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 Name been saying, say it three times.
The meeting of the largest armies in the history of the world.
Then there's going to be an invasion.
All right you guys, introducing Daniel Lazar.
He writes mostly for consortiumnews.com.
This one here is at strategicculture, reprinted at lerockwell.com.
And we're going to run it at antiwar.com tomorrow I think.
Another day, another scandal.
What the Trump-Ukraine collusion is really about.
Before that, at Consortium News, the plan to trip up Trump.
Welcome back to the show.
How are you doing, Daniel?
I'm fine.
How are you, Scott?
I'm doing great.
Appreciate you joining us on the show again.
My pleasure.
Yeah, let's start with the current news here.
They're going to impeach the president over this phone call with the new president of Ukraine.
What do you think?
I think it's Ukraine gate is son of Russia gate.
I think that the CIA has been trying to get Trump since the moment he was elected.
They've seized upon another angle.
I can't really quite figure out what Trump did that was wrong.
I mean, asking a foreign leader to investigate a political opponent is kind of pushing the envelope.
And relying on your personal attorney to sort of act as intermediary is even a bit weirder.
But the fact is that Biden's activities fairly call out for an investigation.
There's a great deal of public interest here.
I mean, what Biden did was outrageous, absolutely outrageous.
And the official explanation doesn't really—well, it certainly is worth looking into.
And that official explanation is that Biden was not trying to get the Ukrainian prosecutor fired because he was investigating his son's company, but that Biden pushed to get him out because he wasn't investigating corruption hard enough.
So therefore Biden was willing to sacrifice his son's interests for the greater good of Ukraine.
I mean, that's possible, I suppose, but certainly I wouldn't take the conventional opinion's word for it.
And I think it's worth looking into.
All right.
Now, so, yeah, no, here's the deal, right?
There's the narrow view and then there's the broader context and all this.
Let's stick with that broader context for a second.
How come the CIA hates Donald Trump so much?
Well, you know, the Ukraine was a big battleground in 2016.
Trump deviated from the official line quite radically with regard to two countries, the Ukraine and Syria.
And he really challenged the official line and the establishment was furious.
I mean, the U.S. wasn't at war with Putin over the Ukraine, but it was kind of at semi-war.
Relations had plunged to a real low.
The U.S. was furious at the way that Putin had screwed up its plans for the Ukraine.
And it was mobilizing to engage in a full board diplomatic mobilization to isolate Putin and to force him to retreat politically.
And then along comes Trump, who announces his candidacy in June 2015 and says and indicates that as far as he's concerned, Putin's activities, including the takeover of the Crimea, was not an especially big deal as far as he was concerned.
And so this made the foreign policy establishment really seriously angry.
Yeah.
Well, and of course, on all these things, he's the one who's in the right.
And they're the ones who have started this, you know, current Cold War for no good reason.
And then there was also Syria and Trump also broke ranks on Syria.
Right.
Because he was listening to Mike Flynn, who was telling him, actually, we hate al-Qaeda more.
And he was saying, yeah, that sounds right to me.
Yeah.
Oh, yeah.
You're right.
I mean, Flynn was the head of the Defense Intelligence Agency, which in which in the August of 2012 put out a report, a stunning report saying that al-Qaeda was dominating the the anti-Assad opposition.
Right.
And here's the guy who is horrible on Iran, too.
But he wasn't so horrible on Iran that he wanted to see al-Qaeda defeat their friends in Syria.
Right.
So.
So.
So.
So Trump said that the the battle against al-Qaeda should take precedence over the battle to overthrow Assad.
And this was and this also, you know, made the establishment seriously, you know, angry.
Now, let me ask you this, though.
Like, what about the power factions and all that?
Obviously, the Israelis love him.
And, you know, you look at the Yemen war and the rest of the escalations.
It doesn't seem like the military industrial complex as an organism is really against him.
Maybe, you know, he plays favorites between Lockheed and Boeing from time to time in this kind of thing.
But it doesn't seem like they probably have much reason to be too dissatisfied with him.
Or maybe you disagree with that, or is it just it's the state agencies themselves more than it is bankers or oil men or arms dealers or any necessary kind of outside power faction?
Well, yes.
I mean, you're right.
The the Israelis love Trump or Netanyahu does, I should say.
And and the the arms manufacturers, of course, are quite happy with him pushing US arms sales in the Middle East.
So they're so they're not displeased.
But, you know, bear in mind, US imperialism is is grossly overextended and it's in serious trouble.
And and Trump is really a manifestation of that trouble.
So so they they see Trump as kind of, you know, undercutting the the empire in two all important arenas.
And they are they want to restabilize the empire and therefore they want Trump out.
They are seriously angry at how he's undercut them and they want to get rid of them.
Yeah.
I mean, you look at the U.N. speech the other day where he's just rails against globalism and for nationalism.
And, of course, I mean, Dick Cheney could have given the same speech right where nationalism means it means globalism and internationalism.
It just means all based out of D.C. instead of based out of New York City or Brussels or something like that.
Right.
Yeah, I suppose so.
But it's not like he's really an isolationist like me.
He's not really an isolationism, an isolationist.
And he's really he's well, he's he's he's of two minds.
In fact, he's like six or eight minds.
But but the but he's he's he's ambivalent on the question of empire.
And one day is for another day.
He's against it.
And in two crucial areas, he he really went against the grain.
And so therefore the the the neocons, the the empire is is is furious.
Yeah.
All right.
Now, so.
Well, and we saw and as you've covered, I totally agree with your narrative, your sort of meta explanation of Russiagate was this was a FBI slash CIA plot against the Republican nominee for president and then the president elect and then the president himself.
Yeah, I think that's really quite clear.
You know, in 2009, there was an amazing case, a criminal case pursued by the FBI against as called the against the Newberg, Newberg for Newberg is a town about an hour and a half north of New York City.
And these are for four black guys who were set up the a FBI informant, a and a Pakistani guy with a long history of criminal, criminal misdeeds, essentially enlisted these guys in a plot to blow up two synagogues and shoot down military aircraft.
These are the guys from the the older one owned the pizza place, right?
Is that the same one?
No, I'm not aware that these guys are penniless.
I'm sorry.
There's so many of these entrapment jobs.
I mix them together.
I'm sorry.
Please go ahead.
It was an amazing it was an amazing entrapment case because the FBI, you know, supplied the idea of the plot, supplied the explosives, lured them in with offers of $250,000 in cash and all expenses paid vacation in Puerto Rico, you know, drove them around, bought the weapons, bought the explosives.
These guys are nothing more than passive onlookers.
And yet they were sentenced to 25 years in prison.
There is a there's a there's a very good documentary on them called the Newberg sting.
And there's also actually a new movie out based on this story.
And and so on.
So it's clear that the FBI was following similar entrapment, a similar entrapment strategy with regard to the Trump campaign.
They wanted to somehow entrap this nice young kid was this kid's name.
I'm sorry.
But yes, George Papadopoulos, a naive young guy who had signed up as a volunteer for the the the the Trump campaign and and somehow get him to admit to working with the Russians.
They threw they threw women at him.
They threw drinks and meals at him.
They flew him to London.
They let him off all kinds of all kinds of leading questions.
And he didn't he didn't go for the bait.
But if he had gone for the bait, if he had said something stupid, if he had bragged about his Russian contacts, for example, to make himself seem like a like a big shot, they would have you know, they would have nabbed him and then they would have forced him to wear a wire and bring down other guys in the Trump campaign.
And now in your article here at Consortium News, you say they pull the same scam on Trump himself in the Trump Tower meeting.
Yes.
So so so you have two different Trump Tower meetings, one right, which was sponsored by the coup plotters in the first place to entrap his son.
And then later, Comey's meeting with Trump.
And it turns out Glenn Simpson sent her in the first place.
Right.
And then and then greeted her a day later.
And and and then this guy claimed to have dirt on Hillary Clinton.
Trump Jr. sent off the famous email saying, I love it.
And and at the meeting came to nothing less than 20 minutes.
She obviously had no information to pass along.
And that was the end of it.
But this this is the meeting that spawned 10,000 news articles.
But but there was a second meeting in Trump Tower.
That was on January 6th, 2017, when Jim Comey, James Clapper and John Brennan met with Trump to inform him of their forthcoming report, finding that that that Russia had interfered in the in the 2016 campaign.
And after they were finished with their presentation, Jim Comey stayed behind and in for to inform Trump about the Steele dossier and the famous golden showers escapade.
And I'm sure your listeners, is there anyone in America who doesn't know what that golden showers escapades about?
So so in any case, so but what we know now from a report by the Department of Justice internal investigator, a guy named Michael Horowitz, is that the purpose of that meeting was to see how Trump would react.
And to see if he would do something or say something that would allow that would permit the FBI to widen its investigation.
So that would focus in on the president elect himself.
And I forgot if it was your thing or something I read just the other day that said they had that dossier and had been meeting with Steele for six months before that meeting at Trump Tower.
Plenty of time, more than plenty of time for the FBI to completely debunk that completely false dossier.
That was the month.
Yes.
Glenn Simpson testified before a congressional committee that that that in late June or early July 2016, Christopher Steele, the British intelligence agent, was meeting with the FBI to acquaint them with his findings.
So that's so that that is a full six months prior to this meeting in the Trump Tower.
Now, how can these six months is more than enough time to try to get a handle, to get some idea of whether this incredible story about a golden showers escapade in the Moscow Ritz Carlton has any truth to it.
But clearly, Comey was less interested in that question than he was in the question of Trump's reaction.
And if Trump had said the wrong thing, I mean, what if he had laughed?
What if he had smiled?
What if he had told some kind of crude joke?
You know, what if he'd said, yeah, the babes in Moscow are really hot?
What if he'd said that?
You know, the FBI would then have like, you know, would would then have said, oh, my God, this investigation is going to now focus in on the president elect himself.
And soon to be in two weeks later, the president of the United States.
This is completely inappropriate, outrageous and undemocratic.
Well, then, as you point out and others have pointed out, too, that Comey leaking or Comey briefing, quote unquote, threatening, revealing this so-called information to Trump at that time is what made it newsworthy that BuzzFeed would go ahead and publish it under the excuse that now that that's out, that they had talked to Trump about it before it was just some unverified stuff that they couldn't publish because of how unverified it was.
Now there was a story about it itself in a larger sense.
And so they could get away with publishing the details themselves.
And then instead of doing their job and falsifying it all, which was all false, all the reporters in D.C. all decided to glom onto the thing and pretend to believe that it was all real and see what of it that they could try to hold up.
This is this is the this is the the heart of the Russiagate investigation.
I mean, so so so after this meeting, then Comey then goes goes to his waiting limo where they were.
His colleagues had a had a dedicated laptop waiting for him and he jots down his notes on this this this meeting.
And he's in his notes.
He says he told Trump that the the meeting, the information, the Steele dossier was being kept on a close hold.
They didn't want it leaking to the press.
And he assured him it would not leak to the press.
Yet he knew that by meeting with Trump that that that very act, you know, would provide the press with the the hook, the news hook it needed to go public with this with this this this the dossier.
And sure enough, four days later, BuzzFeed published it.
Now, so so so so either Comey is a complete idiot or he's not.
Does he?
He's simply lying.
And and and this this dossier is what, you know, is what blew up Russiagate because three months later, two months later, the House Intelligence Committee's Adam Schiff for the House Intelligence Committee at a public hearing, you know, gave a 30 minute talk.
And which he essentially quoted line by line from the Steele dossier and proclaimed it to be the gospel truth.
Yeah.
So while the FBI is pretending to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court to think that, yeah, I mean, maybe Carter Page was promised a zillion dollar stake, a 20 percent stake in a Russian government owned oil company.
Yeah.
I mean, as the FBI apologized to Carter Page.
Yeah.
Come on.
Turning it for turning his life upside down.
Being in government means never having to say you're sorry.
Ruining this completely nice, inoffensive guy.
But I do agree with you, by the way, that the reporting was amazingly incompetent because any decent reporter would have asked, well, you know, well, who leaked it?
Why did they leak it?
You know, what is the purpose of leaking this this thing?
And when he asked that question, then you what that leads you down a different avenue.
But that was the question that no one wanted to ask.
You know, what we really need is a master list of all of the bad stories here, because there's the bad government claims about, oh, no, we're pretending to be concerned that maybe, you know, something untoward happened when the Russian ambassador visited Senator Jeff Sessions in his office with all of his former military officer staff standing right there.
And this kind of garbage, which, of course, didn't go anywhere because there was nothing to it.
But there is also another few hundred probably stories in the media that didn't necessarily come straight from the FBI, but maybe a DHS story about hacking some state computer, you know, voter rolls or hacking the electric grid or Rachel Maddow speculation.
That may be the reason that the CEO of Exxon got the job as secretary of state wasn't because the State Department was actually built on Exxon Standard Oil of New Jersey's global business practice after World War Two.
No, I couldn't have anything to do with that.
It's Putin and Russia.
Oh, by the way, Putin is probably also why Tillerson got fired because he was so good on Russia and Trump is such a trick.
And there's a million of them.
And I know there have been a few good attempts to write like a master list of them all, but I bet the whole thing together, there's probably a couple of few hundred of these things, none of which went anywhere.
Actually, actually, according to the White House, the four horsemen of the Rushgate apocalypse, CNN, MSNBC, The Washington Post and The New York Times published 8500 news articles on the collusion theme.
8500.
And a lot of them with very specific false claims in them, too.
And never once did those four publications, never once did they open their pages in any way or their websites to any contrary skeptical point of view.
Not once.
It was an amazing, an amazing media barrage.
Well, and here's our segue back to the topic of Ukraine here, too, where everybody's already assumed their conclusion with this thing before the transcript or the pseudo transcript or the whistleblower complaint was out.
They're already jumping the gun all over that.
And in fact, they're even saying there's an NBC story that the Democrats are certain what they want to do now is drop Russiagate cold and just forget about that and go with the Ukraine gate thing instead.
In other words, there never was anything to their false accusations of high treason against the president of the United States.
And so, oh, well, anyway, but we found a new thing.
We're going to try to hang with that.
What do you think of that?
It's it's it's it's just, you know, it's a it's a it's a herd of independent minds.
I mean, this country is so conformist.
It's political system.
It's political classes have just collapsed.
We are seeing we are seeing a case of mass hysteria seizing a season of the nation's capital.
It's really quite amazing.
And, you know, and for the life of me, I really can't exactly see what Trump did that was wrong.
I mean, you know, it's yeah, it's weird asking, pushing for an investigation.
And it's weird, you know, bringing in his personal attorney to take charge of this thing.
That's, you know, that's kind of strange, weird and pushing the envelope.
But he didn't ask Zelensky to get dirt on Biden.
He simply asked him to investigate.
And that's something the US does all the time.
And Biden's activities in the Ukraine fairly cry out for an investigation.
There is a significant public interest in finding out what really happened.
And the Ukraine, as you know, is an incredibly murky place.
It's one of the most corrupt countries in the face of the earth.
And it's really hard to figure out.
And the official explanation that, of course, Joe Biden was not trying to protect his son by pushing for the dismissal of Viktor Shokin, the Ukrainian prosecutor general.
Well, you know, maybe that's true.
But there certainly is a good deal of reason to look into that a bit more deeply to find out if it's true.
Right.
So I'm glad you brought that up again, because this is really something that has been a major part of, well, both sides narrative here, where, for example, Jim Risen, former New York Times reporter at The Intercept, is saying, look, this is debunked and now it's debunked like the CIA coming after you six ways from Sunday.
Forget about it.
It's obvious and it's clear that Biden was saying this prosecutor is corrupt and he's not doing enough to bring down corrupt interests.
And that, as you put it earlier, gee whiz, even if the new guy goes after my son's company, good, if that's what it takes, you know, kind of attitude, which, as you said, you know, as a deniability sort of counter narrative, it kind of makes sense.
In fact, my friend Hunter Durensis at The National Interest had a quote from another former Obama official, a nameless one, saying, listen, man, trust me, the whole interagency wanted rid of this prosecutor.
He was terrible.
And Biden was not the driving force behind that.
We had our own.
I mean, that is totally plausible to me at the same time.
Oh, and they're saying that whatever investigation had already really been shut down.
But, you know, I'm reading in The Hill this morning, John Solomon has a thing where he says, actually, that's not true.
There were three sort of sub investigations and one of the three had been shut down, I think, on the tax evasion question.
But there were still two more.
And so and then, as I think you pointed out, or was it him?
I'm getting all my footnotes mixed up in my head these days.
Sorry.
But that The New York Times had said then that this company was quite relieved when they found out that the prosecutor had been fired and they were looking at it as a great opportunity to try to work things out with, you know, in a more beneficial way.
So it sure sounds from their point of view like they looked at it as a positive thing.
So I don't know.
Yes.
And the fact that in fact, the company did then reach an amicable settlement with the Poroshenko government.
But, you know, it's murky and this is a very murky place.
I mean, Poroshenko was a guy who was installed by the U.S. to clean things up.
And he turned out to be just as corrupt as Yanukovych, if not more.
OK.
And so if Poroshenko, you know, appointed Shokin and suddenly Shokin's the fall guy and Shokin's really bad and everyone wants him out.
And of course, it has nothing to do with Hunter Biden's job at Burisma Holdings.
You know, it's it's not impossible.
I don't I don't have the answer.
But I do think that there is a significant public interest in learning the answer.
Yeah.
And by the way, let it not be said that we're talking about them.
Even if you take their best case spin scenario, we're talking about them trying to clean up corruption in a government that they installed after a violent coup.
Yes, yes.
And they overthrew a democratically elected government in 2014.
So, yeah, we're going to clean up all the corruption in this new coup d'etat government that we installed.
Yes.
And so the whole thing is very murky.
You know, I mean, like what was the U.S. really doing?
Was it was a blocking with certain factions in the Ukraine?
The fact that the U.S. and the EU agreed that Shokin had to go to me, that's that's that's monumentally unimpressive.
And so so and Zelensky is a guy from outside the establishment.
And if he does mount an honest investigation, which is possible, it'll be fascinating.
I'd love to see what what he comes up with, because it's a it's a very murky episode that I don't truly understand.
And I think the public should have a better idea of what it's about.
Yeah.
I've got to say the whole irony here, I was even joking around, not that I really believe this, but you could see where this whole thing could be a Roger Stone or Karl Rove kind of dirty trick, where how do we get the Democrats to make Joe Biden's corruption the center of their whole narrative?
You know, I know.
Hey, Joey, come here.
You want to be a whistleblower?
Here's what we're going to do.
And you just get this thing to whole leak out.
And then so what's the Democrats stand?
Hey, Hunter Biden can make all the money off of foreign governments.
He wants while his father is the vice president.
And you shut up about that.
Right.
These are the same people want to abolish your ability to leave your house to your son.
You know, but anyway.
Well, well, in any case, I'd leave living the inheritance tax aside.
But Biden is a.
But yes, this is the whole the whole the whole concern.
Hunter Biden has now been officially dismissed as a conspiracy theory.
And, you know, anybody who looks into it, you know, is obviously some kind of wacko.
But it's not.
I mean, you know, even if even if if Biden's explanation is correct.
I mean, he's still guilty of massive conflict of interest.
And it's outrageous that his son did get this job.
Right.
Yeah.
There's been plenty of like public interest professors at colleges and whatever.
People who obviously very much lean Democrat saying, actually, this is quite against the ethics rules and blah, blah, blah.
Very black and white kind of thing.
No question about it.
So.
So.
So.
So.
So Biden, essentially, Joe Biden is kaput.
He's finished the guy because this will demonstrate the guy is massively corrupt.
And just wait till the impeachment hearings like the like the Republicans are going to bring all this stuff up at the hearings.
They're not going to fight about all of this and demand to have Hunter himself testify and all the rest.
Oh, yes.
Well, listen, an impeachment hearing is is a is a is a godsend to the Republicans.
Of course, they'll they'll have a ball and Trump will love it as well.
I mean, the I really this is really this is Br'er Rabbit.
They don't throw me into the briar patch.
Yeah, exactly.
I mean, Trump will be in his element.
And yes, the the Republicans will have ample opportunity to bring all this up and to push for a true investigation of what happened under Obama's watch in the Ukraine, which, as we know, is is is very strange, very hard to figure out.
And, you know, Victoria Nuland, you know, is passing out cookies to to neo-Nazis, you know, seeking to overthrow Yanukovych.
And, of course, and anyone who dared to point out that that they were hey, there are neo-Nazis who are spearheading these investigate these demonstrations.
Well, that person was was seen as either a Russian agent or a conspiracy theorist or whatever.
Yeah.
Just to mark how true it was.
And by the way, I'm sorry, because I'm over and I really got to go.
But let's just end then with there's no place better in the world online that that you could find than Consortium News dot com to read all about the Ukraine coup of 2014.
So all you do, you go site colon Consortium News dot com and then just say Ukraine 2014.
And you read a million articles by Bob Perry and Ray McGovern and others explain that entire bit.
It's really the very best stuff on that that you can find anywhere.
And I'm sorry that I got to go.
But that is Dan Lazar.
He is the author of The Frozen Republic.
He writes quite often at Consortium News dot com.
And you can find this one at LRC and it's going to be at Antiwar dot com tomorrow.
Another day, another scandal.
What the Trump Ukraine collusion is really about.
Thanks, Dan.
Thank you so much.
All right, y'all.
Thanks.
Find me at Libertarian Institute dot org at Scott Horton dot org, Antiwar dot com and Reddit dot com slash Scott Horton show.
Oh, yeah.
And read my book, Fool's Errand, Timed and the War in Afghanistan at Fool's Errand dot US.
