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, saying 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 Peter Van Buren, a career State Department official turned whistleblower and author of We Meant Well.
And, you know, that's also the name of his blog, of course, We Meant Well.
And then, well, and he has this article for the American Conservative Magazine, Paul Manafort, eulogy for a straw man.
Welcome back to the show.
How are you doing, Peter?
Scott, it's been a long time.
We haven't spoken for a while.
I'm doing well.
Thank you.
You know, Ed Snowden and I, we meet for, you know, coffee in the park.
Now we have the either of us really get a lot of time anymore.
I knew it.
You've been living in Russia this whole time.
You Russian agent.
That's not the case.
It's back here in New York.
Nobody really cares anymore.
Oh, I see.
Good time.
Yeah, he's just I just ran into him in the neighborhood.
He was out walking his dog.
And neither of us really have much to do anymore.
A lot of free time.
So we meet in the park.
We have coffee, you know, past the bottle once in a while.
Anyway, he sends his regards.
He just reminds everybody that, you know, he's still he's still relevant.
And he's at the usual number if anybody wanted to call.
You know what?
I really should interview him.
I will say this, though, as long as you bring that up, that if people were to just search into their favorite search engine, the CIA, Google or whatever they want, they can find what they have to do is they have to search EFF NSA.
And what you find there is the Electronic Frontier Foundation has a compendium of all of the different news stories from all of the different outlets about Edward Snowden's leak.
And then links also to all of the source documentation as well.
And it's all there.
It's the ultimate compendium of the Edward Snowden leak there.
EFF NSA.
As long as you're bringing it up.
Yeah, no, that's interesting.
It's also I'm not quite sure when this is going to air, but we're speaking on the anniversary of the beginning of the Iraq war.
Oh, it is on the 20th.
The media not following reality and instead pushing a government sponsored narrative.
It's the anniversary of the first day of shock and awe, the beginning of the Iraq war, which arguably for historians will mark the destruction of the Middle East.
I mean, if you needed a convenient date to, you know, history books like that kind of thing.
So, yeah, the New York Times, Washington Post helped lead us into that war by buying every lie that came out of the Bush government and using a variety of anonymous sources to drive the narrative.
And also by working very hard to sideline any critics that suggested perhaps we were being lied to, that the war was being made up and telling us that actually the United States was at great risk.
Foreigners were trying to mess with us.
And I guess that brings us to Paul Manafort.
It kind of does.
But you know what?
I want to mention on the Iraq thing real quick, too, as long as we're making a metaphor and an analogy and a parallel and all these kinds of things with back then, because I think it's a perfect one with just Trump and or Putin standing in as Saddam Hussein or David Koresh in this narrative, the demonization kind of all of that, that there were so many people who could see through this in real time.
I mean, I remember talking about on my radio show in the late summer of 2002, talking about how for all of the aggressive wars that America started, I can't think of one where a year and a half before it started, they announced that we're going to lie you into war over the next year and a half.
And then we're going to start a war like this.
It's just crazy.
It's just unprecedented.
And I was a cab driver at the time, so I met a lot of people and all kinds of people from all different walks of life saw through it.
Right-wingers and left-wingers, rich people and poor people.
And especially if people leaned left and had a bias against the Bush government, they could see right through this.
What an obvious lie that Iraq is a threat to the USA, that we have to attack them before they attack us.
And you're just supposed to accept that massive begged question that we just know Saddam is going to attack us any minute now.
The lesson of 9-11 is, you have to start all the wars from now on.
Might as well be attacking Spain or pango-pango for all Iraq had to do with 9-11 or any kind of threat.
And again, sorry, I'm going on and on.
150 million Americans knew better.
And the other 150 million Americans thought that they were all traitors to America for knowing better and not wanting to go and get Saddam that George Bush says did something to us.
So that's the real history of that.
And that's the real history of this Russiagate thing, too.
I love to sit here and talk about, Max, I'm not exactly certain where...
I think you're one shade to the left of something.
You're not a right-winger, as far as I know.
You write for the American Conservative.
But I think your economic stuff, you're a little bit left.
But I know that, regardless of you, that Glenn Greenwald, Max Blumenthal, I'm sorry, Cohen from The Nation.
I forget his first name there.
And Ray McGovern.
And I'm sorry, I'm spacing out on the list.
But go on and on and on and on with progressives and leftists, Aaron Maté, who see right through this Russiagate narrative and haven't believed it for a minute and relish debunking all of the different failures of the Russiagate prognosticators about what all is going on here.
And I bring up the leftists especially because the right-wingers obviously have a motive to defend their president and to debunk these lies.
But when leftists, who are the kind of people who do absolutely despise Trump in every way, it's quote-unquote against interest for them to not glom onto this narrative.
But they're just not willing to be dishonest.
And that's what it would take to believe and to propagate this garbage about that Russia installed the president of the United States.
Well, one of the nice things, kind of tying this back with Iraq again, is how those handful of journalists and commentators who did speak out against the war and who did try to educate the public about how they were being lied to.
It's great to see how they've all been offered reparations and have been elevated to positions of authority.
Right, like the Eric Margulies show on Fox News every night.
And the journalists, for example, at the New York Times, like Tom Friedman and Max Boot, who promoted this war and promoted the lies, how they've been ostracized and run out of town.
Max who?
I'm not sure who you're even talking about.
Mr. Hard Wilsonianism?
Yeah, no.
I thought he committed suicide.
Oh, I'm sorry.
Except that, of course, those people were never ostracized.
They were elevated.
And I'm hoping that as this Russia thing works its way out past the, you know, the gigantic blocking hemorrhoid of American stupidity, that at some point persons, I'll just include myself here, who have been ostracized by their former left of center colleagues and friends, will come back and say, man, you were right.
You saw through it from the beginning.
I mean, I'm expecting a fruit basket from Marcy Wheeler before this is over.
You know, well, OK, so let's we're going to get in a metaphor here in a second.
But on the Mueller report, I mean, they're saying that it's coming out real soon here.
And this is just tea leaves.
And I'm not exactly sure how this works.
I know you have a lot more experience in or at least you've been a lot closer to this sort of action in your career.
They're saying that the fact that the very lead investigators and top lawyers working for Mueller are resigning now means that there are no big new indictments coming, that they're just essentially they're wrapping up with what they've already wrapped up.
We're going to have a report about what's already happened and that it's very unlikely that there's going to be any new big thing at all.
That is a reasonable way to look at this.
I mean, this has been it's important to understand that the full force of the U.S. government, first through the FBI and the intelligence agencies, later through James Comey leading the investigation and then handing it off to Bob Mueller.
I mean, the full force of the U.S. government with all of its technical means and all of its ability to look into things has been on this for coming into three years now.
If it was a child, it would be walking.
If it was a student, it would be entering junior year.
So this has gone on a long time.
The fact that Mueller is starting to shed personnel is part and parcel to the broader picture, which is if you haven't found the smoking gun in three years, the odds that it's going to turn up tomorrow seem increasingly small.
You've turned over every rock twice and haven't found it.
The idea that there are still people who are clinging to the belief that there's going to be a document or a process or an announcement that, yes, the president of the United States was helped into his job through active work by the Russians and in hand with the Trump campaign.
The idea that that has somehow been known to Mueller in part for three years and we just haven't bothered to tell anybody, we've just kind of let that run its course.
That alone tells you this whole thing is going to be a lot of nothing.
The idea that if there was even a shred of actual evidence that the president of the United States was connected, beholden somehow on the book in even the smallest way to Putin and we've let him stay in office for three years.
I mean, Mueller's the guy who needs to go to jail at that point, never mind anybody else.
So the idea that there has been nothing is the best indication that there will be nothing.
Well, and that really is the only difference between this and Iraq is that it's not the president in the White House leading the charge.
They're the targets of it.
So that confused the issue for people a little bit.
But in this case, it's just Mueller and Comey as Bush and Cheney or however you want to do the analogy that way.
But it still holds.
As my friend Shauna said back then, they actually don't really care that they get caught lying all the time and that nothing that they say ever really pans out.
All they care is that you believe it the day that they say it.
You believe the lie the day that they need you to believe it.
And when you know that they're liars later, they don't care because they know you're going to believe them next time, too.
There was a time, Peter, where you kind of paraphrase it, but you didn't really remind us as much.
It's sort of petered out now that the narrative has diminished a bit.
But there was a time where, damn right, the accusation was that Donald Trump was the Manchurian candidate, the Siberian candidate, that he was an agent, either witting or unwitting, of the government of Russia.
That they controlled him and that all of his smoke, meaning his campaign's officials had contact with Russians at X number of different times and points.
All of that went to show this was how the Russians were controlling the Trump campaign and were making sure that he became the president of the United States.
And that's a pretty big set of claims.
None of which so far have proven true or even do we have any real indication that it's true at all.
It's the same thing as Saddam is going to give chemical weapons to Osama.
You'd have to believe six phony things and just have faith in the whole thing to then turn around and think that that could really happen and be a real threat.
To look at that, as you start to parse out what's going to happen here, it's important to remember that the genesis of all things Russiagate, and I hate that word but do use it as a convenience, that all things Russiagate were based on the root idea that Vladimir Putin engineered Trump's success in the election, that Trump was a willing participant in this and that Putin has something on Trump that allows him influence over the American government.
That's what we've always been sort of talking about here.
So whenever this Mueller report or whatever we're going to call it comes out, that's what's important to remember.
What question did we ask at the beginning and what did so many people believe was true and many still believe it.
Well of course when they had the meeting in Helsinki and Trump obviously has this huge motive to deny that this happened, to defend his own so-called honor that he won this election fair and square, that he didn't get help from Putin.
So he goes, look, Putin says he didn't do it and I think that that's right.
And then all kinds of people, all kind of pundits from all across the spectrum say there is no other interpretation of this other than Putin has something on Trump that he's holding over Trump.
And it's like, no dude, the guy's defending his own self from your accusation that he either cheated or someone cheated for him and that he's not really the president.
You just had to pretend that you can't imagine that Trump would feel that way or think that way to then choose the other most likely explanation, which is, yeah, this treason.
And they even had a story about this a couple of weeks ago where in all of Trump's meetings with Putin, there are no minutes of all these meetings for the public to read.
Like this is a scandal in itself that these men talk privately, just the same as any American president and Russian president do.
Give me a break.
That's my point, of course, is that, you know, I've looked all over the place for the line by line minutes of Obama's meetings and Bush's meetings with world leaders.
And gosh darn it, I just can't seem to find any of this conspiracy apparently goes deeper than we thought.
Now, one thing that's very, very important, and we've actually gotten some new information recently that has not been widely reported, is more information about the genesis of the so-called Steele dossier and how it found its way out of Democratic opposition research into forming, we'll be generous and say part of the basis for the FBI launching this investigation.
Now, Christopher Steele was a, was, in quotes, a former British MI6 spy and operative, and he was commissioned to create a dossier showing that Trump was connected into the Russian intelligence apparatus, all the stuff we've been talking about.
Now, keep in mind that when you send someone out to fact find, that's a different story than when you send someone out to prove a thesis.
In other words, find me the best evidence you can that Trump is connected to Russian intelligence is a different tasking than find out if Trump is connected.
So Steele was sent out to do a job, and he collected this so-called dossier, which is based on a bunch of interviews with anonymous people and bits and pieces.
But Steele has been sued in Britain, and we know more from that defamation trial.
And we also know now it's more of the testimony of Bruce Orr.
Bruce Orr was the U.S. Department of Justice official who appears to be one of the main conduits for getting Steele's opposition research into the hands of the FBI.
Now, it's convenient because Bruce Orr, while he worked at the Department of Justice, Bruce Orr's wife worked for the company that sponsored and funded Steele.
So the connection there is not hard to figure out.
And when you read Bruce Orr's testimony that has come out, and not a lot of places—I read State.
There's a guy over there who's been following it very closely.
You find out that Christopher Steele was running a very successful information op against the United States.
Now, I've written about this at the American Conservative quite a while ago, and as you said, it was hidden in plain sight.
Any of us who were in government who are familiar with information ops, this was textbook stuff.
And basically what you try to do is you try to get your version of information, which may either be a partisan version or outright propaganda or direct disinformation, you try to get that into the hands of people who are credible, who will then pass it on to your target country's media and your target country's intelligence services.
So the idea would be that I create this dossier, which is what Steele did, and then using a variety of connections, he gets it into the very highest levels of government.
He talks to some friends at the State Department, who pass it to Victoria Nuland, who passes it on to John Kerry, as well as some other aides.
He gets it into the hands of John McCain's senior aide, and McCain passes it to the FBI.
Using Bruce Orr's wife, he puts it into the Department of Justice, who passes it to the FBI.
And so suddenly this work of clever fiction by Chris Steele suddenly is falling into the FBI from three different directions at least, if not more.
And suddenly it's no longer Chris Steele, it's Bruce Orr, it's John McCain, it's Victoria Nuland, who are becoming the quote-unquote sources of this, propagators, if you will.
Victoria Nuland, that's Robert Kagan's wife, the lady that did the coup in Ukraine.
Sorry, go ahead.
Golly, what a small world it is out there.
And suddenly then you also have Chris Steele working his media contacts, and this starts to pop up in the media, his so-called facts of his dossier.
And what you create in this information op is kind of a circular reference.
And so McCain says, oh my gosh, it looks like the New York Times is onto this as well.
That dovetails with what I've been hearing from this Chris Steele guy.
And all of a sudden it becomes part of the environment, and it gets picked up by sources who have inherent credibility, like John McCain, like Victoria Nuland, like New York Times.
And at that point it reaches a paranoid FBI who's already terrified of Trump for their own political reasons, and you open an investigation.
You then take Christopher Steele's dossier and you use it to open the FISA door.
Now, they claim there's some other reasons they opened the FISA investigation, but Steele's stuff is at the base of all of it.
The other things involve minor Trump officials like Carter Page, who are accidentally running into Russians in different places, and George Papadopoulos, who are running into Russians, as well as professors with long connections to the CIA.
And all of a sudden all these people start bumping into each other and saying similar things, but the sources are not multiple.
The sources are singular, they're just being proclamated through multiple sources.
And that's how you run an information op.
The FBI picks up and that says, oh my gosh, look at this, there's gambling going on in this establishment, gets the FISA warrants, and at that point they don't need Chris Steele anymore because they've got the ability to spy on everyone inside the Trump campaign.
And you just kind of see where it goes from there.
And that's what's really happened here is a bit of nothing has been cleverly spun into the justification for all the surveillance that has created the so-called perjury traps and things like that.
Paul Manafort was convicted of crimes that he committed largely before he even joined the Trump campaign.
Most of what he was convicted of involved money laundering going back to 2014 or earlier.
And in fact, he was wiretapped in 2014, and the FBI declined to prosecute based on the same information Mueller did prosecute on.
It all goes in big circles, and we choose not to look at that, at least most of the mainstream media, because the idea is that Trump couldn't possibly have won by himself.
The only explanations are everyone, half of America are racist, misogynist, white supremacist nutballs, or the Russians did it.
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You know, Bill Burr, the comedian, went on The Tonight Show a couple of months after the election and was saying, I love this argument, because that really was the first big argument.
There was fake news.
They tried a few different ones.
Russia was always part of it, but one of them was the racist.
It was the racist, all the racists, and Pepe the Frog and the race.
And Bill Burr says on The Tonight Show, isn't that funny how the racists all stayed home two elections in a row when the black guy won?
But then, when this white lady runs, all the racists come out of the backwoods somewhere to all line up and vote to stop her.
You know, that's a pretty convincing narrative.
Now, what Mueller's going to come out with—we're all into predictions, so I might as well make one.
Mueller's going to come out with—it's going to take a while and there's going to be leaks and all this other stuff.
But at the end of all, you're going to get a very legalistic attempt to claim that while he couldn't find any evidence of so-called collusion, Trump appeared to obstruct justice into an investigation that ultimately found nothing.
And while— I mean, do they even have anything like that?
I mean, the closest I've ever heard to that claim is, well, he fired the director of the FBI.
If they're going to try to pretend that that's obstruction of justice, then just get the hell out of here.
The great thing is that a lot of these terms, obstruction of justice, these are what you want them to be.
You can define them as you wish, and in the real world, you have to take them to court.
But that's not what Mueller's going to do.
Mueller's going to dump this big steaming mess in the Democrats' lap and walk away with it.
The Democrats are then going to run hearings from now until Election Day trying to make the case outside of court.
But everybody now is seeing that this is a very weak tool.
You know, a year ago, the Russia paranoia was much higher.
Two years ago, you know, we were ready to storm the barricades.
But here, as we head into spring 2019, it just doesn't have the oomph anymore.
Right.
I mean, Nancy Pelosi says, yeah, no, we're not going to impeach him because that would be too divisive.
And we don't really have anything on him that's really conclusive enough to cut and dry, impeach him in a way that we could rally the rest of the country behind it.
And so she doesn't even mention Russia when she says that.
But she's implying, obviously, I'm inferring that she doesn't believe at all in this garbage.
And she doesn't think for a minute that she could try to make a case in a House impeachment hearing that he's an agent of a foreign power, the worst one of all, and must be removed.
So she's preparing the ground here.
This is she's getting people ready.
And there have been articles in The Times and Reuters and a lot of other the usual sources that are preparing the ground that, hey, you know, maybe Mueller doesn't have anything.
And so you're watching in real time.
The Democrats are pivoting to two new themes, and they're not sure which one is going to be the so-called winner here.
But they're walking away from the so-called Putin-Russia thing, and they're trying out two new themes.
One of them we saw previewed with the Michael Cohen hearings, and that is it's not about Russia.
It's about corruption.
And Trump paid off porn stars, and Trump cheated on his taxes, and Trump paid off these guys.
They're trying out this new idea to see if there's anything that might stick with that in corruption.
The second one is kind of a back-to-the-future thing, and that is white supremacy.
We have in the United States determined that our, you know, near-daily mass killings are not, in fact, a gun problem.
They're a white supremacist problem, and everything that is now being pivoted towards those two lines.
Trump is a white supremacist.
Gosh, he influences people as far away as New Zealand.
If you vote for him, you're a racist, too.
And that cleans up the gun problem, because we don't have a gun problem.
We have a white supremacist problem.
And it also allows the Democrats to experiment with this white supremacy theme to see if that has any more traction than corruption, which is going to be a big nothing.
The idea of the things they're accusing Trump of doing are absolutely hilarious.
Overvaluing his real estate assets to get a loan, but undervaluing them for his taxes.
Everybody in New York does that.
The co-op building that I belong to does that.
It's not a crime at all.
It's actually what is done.
And, in fact, the city of New York has an office that does nothing but evaluate those claims.
You don't just announce what your taxes are.
You make an application to have your building devalued so you pay less taxes.
There are lawyers that specialize in all this.
And Trump was pretty skillful, apparently, in working this system.
Like I said, the co-op building where I live uses a very similar process every year to try to lower our taxes as well.
So there's nothing there.
There's absolutely nothing there.
The idea of paying off Stormy Daniels, they've been barking at that tree for literally three years now as well.
And it just doesn't stick.
Michael, don't you remember, gosh, those fun days when Michael Avenatti was on all the talk shows and was a mainstream personality?
And now he might as well be on the bench in the park with me in Snowden talking about the good old days.
The Democrats are now, with Russiagate fading kind of in real time, they're trying out these new ideas that it's going to be about corruption, not about treason, and then white supremacy, that a vote for Trump is going to be a vote for more mass killings.
Yeah.
I mean, and the thing is, what a climb down from high treason.
You know, geez, I got to say, the Clintons and the Bushes both are legendary criminals, too.
And I think that, I mean, we all know who Donald Trump is.
Money laundering and whatever, you know, what amounts to low level pre-presidential criminal behavior, this kind of stuff.
As you call it, basic corruption.
If it wasn't enough to keep him out of the office, it sure as hell is nothing that you can impeach him over.
And certainly not as the result of all of this, at the end of all of this.
It's very creative, I mean, that we're going to go back.
You know what?
Here's the thing about it, too.
And I don't want people to misunderstand.
I don't know how you feel about it, but the thing is, is that I think that Donald Trump should be buried under the supermax with Barack Obama and George W. Bush.
He's a war criminal.
He's guilty of genocide in Yemen.
And I don't know why the war in Somalia is any different, that he's escalated there.
He's killed at least tens of thousands of innocent people in the last couple of years.
And I support impeachment of all presidents, all the time.
And so, it's kind of ridiculous to be in the position of defending Donald Trump's position in this story.
But I guess not any different than defending the Ayatollah when it comes to the truth about his nuclear program, compared to the lies coming out of the CIA, for example.
So, you know, it is what it is.
And I know that people are so quick to say, oh, well, look, Van Buren and Horton clearly are just pro-Trump people, so they're taking the pro-Trump line and that kind of thing.
And no, really, the worst thing that could happen to him, I don't care, personally.
I mean, he should get a fair trial first, but after that, I don't care.
Yeah.
I mean, well, you talked about making war.
I mean, that's not a bug.
That's a feature in the American presidency.
Look at Richard Nixon, right?
He committed genocide in Cambodia, completely off the books, totally impeachable, high crimes in every way.
And then they get him for a burglary.
They don't get him for crimes of state.
They get him for crimes outside the loopholes.
And that's where, you know, same thing for Bill Clinton, who, you know, don't get me started.
But then they end up impeaching him for, it was perjury as a real crime in front of the grand jury.
But essentially around a cooked up story about stuff happening off the clock rather than things he did with government power.
And so same old story.
And that's it.
I am not defending Trump.
I didn't vote for Donald Trump.
I'm not going to vote for Donald Trump.
I voted for, I supported Bernie for a while and then I kind of started drinking.
But the point is that we're not defending Trump.
We're defending the process here.
We're defending truth.
We're defending the idea that American politics should not be happening this way.
We're defending, not defending, we're criticizing the media for once again becoming the lapdogs of a process that they have wholly and completely devoted themselves to trying to find something impeachable about Donald Trump.
The only time I watch the regular TV news or CNN or any of those things is when I go to the gym where somebody's already turned it on.
And, you know, you watch this and it doesn't matter what else is going on in the world.
There's a panel sitting on CNN or MSNBC saying, here's what we think Donald Trump has done wrong today.
And it could be anything from a silly tweet to thinking that he's Putin's cock holster still or arguing about Stormy Daniels or what have you.
But it doesn't matter what's happening elsewhere.
If it's a big enough thing like the New Zealand massacre and they've got some video, you know, they'll kind of cut in once in a while.
But seeing what's happened to our media, what's happened to the concept of objective journalism is what I'm worried about here.
I'm trying to think bigger than Donald Trump.
Donald Trump may disappear from history in a year and a half, or if not, it'll take four and a half years, but he's gone.
But as we ruin institutions, as we turn the FBI into partisan Stasi, as we turn the media into away from journalism and into just constant information operations, as we allow this to happen to our political system, that will live past Donald Trump.
And it will harm us as people, as a nation far into the future, long after Trump is just kind of off to the list of former presidents.
You are so right about that.
I mean, that's the whole game here is the forest and the trees.
And and, you know, and I understand how it is for partisans of any kind.
And I feel very lucky, really, in a sense that I'm a libertarian and I just had never been.
And I mean, I'm especially lucky now.
I've never been left wing or right wing in my whole life.
I've never felt married to pick one side or the other and have to defend it or any of that.
So it makes it a lot easier for me, I guess, than for other people, because I can understand how if you're a left winger, your whole identity is that you're some some kind of, I don't know, left wing feminist or whatever the kind of thing, that he's such a perfect hate figure that it's easy to see how for people, especially who are sort of political amateurs, to get caught up in the hate figure of the man himself, that, you know, the problem is not the state.
The problem is this guy.
And, you know, we see that kind of happen over and over again in the 1990s.
Government was way out of control.
And then everybody by the and people were really getting that.
Then by the end of the Clinton administration, it was more like, you know what, the problem is this guy.
And once we get George Bush's son in there, everything is going to really be good again.
We're going to have the adults are coming back instead of these high school kids of the Clinton years.
And they change it to the personality.
And Clinton was a great hate figure to him and his wife and her, especially maybe.
And then but for the left wing side, you couldn't get better kind of caricatures of these right wing corporate oil men from Houston come to take over and in alliance with the Likud party in Israel and their partisans in D.C. to take us to a war.
And then.
But so to me, it seems like living through any of this stuff, anybody old enough to have lived through this stuff, has got to start picking up on the fact that actually it's the military and the FBI and the CIA that are the problem.
And if you take those things away from these presidents, it won't really matter how evil they are.
The problem is the power to abuse.
The problem is these agencies.
So then I kind of don't give a damn, even if it was Hillary Clinton, who I really hate Donald Trump, but I really hate Hillary Clinton.
But if it was the FBI and the CIA just outright lying so they can do some kind of right wing militarist putsch and put some fake counter terror or counter intelligence investigation on her, like she's an agent of the Russians in order to quash her presidency when she won at the ballot, then no way, dude, I would defend her just the same.
It's the FBI and the CIA are actually the worst people in the whole wide world.
You might have noticed.
Well, that is the most even worse than her.
That is the most amazing thing about the events of the last couple of years is the people who now defend the FBI and the CIA, that their strongest supporters, their defenders in the media and public are folks who three years ago would have clearly labeled themselves left of center.
Absolute pieces of human species like James Clapper are now on CNN, working hand in hand with CNN to defend the CIA, the NSA, the FBI as the last line of defense for our so-called democracy.
This is something that will come out a little bit later, and it's lost right now in all the partisanship, is how much of this investigation into Trump is going to turn out to have been done electronically and on the edges of legality.
How much of the so-called convictions, the perjury convictions, it's all based on intercepts.
It's all based on emails.
Mueller's people have known in advance what questions to ask because they have been electronically surveilling people.
We now find out that Cohen has been under surveillance, was under surveillance since 2017.
Once upon a time, lawyer-attorney-client privilege was considered somewhat sacrosanct, but no more.
These doors have been flung open and are now being supported by people who otherwise should have been saying, wait, wait, wait, Trump sucks, but we're going to really start surveilling people's lawyers?
That's where we're going now?
And presidential candidates, as you say, not just the Stasi, because they've been the secret police for a long, long time, but being used in such a partisan way like this against presidential candidates, right?
Like even Bill Clinton and Hillary using the IRS to go after their political enemies and that kind of thing back then.
And the FBI files, remember that?
But actually sicken an FBI counterintelligence investigation on a presidential candidate based on a bunch of hooey?
That's a pretty big Rubicon to cross.
And we've forgotten, conveniently forgotten, about Susan Rice and Samantha Powers and others in the Obama administration abusing their power to unmask American citizen identities in intercepts so that they could know more about what was going on internally.
The FBI has also admitted to having sources inside the Trump campaign.
We've never really heard much more about that.
But what you've got is the America's internal police force, its internal secret police actively working against one campaign.
They're recruiting sources.
They're employing technical means.
They're using investigative powers.
They're threatening people with jail times to get them to rat out other people.
This is what the CIA does overseas, right?
This is what's going on in Venezuela right now, right?
You're recruiting people inside the Venezuelan military to try to find out what's going on and influence things.
You're electronically listening in to find out who's on what side and how you could sway these things.
This is what was employed against the Trump campaign.
The U.S. intelligence services collected against it.
They operated against it.
They used the tools that they use overseas here in the United States.
I mean, we still get all...
We started with comparing the lies about Iraq and this story.
But in terms of the results, it's not like the army is going to invade D.C., right?
It's not about that.
In essence, the way it's playing out is the closest parallel would be the color-coded revolutions against Shevardnadze, against Milosevic, against Yanukovych twice in 10 years in Ukraine.
They tried to do one in Lebanon, the Cedar Revolution there, where the National Endowment for Democracy and the CIA come and do all this.
And essentially the script is, Raimondo years ago, Justin Raimondo called it the Ukrainian template.
And what you do is you have your side refuse to accept the fact that they lost the election.
And instead of saying, OK, well, that's democracy.
Sometimes you win, sometimes you lose, and we'll have to organize better next time or whatever it is.
You just stay outside and you refuse to accept the thing.
And you just do everything you can to make a riot out of it and to undermine the ability of the government to proceed.
And now America is not quite as bad of a banana republic as we've turned all these other countries into, or some of them already were anyway.
So it hasn't played out quite as well in terms of the coup.
But that's essentially what's going on here.
You know, Hillary Clinton said in the summer of 2016 that Donald Trump is implying that he might not accept the results of the election.
And that would be terribly destructive.
And essentially she conceded because Obama made her.
Obama called and said, we're not doing a Bush-Gore thing.
You're going to make that call right now, lady, because there's not going to be this controversy on my watch.
No way.
But other than that, she didn't want to concede.
And then she essentially has taken that back and remembered, too.
She was trying to organize a thing.
And this sounds crazy and stupid.
It sounds like I'm the crazy and stupid one for bringing it up.
I know this every time.
So I use that as a disclaimer that you can read this in the New York Times, that this is real.
That the Hillary Clinton campaign was working with recently retired and I guess current CIA officials trying to arrange a CIA briefing of the Electoral College.
In order to get the Electoral College to vote against Donald Trump.
And to either give it to her or to deadlock and throw it to the House of Representatives.
So that the House of Representatives could give it to Paul Ryan or Colin Powell.
They were floating.
And I don't know if he ever agreed to that.
But they said his name, not me.
That was where that came from.
They were really trying to do that.
They didn't understand that the way James Madison designed it was that those electors are from Missouri and wherever.
And they're not going to do what you say, lady.
The thing is that we're at early days on all this.
People who talk about coups and talk about deep state as we do.
The big counter argument is, well, James Comey basically torpedoed Hillary Clinton in July of 2016 when he announced that they were still going to have to investigate some things.
And what you're seeing there is not information that's counter to the idea of a coup.
What you're seeing there are internal divisions within the FBI about how they wanted the coup to go down.
And how they wanted to cover themselves.
The idea that you're finding manipulation overtly, but it just doesn't all follow the same straight line, doesn't mean it wasn't manipulation.
It's manipulation.
It just means that there were differences of opinion on how this was supposed to work.
There were people who were less skilled.
And shifting over time as well.
Right.
There were people that were less skilled than others.
So the idea that you're saying, well, because the manipulation doesn't go in a straight line, it proves that it wasn't manipulation.
You're ignoring the most obvious fact, which is that the FBI, through a number of means, was influencing the election.
Maybe amateurly.
But people tend to get better at stuff like this over time.
We'll keep an eye on the 2020 elections and see how many leaks come out.
The amount of information that was gathered by Mueller's team and the FBI ancillary to whatever they thought they were investigating.
The amount of dirt that must have been found.
The amount of dirt that you could find basically taking anybody and exposing their entire life to scrutiny.
I'd be interested to see how much of that pops up at interesting times during the 2020 campaign.
Speaking of that, let me let it not go without saying, this guy Beto O'Rourke is completely ridiculous.
And I'm not saying anything in favor of him at all.
Just as my disclaimer, the same as with Trump there.
But I saw where they're going back to and saying, oh my God, this guy, when he was a teenager, he wrote a short story where the protagonist ran down two kids with his car.
In a short story that he wrote when he was a child.
And I'm supposed to care?
But anyway, the mark is that, yes, they're going back to what you wrote when you were a teenager now.
I don't know how anyone's ever supposed to run for anything.
God help us.
Some of that is just the idiocy of what's happened to the media where because of Twitter and things, they have to constantly shock you in some way or at least try to stimulate you in some way.
And, you know, some days they've got good stuff and some days they got to make do.
Yeah.
And they got a reaction out of me, which was just shaking my head going, man, these people come up with this is his stuff from high school.
But I mean, they're even there.
You can have some some interesting thoughts about it because it's like, well, you know, why was it, you know, Kevin Brett Kavanaugh's high school life was suddenly seen as the critical fulcrum of whether he should be on the Supreme Court.
So why not?
Well, at least that was a question of whether he had done something to someone or not, rather than just complete nonsense.
But even still, I mean, the arguments about, well, look, Beto was in high school.
It's just not a good deal.
It doesn't really give us any information.
But with Kevin, all the whole idea was, no, no, no.
These are these are clues to his inner inner self.
This is who he is.
People don't change.
Those same arguments, when you point them at Beto and his stupid high school scribblings, those arguments look ridiculous.
Yeah, but we're willing to accept them in some context and then reject them wholly in other contexts.
But I'm talking more serious stuff.
Yeah.
Well, and speaking of which, and this is the one point that I didn't make in my little soliloquy.
My last soliloquy during your interview here was about the 25th Amendment.
The briefing of the Electoral College was where I left off.
But the one more thing was, and we know that this started, I guess, with the FBI themselves, that they would invoke the 25th Amendment, which apparently, have you read the Constitution lately, Peter Van Buren?
It says in there that the 25th Amendment says that the FBI can do a coup if they want and or they can convince the cabinet to overthrow the president on a pretext.
They'll just pretend that he's mentally deficient or that he's incapable in the most general way of carrying out his office.
And they'll just overthrow him because, yeah, we can do that.
It's in Federalist No.
99 or something.
The interesting thing about the 25th Amendment and how, first of all, the people who wrote it are mostly still alive because it was written following the Kennedy assassination.
This isn't like trying to figure out what Thomas Jefferson was thinking or reading between the lines of the Federalist Papers.
We actually know what these people were trying to do when they wrote that.
And they have been and they were very, very clear that they wanted to create a formal line of succession that had been left out of the Constitution.
And that was pretty much what they wanted to do.
They were not trying to create a backdoor mechanism for redoing an election or overturning an election.
But the thing with the 25th Amendment is that what we have, what people, I guess, whatever you want to call them, Democrats, leftists, progressives, whatever, Trump haters.
Trump haters have totally allowed, with the concurrence of the media, have totally created this myth of what the 25th Amendment exists to do and how it works and why it's there.
It doesn't work that way.
It's not there so that people can kind of look again at the election and say, do we do the right thing?
Do we want to take another look at this kind of thing?
It's not an escape clause for an election.
It exists simply as a matter of housekeeping, really, of bookkeeping.
The Constitution, as it was originally drafted, did not kind of lay out this whole idea of succession.
The predecessors to the 25th Amendment before the Kennedy assassination were all highly classified, and they were done through national security directives, and they were aimed at nuclear war.
And they created, in fact, a kind of nuclear succession that was designed in the absence of the president to make sure somebody was around to give the order to blow up Russia.
And those national security directives were never really aimed at questions of, well, what happens after the war is over?
You know, is the secretary of agriculture still in charge or not?
They were really aimed at one thing, which was we want to make sure there's somebody around to give the order to blow up Russia.
And so they created these so-called nuclear successions.
I actually did some research on this.
Let me stop and ask you for a second, and please continue with the research thing in a second, but I just want to make sure I understand you right.
You haven't mentioned Woodrow Wilson's stroke yet.
You're saying that this is not really about something like that.
This always really was simply about continuity of government in the event of war with the USSR.
No, no, I'm saying the 25th Amendment cleaned up this ambiguity.
Part of it says that, yeah, after the House speaker, then it's the president pro tempore.
But part of it also is about the cabinet voting that the president is incompetent and that then it can go back and forth.
So please address that part, too.
Prior to the 25th Amendment, what we had was an attempt to create a de minimis continuity of government that was really only aimed at one thing, which was make sure someone's around to blow up Russia.
And following the Kennedy assassination, there was this understanding that we need to have this codified.
What happens if the president isn't able to execute his duties, either because in Wilson's case he had a stroke and his wife sort of ran the government unofficially, or in the Kennedy case where we just kind of assumed the vice president would just step in and everything would kind of fall in place after that.
And they decided it was important enough to kind of codify, and that it was important enough to add in this incapacitation clause, because in the modern world, you know, once upon a time, if you got shot, you died.
I mean, you didn't kind of – but with modern medicine and things, it was very possible that people could be incapacitated.
And they were aware of the Wilson thing.
So they codified.
It was housekeeping.
It was administrative.
It was just kind of getting something that had been inadvertently left out of the Constitution written down.
What I'm saying about the continuity of government stuff during the Cold War is that it was really only aimed at one thing, and that seemed to be enough at the time.
One of the things I did some research on was if you remember back when Ronald Reagan was shot, there were – and then the Secretary of Defense, Alexander Haig – was he Secretary of Defense or State?
State at the time, I think.
State.
But Alexander Haig announced, I'm in charge.
I'm in charge.
Right.
I am in the chair, he said.
He was possibly citing these classified nuclear chain of command rules instead of citing the – what would have been, I guess we'd call it the 25th Amendment.
It may have been that he misunderstood this or that he was trying in an awkward way to clarify who was in charge of what.
It's a little footnote to history, but the fact that – I actually saw an interview of him where he explained that he knew that he was a bit outside the law, but he was just doing it because somebody – the Russians had to know that someone was in charge of the executive branch, and if – hell, if they put me in prison later, fine.
I don't know if he said exactly that, but essentially somebody had to do it, and I was Secretary of State.
I figured good enough.
The bottom line is that none of the 25th Amendment was designed to have a do-over on an election or to give us a chance to second-guess the electorate or to end a president's term because we've collectively decided we don't want him there anymore for any of these other reasons.
It was there simply to say if the president drops dead or becomes unable to do his work – and we all know that the 25th Amendment famously is invoked when the president goes for his yearly colonoscopy and goes under anesthesia or something.
That's what it's there for, but we have allowed ourselves, and the media has taken this up as a cause.
People have written books.
Elizabeth Warren, who is a leading candidate for president on the other side, just said that this should be done.
And the FBI certainly thought it should be done, and we've seen that some people in the FBI may or may not even actively have tried to organize something along these lines.
And that's not what the 25th Amendment was there to do.
If you don't like the president, there's exactly one avenue that exists, and it's impeachment, and it requires him to commit real crimes, not just be a shitty guy.
The Constitution is very clear.
Shitty guy, you know, somebody you think is crazy because he tweets all the time, just are not what this was meant to be.
It's very clear.
And leave it to these Democrat warmongers to not think ahead about what would really happen if they illegally overthrew the president under some 25th Amendment type pretext.
There'd be a war.
And the people who would go to war on the right-wing side, they wouldn't just start assassinating Democrats.
They'd start murdering innocent people, blacks and Jews, wherever they find them, or whatever their problem is.
It would be a catastrophe.
And, you know, I don't know.
And the right-wing militias these days compared to the 90s seem to be, you know, a lot more right-wing than they used to be in a sense.
They're just as armed, which is fine.
But, yeah, much more ideological, and I think in more dangerous ways.
But Elizabeth Warren thinks, yeah, this will just be fine.
We'll just do a coup, and then we don't have to worry about what's going to happen after that.
You know, like David Petraeus, the great American fraud David Petraeus said, tell me how this ends, where you do this, where now we don't do elections anymore.
Now we're just going to have a war over power in D.C.
And how that's supposed to work out.
Well, I suspect, I don't want to give him too much credit, but I suspect that Obama had some of these things on his mind when he behind the scenes worked very actively to finish the election in 2016.
That's right.
Absolutely right.
Because he was already being accused by, you know, the kind of right populist conspiracy types.
He's going to try to cancel the election.
He's going to do a coup.
He's going to overthrow.
He's going to rig it for Hillary.
It was going to be his fault if there was a problem like that, and he didn't want that.
Think of how that would have looked on his record, that that was the end of his presidency, was a violent fight for power or anything along those lines at all.
Yeah, a chaotic breakdown of the elections.
But I'm certain that Hillary would not have conceded if he hadn't called her and told her that, hey, we're not doing this, lady, I'm telling you right now.
She's still sort of running.
I mean, she's still sort of, she's like herpes.
She still keeps popping up in different places to make a little speech about, you know, this is wrong and that's bad.
I'm so disappointed that she's not actually running again.
When she announced that she's not going to be in the race, I was so bummed, because that promised to be the most hilarious thing that ever happened in American politics, to watch her lose again for the third time.
I think we'll be watching all the current candidates, you know, kind of like, gee, Hillary, we'd love to have you speak at my rally, but gosh, it's sort of, we're already full.
We'll have a microphone and, you know, maybe you could do an op-ed for The Washington Post.
That's a good idea.
That's funny.
You know, I think we probably joked about this back then, that how in the world do they think that this is the best candidate to put forward here?
When if you even look back at the 90s, like, why did everybody hate Bill Clinton so much?
It was because of his wife.
I mean, some of us hated him because of Waco and stuff like that.
But for most people, it's just because of his wife.
Like, have you ever gone back and watched the Norm MacDonald clips from Weekend Update about how Bill Clinton came out against gay marriage today?
And he also said he's not very happy about the other kind either.
You know, like, there's a million of them.
You know, this will be, it'll be interesting to see as the Democratic field works its way through whether they will manage to find the worst candidate among all the people running and make sure that that person gets elevated to lose to Trump the way Hillary did.
I've written for the American conservative that the Democrats need, if they want to successfully challenge Donald Trump, they need to have a real primary.
I hate the word robust.
It's overused.
But they need to have a robust primary and they need to weed out the weak candidates.
And if they allow themselves to try to fix the primary as they did with Clinton, they're going to end up with someone who plays well to their base and dies on the national stage.
Yeah.
Well, I'm excited about the Democratic primary season coming up, honestly, because there's, as you referred to, there's such powerful institutional force at the top of controlling all those super delegates and all that sort of way.
But at the same time, there's a lot of candidates in this thing.
And you have Tulsi Gabbard, who, you know, really has some anti-war things to say.
She's not perfect on everything, but she can win a fight about any one of these foreign policy topics with any of these other people want to tangle with her.
She knows who's on whose side better than any of them.
And then I just saw this today that Bernie Sanders just put out a campaign ad that features Shaun White at the rally where he began his campaign this time, highlighting the statements that Bernie Sanders is against apartheid in Israel, apartheid-like conditions that the Palestinians are subjected to.
So for Bernie Sanders to really kind of lead with that, that he is really absolutely unhappy with the status quo in Israel-Palestine, he wants to fight about it right now.
That, to me, is – I mean, I don't know.
I'm not naive.
I'm not saying I think a lot of good things are going to happen, but I think a lot of hilarious fights are going to break out.
That's what I want to see.
I'm looking forward to it.
I hope there is a lot of discussion.
I hope it's not just an endless drag of Medicare for all, but we're not going to talk about the details, and reparation, but we're not going to talk about the details, and restore America's honor and all those kind of ambiguous things.
The more of it there is there, the less chance that Democrats have.
All right.
Well, listen, I don't know how long it takes to get to D.C. from New York, but coming up this Friday, I think it is – oh, man, I hope I didn't get that wrong – is Grant Smith and the Institute for Research Middle Eastern Policy, as well as the Middle East Report – or the – RMEA.
You know the guys.
The Washington Report on Middle Eastern Affairs.
They put on this Israel lobby conference, not for the Israel lobby, but against it, every year at the National Press Club in D.C., and that's coming up this week, and I'm about to interview Grant about it right now.
And I've been there twice, and it's really great.
And so, if you're able to get there for that, I think you would probably want to.
All the information is at IRMEP, I-R-M-E-P, IRMEP.org.
Sounds good.
I'll check it out.
Scott, always a pleasure.
Thank you.
Great to talk to you again.
Really appreciate it.
OK, guys, so that's Peter Van Buren, and the book – the most recent book is Hooper's War.
I'm sorry I didn't mention that at the beginning, but I meant to.
And his website is WeMentWell.com, where he writes all these great articles.
And then also here's at the American Conservative, Paul Manafort, Eulogy for a Straw Man.
All right, y'all, thanks.
Find me at LibertarianInstitute.org, at ScottHorton.org, AntiWar.com, and Reddit.com slash Scott Horton Show.
Oh, yeah, and read my book, Fool's Errand, Timed and the War in Afghanistan, at foolserrand.us.
