Sorry, I'm late.
I had to stop by the Wax Museum again and give the finger to FDR.
We know Al-Qaeda, Zawahiri is supporting the opposition in Syria.
Are we supporting Al-Qaeda in Syria?
It's a proud day for America.
And by God, we've kicked Vietnam syndrome once and for all.
Thank you very, very much.
I say it, I say it again, you've been had.
You've been took.
You've been hoodwinked.
These witnesses are trying to simply deny things that just about everybody else accepts as fact.
He came, he saw us, he died.
We ain't killing they 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 Mr. Told You So, Mr. Right About Everything, all the time, the great Ray McGovern.
Welcome back to the show.
Ray, how are you, my friend?
Thanks, Scott.
I've never been right all the time.
I asked my wife about that.
But on this one, I think we can be proud of veteran intelligence professionals for sanity's record on this.
And of course, our beloved and much admired tutor, Robert Perry, who died in January of last year, was an incredibly valuable.
Well, what's the word?
Paragon of integrity.
And he taught me a heck of a lot about journalism.
Yeah.
You know what?
I'm glad you started with that.
I have my list of honorable mentions here.
It sort of goes without saying we're talking about Russiagate today here.
Ray McGovern, former CIA analyst.
He was actually the head of the Soviet division way back when.
And like a lot of other people who we're going to get to in a minute, you've been good on this Russiagate nonsense for three years, from the very beginning, when they started putting this stuff out in late spring or early summer of 2016.
And the record will reflect that.
There's no question about that.
And so that's you and your colleagues at Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity.
But also, as you say there, your former colleague, the late Robert Perry from ConsortiumNews.com.
So take us back actually to the beginning there, if you could.
And as I know, the two of you were very close friends as well as colleagues and talked about this stuff all the time as the story was breaking and developing from the very beginning.
So go ahead.
Tell us a little bit about who was Robert Perry for those who aren't familiar and just how great he was on this particular story here, Ray.
Well, he's a very unassuming person, but he was a crackerjack investigative reporter.
One of the few left, actually, he and Cy Hirsch and Glenn Greenwald, you know, maybe Mark Danner.
On the fingers of one hand, I can count them now.
The rest are all thoroughly discredited over this weekend by the Mueller report or what Barr had to say about it.
So suffice it to say that Bob set up ConsortiumNews.com when Newsweek wouldn't let him print what he'd come up with in investigative reporting.
He had cracked the Iran-Contra affair.
You know, Bob won such acclaim for unveiling not only that, but the October surprise, which showed that the CIA and others persuaded Iran not to release the hostages until new President Reagan was inaugurated, which they did an hour later.
So he was on to a lot of stuff and all of a sudden he became very unpopular because the powers that be didn't want another crisis.
They didn't want another Republican president.
You know, after Nixon, you had Reagan, totally popular, all fraudulent.
But so anyway, here's a vignette that speaks volumes.
Bob was invited by the head of Newsweek to a small soiree.
Corporate was coming down from New York and various other mookity mooks, as my Irish grandmother would call them.
And they're sitting around.
There was a representative from the state of Wyoming.
His name was Dick Cheney.
And Brent Scowcroft, who had just left being national security advisor, was holding forth.
And as Bob explained it, he's had this little shrimp cocktail.
He said it was quite good, shrimp cocktail.
And he had it in a fork.
And Scowcroft says, you know, my former deputy, Admiral Poindexter, is going to testify before Congress on Tuesday about Iran-Contra.
And if I were advising him, I would tell him to say that we never told President Reagan anything about any of this.
Now, Bob knew different, of course, and instinctively just drops his fork.
It shatters his glass.
And he says, General Scowcroft, do I understand correctly that you would counsel your former deputy to perjure himself before Congress?
Complete silence, Bob says.
Seemed like five minutes, but it was about half a minute.
And finally, the head of Newsweek put his arm around me.
Now, Bob, sometimes you have to do what's best for the country.
Gentlemenly laughter around the room.
Well, all men, anyway.
And, you know, there it was.
We know what's best for the country.
We will tell lies or we will tell the truth depending on what we decide is best for the country.
Now, that set the tone.
Now we see the New York Times, the Washington Post, CNN, MSNBC, all knowing what's best for the country and distorting all the evidence and persuading, you know, America's not used to what we saw in the Soviet Union.
They're not used to the whole media lying through their teeth.
And so as before the attack on Iraq, when 69 percent of the American people believed not only that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction, but also that he played a key role in 9-11.
Okay, 69 percent.
Wow.
Now, I guess it's about 69 percent of the American people believe that Russia interfered in the election.
Now, that's big because, you know, last time I checked, Russia still has nuclear weapons.
And to the degree you stoke up artificial tension with Russia and with crazies like Bolton and Pompeo having Trump's ear.
And now he feeling his oats as having been vindicated on this.
My God, I think the situation is more labile, as the Germans say, more delicate than ever before.
So I worry about this.
And the whole thing traces back to how the media decided that they would not be the fourth estate holding the government accountable, as Edmund Burke suggested when he coined the phrase.
No, no.
They would be a handmaiden.
They would drink the Kool-Aid and they would decide what's best for the American people to know.
And so we have this lie, let's call it what it is, this lie about Russian hacking.
That was the cornerstone.
Let's not forget, nobody talks about Russian hacking anymore because there is no evidence of Russian hacking.
The forensics that we have done in veteran intelligence professionals for sanity, which includes two former technical directors of the National Security Agency.
The forensics we have done on the metadata show beyond reasonable doubt that the Russian, nobody hacked the Russians.
Nobody hacked the DNC.
What happened was some insider put a thumb drive in a computer, copied onto the thumb drive the DNC emails and got them somehow, probably by getting on a, I was going to say Pan American, then I was going to say TWA, my God.
No, getting on some kind of flight across the Atlantic and giving it to one of maybe Julian Assange's associates.
So just to finish up on this, what was the effect of the publication of the DNC emails?
Well, I think most people would agree that it really hurt Hillary Clinton.
Why?
Because they were true.
They were factual.
They were literally authentic.
Okay.
What did they show?
They show that she cheated Bernie Sanders out of the nomination for the presidency.
Oh, did that tick off a lot of people?
I'll bet your boots it did, especially all those fans of Bernie who went over to work in the DNC when Bernie caved in.
Oh, did one of those fans put a thumb drive in a DNC computer?
That's what I think.
I can't prove that, but I can prove that it wasn't hacked and NSA would have that information if it were hacked.
Let me jump in there for a second to say that I read some dissent from even inside veteran intelligence professionals for sanity, which is worth mentioning here about that.
It seems like a Russian agent could have put a thumb drive in there.
I don't know.
It's all kind of hypothetical, so I don't know about beyond reasonable doubt personally.
And I'm no NSA forensic computer genius either, so I don't know what position I'm in to judge.
But I can certainly say that Benny and Yeltsin report cast plenty of doubt on the whole theory that this must have, essentially this giant begged question, that this all must have been the GRU that did it.
And I'll add that I interviewed Craig Murray myself, and Craig Murray told me not that he received the leak, the Daily Mail got that wrong, but that he met with the person who gave the leak to WikiLeaks and talked with that person and that that person was in no way conceivably tied to Russia whatsoever.
And he did not say specifically that it was a disgruntled Democrat member or anything that specific.
But certainly there was room for that.
And then he implied, quite specifically, meant for us to infer that the Podesta leak actually came from inside the intelligence community.
And that that was a vendetta by, I think he was implying the National Security Agency were the ones who were responsible for that one.
I don't know about that.
But certainly there's enough to cast a lot of doubt on the theory that it was certainly the Russians.
And so you can go ahead and say one thing, but then I'm going to play this clip of you confronting Representative Adam Schiff about this, Ray.
Yeah, let me just interject here, Scott.
I guess the highest position besides briefing the president of the White House every other morning that I had at CIA was being a national intelligence officer.
That meant that I had my at my beck and call all the assets of the intelligence community, not just the CIA.
And I represented Bill Colby at the time, the head of CIA.
Now, what does that mean?
That means when technical issues came up, I relished the notion that I could pick the most honest, the most experienced, the most expert technical people that I knew were honest.
And I could ask them to give me a draft.
And that's precisely what happened.
When the flap went up, Turkey invaded Cyprus, right?
And Congress cut off arms aid or arms deliveries to Turkey.
Whoa, that was a big flap.
So what's Kissinger wanting to do?
He's going to say, oh, this will deprive our intelligence people of insight into what's going on in Russia because we have all these bases in Turkey and they're going to close them and it's going to be terrible.
So I said to Bill Colby, I said, Bill, I don't know if that's the case.
I need to do a memo so that we can inform Congress as well as Kissinger what damages would do if the Turks kicked us out of Turkey.
OK, so I went to Admiral Showers, the guy who knew chapter and verse about our collection in Turkey.
And he said to me, Ray, no sweat.
In two months, we have the kind of, we have an array of satellites that can collect three times as much intelligence that we need on the Soviet Union as the current set up land based radar and so forth in Turkey.
So write that.
Now, I said, give me a draft.
So he gave me a draft.
I polished it and checked it out with the other analysts.
And we gave it to Kissinger.
Now, did Kissinger like that?
He hated it because this destroyed his whole case.
What's my point here?
My point here is that we squishy, squishy political analysts, Bill Binney calls us, history majors with some derision.
Well, we can add something, but we can't add forensic detail.
And I just have to tell you that if you have not read the last VIPS memorandum, then you need to do that because it makes a conclusive case from a technical point of view.
And nobody knows more than Bill Binney and his colleague Ed Loomis about this.
So, you know, I'm not exaggerating in saying that from a technical point of view, some things are possible.
Some things are not.
Physics, physics makes things possible or impossible.
Binney knows about this.
We've been saying this for.
OK, so the most obvious objection, though, Ray, is that you guys seem to presume that if the Russians did it, that they did it from Russia.
And now maybe that's Mueller's claim.
But wouldn't it be possible that through VPNs or whatever, that they could have downloaded it from next door to DNC headquarters?
Or even that a cut out double secret agent could have gone in there with a thumb drive and it still could have been them.
Scott, this has been argued ad infinitum.
OK, now, I guess maybe we can't argue it right now.
But what I'm sorry, but I actually have never heard you answer the objection about whether the hack, if it was the Russians, whether it had to have taken place from Russia or whether it still could have been the Russians, but in the neighborhood.
Look, it was saved to a thumb drive.
We know that because it was staged to a storage device using the FAT application, which can only be used for storage.
Now, that appeared in the initial WikiLeaks revelations.
So we know that it was saved to a thumb drive before it was given to WikiLeaks.
What more proof do you need?
OK, so in other words, let me make sure I understand, because you know me, man, I'm on your side.
But what you're saying, though, then is that that precludes.
So it's not just that it had to have been, you know, from Russia.
It could have been the argument that it could have been from next door in the neighborhood, that that's precluded as well.
You're saying it had to have been from the actual computers on site, not even connected to the same AT&T box or anything.
Yeah.
If you really want, as I say, Bill Binney is confronted with these questions all the time.
So you really should have him on.
But suffice it to say that, you know, in all candor.
Actually, I did when this first all came out back two years ago.
In all candor, I've learned in my long life and career to trust trustworthy technical evidence based on physics.
OK, physics, the unchanging laws of physics.
Now, for people to set themselves up as equals to Bill Binney and ask those questions and not be satisfied with technical answers based on physics.
Well, I'm getting tired of it.
So ask Bill Binney back on.
You'll see that it's a conclusive case now.
And this is no small thing, because even, you know, even Barr.
Does he mention forensics in those four pages?
He mentioned it once and he mentions it in the forensic investigators, CPAs, accountants.
That's what he consulted.
He did not.
He did not consult, as far as I can see, or Barr.
I mean, we have Mueller committed to fairy tales based on this Guccifer 2.0.
We can't prove what I'm just about to say.
But Binney and I believe with the preponderance of evidence that Guccifer 2.0 is none other than John Brennan, head of the CIA, who had the means, the offensive cyber warfare tool and the opportunity.
And we know some of the things that they claim were Guccifer 2.0 revelations to Russia were doctored, were superimposed on Russian MS Word type documents and so on.
So, you know, it's technical, but it's not really hard to understand.
I request that all your listeners just read our last VIPS memorandum.
And, you know, if you're not convinced, well, that's OK.
Some people will never be convinced.
All right.
Well, I mean, in a way, it almost doesn't matter because that's just one part of a 75 or 175 assertion long conspiracy theory here about the Russian intervention.
So, in other words, if the Russians had broken in there and downloaded some data, that doesn't prove they're the ones who provided it to WikiLeaks.
The Russians might have stole everything out of every computer in America.
And it still was a disgruntled Democrat who took it on a thumb drive and gave it to Assange somehow or something.
We don't know.
And in fact, isn't it fair to assume that America and Russia are trying to break into each other's political party's computers all day, every day, no matter what?
That doesn't necessarily imply responsibility for the leak at all.
And then, of course, from there, you have all the, as the TV likes to put it, all the contacts between the Trump team and the Russians.
It all must amount to something, even though it's simply just, as I've always said this whole time, it's just like the case against Saddam Hussein in 2002.
It's 100 times zero equals zero.
It's all just a bunch of things.
If you believe them all, and if you believe in your conclusion first, then wow, what a conspiracy theory.
But if you're skeptical at all, like Robert Perry, like Joe Lauria, his successor as editor at Consortium News, yourself, of course, Aaron Maté from The Nation, Glenn Greenwald, Max Blumenthal.
I mostly am giving credit to the left here, because it's against interest.
Here are all people who are necessarily anti-Trump in every way, who have never bought into this for a minute.
And there have been some good journalists on the right who have covered it, of course, as well.
So, those people deserve credit.
I want to make sure I mention that.
Peter Van Buren, of course, he's coming on next, has been right about this all along.
I've been right about it all along.
So, yeah, it's a pretty big deal, isn't it?
I'm sure you saw the thing by Matt Taibbi about how this is absolutely this generation's WMD, which is crazy to think it's already a generation later.
But this is absolutely as huge of a CIA and media scandal as when they lied us into Iraq War II.
Ray, what do you think of that?
I'm more afraid of, yeah, Iraq War II could be run, as I mentioned in passing before.
Just kind of a footnote here, I need to make something very clear.
If Guccifer 2.0 can be proven to be a fraud by the principles of physics and forensics, then Mueller's indictment of these 12 GRU, not apostles, but the GRU operatives, you know, for doing their intelligence work.
I mean, if Guccifer 2 is a source, which it is, then that thing falls apart too.
So, Guccifer 2 does matter.
Oh, absolutely.
And I'm telling you what, I mean, if John Brennan is, in other words, the CIA was behind that aspect of this, then he ought to be in permanent exile to Iraqi Sunnistan or something.
Well, he's sweating it out, and with good reason.
If Trump picks up the cudgel here, and I doubt that he will because he's afraid of the deep state, but if it goes after these people, the evidence is abundant for what they did.
And that's one reason why you have Russiagate, to disguise what really went on, which was FBIgate doing everything they possibly could to make sure that Hillary won and Trump lost.
And then when Trump won, trying to emasculate him, make sure that he couldn't do anything, especially improve relations with Russia, because, you know, unless you have a good enemy, it's really, really hard.
Hey, and that's what they told CNN.
Yeah, we were trying to hem him in.
That was what they said.
Well, you know, it's really bizarre, the whole thing.
But I'm glad that you mentioned Matt Taibbi, because I read his thing last night.
It is excellent.
I'm glad you mentioned Peter Van Buren.
He's a veteran intelligence professional society associate, and I have a high admiration for him.
The other person I'll mention is Glenn Greenwald.
Finally, Amy Goodman had Glenn Greenwald on yesterday instead of these amateur lawyers that she has on often, and he just did an incredibly direct job in exposing how guilty the media is and how serious it is.
In my view, it's more serious.
How can it be more serious than weapons of mass destruction?
But in terms of what Trump might be emboldened to do now by the likes of Bolton and Pompeo, you know, I fear for Iran.
I fear for an attack on Iran.
I think it just as easily could come to help Netanyahu win the election in another month or two.
And these people don't care about the consequences.
And those consequences will be very, very big.
Yeah.
I mean, that's the whole thing of it, right, is we already have seen hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of thousands of people killed from the WMD lies.
We don't really know what the consequences of this are going to be yet, but they're going to play out for a long time.
And, you know, at the top, Antiwar.com today, we're running an article about the Russian reaction to Mueller's announcement that there's no charge, the whole thing is bogus.
And they're saying, yes.
So what about all the demonization of us?
What about this whole thing, this whole pile of what about?
And I think he even mentions it's like a deputy foreign minister type, I think, talking and saying, well, what about these poll numbers now where Americans hate us and fear us and all this stuff?
And it was all BS.
We're going to wind back the clock on that.
And it just you could tell it was like a heartfelt, real outrage here that what a hoax.
And at the expense of the most important relationship in all of history forever, the relationship between America and Russia, the possessors of the high thousands of H-bombs.
I mean, this is absolutely crazy.
People tell a lot of lies, but with something like the relationship between America and Russia at stake, my God, man.
Well, that's the point.
And people lose sight of that because they're inured to all this.
They don't they don't know what it was like during the Cold War.
They don't know, for example, that in 1987, I was still on active duty, still working in the CIA at the time, a whole class of nuclear missile weapons were banned, were destroyed.
They were called SS-20s on the Soviet side.
We call them Pershing II missiles.
They were medium range ballistic missiles.
They were at high alert in Western Europe and west of the Urals in the Soviet Union.
And the reaction time to prevent a nuclear holocaust was trimmed down from 30 minutes to about 12 minutes.
Now, what is it?
Well, Trump decided on Bolton's advice not only to leave, as Bush did, the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, but now the Intermediate Nuclear Forces Treaty, the INF Treaty.
What's the reaction time now if this persists?
Well, it's down around eight or nine minutes.
Now, we know from history that we would all have been blown off if there were only eight or nine minutes for the Russians to decide whether this was real or not.
And for those who have this naive idea that if we did a first strike on Russia, Putin would, in his wisdom and his kind of nonchalance, say, all right, well, we're doomed, so what's the sense of killing a hundred million Americans?
No, no.
He made clear when he ran for reelection last year that when somebody said, well, would you really retaliate if Russia was going to be blown up anyway?
And he said, look, he said, what would the world be like without Russia?
Now, that's pretty clear.
The Russians are used to being attacked.
They lost 26 million in World War II.
They know that we're not used to being attacked.
So, if you're a Russian commander in chief, what are you going to tell your rocket forces commander when you hear people like Pompeo or Pence saying, well, you know, the rapture's not so bad, you know?
If we destroy the world, at least we'll be saved, we'll be raptured up, but the rest of you will be left behind.
What is Putin to make of all that?
And what about the people that oppose Putin's relaxed, relative relaxed reaction to what he sees on this side?
So, all this is at stake, and you do very well, Scott, to point out that, you know, this is what really matters.
A broken clock is right two times a day.
Trump is right about Russia.
He's right about Korea, okay?
Maybe that's all he's right about.
More so about Afghanistan, too.
Yeah, well, he'd like to be right, and he'd like to be right about Syria, too, but he's not his own man, as you and I know.
He's got the deep state to contend with, especially in military in those cases, and so he's got to tread a pretty careful path.
What worries me, as I'll say for the third time, is that now that he's been vindicated, and that's the right word to use, okay, vindicated, that this was a big witch hunt, what will that prompt a man with his sort of brain cells to do?
Well, what he's already done is violate every international treaty, and recognizing Israeli occupation of the Golan, that's big, you know?
What will he do?
Recognize occupation of the West Bank next?
I know, that's what Jonathan Cook says this morning, is why not?
Yeah, and would he perhaps authorize a limited strike on Iran, or create some sort of provocation so that there would be a Netanyahu riding the wave of active hostilities with Iran when the election comes in another month or so?
I mean, this is all really, really where the rubber hits the road, in my view.
Wherefore art thou, Admiral Fallon?
Somebody stop these guys.
Yeah, you know, when he said that, he said that to my friend Pat Lang, who runs his own website.
Wait, what did he say?
Tell him.
Admiral Pat Lang, he said, you know, we're not going to do Iran on my watch.
Now what was his watch?
He was head of CENTCOM.
Yeah.
Who was one of the people working for him?
Petraeus.
What did he call Petraeus?
Well, I won't say it on air because, you know, it's not really nice.
A kissing little chicken S, that's what it was.
There you go, the censored grown up little kid version.
And he was cashiered within a month.
Bobby Gates went out and said, sorry, you know, you got to.
So Fallon.
Isn't that funny right now?
The head of CENTCOM right now, General Votel, he is also belaying presidential orders and wishes in just the last couple of weeks.
But what he's saying is we're not leaving Afghanistan.
We're not leaving until the conditions are right, according to me.
And so I don't care what the president told you.
Forget it.
So that's kind of the same thing, only in the other direction there.
Yeah.
Obama bowed to them.
Trump is bowing to them.
And not only them, but the other members of the deep state.
You know, most people forget that just two weeks before Trump became president, Chuck Schumer, who has something like 30 years in Congress, House and Senate together.
He said, you know, I thought Trump was pretty smart guy, but he's going to have done a very dumb thing.
And Rachel Maddow says, oh, what would that be, Chuck?
And Chuck says, well, he's taken on the intelligence community and and they have six ways from Sunday to get you.
It's a very I thought he was smart in that.
He's done a very foolish thing.
OK.
That was the 3rd of January 2017.
Fast forward to the 6th of January.
Was that just three days later?
And what what happens?
Well, the Gang of Four, the head of national intelligence, James Comey.
I'm sorry, I was James Clapper, head FBI, James Comey, CIA, Brennan and the head of the NSA, Rogers.
They dissent on president elect Trump.
And what do they say?
Oh, we just committed it.
We just we just completed an assessment that says that, you know, actually it says that, you know, you wouldn't have won the election without Putin's help.
OK.
And then if you want to add insult to injury, Comey says now, gentlemen, I have something very important with the president elect.
Could you leave the room, please?
The other three leave.
And then then the coup de grace, he says.
Now, Mr. Trump, I have to tell you something very delicate here.
It's not confirmed, but we have these reports that you are cavorting with prostitutes in Moscow and all kinds of other scurrilous detail.
And we just want to let you know ahead of time that we have it, that we have it.
And it's probably we hit the press.
Of course, it did the next couple of days.
And so we just want to let you know that we have it now.
And Trump should have fired him on the spot.
What a punk he is.
Mr. Deal closer getting pushed around by his underlings that way.
So instead, Trump sort of tries to cajole, try to get Comey on his team.
Right.
And finally, he fires him.
And when he fires him, what does he say?
He says, it's a Russia thing.
Now, that's a far cry from saying, well, I'm trying to stop the Russia probe or I fired him because he investigated me.
No, it was the Russia thing.
It's Comey going to him in the best tradition of J. Edgar Hoover and say, I just so you know, Mr.
President, like we have this dossier.
Actually, it's on you.
And we care about what we have.
Just to let you know, I would have fired him.
I would have said, Mr. Comey, please go back, clear out your desk.
As soon as I'm president, you're out of there.
You know, but he didn't do that.
So, you know, it's sort of complicated, but not really.
There's a storyline here.
Hillary Clinton decided that she would use the Russia thing as a wage issue.
That when Julian Assange announced he had e-mails related to Hillary Clinton, she needed to find some magnificent diversion from that.
And so she said the Russians did it.
And the obedient media, as soon as the e-mails came out, said, why did Russia do this?
Why did Russia?
And nobody, nobody looked at the content of the e-mails which showed that she stole the nomination for Bernie Sanders, pure and simple.
It worked then.
And then when she lost, of course, they were very eager to pursue this.
Not so much, well, with equal intent to disguise what they had done with the FBI, with the Department of Justice, for God's sake.
The CIA, NSA had done to make sure that Hillary won.
And when she lost, to make sure that they emasculated Donald Trump.
So it's pretty complicated, but not so complicated that Matt Taibbi and people like Peter Van Buren and we at the Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity, and not least Glenn Greenwald, can't dissect it in a digestible way.
The problem is, of course, you know what I'm going to say, we can't get in the mainstream media.
So how, how are Americans going to learn what really happened?
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Yep, well, and that's the whole thing.
That's actually been Greenwald's biggest point, is that, never mind any right-winger, that you have all of these left-wing and progressive critics of the Russiagate scandal who were all banned, outright banned by name from MSNBC and CNN, so that they could perpetuate mostly the narrative that no one disagrees with this truth other than Donald Trump, the guilty party denier.
But they would have you think that there are no Blumenthal's out there, Max Blumenthal's out there, saying that this is completely ridiculous, just like you.
That Donald Trump is the worst president I could think of.
And it still isn't true.
You know?
David Koresh was a scumbag, but all the things that you say about him are still a bunch of lies and demonization to justify mass murder or justify whatever it is.
And so, we've got to be able to parse these things.
But here's the other thing, though.
This is so silly.
I'm about to play this clip of you saying, And that is what it is.
The whole thing is just completely ridiculous, like a Saturday morning cartoon.
But the problem is then, for me, is I sometimes forget the real context of the tens or maybe more than a hundred million Americans who are completely caught up in absolutely in this belief that the president of the United States is, or at least they believed this last week, was an agent of the Kremlin who had usurped Hillary Clinton's rightful throne and all this kind of thing.
That is a big deal.
Donald Trump is a lot of things.
But a traitor?
The president of the United States is a traitor under the control of the president of Russia?
I mean, for people to actually believe in that.
I put myself in their shoes once they've already bought it.
How terrifying that is.
This is huge, what they have done here.
I mean, when they lied about Saddam Hussein, Hey, at least it was Saddam Hussein.
I don't know.
But they're basically, this time they did the whole thing, but it was directed inward.
Yeah, let me just give a for instance here.
I'm from the Bronx and we like to give for instances, okay?
David K. Johnston.
Excellent reporter.
Pulitzer Prize winner.
Knows an awful lot about politics.
He's on with Glenn Greenwald on Amy Goodman's Democracy Now!
yesterday.
And he's after saying last week that Trump is a Russian agent.
And so Glenn called him on that.
And Johnston said, oh, I didn't mean agent.
I meant asset.
Which of course he defines down to mean nothing, right?
Yeah, but Amy looked in the record and said, no, no, you said agent, you know?
But then even, wait, wait.
But on that point is he defines asset as anyone who does anything that the Russians would approve of.
So in other words, it means nothing at all, which is a huge climb down from agent.
You know, it's not just a different term for the same thing.
It's a different term for an entirely different thing.
Not for the normal American.
Look, I forgot to say this from the outset and my wife is going to yell at me.
I think Trump is the worst president the United States ever had.
All right.
I think he should be impeached.
I think Nancy Pelosi is a coward in not beginning impeachment proceedings.
I don't think it should be impeachment on a lie, though.
That's the point of our conversation.
There you go.
Well, obviously it's the genocide in Yemen, right?
That's obviously charge number one.
Well, look, he's got a billion dollars going on approved to building that stupid wall.
OK, now that's circumventing Congress's prerogative.
Now, if that's not enough for Pelosi to do what she should have done to George Bush, namely just begin impeachment proceedings, what does that mean?
Well, he can be impeached.
Now, the fact that he can't be convicted probably doesn't matter.
Well, the thing is, there's going to be no accountability for him now because they already completely blew it on this fake case.
And so for them to charge him with anything now to impeach him for anything else will smack only of absolute desperation that to Democrats, democracy means when Democrats win.
Otherwise, they'll cheat and they'll use the CIA and the secret police to overthrow you, to make up lies about you, to come up with any excuse, which is true.
Yeah.
You know, you put your finger on it.
You're more politically astute domestically than I am.
And I think Trump has reason for concern now, because if he goes ahead and goes ahead and does the things that he's threatening to do, namely hold these guys accountable.
Well, these guys are the people that Chuck Schumer warned about.
This is the this is the, quote, intelligence community.
End quote.
We call it the deep state now.
And it's everybody.
You know, we used to say the military industrial complex.
I've got a new acronym.
It's Mickey Matt.
Here, listen to this.
The Military Industrial Congressional Intelligence Media Think Tank or Academia Think Tank Complex.
Mickey Matt.
Now everybody's in it together.
Don't forget Twitter.
Well, that's the media.
See, media is big.
And as I've been saying for years now, there is no fourth estate.
The thing that I've noticed most of the transcendent value that I point to in my 55 years in Washington is the fact that we no longer have a free media.
And that's so big that we have to use people like us and others to figure out we should be smart enough to be able to break in.
And maybe this is our chance.
You know, the mainstream media has disgraced itself and leading people.
I mean, you don't have to talk about Rachel Maddow.
She's sort of mad anyway.
But Johnstone, Risen, Mayer.
I mean, these are people I used to cite as really good investigative reporters, almost on a par with Robert Perry.
They all, they all repeated all this stuff without any evidence at all.
And that's not to mention amateurs like what's her name, Marcy Wheeler from who Amy Goodman has always been her go to gal for this.
By the way, yeah, I wanted to mention about yesterday's show with Greenwald where he just got up there and completely smashed him.
But Amy Goodman pretended as though, oh, yeah, of course, she's agreed with Greenwald about this all along.
Obviously, this whole thing.
Right.
But no.
Listen, I used to be a regular on Amy Goodman.
Not a regular, but every three, four months or so.
But now I have to get beat up in Congress to get on Amy Goodman because she doesn't want to hear what I have to say.
So we've been effectively banned from from democracy now and from other ostensibly progressive sites simply because we not would not go along with the Russiagate fable.
And now we have to see.
Maybe I've been suggesting that Amy invite Bill Binney back on for about three months now.
Well, she had Greenwald.
That's almost as good.
But if you want physical evidence, if you want a physical description of what happened and what didn't happen based on physics and forensics, then you need a person like Bill Binney or his compatriot Ed Loomis, who was also a technical director at NSA before he retired.
By the way, I left Gareth Porter off the list.
He's, of course, done great work on this.
Gareth is debunking this.
I got I'm sure I'm leaving a lot of people off the list, but I'm trying to mention him as I remember him.
Now, hold on with your horses there for just a second, because I want to play this clip of you confronting Adam Schiff, Democrat member of the House of Representatives from California.
And he is the ranking.
Oh, at this time is the was the ranking member.
He's now the chairman of the Intelligence Committee.
And this is you busting his chops right to his face at the Center for American Progress.
The very Democratic Party connected centrist center left think tank here.
Ray.
So here we go.
It's just two minutes.
You guys will like this.
My name is Ray McGovern.
I served in CIA under seven presidents and nine directors.
Thank you very much.
We have a little alumni group called Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity.
And we've been following this issue very closely.
One of our members is the former technical director of NSA.
I'm interested in one week ago when the president said this.
I don't want to misquote him.
The conclusions of the intelligence community with respect to Russian hacking were not conclusive regarding WikiLeaks.
In other words, there's a big gap between alleged Russian hacking and WikiLeaks.
The intelligence community does not know how or if that information, to the degree it exists, got to WikiLeaks.
Now, you assert as flat fact that Russia did this.
Do you know more than Obama?
Well, I would never claim to know more than Obama.
I think he's a brilliant man.
It's a very serious question.
No, it's a serious question.
I have every confidence in the intelligence of the Russian hacking of both the DNC as well as John Podesta.
James Clapper is a convict.
You asked me a question.
Do you want to hear the answer?
I will.
While I can't go into the classified information, I have every confidence that the Russians used WikiLeaks.
Whether Julian Assange was a knowing participant or, as the Russians would describe, a useful idiot, that we will hopefully find out.
But I don't have any question in the conclusions of the intelligence community.
You have every confidence but no evidence.
Is that right?
No, I can't share the evidence with you.
That's bogus.
Good for you.
Good times, right?
That's a funny clip.
And of course, this is a guy who's told the TV news repeatedly that, oh yeah, no, I've seen the real evidence.
And told Chuck Todd, not just circumstantial evidence, no, no, no, actual evidence.
Sorry, I could tell you, but I'd have to kill you.
But yeah, no, it's there.
Just wait.
Just be patient.
Just keep waiting.
He's still saying that.
And by the way, and this is something we should talk about here in the last few minutes, at least briefly, is the fact that on MSNBC and on CNN and in the Democratic Party in Congress, they're not giving an inch on this.
They're not saying, ah, jeez, I guess maybe that's a little ridiculous.
No, they're saying, well, yeah, well, we want to see the real report because this guy Barr says this and that and whatever.
Greenwald, of course, mocked this.
Nobody thinks that Robert Mueller is just going to sit there while Barr misrepresents what's in the report.
That's just so stupid.
It's not even worth entertaining.
Except if all your questions are begged and all your conclusions come first, then, of course, this is just Barr's cover up.
Or for that matter, Mueller was a Bush guy, wasn't he?
So all this time they were relying on him, but it turns out he's just another partisan Republican, probably.
And Trump is just as much a traitor today as he was a week ago.
Yeah, he might be a Russian agent, this guy.
Look, here's what Schiff said just three days ago, quote, Congress is going to need the underlying evidence because some of that evidence may go to the compromise of the president or people around him that poses a real threat to our national security, period, end quote.
Well, you know, the Democrats are digging their own grave here.
I mean, the whole thing has given Trump an unexpected gift for the next election.
So unless they get off this thing, unless they say, hey, look, you know, we thought that Mueller was St. Robert Mueller.
And so we follow through and say, OK, now we accept that.
But, you know, these are the other things he's done.
That's my point.
In other words, this has been a magnificent diversion.
What the Democrats really need to do if they honor their oath to the Constitution is honor the part of the Constitution that our founders put in there so that would be an orderly, political way to get rid of a president who started acting like a king.
I mean, it was very clear from their own experience what they had to do.
No fewer than four times in the Constitution they wrote in impeachment.
Now, people say, oh, he can't be convicted.
That doesn't matter.
Andrew Johnson was impeached.
What was the result of that?
People think, oh, he wasn't convicted.
It doesn't matter he wasn't convicted.
He was restrained.
He was prevented from doing some more of the crimes that he was doing in the south of our country.
It was an incredibly effective, salutary result.
Impeachment, the fact that he wasn't convicted because of one vote, that doesn't really matter.
So what Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer and the whole bunch of them are doing is playing politics because they thought, at least up until now, that this was a big issue they could win on big in the next election.
And, you know, I remember when Cindy Sheehan and I talked to John Conyers, once John Conyers became chair of the Judiciary Committee in the House right after the Democrats won big in the 2006 election.
What Conyers said is Nancy will not let us impeach.
And we said, well, wait a second now, you could get the votes.
He said, no, no, she says that we don't want to appear divisive because then we won't win as big.
But the thing is, there's so much truth to that.
Right.
I mean, they could start a war right now.
You know, they've been talking this whole time.
Elizabeth Warren, three weeks ago, was saying, we need to use the 25th Amendment to overthrow Trump.
As though the 25th Amendment says there that, oh, yeah, the establishment can do a coup d'etat if they feel like it.
That's not what it says.
You're going to get people assassinated with this kind of thing.
You know, if you want to make it bipartisan, how about, OK, Trump gets impeached, but Brennan and Clapper and Comey and McCabe and all the people responsible for this are permanently stripped of their citizenship and exiled out of the United States for the rest of their lives.
How about real accountability for the people who set him up on these bogus charges?
And then we'll impeach him for something real like mass murdering tiny helpless babies in Yemen.
But, of course, that would never be it.
Right.
Because that's a crime of state.
They'll impeach him for a Watergate burglary.
They won't impeach him for killing every kid in Cambodia.
And that's the deal.
We all know that's the deal.
And, you know, he's going to get reelected is what's going to happen.
Because the Democrats and their opposition, they deserve to lose.
They deserve to lose every single seat they've got for what they've done here.
And that doesn't make him the good guy, but it makes them the much, much, much worse guys that they have done this.
So, I mean, impeaching him, I hate to put it on the back burner, but compared to a CIA secret police putsch against the elected president, those guys should be buried under the Supermax right now.
That should be the priority, no matter who.
And I would say the exact same thing if they did it to Hillary Clinton.
I would.
And I hate her beyond all reason.
And I would still always defend the elected president against the CIA and the FBI, for God's sake.
Well, here's the crucible.
The evidence is there.
The Justice Department that is supposed to work for Trump has that evidence.
Their inspector general seems to be a relatively honest person.
I don't know about Barr.
He's not got a very good record, in my view.
But if the president wants to act like the president, he can do all those things that you just mentioned.
The evidence is there.
Brennan should be in jail.
Comey should be in jail.
They all lied through their teeth, and that's demonstrably true.
Now, the problem is, as Chuck Schumer warned, the intelligence community has six ways from Sunday to get at a president.
You know what happened to John Kennedy, right?
You know what happened to Martin Luther King, Jr.?
So Trump has already shown himself able and willing to shy away from things that he said he'd do in the morning.
Here, he says, hey, Congress has a law saying you have to release the rest of the assassination material on John Kennedy, and I'm going to do it.
I'm going to do it this afternoon.
What does he do at three o'clock in the afternoon?
He says, without any embarrassment, I've talked to the FBI and the CIA, and they say we can't do that.
It's too sensitive.
So we'll revisit it in six months.
What happens after six months?
Not one journalist makes a note and says, oh, hey, six months ago, you said you'd declassify the rest of those documents.
Well, six months now, what are you going to do?
They don't even ask.
So if you're looking for the power balance here, it's going to take a very gutsy, in Schumer's words, foolish president to take these guys on.
If he does take them on, I think that this would be a really, really good thing for our republic.
But meanwhile, he's done so many unconstitutional things.
The most recent one is $1 billion for that stupid wall.
There's high crimes and misdemeanors galore for which he should be impeached.
The Democrats have the majority.
They should impeach him.
Why does nobody say that except me?
Well, it's because his worst crimes, I mean, you're right about he has absolutely no authority whatsoever to appropriate money that way, declaring an emergency that his own colleagues in the Senate helped repudiate his Republicans colleagues, et cetera, like that.
But as we all know, all of his worst crimes he inherited from Barack Obama.
And if they're going to put him under the supermax, they got to bury Obama with him and they won't do that.
Obama inherited two wars from Bush.
Trump inherited seven from Obama.
And so everything else is trivial compared to that.
But that's all stuff that the CIA and the military are doing for him, with him.
And so that can't be a crime, no matter how many innocent civilian people are being killed over there.
Well, Obama, in my view, was a fraud from the beginning.
Well, the war in Yemen is four years old right now.
Two years under Obama, two years under Trump, equally divided responsibility.
If anything, Obama is more responsible because he started it.
But still, I weigh a government by what it does to the least of the people in our country.
And when I see the accumulation of wealth upwards and I see how people are hurting and what what Trump has done to exacerbate that situation ad infinitum, that's what speaks to me.
I care about all Americans.
Trump does not.
And he's done things that are horrendous in terms of hurting our own people, as well as bad things abroad.
So Obama was bad, but at least he did get some medical insurance for a lot of Americans that didn't have it before.
It wasn't perfect, but at least he did that.
That's about the only thing that comes immediately to mind.
The Iran deal.
He gets credit for the Iran deal.
So, you know, it really is worse now.
And as I say for the fourth time, my fear is that Trump is going to feel his oats now and he's going to listen to Netanyahu.
And Netanyahu says, look, just a little strike, a little false flag in the Persian Gulf and I will strike back and I'll win the election and we'll be best buddies again.
And then we'll annex the West Bank.
Let's just hope he takes out all his anger on Brennan and Clapper and Comey and them and leave the poor Iranians alone.
I'm sorry I got to go, Ray.
It's Peter Van Buren's turn here.
But thank you so much for coming on and talking about this.
You're most welcome.
And thank you, by the way, especially just for being good on everything and being reliably smart and seeing through these lies.
And, you know, people really count on that.
You know, if this stuff is true, how come Ray McGovern doesn't believe in it?
It's because it's not true.
That's why.
It's really important.
So thank you for that.
Really.
You're most welcome, Scott.
Yeah.
OK.
That's the great Ray McGovern, everybody.
Former CIA.
But he's a hero now.
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.
