7/12/19 Daniel Lazare on the End of Russiagate

by | Jul 15, 2019 | Interviews

Daniel Lazare gives an update in the indictment of the Russain Internet Research Agency, who actually showed up in American court, contrary to the expectations of Robert Mueller. In Mueller’s report, he alleges that the firm conducted their activity on American social media sites at the behest of the Putin Government. The first part of that allegation is true, but there is no evidence that the firm has any connection to the Russian government. The judge in the case recently issued an order saying as much, which completely undermines any case of government collusion.

Discussed on the show:

Daniel Lazare is the author of The Frozen Republic: How the constitution is Paralyzing Democracy and a regular contributor at Consortium News. Find all of his work at his website and follow him on Twitter @dhlazare.

This episode of the Scott Horton Show is sponsored by: Kesslyn Runs, by Charles Featherstone; NoDev NoOps NoIT, by Hussein Badakhchani; The War State, by Mike Swanson; WallStreetWindow.com; Tom Woods’ Liberty ClassroomExpandDesigns.com/Scott; and LibertyStickers.com.

Donate to the show through PatreonPayPal, or Bitcoin: 1KGye7S3pk7XXJT6TzrbFephGDbdhYznTa.

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Sorry, I'm late.
I had to stop by the Whites Museum again and give the finger to FDR.
We know Al-Qaeda, Zawahiri, is supporting the opposition in Syria.
Are we supporting Al-Qaeda in Syria?
It's a proud day for America, and by God, we've kicked Vietnam syndrome once and for all.
Thank you very, very much.
I say it, I say it again, you've been had.
You've been took.
You've been hoodwinked.
These witnesses are trying to simply deny things that just about everybody else accepts as fact.
He came, he saw, he died.
We ain't killing their army, but we killing them.
We be on CNN like, say our name, bitch, 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 Daniel Lazar, writing again for ConsortiumNews.com.
This one's really important, very interesting stuff here on Russiagate.
Concord Management and the end of Russiagate.
I'm leaving off the question mark because, yeah, no.
Welcome back, Dan.
How are you?
I'm fine, Scott.
How are you?
I'm doing great.
You know, I remember thinking like a year or two ago, looking at some of these liberal, you know, sort of centrist conspiracy truthers on Russia, on Twitter, and the depth of their commitment to the belief that Donald Trump was a secret agent spy of the Russian state.
It's about as much conviction as I've ever seen people hold politically in anything, even if you were talking about the way things should be or it's too bad that things happen that way or kind of any political conviction at all.
Saddam Hussein must be stopped.
I mean, it's really something.
And so now what's really fun to see is the failure of the climb down.
They're just not stopping.
There was just a thing the other day on CNN, and they wrote up a whole report about it, too, where the guest was saying, that's right.
You know, they just kept repeating no collusion so much that it sort of took hold and people believe it.
But that's why you have to actually read the report and going on.
But she doesn't ever explain what it is you'll find in the report that makes her case.
It's just the entire narrative is still there.
Nothing ever happened to it.
The actual substance of the report, if you read it, has no effect on the narrative about it at all.
It's the scandal that refuses to die.
It just keeps going on and on.
It has more lives than a cat.
It's incredible.
But the latest story seems to be yet another stake in the heart of this phony pseudo scandal.
It involves a federal judge in Washington, D.C.
And this is complicated, so let me try to explain very carefully and clearly what's going on.
In February 2018, Mueller indicted the Internet Research Agency, a company in St. Petersburg, Russia, and accused them of trying to sow discord in the United States and hack the election by putting phony posts on Facebook, Twitter, etc.
There's a huge outcry in the press.
The press went bonkers.
Mueller looked like a real hero, and everyone had a really great time.
But it was pointed out at the time that an indictment in which the defendants had zero chance, a little chance of showing up in a U.S. courtroom, really was little more than a press release.
So that's where things stood.
But then a few months later, something strange happened.
One of the three companies that Mueller indicted actually showed up in a Washington, D.C. courtroom, pleading innocent and demanding it stay in court.
That was really strange.
Mueller seemed to be quite surprised.
The prosecutor asked for a delay, which is really kind of unprecedented.
And then the trial began.
And then the other day, on Monday, the federal judge, whose name is Dabney Friedrich, issued an astonishing ruling.
And let me explain what the ruling says.
The February 18th indictment of this company merely says that it sowed discord by putting phony posts on Facebook.
That's it.
The Mueller report, which came out in April, added a crucial fact.
And that was that this company was operating at the behest of the Russian government.
So that was not in the indictment, but that was in the report.
The indictments in February 2018, report April 2019, 14 months later.
So Mueller, the report says this.
And when William Barr gave his press conference in late March, summarizing the contents of the report, he repeated the allegation that the company was operating at the behest of the federal government.
OK.
Now, Judge Friedrichs has just issued a ruling saying to Robert Mueller and Attorney General William Barr, telling them you can't say that anymore because that is not that is a departure from the original indictment.
It's not pertinent.
And although Judge didn't say this, he might have added there is no evidence that that is indeed the case, at least no evidence in the version of the report that the public has been allowed to say.
So essentially, the judge has ordered Mueller and Barr to stay silent on essentially one half of the major charges against the Russian government.
Now, is the judge saying to them, unless you're going to prove it or is just saying, no, forget this, you already have failed to demonstrate this.
He's saying the latter, because there's nothing in the indictment about any kind of role by the Russian government.
So therefore, you can't make these additional charges without filing an additional indictment.
But however, there's nothing in the report that we've seen so far that has anything by way of proof linking the company with the Russian government.
Right.
So therefore, so therefore the problem.
So therefore, essentially, he has told Mueller to shut the F up about one half of his report.
This is a very, very important thing.
Well, yeah, it goes to show, right, that comes down to the courtroom in some cases anyway.
I guess the ruling could have gone the other way.
But when it comes to being forced to put up or shut up, they have to kind of shut up.
In fact, that was the reason that they issued the report in the first place.
It seems like Mueller would have dragged the thing on for another year as part of the plan or whatever the hell until finally he just ran out of accusations to make or innuendo to spin.
He had to either put up or shut up.
And so he just shut up.
He didn't invite anyone else, never accused anyone of colluding anything.
And yet here we still are.
Yeah, I mean, I mean, it's first of all, number one, I can't help but admit to being impressed by the by American legal procedure.
I mean, it's very rigorous.
And the judge, you know, the judge really is quite insistent on on that.
There'd be a fair trial for the for the defendants.
And this is going to get their fair day in court.
So therefore, you know, he's holding Mueller to the his feet to the fire, saying saying, you know, you you filed an indictment.
You can't say anything which prejudices which might prejudice the outcome of the trial that isn't in the original indictment.
That's that's kind of impressive, actually.
But but Mueller was really sloppy because, number one, he didn't count on the defendants ever answering these charges in court.
And even after they answered the charges in court, he included this material in his in his in his report, which he should have known would be prejudiced, prejudicial and would be challenged by the defense attorneys.
Yet he went ahead and did it.
And that strikes me as kind of.
At the very least, flaky and at the very most unethical.
I mean, I thought it was I thought that he was he played it straight and narrow on the collusion question because he knew that if he did charge collusion, he'd have to prove he'd have to file charges and then prove it in a court of law.
So therefore, he didn't do that because he knew that there'd be no way to prove that.
But he thought he could get off easy by attacking Russian military intelligence and accusing them of supplying WikiLeaks with this was stolen emails.
And he also sort of hoped to do the same thing, pull a fast number with the Internet Research Agency, even though one of those one of those the IRA's sister corporation had already shown up in court and was contesting the charges.
So essentially, the judges said, you can't do that if you are going to make any try any claim about the IRA or sister corporations acting at the behest of the federal government.
You have the Russian government.
You have got to file charges.
You've got to file charges, issue an indictment and then allow the defendants to have their day in court.
If you don't do that, you can't say that.
And that to me is, I mean, that's both impressive on the judge's part, but it just shows what a slipshod job, slipshod job Mueller did.
Well, in that part of the indictment, he just cites a New York Times story that says that the guy that runs it knows Putin.
Yeah.
Well, that was not the indictment.
That was in the report.
I'm sorry.
Yeah.
In the report.
Dealing, dealing with the with the of the IRA.
They don't bother to even make another claim beyond that.
And I'm sorry.
What does the indictment say about it?
The indictment is completely silent, completely silent, says nothing whatsoever about any Russian government connection.
Nothing.
I like how they always make such a big deal about, oh, he's known as Putin's cook, as though that's his gangster nickname who, you know, he goes around taking care of business for Putin or whatever.
But no, they just mean that he ate at his restaurant one time and was catered another time.
Something like that.
That's it.
All it means is, in fact, he ate at his restaurant a few times in the years 2001 to 2013.
That was a long time, 2001 to 2003.
That was a long time ago, more than a decade and a half ago.
So he's so he isn't even Putin's cook.
You know, he was put Putin's cook 15 years ago.
Think about if that was the Russian conspiracy theory where Obama had gone to Burger King.
I mean, that would be the most ridiculous thing in the world.
Right.
As if Burger King was Obama's cook.
You're absolutely correct.
The connections are so tenuous that the indictment doesn't even try to establish them at all.
And the report quite irresponsibly speculates and charges that without evidence that they were acting at the behest of the federal government.
And now Mueller and his report have been called up short by the federal government in the case.
And that, to me, is very, very important.
Well, and first of all, and the ironic and funny part is that they've been called up short by the accused here.
They weren't supposed to show up at all.
And instead, they're showing up and saying, arraign me.
And then, as you said, the prosecutor said, Your Honor, we're not ready to arraign these guys yet.
Please give us a delay.
Well, even more, in fact, the prosecutor said, complained to the judge that the defendants had not been properly served.
Even though the defendants were right there begging to be heard.
It's really quite ludicrous.
And what did the judge say to that particular point?
The judge refused to grant them a delay.
But then more delays ensued due to wrangling over the evidence that the Purgosian company wants to get its hands on.
I mean, essentially, Mueller has really gotten himself into a legal pickle over this case.
Because he can't prosecute Purgosian.
He can't get any kind of damages.
He can't do anything.
Yet Purgosian's company is demanding access to literally millions of bits of evidence, much of it sensitive, that Mueller acquired in the course of his investigation.
So originally Mueller thought that indicting the IRA would be a no-lose proposition for him.
But now it turns out that the IRA is in the no-lose situation, where it is able to sort of hold Mueller's feet to the fire and just torture him through legal procedure for as long as it wishes.
It's really quite hilarious.
Yeah, it is.
And, hey, never even mind his role in Russiagate.
He already deserved that from before when he was the director of the FBI, rounded up all kinds of innocent people right after September 11th that he knew were innocent, violated all their rights, and must have framed up 200 innocent idiots and fake Osama bin Laden plots against us with all their fake orange alerts.
Yes, yes.
And he also said that Iraq was one of seven countries, including Cuba and North Korea, that were sponsors of international terrorism.
And those seven countries did not include Saudi Arabia, even though 15 of the 19 hijackers, as we all know, were Saudi citizens.
And, in fact, Mueller played a major role in covering up the Saudi role in 9-11.
So this guy is really a creep.
And so, therefore, I must confess that I am really quite delighted to see him getting his comeuppance at last.
Well, now, so he's been subpoenaed to come and testify before the Congress, where there are Trump partisans ready and waiting for him.
Now, of course, we're talking about Republicans.
So, as James Bovard said about the Waco hearings, about the Republicans and the Democrats, it's like watching drunks fight in a bar.
They swing and they miss.
And so we'll have, you know, people will be trying to go after him.
It's not clear how effective they'll be able to really nail him.
But I wonder if he's going to bow out rather than show up and have to try to face this music, you know?
It's very possible.
He will bow out.
And even if he doesn't bow out, he won't be able to talk about half his case.
I want to hear answered.
What's his excuse for dragging this thing on for two years when he could have just as easily made it known that he had no angle to pursue that was leading toward the implication that Donald Trump had made any illegal compromise with the Russians of any kind?
For him to let that stand as a distinct possibility for two years is itself obviously part of the plot against this president.
Well, why did he testify in 2003 that Saddam Hussein was bristling with WMDs and that Cuba and North Korea were major exporters of terrorism?
Because he's a loyal servant of power.
That's why.
Because it's all politics, not law.
That's why.
But what goes on in his brain, though?
What is he thinking?
Is he thinking, like, why am I lying?
Why am I saying this stuff?
Well, I think he was doing it for the same reason that John Brennan and the rest of them came up with this thing in the first place.
As they even put it to the New York Times, to hem Trump in.
If they can't overthrow him with the 25th Amendment, they're at least going to saddle him with these accusations so that he cannot move particularly on relations with Russia.
Hold on just one second.
Be right back.
Hey, guys, check it out.
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You do us a good favor here in this article, Dan, where you take us back through another major point, maybe the major point of all points about this whole Russiagate thing, that there is very real reason to doubt the underlying basis of the whole thing.
And that is that Russia was responsible for hacking the DNC and the Podesta emails and transferring those materials to WikiLeaks.
Yes, that's that's so.
So the so the way Mueller describes that there was a two pronged campaign.
One was the IRA campaign on social media.
The other was an effort by the Russian military intelligence to hack the DNC and then to pass along some twenty eight thousand emails and other documents to WikiLeaks, which then released them in July 2016 and causing acute embarrassment to the Democratic Party.
So the first one, the first half of that statement is unproven.
There's no evidence linking the IRA to to the Russian government.
And as an aside, what the rush what the IRA did on social media is this was incredibly insignificant, maladroit, ineffective.
I don't think they succeeded in persuading and changing a single mind, number one.
But number two, the second half, which is that Russian GRU and military intelligence hacked the DNC and then passed along its findings to Wikileaks.
That is almost certainly untrue as well.
Yes, it's possible that the Russian military intelligence did hack the DNC.
However, it's extremely unlikely that they were responsible for the massive email dump that occurred in July 22nd, 2016, which caused such an uproar among Democrats.
And the reason that is, is very simple.
In his report, Mueller essentially gives a chronology of how this happened.
But the chronology doesn't make sense because it has Julian Assange, founder of Wikileaks, announcing that another leak is on the way.
And then it has a supposed Russian military intelligence cut out, calling himself Guccifer 2.0, then contacting, then taking credit for the leak and then contacting Assange for the first time.
I happen to have it right in front of me here.
So just to be clear here, June 12th, Assange announces he has some new Hillary Clinton leaks coming out.
June 15th, three days later, Guccifer 2.0 goes online and claims credit for the hack.
You know, come on.
I think I found some reasonable doubt in this timeline already here.
But then even worse, according to Mueller again, June 22nd, 10 days after the original announcement by Assange, Guccifer finally speaks with Assange, apparently over Twitter, direct messages, right?
Yeah.
So how would he do that?
I mean, how would Assange know a leak was coming before hearing from the supposed source?
That's point number A.
Point number B is that Guccifer finally sends Assange a file on July 14th.
And the file supposedly contains 28,000 emails.
Which July 14th, now we're talking about 32 days later.
OK, sorry, go ahead.
And then Guccifer, then Assange releases a bunch of emails on July 22nd.
So therefore, eight days after receiving this file, he releases the emails.
But how is that possible?
How could he review 28,000 emails to make sure they're genuine, that they weren't tampered with, they weren't phony, this is a source he doesn't know?
And also WikiLeaks has got a very high reputation for its accuracy and scrupulousness.
So therefore, the idea that he would publish such a massive file a mere eight days after receiving it doesn't make sense.
So therefore, he has insisted all along that his source was not a state actor, was not Russia.
And therefore, there is no good evidence that that original statement was untrue.
So Mueller's report is simply unconvincing and there is no other evidence.
So the whole thing is just so insubstantial.
And yet the press refuses to ask any serious questions about it.
And when Mueller appears before Congress next week, if he appears, I can almost guarantee you that no members of the committees, of the House committees he's appearing before, will ask any kind of serious questions either.
They're just so brain dead and so bought into the system and so timid.
And as James Bovard says, such drunkards that they just are incapable of just giving the guy the grilling he really deserves.
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You know, the other thing that is a major point, I guess, grading on a curve major compared to all of the rest of the flops in the thing from, you know, Papadopoulos on through.
But one major deal that they made was about this guy, Kalemnik.
And this guy, check it out, has ties to Russian intelligence.
That's a little vague.
Apparently it's because he went to a language school run by the Russian military in 1993.
So, anyway, yeah, ties.
But we've known all along that, well, I'm sorry, no, no, no.
We've known at least for months and months that he worked for, and this is in the Mueller report, too, that he worked for John McCain for the International Republican Institute.
And that, you know, his ties to Manafort, rather than representing anything that could conceivably be a channel from Putin through this agent to Manafort and Trump, we already know that if anything, it was at least suspicious.
I'm not saying I believe this is true, but it was at least a plausible case that Manafort was CIA.
He was working for the U.S. because his role inside the Party of Regions was trying to convince Yanukovych to ignore the Russians and to sign up with the European Union.
In other words, to do what the Americans wanted.
And this is at the core of, oh, yeah, they were even trying.
The Russians even had a plan to influence this election at all then.
You know, when I was a cub reporter a zillion years ago, you know, I had a very hard-nosed editor who would just ream me out if I didn't give both sides of the story.
I mean, he would just give me a spanking if that was not to be believed in so many words.
And, you know, and yet Mueller in his report presents a incredibly tendentious, one-sided picture of the story.
I mean, yeah, I mean, maybe Kalymnik was working for Russian intelligence, but we know he was also a trusted source for the U.S. State Department.
You know, so we just really don't know.
Mueller identifies a very important guy named Joseph Mifsud.
He hints very strongly that he is also a Russian intelligence asset.
But we know that Mifsud actually had very close ties with Western intelligence.
This is all very important because this is this is how we know what direction these guys are coming from and what they're doing.
I only just read the interview of him in the Italian magazine from, I guess, last year.
And nobody can find this guy apparently now, but he was living in Rome then.
And, you know, I don't know.
Liars can lie well, I guess.
But he sure seemed to be on the up and up.
On one hand, he said, I never even told Papadopoulos that in the first place.
But then secondly, as he put it, I swear on my daughter.
I don't represent no stinking Russians.
Are you kidding me?
You know, and that sounds to me like an honest man's talk.
I don't know.
I wasn't there, but it's pretty hard to believe.
Again, it's just like a it's a classic conspiracy theory.
It's perfect.
If you think that data point A, B, C, D and E are all true, then it does make sense maybe to conclude that this other thing is right, too.
Except that you have to have some evidence for A through D there or forget it.
And instead, what you have is a case that's made out of all zeros, out of all nothings.
Yes.
I mean, I mean, look, I mean, the Russiagate episode is one of the strangest episodes in modern American political history.
I mean, it's a conspiracy tale.
Everyone always laughed at the nuts who were going around, you know, about, you know, about the JFK assassination.
And, you know, and this this plot, that plot.
And it was all so incredibly complicated, you know, and there was that great movie, The Parallax View, which, you know, it's also sort of like a theorized, but, you know, but infinite number of plots.
And we all know how silly this kind of conspiratorialism can get.
Yet that is exactly what Russiagate did, was.
I mean, the entire mainstream essentially plunged down a conspiratorialist rabbit hole.
And and and skeptics are merely asking for for evidence, for proof, for balance, you know, simple balance.
You know, I mean, if, you know, Kalimnik was dealing with a lot of people, you know, maybe he was dealing with Russian intelligence, but maybe he's only but we also know he's dealing with the U.S. State Department.
You know, Manafort was actually playing a kind of a complicated game in Kiev.
He was trying to to gently steer the government he was working for towards a rapprochement with the EU.
His role was not nearly as pro-Russian as everyone seems to assume.
I mean, there's a lot of complicated, ambiguous stuff that deserves to be sort of treated in a very kind of careful, you know, mature, intelligent way.
And that is not what the press or Mueller have done.
Right.
And by the way, you know, I keep noticing this, too, in places like the New Yorker magazine and things along those lines is it's really popular.
I guess there's some new books out now by these very sort of centrist liberals saying, you know, essentially denouncing, criticizing mostly right wing conspiracy culture, which there's a lot to criticize there, of course.
But they go, you know, essentially anybody who's a critic of the state from the right is a total chemtrail kook to be completely, you know, dismissed, patronized, pitied or whatever.
Certainly not ever listened to.
But meanwhile, no mention at all of which you would think it's only fair enough to say that.
You know what?
Honestly, the political center in America, liberals like the people who, you know, these NPR types who are pushing these anti-conspiracy narratives, they all bought into the conspiracy theory that Saddam Hussein was working with Osama bin Laden.
The conspiracy theory that Muammar Gaddafi was going to murder every last man, woman and child in Benghazi when his forces got there if we didn't stop him.
That Bashar al-Assad was in alliance with ISIS against the moderate rebels who we were backing in Syria and, you know, on and on with all of their crazy conspiracy garbage and including.
And, you know, as you say, this is sort of the coup de grace here or whichever.
I don't know the damn French.
The worst one of all here is this Russiagate thing, accusing the elected president essentially of high treason in a way that makes, you know, Obama and Brennan look like heroes after Syria or something.
And yet it wasn't true at all.
And it was all at the expense of the most important relationship on the planet Earth, America's relationship with Russia.
The two countries who each have possessed thousands of thermonuclear weapons and could eliminate at least all of northern civilization from the face of the earth if these kind of contests get out of hand.
And to have all of that based on this kind of garbage and then to ignore that and to say, yeah, it's a conspiracy theory that the news is fake.
Yeah, no, it's not.
That's the truth that the news is fake.
And it's true.
And we all know why, too.
It's because of the state and corporate interests involved.
As Dan Rather put, you know, it's not just the Northrop Grumman ads on MSNBC all day and all that, too.
As Dan Rather put it to Bill Moyers after Iraq War II, he said, listen, when you work in these giant corporations, you don't have to get a memo from the boss reminding you that your company has huge regulatory needs in Washington, D.C.
And there's only so far you can push.
There is a line, as he put it on David Letterman, line up and salute, Mr. President, whatever you say.
And that's their role is to push this stuff on us.
And then they want to denounce us for not believing them.
That's just making it worse.
Yeah.
I mean, there's a there's a guy named Rob Goldman, who was a Facebook vice president for advertising, who at one point tweeted in defense of Facebook that that more than more than half of the IRAs ad spending in Facebook occurred after the election.
Now, this is true.
Number one, this is true.
Number two, Goldman was forced to apologize, to grovel, to apologize in the most cringing manner for daring to point out the truth because it's somehow conflicted with the mission of Robert.
Robert Mueller is an amazing episode.
I mean, he merely he merely stated a few facts and got and got shot down, you know, within hours.
And as Aramonte was pointing out that Facebook originally was honest about this until Senator Warner came to town.
And then they said, OK, yes, sir.
Mr. Political pressure.
We'll go ahead and serve you up some stats you want to hear.
Yes, because Facebook knew that the federal government could make life miserable for it if if it didn't play along.
They have huge regulatory needs in Washington, D.C.
So therefore, Facebook snapped to attention, gave the salute and played along.
So and this guy, Rob Goldman, you know, who had the temerity to to to point up, you know, to point out a few unassailable facts on Twitter, you know, got his, you know, got his derriere handed to him on a silver platter.
So, you know, so so this is this is just an example of the amazing, you know, conformity censorship that has surrounded this whole very, very strange episode.
I mean, listen, by comparison, McCarthyism in the early 50s was a very sober inquiry into into Russian espionage penetration.
And at least there was a kernel of truth there that there were a lot of guys that when America was allied with the Soviet Union had moved into the government and had these ideas.
Doesn't necessarily mean that even a very large percent of them continued to side with the Russians after the Cold War broke out.
But some of them did.
In other words, there was a kernel of truth to the thing, whereas here there's no kernel of truth at all.
The kernel of truth here is Hillary lost.
Absolutely.
There were there was there was as as absurd, ridiculous and absurd and vicious as McCarthyism was.
This is even more so.
And so so, you know, so it's just it's just historians will be puzzling over the over this episode and subsequent death, you know, decades once the dust clears and they be able to think clearly.
But, you know, I appreciate the fact that you're a leftist and you're saying, yeah, facts are the facts.
This is no defense of Trump, just of the truth.
I guess it's a criticism of the secret police for setting this thing up in the first place, the way that they framed him and pretended to believe in this and the media and the rest of that.
But no one has to be a partisan of any side here to just be a stickler for the truth.
And after all.
And this is something that Aaron Maté, who's been so great on this at the Nation all along, has said all along, too, that as all of Trump's critics are wasting all their time, essentially attacking him from the right for not being patriotic enough.
Boy, all of the worst stuff that he's doing, he's getting away with.
Well, that's like as in the Persian Gulf at this very moment.
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And thanks.
Yeah, I mean, as I said, this episode is so strange.
And the funny thing is about being afraid of facts.
I mean, facts are really important.
And the facts, if you're right politically, then you're confident the facts are on your side.
And there's no reason to shave the truth to advance your argument, because if your argument is sound, the truth will back it up.
And so I'm not afraid of the facts in this case, because I think the facts clearly show that there's no evidence of a Russian government campaign.
The role of the IRA has been vastly overblown.
And that, as you say, Hillary lost because, number one, the Electoral College was a constitutional problem that should have been fixed decades ago, if not centuries ago.
And she also ran a lousy campaign and still was ahead by 2.8 million popular votes.
And she only lost by virtue of the Electoral College.
That's the story.
That's the end of it.
Russia had nothing to do with that story.
And you know, this is a really important point, too, that is so often overlooked, because people say, well, Hillary, she should have gone to Wisconsin and this kind of thing.
But Aramonte also, I keep quoting him because he's done such great work on this.
He points out, and it's from the book Shattered, which is, I forgot the guys' names.
I think it's Halperin and those guys.
It's Parnes and Allen.
Oh, OK.
Two authors' names.
And they talk about how in the internal discussions in the campaign that they strategically decided it was not a mistake.
They quite deliberately stayed out of those Midwestern states because the more exposure those people had to Hillary Clinton, the worse it was for her.
And so they said, you know what, we have to stay out and just cross our fingers and hope that we can sail through at 51 percent or something and get through there.
But we don't want to go there and remind them about who you are, lady, because they hate your guts for some reason, you know.
Well, for a lot of reasons, a lot of good reasons.
And she was a very unpopular president because she was a dreadful senator and secretary of state.
And while the press forgot that, the public didn't.
But still, she won by 2.8 million votes.
And it's only the idiotic Electoral College that overrode the election.
See, I like the Electoral College.
It's supposed to make it where it's not one national election with a mandate for a great leader.
Instead, it's 50 separate contests for some electors.
It's supposed to make it more limited in what the president can claim.
He's supposed to be the chief executive of the government departments.
He's not supposed to be the leader of us all and our commander in chief and all this garbage the way they do it now, you know.
Well, Scott, you and I have got to agree to disagree on this issue.
All right.
Well, you know what, we agree in abolishing this constitution.
We just don't agree what we want to replace it with, but that's OK.
That's true.
That's true.
All right.
You're great.
Thank you so much for coming on the show.
I sure appreciate that.
My pleasure.
See you.
See you.
Bye.
All right, you guys, that is Daniel Lazar.
You got to find this piece over at ConsortiumNews.com.
It's called Concord Management and the End of Russiagate.
All right, y'all.
Thanks.
Find me at LibertarianInstitute.org, at ScottHorton.org, AntiWar.com, and Reddit.com slash Scott Horton Show.
Oh, yeah.
And read my book, Fool's Errand, Timed and the War in Afghanistan at FoolsErrand.us.

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