trump elected, all this based on nonsense.
Well, as soon as the defense tried to get the prosecution to reveal the underlying basis for that charge, the prosecution got a gag order on the defense.
So they couldn't tell anybody that this is what really happened.
And so this kept going on and on and on, and this story became this enormous story of this woman who was a red sparrow, came over to the United States and tried to get Trump elected.
So I tried to look at what really happened, and that was the basis for my article, and the basis for my conclusion that she was just a scapegoat.
This whole thing was nonsense.
Scott Horton's show is brought to you by The War State by Mike Swanson.
It's a great history of the rise of the military-industrial complex after World War II, the Truman, Eisenhower, and Kennedy years.
I think you'll really like it.
And check out all of Mike's great investment advice at wallstreetwindow.com.
You want to learn how to survive this stuff?
Wallstreetwindow.com.
Man, I'll tell you what, too.
I remember when those headlines broke, and it's one of a lot of stories about Saddam Hussein—I mean, about Donald Trump and the Russians here.
One of many, and boy, was it played up when you mentioned those headlines, and you cite a lot of those headlines.
You correctly, I think, characterize them as blaring headlines with these claims about her.
And how—I think it's great, too, how you connect her, too, because of the red hair, and she's young and pretty.
So you connect her, I think correctly, in the public imagination with Anna Chapman, who actually was a Russian spy.
And then also with Jennifer Lawrence and all this popular culture stuff in the movies, too, and on TV, where, oh, this is the kind of thing those crafty Russians do.
So it fits right in to what people want to believe.
But essentially it is like you're saying, and it sounds very dishonest when you talk about the way that they censored and just chose small portions of that text message out of context like that.
Well, totally out of context.
And one of the big differences was with Anna Chapman, who was arrested as being a sleeper agent in 2000.
If you read the indictment, it looked like a spy novel.
I mean, they found all kinds of encryption on her.
They found all kinds of spy gear, secret meetings with other Russian agents and all that.
With Putina, they didn't find any espionage whatsoever.
That's why they never charged her with espionage.
They couldn't even find any evidence of espionage.
So the press really likes writing spies because every time you do, you definitely sell more newspapers and you're definitely going to get more people watching the show.
The irony here is she wasn't charged with being a spy.
It's like somebody robbing or somebody stealing a car and saying, oh, he's been arrested for a bank robbery because it sounds better.
I mean, she wasn't charged with being a spy, so it makes no difference to the media.
And you're talking about fake media.
Well, calling somebody a spy who wasn't charged with being a spy is fake media.
Yeah, and it really is, as you say, kind of just conspiracy mongering.
It's sort of textbook, and I don't mean to trash all conspiracists because a lot of times they got insight.
But in this case, it really is just sort of textbook question begging, where since we all know that the world is run through this conspiracy of the Kremlin and the White House, then how to explain all these other things that seem to also be true.
And so once you look at that through that lens, then the sky's the limit for what's possible here, really.
And this thing doesn't sound as ridiculous to people who've already bought in as it does to somebody like you who's going, well, let's start from the evidence first and see what we really have.
And I guess as you talk about in here, you were interviewing her as a journalist, talking with her regularly up until they grabbed her.
So you already knew all about her and what her job really was.
Were you surprised when they went after her?
Yeah, I'd known her for two years.
I've known her since she started at American University.
I was the national security columnist for Foreign Policy magazine, so I go to a lot of foreign policy talks.
And I met her at a talk, just a regular lecture on the Middle East.
I was there and I told somebody I was planning to go to take the Trans-Siberian Railway, go through Siberia.
And they said, oh, you ought to talk to this woman over here, Maria.
She's at American University.
She was born in Siberia and lived there until she was in her early 20s when she moved to Moscow.
And so I got together with her for lunch and tried to sort of check her brain on Siberia, since I'd never talked to anybody that actually was born and lived there.
And so that's how it began.
And then I didn't see her again until I got back from my trip.
And then when I got back, by now it's early 2018, that's when she told me that there had been all these stories in the press, these wild conspiracy stories about how accusing her of being a conduit for tens of millions of dollars from Putin to Patina to the NRA to Trump.
And I just thought the whole thing was absurd.
And so I began – I was planning to do an article, you know, just based on the sort of the crazy headlines I'd been reading.
And that's how I started interviewing her.
I interviewed her about half a dozen times over lunch.
And then one day she didn't – one day in the middle of all that, she didn't show up, which was really odd.
And the next day she told me she didn't – she apologized.
She didn't show up because the FBI had – about a dozen agents had raided her apartment with search warrants.
So they searched her apartment.
And about a week before that, she had voluntarily testified and given all her electronic data to the Senate Intelligence Committee.
And they never found any problems with anything.
And then the FBI searched her apartment, never found anything that even came close to being related to being a spy or anything else.
And so they finally ended up – in order just to arrest her, they came up with this thing called 18 U.S.C. 951, which is agent of a foreign government.
And according to one counterintelligence guy I interviewed, he said they hardly ever use it, but when they do use it, they use it because it's so easy to arrest somebody on that because you don't really have to show hardly anything.
And so that was the basis of it.
So all this led to my conclusion that this case had nothing – there was nothing there.
And for people who actually think that the FBI are these brilliant guys that are tracking down real spies all the time, I was threatened with the Espionage Act for writing my first book, The Puzzle Palace.
One of the biggest spies in American history was Robert Hansen.
But the FBI went looking at this other guy who was Brian Kelly who was at the CIA, and they pretty much ruined his life.
They suspected him as being the Russian spy, and he was suspended from the CIA.
His family was told he was going to go to jail for a year.
They harassed him like that, and they were just about to arrest him.
When it turns out, the real spy was one of their own guys, Robert Hansen, FBI counterintelligence agent.
And he'd even been in charge of the hunt for the spy for a while there at least.
Exactly, yeah.
And Hansen was somebody I'd known for years too.
Really?
That's a whole other interview.
I'm sorry, go ahead.
I have a piece for the New York Times Magazine about my friend the spy.
I've written about spies for 35 years, and I've met many of them.
I didn't just fall off the turnip truck when I'm writing about espionage, I think.
I see it now here.
March 18th, 2001 in the New York Times Magazine.
My Friend the Spy by James Bamford.
Great.
Can't wait to read this.
Sorry, go ahead.
This is one that my wife is really interested in too, the Hansen case.
Because she knows the guy who I guess was the FBI agent who really busted him from the inside when they finally did.
Yeah, when they finally did.
A little late on the uptake there.
I would visit him occasionally.
I lived on a boat at the time, and would go out on my boat occasionally.
All right, now wait a minute.
So back to the story here.
Alexander Torshin.
He's powerful, and he's Russian, and he has a scary-sounding name, and he probably is the link between Putin and Butina here, and so what about him?
Well, Torshin was sort of the equivalent of a senator in Russia.
He was in the upper chamber of the Duma, and he was a very big gun advocate.
He was a big hunter.
He was just the typical type of guy that would join the NRA, for example.
So he was very thrilled when Maria Butina began this gun rights organization, and he was one of the earliest members, and he tried very hard to get legislation passed, and he did.
They passed some pro-gun legislation in Russia, which was very much opposed by Putin, and Putin never signed the legislation, so it never made it into law.
But that was the point.
The point was that he became friends with Maria because he was in her gun rights organization.
She was a student who had majored in international relations and all those type of things, so she looked at him as sort of a mentor in government.
She came from Siberia with degrees in political science and international relations, and here's this senator, a Russian senator, who's in her group.
And so, obviously, they were working together on legislation, so she became like a protege or looked at him as a mentor, basically.
But that was it.
I graduated from college with a political science degree and law school with an international law degree, and I would try to find people who were in the same field and use them as being mentors, so it was fairly natural.
And so one of the key charges against her was that she was an agent of the Russian government, and the Russian government person that she was an agent of was Torshin.
The problem is that there was no evidence.
The government never came up with any evidence whatsoever that she was ever paid by the Russian government, that she was ever employed by the Russian government.
It had nothing to do with the Russian government.
The Russian government was actually suspicious of her because she was going against Putin.
They actually tried to silence her at one point, as I write in the article.
So that was their charge, that she was an agent of Torshin.
And again, there was no evidence that there was any agency connection.
He couldn't fire her, he couldn't demote her, he couldn't reassign her because she didn't work for him.
One other point is that she couldn't even get any money from either the Russian government or Torshin for her tuition.
It was George O'Neill, one of the Rockefellers, and her boyfriend, Paul Erickson, who helped her get the tuition for school.
So not only wasn't she being paid, she couldn't even get them to give any money to her tuition.
So what kind of an agent is that?
Are you a libertarian?
You run an IT business?
Well, then you have to read No Dev, No Ops, No IT by Hussain Badakhshani.
No dev, no ops, no IT.
It's how to run your computer company like a libertarian should.
Okay, so talk about George O'Neill's role in her story.
He's actually identified as person number two, I think, in her indictment.
Yeah, Torshin's person number one, George O'Neill's person number two.
George O'Neill, I think he's a great-great-grandson, one of those, of John D. Rockefeller.
He's heir to the Rockefeller fortune, so he has a considerable amount of money.
And his avocation, the thing that he likes doing, is trying to find peaceful ways to settle large disputes, like wars or disagreements between the United States and Russia.
His father also did that, and ten years earlier, his father had a conference in Moscow, sort of a friendship, you know, let's get the U.S. and Russia together type of conference.
And Torshin was there, because Torshin's an old Gorby guy who goes back to Gorbachev and all that.
And that's how George O'Neill first met Torshin a long time ago.
And so George O'Neill meets Maria Butina through Paul Erikson, because they used to work together on the Pat Buchanan campaign back in the 90s.
Erikson introduces O'Neill to Maria, and they find they have this common denominator, the common denominator being trying to bring more normal, friendly relations between the two countries.
So George O'Neill says, well, what I can do, what I normally do, these kind of things I do, I could set up dinners, some dinners in Washington, where we have people that get together and talk about ways we can improve foreign policy to have better relations between the two countries.
And she agrees to help him set up the dinners.
This is pretty much the basis for their charges of being a Russian agent, helping out George O'Neill with these dinners and later a prayer breakfast dinner.
Well, just to be clear, all other things being equal, and Trump and Hillary's emails and all these other things notwithstanding, that this is perfectly Washington, D.C. behavior, that this is exactly what people are even supposed to do.
It's called networking.
It's what students, quick grad students do if they want to advance.
I mean, if you want to advance in international relations.
I mean, especially when you're talking about these prayer breakfasts, that doesn't sound like clandestine meetings to commit treason or anything like that so much.
Of course not.
It's absurd.
They didn't even bring any government officials over.
I mean, the Russians wouldn't even agree to send officials to the prayer breakfast.
It was sort of prominent people in Russia, like a head of a university or something like that.
A lot of countries send people to the prayer breakfast.
That's the whole idea.
It's an international conclave, this prayer breakfast.
All these people from different countries come together for the prayer breakfast.
So there's nothing diabolical or sinister about it.
Well, and listen, I mean, I guess for disclosure, I mean, you live in D.C.
You reported on the case, but I know George.
I've met him a couple of times, and he had me out to D.C. to give a speech last October, which is where I got a chance to finally meet you in person, which was great.
And so I say that not so much as a conflict of interest as much as just to say that I know this guy, and as you say, he's a Buchanan guy.
He's a right-wing anti-war guy.
The best kind of right-wing.
You know, a paleo peacenik.
Yeah, exactly.
And he doesn't hide it.
I mean, these are public events.
And as you say in the article, too, despite the Rockefeller pedigree and so forth, he's no direct avenue to power if you were a Russian spy.
He's not the route that you would go through to control Donald Trump, your puppet.
He's considered an outsider in D.C., for sure.
Yeah, I mean, if you were Maria Bettina's handler in Russia, and she said, well, look, I'm helping George O'Neill put some dinners together.
My boyfriend is Paula Erickson.
They would say, look, you know, you're over there to do a job.
The job is not to have a boyfriend who has no power.
I mean, Paula Erickson didn't have any power at all.
And not to make friends with some outsider like George O'Neill, who doesn't have any power.
It's to get people in power.
And one of the most perfect examples that show that she was not an agent of foreign power, an agent of Russia, was her connection to a guy named J.D. Gordon.
J.D. Gordon was somebody I'd known for years.
He was a public affairs guy for the Pentagon.
He was a senior military officer, a naval officer.
And the Pentagon spokesman, he knew, you know, everybody at the Pentagon.
He got picked by Trump to be one of his top national security advisors.
And, you know, he was on the potential road of becoming maybe the national security advisor.
He was very high up in the Trump administration in terms of national security.
So Maria bumps into him, sort of got a party.
Paula Erickson knew him.
And then Erickson puts the two together and says, oh, you ought to meet Maria here.
And Maria sent an email saying, well, George O'Neill is setting up these dinners.
You ought to come to one of these dinners.
You'd find it very interesting.
So Gordon says he can't make the dinner, but let's go.
How about if we go to a Styx concert?
And so she went to the Styx concert with him.
And that was it.
And then he sent her more emails saying, oh, I just got back from Europe.
I was meeting with some prime ministers and deputy prime ministers and all that.
And, you know, let's get together again.
And she never replied to him.
He sent her another email, let's get together again.
Again, she never replied.
Because the whole idea here was that she was just trying to be friends with him to get him to go to the dinner, not to turn him into a contact for Russia or anything.
And to show it even more that she wasn't an agent of Russia, there was no evidence that she even told Torshin that she'd ever met this guy.
Now, if you're an agent of the Russian government, and the whole idea here is to work your way into the Trump administration, he was the absolute perfect choice, a senior national security official on the Trump campaign.
And she not only didn't try to recruit him, she turned him away and never even bothered to tell Torshin about it.
And she just continued helping him deal with his dinner.
So, again, this is definite evidence that shows that the whole charge is for total nonsense.
You know, I interviewed a lady a few weeks back named Sharon Tennyson.
Have you ever heard of her?
You know her?
Doesn't strike a bell right off the top of my head.
Well, she's this kind of lady now.
And I talked with her, and she's apparently spent many decades since the 1980s going to Russia and doing really just this exact same kind of thing.
Civilian to civilian contacts.
Hey, let's all be friends.
Let's all witness each other's humanity here in order to, you know, hopefully put off conflict or resolve conflict before it breaks out.
And that kind of thing.
This is exactly the kind of thing we want to do.
And so a case like this really leaves people questioning, I think, probably where exactly is the line.
Lord knows you can lobby for Israel all you want without ever being accused of being an agent of a foreign power.
But so, you know, which kind of things are you allowed to say before you get busted or caught up in this kind of thing, if they feel like using you and making an example out of you?
Well, right.
There is a real danger here that, you know, these sort of naive prosecutors never put in their calculus when they face these silly charges.
And the danger here is that having followed spy cases for many years, most spies, when they're arrested, they're diplomats.
They work at an embassy.
And the worst thing that happens is they're a PNG, persona non grata.
They're thrown out of the country.
And then they just go back to their own country and get assigned someplace else.
So, you know, we find Russian spies here, throw them out of the country, and they go back to Russia.
And then Russia throws some Americans out, and so forth.
It's very, very different and very, very rare for the U.S. to ever arrest a civilian, a non-diplomat, a nongovernment person for espionage like this.
And the reason is because of the retaliation.
You arrest somebody like this, it's not like PNGing somebody.
Somebody just gets thrown out of the country from the embassy.
The other side will end up arresting a civilian.
And then you're facing some poor guy in Russia being arrested in retaliation for arresting an innocent civilian in the United States.
That's what happened with Paul Whelan, this guy that was over there attending a wedding.
And then he gets picked up as a potential—picked up for espionage, facing 20 years in prison.
And, you know, it's very illogical to assume that that never would have happened had Maria Butina not been arrested.
And now he's facing, like I said, 20 years in prison, and I think he was arrested for two reasons.
One was for retaliation for the arrest of Maria Butina, and second, as a possible trade.
So Butina actually got sentenced to a long prison sentence.
Then they would trade Paul Whelan for Butina, and they would be able to have that exchange.
So that's a danger, and that's why, you know, in the past, this isn't done.
You don't arrest innocent civilians for made-up charges because the other side is going to do the very same thing.
You know, here's something, too, that I learned in this article that's so telling, and I didn't even realize this, and that is that it wasn't Robert Mueller who pursued this case at all.
And I think you even say that he could have and decided not to.
It's some other lawyer at the Department of Justice who decided to pursue this.
Right.
That's the point.
That's one of the key points here is that this whole thing— the reason I began interviewing her in the first place was because her name appeared in the paper, like McClatchy, had these wild headlines about how she was possibly a conduit for all this money going from Putin to Trump and so forth.
And other news organizations, Mother Jones and all that, started picking up on all this conspiracy writing.
And so the name was out there, and that's what—this was certainly Mueller's bellywood in his jurisdiction.
That's what his job is.
You know, is there a connection between Putin and Trump?
So he never—he passed on this.
There never was any evidence of that.
Mueller, according to a source close to Mueller's office that I spoke with, said that they passed on this.
They didn't want anything to do with it because there was nothing there.
And so it was done instead by the local D.C. prosecutor's office, because all they ever do normally is, you know, murders, robberies, those kind of things.
And this was a way to get some really good publicity in the Russia investigation, to be the prosecutors who actually made the very first and only arrest of a Russian in the United States.
I mean, that was the galvanizing reason for doing this, was for—to put a very big notch in their belt.
And this prosecutor's office had been involved in prosecutorial misconduct numerous times in the past.
One judge excoriated the prosecutor for prosecutorial misconduct.
And they just keep on going on, and nothing ever happens to prosecutors.
You know, Flynn, General Flynn, headline after headline after headline, because he lied to the FBI about, you know, a fairly meaningless conversation with Kislyak, the Russian ambassador, a conversation that the NSA had anyway, because they pick up those things and the FBI had, so it wasn't secret, but anyway, he lied about it.
And headline after headline after headline, you know, he's indicted for perjury, everything.
Yet you get prosecutors who lie in court over and over again, and nothing ever happens to them.
The New York Times came out with a good editorial about a month or two ago, arguing that there should be some far better oversight of prosecutors because they keep getting away with it.
There should be some watchdog that watches prosecutors.
So that's what's happened here.
You get this prosecutor who had nothing to do with the Mueller investigation, wanted to get a little fame out of this, and that's how this arrest took place.
Yeah.
Well, and it sort of fits in, like, if you compare it to a pretext for war.
This is another orange alert, right?
This is another one of those things to get you worried and afraid that more violence is necessary in the near term here as they prepare you to attack Iraq.
And I'm not saying they're preparing us to attack Russia, but it's part of the buildup of the Cold War and the self-justification, really, for the Cold War that they've gotten us into, not just going after Trump, but in scapegoating Russia in this way as well.
Well, it's also similar to what happened after 9-11 with the FBI going after all these Muslims as potential terrorists.
If you were a Muslim, you were a potential terrorist, and that was their attitude.
There were so many senseless arrests that took place after 9-11, and now you've got Russians in the bullseye.
So you've got all this fear-mongering over Russians and Russians, and now you've got an innocent Russian arrested, basically.
So we go through these periods of fear-mongering.
Hey, let me ask you this.
In your experience, I know that, of course, during the run-up to Iraq War II, there were a lot of people in power and in the intelligence so-called community and all that, saying that this is BS, man, what are we doing here?
And I'm sure you were talking to people who didn't buy it.
I know that recently I spoke to a former CIA officer who said that when Donald Trump called off the support for Tahrir al-Sham, whatever they call themselves now, Hayat Tahrir al-Sham now, in the Idlib province in the summer of 2017, that the CIA was behind that decision.
They never really wanted to do that mission in the first place.
They did it for Obama, but they really kind of supported that.
So in other words, they have their own opinions.
Phil Giroldi, the same guy, says that the rank and file of the CIA voted for Trump, regardless of what Mike Morrell and John O'Brennan preferred.
And so I wonder if you hear much kind of pushback about all this Russia stuff from inside the CIA or the FBI or any of these agencies that, you know, this really is overblown and pretty unprecedented to go after a president this way, although I'm for diminishing presidents overall.
But this seems so dishonest and such, I mean, essentially accusing the man of treason for something that's a hoax, you know?
Yeah, well, I did it in relation to Maria Butina, and I interviewed a former head of the FBI's counterintelligence division.
He was the top counter-spy and head of counterintelligence for the FBI.
And he was shocked at what happened in the court with the prosecutors lying and so forth.
And he told me, I caught him in the article saying he was very disturbed by it.
He thinks there should be an investigation and so forth.
A former top CIA official said that a lot of times he's worked with the FBI on counterintelligence investigations, and publicity is a driving factor a lot of times.
So, yeah, and I can see that from the way we do this.
We sort of, you know, run from enemy to enemy.
Everybody, you know, you get rid of one enemy, you've got to find another enemy.
Now we've got Russia.
Before we had all these Muslim countries were potential terrorist countries, and now we've got Russia as, you know, another potential threat.
Who knows who the next country is going to be?
But it's this hysteria that we generate every time the government decides to go after some ethnic group or some country, then a lot of times the press just moves sharply and falls in line, marches right behind the government.
Yeah.
Well, we'll see how this one comes out.
You know, of course, the Senate committee, the Democrats on the Senate committee, confirmed to NBC News that, yeah, we never really did find any evidence of a quid pro quo with Trump and the Russians.
But, geez, who knows what the Mueller report might say, kind of thing.
A pretty anticlimactic end to that.
They said they interviewed 200 witnesses.
You'd think they got somewhere.
Right.
Yeah, I mean, I'm very skeptical.
I don't have any inside knowledge, but just from looking at it from the outside, I don't see any smoke, let alone fire.
Yeah.
It's like the Liberty City 7 case, right?
Same Robert Mueller, same FBI hoax department coming up with these fake cases.
Hey, kid, here's $10,000.
Say you love Osama into this microphone.
Yeah.
And the other thing is that it's been going on for two years.
And it's basically all the indictments are the usual collection of Washington liars and crooks.
I mean, that's those are like every every other person you meet.
Sometimes the government is either a liar or a crook or something at one point.
So there's nothing really unusual about that.
But yet I haven't seen the anything that even really comes close to being a conspiracy between Trump and the and Putin or Trump and the Russian government.
And, you know, I have no idea what Mueller is going to come up with.
So and I haven't written on that aspect.
It's just from an outsider looking in.
It just doesn't seem that there that there's anything there so far anyway.
Yeah.
Well, and a real good measure that I think, too, is so many journalists that are either progressives or leftists who completely reject this narrative and have done so much great reporting and opinion writing about how much they don't buy it and how little there is there.
And these are people who are predisposed in every way to disapprove and do disapprove of everything about Trump's presidency, except for this whole thing about him being a Russian agent, because that just isn't true.
That just doesn't hold up.
And they just, you know, I've interviewed a dozen of them and they keep coming.
One of the problems, however, is the it's not the reporters themselves, it's the editors and the publishers and the network owners and so forth, because this is enormous money making, very profitable.
You know, he published three articles a day on Trump.
Every time he wakes up, he sort of pulls his pants down, flashes a moon.
And that's all the news all day.
You know, you see the moon that Trump flashed today.
And so the problem with that is that everybody writes about Trump and his, the moon he flashed that morning, tweet messages or whatever, and nobody is watching the FBI, nobody's watching the NSA, the CIA.
When was the last time you ever saw an in-depth story about what the CIA is doing, what NSA is doing, what the FBI is doing?
So everybody is sort of marching to the same drummer.
You see very few journalists out there who either have the courage or the ability, and if they work for a newspaper or network, they've got to do what their bosses tell them.
Their bosses are making lots of money ever since the Trump administration came into office.
Well, it's the difference between the TV and the Internet, too, where you have, you know, the real news or the nation or the American conservative on the right, for sure.
But, you know, good stuff from time to time, at least at Truthout and some other places where they're far enough left that they're not married to every Democrat narrative.
They don't, you know, they're anti-militarism, anti-imperialism, and they remember the 2000s and the 2010s a little bit, and they're not ready to swallow these stories whole.
They know a little bit better about America's relationship with Russia than what they're kind of being told here.
And so, yeah, you're certainly right that you turn on NBC, and they broke no dissent in the premise to all of their arguments that they discussed within a very narrow goalpost.
But out here in the world, you see a lot of people who have every reason to despise Trump in every way who aren't impressed one bit by this.
I mean, I just interviewed Gareth Porter for a perfect example, right, who comes from the left, for sure.
Yeah, Gareth's an old friend of mine, sure.
But he's just one of them.
I mean, there's quite a few, you know, at The Nation magazine, for one, and thank goodness for that.
Right, exactly, and I'm always grateful that there are courageous people who are not associated with one network or another.
So you turn on cable, and all you ever see are the rent-a-spies there.
You know, you hire these – I mean, they are making a lot of money, these former CIA guys and former FBI guys.
And, you know, they're just going to tell the company line, basically.
I wonder if there's going to be hell to pay for this, eventually.
I mean, think about what a severe diversion this is off of what really, not just ought to be, but really are the priorities, even of the mainstream Democratic politicians.
All the opportunity costs here are just tremendous for something that is pretty easy to predict is not going to have the payoff that they expect, you know?
Well, yeah, my view is that we won't, because one thing that I've always seen is that the U.S. – people in the U.S. just avoid mirrors completely.
I mean, we never want to look at ourselves in the mirror, because I think a lot of times what we're afraid of we're going to see.
So after the Iraq war, that whole debacle of the Iraq war, you have the British that actually came out with, I think, a year or two-year investigation on how they got into that idiotic mess.
But we're in the United States.
Nobody looks back.
Nobody looked into why and how that whole thing happened, or nobody went to jail for lying about that.
Nothing ever happened.
And so you get these major events, and we don't have a truth and reconciliation hearing or anything like that.
We just sort of move on.
We don't want to look at that.
And same thing with a lot of what happened with the anti-Muslim arrest that took place after 9-11.
We'll just sort of forget about it.
We'll brush it under the rug and talk about it.
And so that's why I can see this thing disappearing and that everybody is sort of moving on.
We won't talk about how we got it wrong or how – Yeah.
I mean, that is – especially with Iraq, that's – Yeah.
They sort of – they kind of conceded that Iraq was a bad idea in such – one at a time over such a long period of time, kind of dragged it out in such a way that no one ever really had to say they were sorry.
And they still got to pretend that everyone agreed with them on what a great thing it was and how important it was, and never had to say, okay, everybody who said we were wrong in the first place turns out they were right.
That never came.
It was just, oh, well, I'm Jake Tapper, and here's the next war.
Yeah, exactly.
They never seem to pay a price for the same people who were wrong before or just hired and put on camera again to ask their opinion on this one and never – I mean, Colin Powell, for example, he's never – I don't think he's ever apologized for being a major player and making that – Or look at John Brennan and how he destroyed Syria.
I mean, that is just – Yeah, exactly.
Talk about accountability loss there.
I mean, that this guy's even in public at all is amazing.
Seems like he'd be hiding out in outer Mongolia right now or something.
Those people have become the – like I said, they're now the rentless spies on TV, Clapper and Brennan and all that, same people who – I mean, Clapper lied to Congress about an issue I was writing about, about NSA's warrantless eavesdropping.
And not only did nothing ever happen to him, he's now like this guru on television talking all about how he's the paragon of virtue on television now, same with Brennan and all that.
And just like you're saying, because he wasn't fired after Iraq War II where he was the head of the reconnaissance office that said that, oh, yeah, that horse trough is a chemical weapons bucket.
Or this new roof means that they're making nuclear weapons under it probably or this kind of garbage that he knew was garbage.
Well, that's what I wrote about was the fact that – and I wrote – I was one of the very few people writing that there were no weapons of mass destruction.
I wrote for USA Today.
I was one of their editorial op-ed writers.
And I argued, I think, in at least three or four op-ed pieces before the war, starting August or something, August to September, October before the war, that there weren't any – there couldn't be any weapons of mass destruction because the people I talked to involved with overhead imagery.
We have satellites that go overhead every 90 minutes, and they could see a coffee cup on a table.
And yet they said they couldn't see what was inside a building, so you might be able to build a warhead in a building, although they would be able to see the kind of trucks that would go in there.
But you definitely couldn't build a delivery system.
You couldn't build a three-stage intercontinental ballistic missile in a building.
You've got to build it in the open, and you've got to test engines, and you've got to test it and all that.
And if they don't have a three-stage intercontinental ballistic missile, which they didn't, then the odds are they don't have a warhead because what are they going to use, Federal Express to get it to the U.S.?
I mean if you don't have a way of getting it there, the odds are you don't have one.
No country in the world has ever built a warhead without building a delivery system.
So that's one of the things I argued.
There were people in the intelligence community that were arguing that, but it made no difference.
We still went to war, even though there were some really knowledgeable people in the intelligence community.
Logically, Saddam can't have mass destruction because we would have seen evidence of it, but we never did.
Well, I found the article.
You also debunked the Prague-Mohammed Atta connection in it as well.
And the article is, Bush wronged to use pretext as excuse to invade Iraq.
And according to the URL, it's from August 29, 2002.
So you sure did tell him so, all right.
Yeah, that was just one of a number of the articles.
Then I ended up, you know, then I did sort of an I told you so book afterwards saying a pretext for war.
And writing, you know, a book about how we got into the war, which we shouldn't have.
Absolutely, an indispensable volume.
And I read Shadow Factor.
I still need to go back and read the first two.
I'm sad to admit, but I won't lie to you.
Well, I was amazed that Puzzle Palace first came out in 1982.
It became a bestseller.
It's my first book, the first book ever written on NSA.
You know, it was back in 82.
And just, I think, last year, it's still in print, actually, amazingly.
And then just last year, the digital, you know, one of the big digital audiobooks put it on audiobook.
So, yeah, so when I was writing the book, I never, in other words, it's on a technology now I never even knew about when I wrote the book.
So it's kind of interesting that the book has survived that long.
Yeah, Body of Secrets came after that one.
Well, they're regarded as definitive by everybody who knows anything about it.
I mean, the three of them together, especially.
It's in Body of Secrets is where you found all the treasure trove about the USS Liberty, right?
That's right.
Yeah, I had a whole chapter on the USS Liberty and Body of Secrets, which was, you know, an enormous tragedy.
Yeah.
All right.
Well, we won't do a whole interview of that starting right now.
But anyway, thank you so much.
Great to talk to you again.
And great work on this article, Jim.
Well, thanks, Scott.
I really appreciate being on your show.
You do great shows with great guests.
So I appreciate it.
Thanks a lot.
Take care.
Bye-bye.
All right, you guys.
Read some Bamford.
The Puzzle Palace, Body of Secrets, a Pretext for War, and then The Shadow Factory, all about the Bush years and 9-11 attacks and the NSA.
And you'll really want to read those things.
And, you know, he also wrote The Man Who Sold the War about John Rendon for Rolling Stone.
You can find the PDF of that somewhere, I bet.
And God knows what.
So, yeah, read just some Bamford.
This one is at the New Republic, believe it or not.
The Russian Spy Who Wasn't.
All right, y'all, thanks.
Find me at libertarianinstitute.org, at scotthorton.org, antiwar.com, and reddit.com slash scotthortonshow.
Oh, yeah, and read my book, Fool's Errand, Timed and the War in Afghanistan, at foolserrand.us.
