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 they army, but we killing them.
We be on CNN like, say our names, say it, say it three times.
The meeting of the largest armies in the history of the world.
Then there's going to be an invasion.
All right, you guys, introducing Aaron Maté.
He's been writing for The Nation, debunking this Russiagate stuff.
And you would have thought his job was done, but no.
Welcome back to the show.
How are you doing?
Hi, Scott.
Thanks for having me back.
Yeah, very good to have you here.
So I won't waste your time on the boring story in NBC about the Russians recruiting American blacks to go to Africa for military training for the revolution.
Because we already debunked that one with Dave DeCamp on the show.
Although that must have been fun over on your Twitter feed that day.
I missed it.
But so yeah, no, more importantly, is that Robert Mueller gave a public statement or Mueller.
His name is spelled just like the old Mueller Airport here in Austin.
So that's his fault, not mine.
Robert Mueller gave a talk there.
And one of the things that he said, he just kind of referred to the.
Oh, you have the quote here.
The multiple systemic efforts to interfere in our election and parroting that the New York Times.
And they've been doing this for a long, long time, of course.
But the New York Times said is beyond doubt that the Russians did what they're accused of here.
Without referring to any evidence having been presented that that's the case, we all just know it now.
Sort of the same way that we all know Saddam Hussein has at least some mustard gas, even if he's not really making nukes or this kind of thing.
No one's willing to really challenge the central premise of this entire deal.
But you are.
And based on what, sir?
Well, you've had Bill Binion before, who's made the case that based on the transfer speeds, that he thinks that this was not a hack, it was a leak.
I'm not technically literate enough to evaluate the merits of that.
But I do think that Binny has the strong credentials that should be taken seriously and should be given a wide platform.
Of course, he hasn't, except for those of us who remain committed to basic journalism and asking questions, asking basic questions like you, Scott.
So that's one thing to consider.
We also don't know.
So in terms of the overall Russian interference effort, I think there's a few areas to look at.
So the first thing is who stole the emails and whether we've seen sufficient evidence that it was the Russian government.
The second question is this social media campaign that Robert Mueller issued an indictment over and that his report also covers again.
And this sophisticated – this social media campaign is supposed to be sophisticated.
It was supposed to have reached tens of millions of Americans.
And according to The New Yorker and columnists in The New York Times and pundits on MSNBC, this social media effort could very well have suppressed the minority vote in the key swing states and even swung the election because it was so sophisticated.
And then there's also the aspect of – there's the claim that all this – that this supposed systematic Russian effort was personally ordered by Vladimir Putin and it was ordered by Putin in order to defeat Clinton and elect Trump.
And we have seen some claims that have been presented to back up all these various elements.
So let's go through them.
So first of all, on the stolen emails, I think the most important thing to start with is the fact that, yes, we do have an indictment from Robert Mueller that was handed down in July 2018 that did accuse specific Russian military intelligence officers of carrying out the hack of the DNC and stealing DNC emails.
And Mueller's indictment lays out a very detailed timeline, even being able to describe specific keyboard actions by specific Russian intelligence agents.
So it's – suffice it to say, it's a very specific indictment.
But there's one problem.
We don't know the source of that information.
We don't know what Robert Mueller is basing his indictment on.
We don't know who it comes from.
One thing we can say definitively, and this is something that Bill Binney says, is that he knows that the agency best placed to supply this information, and really the only agency that could supply this information, is the NSA.
And Binney says, and he's right, that there's no way this information could have come from the NSA because for it to have come from the NSA, it would have had to have been declassified by the president, which we know didn't happen.
So Mueller got this from somewhere.
We don't know where.
Roger Stone's attorneys contend that it came from CrowdStrike, which is a DNC contractor, which first accused Russia of carrying out the hack.
It's headed by people who have – Wait, stop.
Go back a point there.
It's certain that Mueller didn't have access to any briefing or intelligence held by the National Security Agency if he had requested specific data about the hack or the leak or whatever it was?
I can't say that for sure.
What I can say is that none of the information included in his indictment comes from the NSA because NSA information like that can't be made public unless it's declassified.
So in other words, if it was in the Mueller report, it would have been redacted anyway, but apparently nothing in the Mueller report was based on NSA information.
Yes.
And the Mueller report even says that its information – in the section about the hacking, it even cites the FBI.
It cites FBI investigators.
It doesn't cite the NSA.
I see.
There's no reference to the NSA at all.
And Benny is saying, again, that it's impossible that it could be from the NSA because for it to come from the NSA, it would have to be declassified.
So Roger Stone's attorneys, in a motion that they're fighting right now, they contend that it came from CrowdStrike and they're trying to compel through discovery CrowdStrike's evidence and CrowdStrike's report.
I don't know if Roger Stone's attorneys are correct, but I also – as crazy as it sounds, I wouldn't rule out the fact that they might be.
Because Mueller's indictment is so specific, but yet not knowing who it comes from and knowing it doesn't come from the NSA just raises questions about who exactly it comes from.
If it comes from the CIA, then that raises questions because the person who controlled the CIA during the time of the theft of the Democratic Party emails up until Donald Trump was inaugurated was John Brennan.
And John Brennan's role in this is shaky and worthy of scrutiny.
He's made no secret of the fact that he despises Trump since leaving office and that he even accused him of treason.
But we know now that Brennan played a critical role in developing the intelligence conclusion before Trump took office that Russia was behind the hacks and that Vladimir Putin had personally ordered it.
How do we know that?
Well, there was a report put out by the House Republicans on the Intelligence Committee in 2018 overseen by Devin Nunes.
And Nunes writes that Brennan's control of the process, this process that Obama ordered to review the intelligence and come up with that report that came out in January 2017 that first formally accused Russia of the sweeping operation, that Brennan's control of that process was, quote, unusually constrained.
And it only involved basically a couple of CIA agents working under Brennan in coordination with the FBI and the NSA.
So even FBI and NSA agents were not even involved in drafting or in writing that January 2017 document that accused Russia of this systematic interference operation.
And Nunes points out that Brennan had unusual control over it.
And Nunes specifically says that the conclusion that Putin personally ordered this, you know, this interference operation to elect Trump, Nunes and House Republicans are right that that was wrong and that that suffered from significant, quote, tradecraft failings, unquote.
So and when Democrats issued a memo in response to that, they did not take issue with that finding.
So basically what we're seeing here is a picture where we don't know the source of the information for Mueller's indictment, which accused Russia of carrying out the hack.
And we also know that in the intelligence that was, intelligence process that led to the intelligence community formally accusing Russia of this, that Brennan, John Brennan, had control over it.
And, you know, he is worthy of scrutiny for many reasons, not just his open disdain for Donald Trump.
Yeah.
Nevermind him running al-Nusra in Syria for a few years there.
That's a different subject.
By the way, I'm sure you must have seen, or maybe not, Andrew McCarthy's piece in the National Review today, who I hate to cite because he really is a horrible guy on so many things going back for a great many years here.
But he seems right on this.
And in this case where he essentially kind of sifts through and says where Brennan tries to make it sound like he has this separate cooperating source.
It's the Steele dossier itself is his source saying that he has these high level sources and methods of classification that must be protected.
And that's why it's such a danger that Trump has ordered Barr, or has really commanded the other agencies to allow Barr to take the position of declassifying different intelligence underlying this case here.
And McCarthy is just saying, well, I don't know if you compare and contrast the way these different stories based on Brennan's leaks are written and the way they talk about sources here and informants there.
It seems like he really just has this one, obviously completely bogus tautology that he's resting on.
It's in the Steele dossier.
And so it got in there somehow.
And so that somehow and the dossier are two separate sources, I guess.
Yeah, well, that whole thing is strange.
We first heard about this supposed secret CIA source in June 2017 in The Washington Post.
And so it's funny now to hear John Brennan through his leaks and in public complain about Barr possibly jeopardizing this secret Russian mole because it's John Brennan who right now is talking about it.
And John Brennan, who, although we don't know for sure, but this came from a source, if not Brennan directly himself, someone close to him two years ago in The Washington Post that revealed there was a mole close to Putin who was able to capture his specific instructions.
So whoever leaked that, and I think it was Brennan or someone close to him, they're the ones who exposed that they supposedly have this high-level source close to Putin, which, yes, I agree, I think is fiction.
I should say that there's another tell from Mueller that he doesn't know who stole the emails, and it's in his report.
He's laying out his timeline now, and he's talking about Russian GRU officers hacking into DNC.
And when he gets to the theft of the DNC emails, he says this.
GRU, quote, officers appear to have stolen thousands of emails and attachments, which were later released by WikiLeaks in July 2016, unquote.
So why the word there appear?
If Mueller knows that the GRU officers stole the emails, he would say the GRU officers, quote, stole the emails.
He has a qualifier.
He says appear, which says to me that he does not know for sure that these people who he's accusing of being GRU officers – because, by the way, it's quite possible.
I mean, I was putting out the possibilities that if there was some hacking going on, that it was people – it could have been people inside of Russia, but that doesn't necessarily mean that they were GRU officers.
But regardless, Mueller feels compelled to add the qualifier.
They appear – or, yes, these officers, quote, appear to have stolen thousands of emails, not these officers stole thousands of emails.
And there's one more interesting qualifier.
He's talking about the transfer of these emails to WikiLeaks.
And previously, in that July 2018 indictment, he had suggested that this was transferred by Guccifer 2.0, this supposed Russian intelligence cutout, after the DNC hack.
That's how he had suggested the emails made their way to WikiLeaks.
Now he says this, quote, the special counsel's office cannot rule out that stolen documents were transferred to WikiLeaks through intermediaries who visited during the summer of 2016, unquote.
Which means that now Mueller does not know for sure how these emails made their way to WikiLeaks.
And by the way, is it clear in the context what he means or where he means by visited?
Is that Assange in the embassy?
That's Assange in the embassy, yeah.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
And it sounds like he even knows who he has in mind there when he says visitors who visited during the summer of 2016.
There is a range of possibilities.
But again, I think the key point is that he does not know for sure even how they made their way to WikiLeaks.
So in terms of, you know, of a chain of custody when it comes to the evidence, the basis for this originally was CrowdStrike.
We know that they didn't hand over the DNC servers independently.
We know that their—or it's possible that it's their information that was used for these indictments.
We're not sure, but it's quite possible.
Mueller can't say for sure that the GRU officers stole the emails because he has to add the qualifier up here.
And he also doesn't know for sure how these emails made their way to WikiLeaks.
So the case is very weak.
And adding to that is the fact that nobody has interviewed Julian Assange, even though Assange has offered to do that.
Assange has offered to talk to Mueller, offered to talk to congressional committees.
But there were even—and there were talks between Assange and the DOJ back when Assange was preparing to release the CIA's Vault 7 files, because the DOJ wanted to mitigate the impact of that with some redactions.
And Assange had floated the possibility of also offering information that could rule out the role of certain actors in the theft of DNC emails, and by which he meant the Russian government.
While those talks were going on, who killed them?
James Comey.
James Comey personally intervened to prevent those negotiations from going through, which means that Robert Mueller and the DOJ and congressional committees have gone about their investigations without talking to the key figure behind the publication of the stolen emails that is at the basis of this entire thing.
Hang on just one second.
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LibertyStickers.com.
You know, I would really like to read about the rank-and-file CIA officers' reaction to the DOJ screwing up their negotiation.
Because as bad as they want Assange's scalp, at least in that case, apparently they were willing to try to compromise and intervene on his behalf with the Department of Justice if he would withhold those Vault 7 documents and not release them.
And then, as you say, Comey, with an assist from Senator Warner, intervened and scotched that, and then all of that stuff was released with, according to them, negative effects.
Exactly.
It's another case, and this is talked about in Max Blumenthal's new book, who you've recently interviewed, The Management of Savagery, where the imperatives of the national security state and what they deemed to be in their personal interest always undermine actual national security.
So this is a case where they could have worked with Assange to redact names, to help not endanger people if that's what they felt would have resulted from the release of these files, but they chose to undermine a process that would have achieved that outcome.
And this extends to many issues.
As you alluded to, this proxy war in Syria, how that could possibly be in the interest of national security, when in reality it's actually a huge threat to it by destabilizing yet one more Middle East country, empowering jihadists and so forth.
And by the way, the fact that Donald Trump was speaking out against that on the campaign trail, he was talking about pulling out of Syria and stuff.
I'm sure that did not sit well with John Brennan, who played a key role in that program.
And that's why, it's one more reason why I just don't, I can't take Brennan's intelligence and his assertions on faith.
I mean, he had a motive to try to undermine Trump's campaign, whether or not Trump was sincere or not.
Well, for any Trump campaign people listening, you really want to get John Brennan, declassify his role in supporting Jabhat al-Nusra in Syria.
He wants to go throwing around treason charges.
We'll see about that.
You know, that would be my take.
By the way, I don't know if you ever heard this or not.
I'm sure you must be aware, at least a part of this story, which is the Daily Mail got the story wrong and said that Craig Murray said that he received the WikiLeaks in a meeting in the forest in D.C.
But he was on my show.
This is a couple of years ago, two, three years ago now, I guess, or two and a half years ago or so, I guess.
It would have been late 2016, I think.
And he said, no, no, no, he didn't receive the leak, but he did meet the leaker in the woods in D.C.
And I know from a couple of other people who were at the same dinner as him that night that he did get up and leave early to go for this mysterious meeting.
At least that much is corroborated.
But he says he knows good and well.
And what he told me was that in so many words, and you can go back and listen to it, but that the DNC leak came from a disgruntled, essentially, I think he said a Bernie Sanders supporter.
But that was the implication inside the DNC.
And that the Podesta hack came from inside the NSA.
He wouldn't say that outright, but that was certainly the implication, that it was the guys in charge of electronic collections.
They were the ones who did that to her as revenge for her being so sloppy with the secrets that they would go to prison if they behaved the same way that she did with her secret server and all of her secret foundation business and all of those things.
So I don't know necessarily that all those things are really true, but that to me, it seems like, you know, it's a little bit of a stretch, but not too much of one, to think that Mueller is referring to the same person that Craig Murray was referring to as this other source who maybe brought these documents to Assange by hand.
It's quite possible.
It's quite possible.
And, you know, look, in terms of who took the Podesta emails, what we know for sure is this.
It was incredibly unsophisticated.
It was a spear phishing operation where they told him he needed to change his password.
He asked an aide if he should.
I think the aide misspoke and said, like, meant to say that he should not, but Podesta took that to mean that he should, and so he did.
His password was very simple.
You know, that was the easiest hack in history, really.
You know, whoever did that, it was not a sophisticated intelligence operation.
And, you know, which gets to also, I mean, the motive here has never sat right with me.
If Vladimir Putin was going to order this sweeping interference operation, it just didn't make sense.
Vladimir Putin was already under heavy U.S. sanctions.
We know that, you know, based on the official story, the Russian hackers were easily caught.
They left traces of their operation.
So Vladimir Putin is going to, and nobody thought that Hillary Clinton was going to lose.
I mean, and, you know.
I did.
Okay.
Well, okay.
Well, I should say the prevailing consensus was that Hillary Clinton was going to lose, especially that early on when Putin would have had to have ordered this supposed sweeping interference operation.
So Vladimir Putin is going to invite even more sanctions on his government just so he could embarrass Hillary Clinton before she comes into office, which just seemed to be, you know, a certainty.
I mean, like the motive there just didn't make sense.
You know, Ray McGovern, who, you know, he hasn't been in the CIA for a long time, but he was the former chief of their Soviet analyst division back when in the Cold War.
And he said, you know, this wasn't conclusive or whatever, but certainly his impression would be that the Putin government would vastly prefer Hillary Clinton to Donald Trump.
Because even though she's a hawk, she's a known quantity and she ain't as brave as she talks sometimes.
Whereas Donald Trump truly is erratic and unreliable and unread.
He's not the kind of guy that you could count on to do the right thing in a way that you would have him, no matter who you are, really.
Right?
Even if you're completely pro-Trump, if you started out totally pro-Trump, you're frustrated by now.
You know what I mean?
And anyone could read him that same way.
And according to Ray, the Russians would prefer the stability of Bill Clinton's wife.
Thank you very much.
Yeah.
I mean, you know, Putin has said that he personally preferred Trump.
We'll never know, I guess.
And the theory of the case just didn't make sense.
And even that, though, is after the fact when he has a motive of just making nice with Trump now.
It could be true, but it also could just be him being polite.
You're totally right.
Literally, he was standing next to Trump when he said that because he said that in Helsinki.
So you're totally right.
So I've addressed the e-mail hacking and then also the supposed fact that there was a sweeping interference campaign personally ordered by Putin.
And the reasons to question that, given that the source for that claim is most likely John Brennan.
I mean we know at minimum that that claim originated with the CIA.
That's been reported by The Washington Post, which means it originated from John Brennan.
And then there's the social media aspect, which seems like it's even— Hold off on that for a second because there's still—I wanted to ask you about what the Mueller report says about Guccifer and D.C. leaks.
Because this is something that Daniel Lazar at ConsortiumNews.com pointed out right away, was that this timeline really doesn't make sense either.
You mentioned these weasel words.
I mean why even put the word appear in there?
No one's reviewing this thing.
This report is the final say on this.
It's not like there's accountability for Robert Mueller no matter what.
Why not just go ahead and make a claim and be brave?
No one's asking him to prove it anyway.
He builds in these kind of weasel words.
And then it's the same thing with the timeline.
He lays out this timeline that then doesn't really make sense at all.
And he lays out in terms of D.C. leaks and Guccifer 2 contacting Assange and then presumably transferring the documents within this timeframe.
And you have things that are off by a day in the wrong direction where someone says thanks before they supposedly got the thing.
That's not the exact example, but something like that.
And then where Guccifer is really trying to force this stuff on Assange, but D.C. leaks is playing real hard to get and Assange is having to go to them and say give me this stuff and all these things.
So it seems like he really kind of – it was almost like a grudging admission that, hey, here are a bunch of kind of contradictory facts if you want to see them that way.
And he went ahead and put them in there.
I think you use that qualified sneaky language, weasel language, because you have to cover yourself in case something comes out in the future and you can say, well, yeah, I wasn't quite totally sure here.
So that's why I used the word up here or in case it comes out in the future that there was other information that you did that was available to Mueller, but he didn't fully weigh.
I mean I don't know.
I mean that's how you basically get around the fact that you're saying something without fully knowing it.
In terms of the timeline, you're exactly right, and that's a great point raised by Daniel Lazar.
So Assange first announces that he has Hillary Clinton's emails on June 12th, 2016.
He says we have upcoming leaks in relation to Hillary Clinton, which is great.
WikiLeaks is having a very big year.
But then in the Mueller report, he reports that – it's under a section called WikiLeaks first contact with Guccifer and DCLeaks.
And that first contact comes after Assange's announcement, which means that by that timeline, Assange would have had to announce that he has leaks before he actually received them, which would – I don't know.
I mean that's possible he did that, but it seems to be pretty unlikely, especially if that's the first time he's making contact with the people who are delivering him the leaks.
Because, yeah, he first makes contact with Guccifer 2.0 on June 22nd and first makes contact with DCLeaks on June 14th.
So after he's announced these upcoming leaks, which – and that's why there are people who say that DCLeaks and Guccifer 2.0 were a front to make it appear as if Russian intelligence cutouts were giving Assange something to make it look as if this was his only source.
That's the theory.
Just like with the Steele dossier, right, where I think as you put it on the show back a couple of years ago or something, that a lot of times what you see here is he's referring to stuff that later came out in the media or that was in the media and he just kind of embellished it.
And then it's written sort of as though it hadn't been covered in the media and he's the one breaking the story.
So there's a kernel of truth to a lot of the different things he says, but then essentially it's built around.
So it does make sense then in a way – I'm not claiming you're claiming this – but it does make sense hypothetically then that Guccifer and DCLeaks were John Brennan, that they knew that this stuff was coming out.
The CIA or the FBI or somebody inside the U.S. government or maybe their friends in a neighboring intelligence state and the Five Eyes group or something like that worked real quick to drum something up to just sort of pollute the narrative with a bunch of Russia stuff.
Right.
I personally doubt it was John Brennan because … Well, I don't mean him at the station.
But yes, something nefarious or somebody, some actor that wanted to pin the blame on Russia doing that.
I mean timeline-wise, that is certainly possible.
You know what I never noticed in any of this, in either indictment or the report, the indictment or the report, I should say, of Fancy Bear.
Did they stop pretending that Fancy Bear was a group of people and that that was how we knew that it was the Russians was because they were Fancy Bear?
They kind of claimed to know from all different directions in that first indictment.
They talked as though they had an informant right there or key loggers on the GRU computers or were spying on the surveillance cameras inside the GRU, which that was kind of an older story that got pushed forward.
That's exactly right.
That was an older story.
I've spoken to the Dutch journalist who wrote that story, and he pointed out that, yes, that concerned an old story where some European intelligence agencies, I believe it was the Dutch one, did gain access to Russian intelligence agencies and did see them hack into things.
But that was for a previous hack, nothing to do with the 2016 DNC hack.
What you say about Steele is important.
The only thing confirmed in his dossier is stuff that was already publicly reported by the time he wrote it.
And that's why you see the sequence, if you look at it, where basically it comes out in the media that there was a Ukraine platform change at the RNC.
Right after that, Steele writes in his dossier that that RNC platform change, which, by the way, was completely overblown.
It was a non-story, but it got turned into a conspiracy theory element.
So Steele writes that that was the quid pro quo between Trump and Russia.
So basically it's so obvious what Steele and sources were doing.
They were just taking what was being reported.
Carter Page goes to Moscow.
They then write about it, and they say that Carter Page has been offered billions of dollars of a stake in the Russian oil company.
And the reason they could—the kernel of truth there is that, yes, Carter Page was in Moscow, and, yes, there had been talk about selling off part of the Russian oil company.
So basically Steele and his sources, if they even exist, were just scam artists reading the newspaper, spinning it to fit a narrative.
And somehow all that was taken seriously.
I would hope that the Russian intelligence guys would know that the party platform doesn't mean anything anyway, dude.
You wouldn't waste your gas on that.
No, exactly.
Of course it means nothing, and even the supposed platform change is not even what it was presented to be.
Basically there was an amendment presented and got rejected, and somehow that was spun into, oh, my God, the Trump campaign changed the platform to help Russia, when even, by the way, everyone ignores the fact that the final text of that platform was far more hawkish on Russia and the issue of Ukraine, which was a subject of the amendment, than the Democrats were.
And also everyone ignores that when Trump came to office he sold the weapons to Ukraine in real life.
Details, details, Mateo.
Exactly.
On Fancy Bear, is that just a dead issue now?
There was some other kind of bear too, I forget, what was the other one?
There's Fancy Bear and Cozy Bear, right?
Or am I mixing that up with a nursery rhyme?
Yeah, you're right, I haven't heard reference to that in a while.
That was the CrowdStrike contention.
I can't remember now how they phrased that in the indictments.
I don't remember seeing it in the report.
But just the important thing here is to point out that the two core aspects of this whole Trump-Russia thing, this allegation of a Russian hacking of DNC emails and then this other allegation that Trump conspired with it, both those allegations come from a Democratic Party contractor.
CrowdStrike made the allegation that Russia stole the emails and may have been the source, possibly, for Mueller's indictment.
And Christopher Steele, who was paid by the DNC, he made the allegation that Trump and Russia conspired.
And he was literally a source, we know that at least, for a FISA warrant on Carter Page, because he was source number one.
And the FBI said that they believe Carter Page is coordinating between the Trump campaign and Moscow.
And their source for that, source number one, was Christopher Steele, who they described as credible.
So, on this whole thing, the information comes from Democratic Party contractors.
Well, you know what they're saying now, though, too, is, well, see, the Steele dossier, it was disinformation.
The Russians were lying to us, it came from all these high-level sources.
But then, so what does that tell you?
That they were trying to hurt Donald Trump, right?
Or they were trying to sow confusion.
The problem with that, I mean, look.
Well, yeah, the Democrats' idea is, oh, well, they were trying to feed us bad information so that we would get caught making stupid accusations.
Yeah, after three years of this garbage and two years of official investigation over it with the special counsel's office and all of this, it seems more like if the Russians were trying to shovel all this bogus intel into the stream in the summer of 2016, it would have been to hurt Trump, not as a reverse psychology campaign.
I mean, everything is the Russians' fault.
So, now the fact that the Steele dossier turns out to be fiction, now, of course, that's the Russians' fault, too.
But, of course, you have Republicans seizing onto that because there is a bipartisan interest in blaming Russia for everything because they want to drum up tensions.
And maintaining Russia as this nefarious adversary is good for everybody, in power, at least.
It's bad for the rest of us, but it's good for everybody in power because it gives us an enemy to fearmonger around, which justifies weapons contracts and all these pop-up digital Sherlocks who are paid, who are given huge contracts to investigate Russian social media activity and paint that as this huge threat, like apply their college degrees to somehow portray Russian Facebook ads of Buff Bernie and Jesus arm wrestling Satan as an existential threat to the republic, as the equivalent of Pearl Harbor and 9-11.
So, there's an incentive behind all this to demonize Russia.
And that's where I think this thing about the Steele dossier being really Russian disinformation comes in, because everyone can get along with that.
Now, Professor Stephen F. Cohen of Princeton at NYU, also writes at The Nation magazine, he says that he highly doubts that.
And this is someone who knows more about Russia than anybody I know, and I agree with him.
It just seems unlikely that this is some sort of Kremlin attempt to throw everyone off the case.
Yeah.
I mean, I'm with that.
I don't see any reason to believe that it's true that the Kremlin, the Kremlin, whether that's Putin or his staff or whoever, were behind this one way or the other as misinformation or double blind, double dog, dare disinformation, or whichever kind of way you want to characterize it.
It doesn't seem like that.
Although, I mean, I guess they're claiming, right, or Steele claimed to the State Department lady that his sources were these two high level people inside the Kremlin, the former head of intelligence, quote unquote, former, I don't know, head of intelligence and another very high level aide.
Although, you know, again, that McCarthy piece from today in National Review, he talks about in the New York Times piece, the way they carefully word the difference between informant and source.
And he's saying essentially Steele is saying that he has a source who claimed that these two guys in the Kremlin are his source.
And so it's hearsay, you know, on that basis anyway.
And then never mind the fact that, as you said, it's clear that all these things are drummed up, you know, essentially that they're just grifters making money selling this garbage to the Democrats mostly.
That's interesting what McCarthy is saying there about the sources.
The only problem is I just be careful about believing Steele.
So Steele might have told someone that he has these sources.
But why should we believe why should we believe him?
He hasn't been to Russia in two decades.
Well, I mean, I think that was that was what McCarthy was saying was that when he says that these guys are his sources, he's not exactly saying that he's talking to them.
He's saying that he's heard what they're saying to somebody, suppose, you know, this kind of.
So it's already hearsay before it even gets to Steele, according to Steele.
So I buy that.
You know what I mean?
Fair enough.
No, that's.
And I'm sorry, because I interrupted you were going to say something real quick about the IRA there and this whole.
Oh, no, you did about the Bernie Sanders ads and all of that.
I mean, it's a joke.
I mean, like to even talk about it is a joke.
It's a complete joke.
I mean, there's the these these Russian social media posts.
Nobody saw them.
They spent about forty six thousand dollars on them before the election.
Most of the posts and ads were not even about the election.
They were about it's clearly obvious what was going on.
They targeted their posts at certain demographic groups in order to gain followers and then leverage that following to basically sell ads on their accounts.
That's what that's a click bait firms do.
Maybe some of them, maybe some of these Russian troll farm workers like Trump and wanted and didn't want wanted to defeat Hillary.
OK, but the notion that any of these ads could have impacted a single vote when they didn't even talk about the vote and they were so small in reach.
It's it's just it's an expression really of contempt by the political media elites who push this.
It's contempt that a that we that we can buy this idea that these dumb ads could have swayed people's votes.
It's contempt in saying that, you know, that the Americans are so because it presumes basically that Americans are so malleable and so vulnerable that they could be duped by these dumb ads.
You know, whereas none of, you know, David Axelrod, who says that he thinks these Russian social media might have suppressed the minority vote.
Would David Axelrod say that he could have been duped by these Russian social media ads?
And if he would couldn't even if he couldn't have been duped by them, then what is he saying about the people who he is suggesting were?
So really, all this serves to express such contempt for average people, average voters and a refusal on the part of of ruling elites that their candidate was bad.
It just it just comes down to that and that they can't believe that this, you know, blow hard Trump who doesn't say the right things, who insults a lot of them, who basically freestyle this campaign.
They can't accept the fact that he won because he convinced enough voters in enough swing states, you know.
And, you know, they don't oppose him because they care about his warmongering or his misogyny or his racism or whatever else.
They they oppose him because they don't think he's a suitable steward of their military machine.
And they think he's you know, they're embarrassed by his by his character.
It's it's it's not about any John Brennan being a progressive and caring about Muslim immigrants.
You know, it's not about Robert Mueller caring about Muslim immigrants because Robert Mueller after 9-11 was rounding up Muslim immigrants and he was sued over it for their harsh attention.
So it's just, you know, this we're still in this thing, not based on any real evidence, but because we you know, people in our in our ruling class in politics and media needed a reason to deflect from the fact that their preferred candidate lost.
And blaming Russia was a very convenient thing to do because that intersects with with the imperatives of the national security state.
Yeah.
And they should also admit that they overreacted and panicked about Donald Trump.
You know, he may not believe in all of the slogans about the liberal world rules based order of friendship and global democracy and all of those things.
But he never had an intention to truly dismantle the thing.
He says something like, I don't know, NATO seems obsolete to me.
And they hit the DEFCON one button like he just announced he's going to dismantle NATO and get us out of it.
Yeah.
No, he didn't.
He didn't come anywhere near saying that, you know, and there's enough he has enough hawkish instincts on enough of the very same issues as our military and our think tanks and our CIA and their agenda.
You know, it's not perfect, but it coincides a lot.
Look, for example, at, you know, the continuing Cold War against Iran, for example, or, you know, support for the Palestinians.
His continued his buildup, his allowing Montenegro and Macedonia into NATO, two new states in NATO just in Trump years so far.
The only thing he's done to seriously challenge the national security state is is not getting in the way of the peace effort in North Korea.
Traditionally in between North and South Korea.
Right.
I mean, that's the one thing.
But even there, though, we've seen sort of an incoherent policy where he says one thing, but then John Bolton comes out and says another.
And, you know, we haven't seen the progress there that that that that could have been made, I think, because Trump is facing so much resistance to actually allowing peace for the first time and sort of reducing the U.S. military posture on the Korean Peninsula.
But everywhere else, you're right.
In terms of Iran, I mean, he's escalated massively the war on Iran.
He escalated the war on Yemen through support of the Saudis.
Support for Israel has increased.
If that was possible, I mean, I'm not sure if even it really was, but at least, you know, Obama wasn't moving the embassy to Jerusalem.
So, you know, he's and as you say, also increased the U.S. troop presence near Russia's borders, admitted more members to NATO.
He approved arms sales to Ukraine that Obama had rejected.
So he's become and policy wise, he's become he's been a total hawk.
And but it's just his mannerisms, the way he goes about it, that offends people in the in the political media elite.
And that's what they oppose him on.
And unfortunately, they've unrolled, you know, millions of liberals and even progressives in their in this performative resistance, you know, in this really sort of reactionary resistance where we're sometimes opposing Donald Trump from the right.
We're opposing him for, you know, for not getting in the way of peace in the Koreas.
We're trying to encourage him to be more aggressive towards Russia.
Meanwhile, all these people go along with him when he stages a coup in Venezuela, which, by the way, is another thing he's doing in the face of Russia, where Venezuela is their key ally.
So, you know, it's amazing.
You know, some of the most hawkish things that Trump is doing are not only proceeding, but they're even they even have the blessing of a supposed resistance.
Yeah.
And then, you know, the neocons really overreacted because Trump had told Sheldon Adelson to go to hell.
Right.
And said, oh, yeah, you know, Marco Rubio is Adelson's perfect little puppet because he takes all that money.
Well, I don't need your money.
He went to AIPAC said, I don't need your money and all these things.
And so they panicked about that.
But it turns out he took that back.
Sheldon Adelson said, who's going to finance the Republican Party's congressional campaigns for your midterms, pal?
And Trump said, you, please.
And then, yeah, come on.
He made that compromise immediately.
So the neocons, I bet at least half of them regret that they were worried about Trump's Zionism.
They should have seen that he was going to be 100 percent on board for and just would be personal chums with Netanyahu and that they would do whatever they wanted and that kind of deal.
And then but the bad news is that the ones who did take, you know, take that stand against him, they now have been rehabilitated by those same liberals that you're talking about who found articulate allies in the never Trump resistance.
And so it doesn't matter if it's all of the very worst people from the first Bush Jr.administration who, you know, all of Richard Perle's best buddies that lied us into Iraq and all of that.
They're all fine now as long as they're taking a principled stand against Trump and from the right.
Isn't that great?
Look, everybody, even David from agrees with us that Donald Trump is just too rude to be president and doesn't hit Syria hard enough or whatever it is.
It's really pathetic.
It's it's it's it's the most pathetic political spectacle of my lifetime.
And, you know, we'll see what happens in 2020.
You know, personally, as someone who doesn't want to see Trump reelected, I think Democrats are doing everything they can to reelect him.
You know, and it's part of the reason why I've been so vocal against Russiagate, because I just thought it was a disaster for, you know, progressive causes in this country and a huge gift to the right.
I mean, I also just thought it was ridiculous as a as a story and as a journalist.
I mean, we're supposed to, you know, assess stories based on the available facts, not go with what might be a convenient, soothing narrative to people who want to believe that the Trump nightmare is just a result of Vladimir Putin.
But it's, you know, we'll see how 2020 ends up.
But as it's going right now, the refusal, even after the Mueller report, which, you know, as as hard as Mueller and his team tried, they really tried hard to validate the conspiracy theory.
But they can't because it's a conspiracy theory.
There was no coordination between Trump and Russia.
The Mueller report even notes sort of in an aside and everyone ignores this, that after Trump won, all these elite Russians in the government and in the business community didn't know who to talk to because they hadn't talked to them before.
Well, if the if top Russian officials and Russian oligarchs don't know who to talk to after Trump wins and what are the odds that they were conspiring.
In the many months before, you know, it's just the whole thing.
No chance.
The whole thing makes no sense.
The whole thing makes no sense.
There's never been any evidence for it, but it's only sustained itself based on, you know, weasel wording, like from the Mueller team and from and from people in Congress and the media who had a personal stake in keeping it going.
Hey, and I just want to thank whoever leaked those emails because the American people had the right to read all of them.
And damn Hillary Clinton's privacy.
Seriously.
The only reason she had, you know, that she even brings up.
You must have seen this on Maddow where she says to Maddow, what if I had said, hey, Donald Trump, let's all see your tax returns.
Hey, China, why don't you get Donald Trump's tax returns for it?
So she can't even accuse him without reminding us that she had a separate secret email server at her house for the precise reason of keeping them out of our hands.
And that the only reason that Donald Trump even had a talking point to make fun and say, hey, Russia, there's still 30,000 missing emails is because she's a criminal.
And she had deleted 30,000 emails and then told the obvious lie that they were between her and her family about yoga lesson times and this and that.
When Bill was already on the record saying he's only ever used email twice in his life on somebody else's account.
And so she can't even she comes back still playing this sore loser card and she can't even accuse Trump without reminding us that there are 30,000 missing emails that I would still very much like to see.
And hey, Russia, if you're listening, you got my email address.
You know how to reach Wikileaks.
They have a secure upload button.
I mean, we get one more in an endless sea of examples of why this is just such a joke.
So Donald Trump says that at a press conference, Russia, if you're listening, and all of a sudden that becomes the basis for this.
Trump encouraged the adversary to hack into our democracy.
And it gets referenced in the Mueller report.
And, you know, people try, you know, and because there was some, you know, some like they say that that day, some Russian hackers attempted some some spear phishing that went nowhere.
The Clinton campaign, the suggestion there is that the hackers took Trump's signal and they were secretly talking to the public.
It's a joke.
The whole thing is a joke.
And it's it's it's being carried out by grown adults across the media establishment.
It's fooled so many people.
It's and it's such a, you know, from the point of view, again, of just of a progressive, it's just been a disaster.
And just the way it's going and going now with no accountability yet.
I just I don't see how it doesn't get worse.
Yeah.
Oh, and it ain't over by a long shot.
It's just there.
These people are way too invested in this narrative to ever let it go.
It's going to be like a rock or two was.
We're now a generation later.
You'll get, OK, yeah, I guess we shouldn't have done that.
But nobody's in trouble.
And it took this long for the consensus to really, you know, change.
And that's how this is going to be in 20 years.
Maybe if we're lucky, they'll admit that.
OK, that was kind of a not really.
Yeah.
All right.
Great work.
Thank you, as always.
Appreciate your time on the show, Aaron.
Thanks, Scott.
That's Aaron Maté, everybody.
He just won the Izzy Stone Award for his journalism on this.
And you can read this press release here at Accuracy.org, Sam Husseini, the Institute for Public Accuracy on Russia.
Did Mueller Mueller, who spells his name wrong, overstate his own report?
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