All right, y'all, welcome to the Scott Horton Show.
I am the Director of the Libertarian Institute, Editorial Director of Antiwar.com, author of the book Fool's Errand, Time to End the War in Afghanistan, and I've recorded more than 5,000 interviews going back to 2003, all of which are available at scotthorton.org.
You can also sign up for the podcast feed.
The full archive is also available at youtube.com slash scotthorton show.
All right, you guys, on the line, I've got the great Ray McGovern.
Yeah, it's true, he used to work for the CIA, but he was just an analyst, never murdered anybody.
And ever since really the late 1990s, I guess, but especially this entire century long, man, he's been fighting for peace.
And he's a great writer.
You can find just about everything he does at consortiumnews.com and at antiwar.com.
And of course, also at raymcgovern.com, you'll find his blog and everything he's up to there.
Welcome back to the show.
How you doing, Ray?
I'm doing fine.
How are you doing?
I'm doing really great.
I'm very happy to have you back on the show.
Do you know?
Thanks, Scott.
Yeah, man.
Hey, listen, so you wrote this great thing, Ukraine for Dummies.
Also for people who just don't know much about Ukraine.
So could you please take us through this here, sir?
Sure.
It's kind of a long story.
So why would you like me to start with the sort of last couple of years?
Why does an American care about Ukraine at all?
Or why shouldn't they be integrated into the union?
Or as the title of Pat Buchanan's piece today is, when did Ukraine become a critical ally?
Well, I guess that would be the happy gray area between nuking them and inviting them to join the United States of America.
Okay.
So when did they become our critical ally?
Well, I guess when there was a situation where we thought we could do a coup, a coup d'etat on the Maidan in the main square there in Kiev, and actually did bring it off and change the government into a differently corrupt government, but one that was more willing to do our bidding.
I guess maybe we'll start there, even though the story goes back much farther.
Suffice it to say that, well, maybe we'll start with the end of September 2013.
Those were the Halcyon days.
They lasted about a week.
That was when the neocons that dearly wanted the U.S. to open fire, send rockets and missiles into Syria in response to a false flag attack of Sarin outside Damascus.
They almost succeeded.
In a word, what happened was Obama was under a lot of pressure.
He made the outlandish claim that he thought that he should go to Congress for permission to make war on a new country.
Whoa.
I mean, that hadn't been done since World War II, for God's sake.
Clearly he was trying to find a way out.
Hey, this is only two years after he launched a war in Libya.
So in this one, he didn't want to go to war, right?
He had good sense, despite all his advisors saying, yeah, we got to do this now because of the Sarin attack.
Now what happened was that he was due to go up to St. Petersburg to a summit, and he met Vladimir Putin the day before.
And Putin said, Mr. President, I got news for you.
Remember that working group that we set up in June, June of 2013, and we started working on how to get rid of the chemical weapons in the Syrian army?
And Obama says, well, we've done it.
The Syrians have agreed to get rid of all their chemical weapons, to give them up under UN inspection, and they'd be happy to have them destroyed on that naval vessel that you have that's specifically outfitted for destroying chemical weapons.
And Obama says, really?
Putin says, watch the Syrian foreign minister announce this next week.
So next week.
Next day, actually.
So the following day, the Syrian foreign minister announces the deal, and Obama is saved from the embarrassment of failing to be mousetrapped.
You know, a year before, exactly a year before, he led himself to be led into saying, you know, if the Syrians use or even move their chemical weapons, he would change his calculation.
That would be his red line.
And all the neocons are saying, yeah, yeah, yeah, right.
And so they perpetrated this chemical attack exactly one year later, and he wouldn't do it.
So he was let off easy.
And what happened was that Putin thought this was a really good beginning.
Here he had done the president a big, big favor.
President seemed appropriately grateful.
And so Putin pens an op-ed in the New York Times.
And it appears on September 11th, coincidence, at 2013.
And it says, Putin writing it, I'm very, very happy with the new atmosphere of trust that has grown up between the U.S. president and me personally.
The only thing that I disagree with the president in his recent speech was this notion that there are different kinds of countries, that there's an exceptional country and all the other ones are not exceptional.
You know, what I say, and there were indications, Scott, that Putin wrote this paragraph himself, it was the concluding paragraph, it almost seems to have been tacked on, he says, you know, I don't agree that there is one exceptional nation.
I think there are good countries and bad countries, big and small, some with the real need to develop democracy, others fairly advanced.
But I see God smiling down at all countries, thinking they're all equal in his sight.
Whoa.
That's very close to an exact quote.
So here's Putin saying these nice things about Obama and their new relationship, mark the day, September 11th, 2013.
Well, I had personal experience with the neocons and their outrage at having been cheated out of their war in Syria, open war, not a subliminal war.
You know, let me just recount this because it's, I think, of interest.
During my last appearance on CNN, after, well, this was all going down, I gave a little interview to their bureau in London, out of their very fancy office in Washington.
So I'm up there on the top floor and I open the booth door for my interview and I knock over a sort of small guy and I say, oh, I'm sorry, and I look at, it's Paul Wolfowitz.
And they're all looking at the commentary that Fox and other analysts are making about how Obama is chickened out.
He's not going to do the war that they all want.
And across the room, Joe Lieberman, I'm saying, my God, where am I?
I'm in, I'm in with the arch neocons.
So they were all, you know, they looked actually, they looked as though their mothers had just been run over by a Mack truck, dark dress, no fancy ties, just door, you know, really.
So they go into their own little interview and we watch it on the screen.
They're across from the elevators.
And sure enough, Joe Lieberman, first thing he says, you know, this Obama thing about needing Congress to, you know, to approve of what?
That's garbage.
He doesn't need Congress to be, blah, blah, blah.
And they went on in that vein.
So I said to myself, you know, here's your chance, McGovern.
So I went to the elevator shaft.
This is really gaudy stuff, look like something out of Bahrain or somebody, some place.
So I went there and sure enough, they came out of their room and I walked up to the middle of the shaft there and I said, Paul, Joe, Ray McGovern.
Now you have to know the ethos in Washington to know that any politician, if he thinks he should know somebody, and I was, you know, dressed to the gills that, you know, you can't say, well, yeah, well, who are you?
So then I said, now, now, Paul and Joe, Paul, hang on for a second, Joe, yeah, I just watched you on TV.
How long you been in Congress?
I mean, you, you know, that Article 1, Section 8 of the Constitution reserves the sole power to declare war to Congress.
And you're saying the president can go off and make war by himself?
Give me a break, Joe.
Then Joe knows that he never knew Ray McGovern before and didn't want to ever see him again.
And Wolfowitz is slithering off into the background.
And then the six foot beautiful lady who's supposed to be accompanying these guys finally appears and she looks down and she says, oh, gentlemen, I'm so sorry.
I looked at her and I said, you know, I'm really sorry too.
Why do you have these clowns on your program here where they don't even know what the Constitution says?
Well, that was it.
That was it for McGovern.
That was the last time I was on CNN.
But you know what?
It was worth it.
It was so outrageous to watch this.
So getting back to this train of thought here, that was when Obama and Putin, that would be the acme or, you know, the zenith of their relationship.
Well, the neocons wanted to get back, wanted to get back at Obama, wanted to get back at Putin for sure.
And so they had developed this plan in Ukraine for, for years, really.
And so that December, December 2013, Victoria Nuland, who is assistant secretary of state for European affairs, one of Hillary Clinton's best friends, appointed by Clinton, she gets up before a gathering and says, you know, we have always tried to foster Ukraine's aspirations to join the West.
Actually, we've appropriated and given Ukraine five billion, I say billion with a B, huh, as in boy, billion dollars towards satisfying their aspirations to join the West.
OK, that's December.
Now, fast forward just two months, February 4th, 2014, YouTube carries a intercepted enclar, that is not encrypted, telephone conversation between Victoria Nuland and Pyatt, who is the ambassador, our ambassador in Kiev.
And Nuland's saying, yeah, OK, we're all set to go.
We got it all planned.
Yats, for Yats, he's the guy, tell the others, Klitschko and the others, they wait in the wings and get it all glued, we're all set to go.
And if Joe Biden is needed, he's prepared to come in here and glue this thing together.
And so it's going to be, and Pyatt says, oh, Madam Secretary, what about the EU?
And she says, and I can't say it on your program, but she says the F word, F the EU.
Now, why do I mention that?
Well, I mention that because a day or two later, she apologized to the EU for the profanity, but not with a coup.
That was the 4th of February, 2014.
So six months, roughly, after the acme of the relationship between Putin and Obama.
And what happened?
Well, I read that transcript and I said, oh, poor Yats, Yats was the guy who was going to be the new prime minister.
They had this cool arranged and now it's blown, of course, out in the air.
I wonder what's going to happen now.
Well, I woke up on the 22nd of February, so what, two and a half weeks later, and I found out that there had been a, they're calling it a revolution for integrity.
But the real word for it is a putsch or a coup d'etat.
Now, no one in Washington likes to use the word coup, especially if they arranged it, you know, and this was when the one in Venezuela was another.
That didn't work.
That didn't work.
And the one in Bolivia did work.
Okay.
So there's a coup d'etat.
And who comes in eventually to be the prime minister?
Yats.
Yatsyniuk.
And what does he say?
First thing out of his mouth?
I think we ought to join NATO.
Yeah, I think we ought to pay in Russian as a native language, as a official language here in Ukraine.
Well, here is Putin.
Where is he?
He's in Sochi.
He's just finishing up the Winter Olympics, a great, great success for the Russians.
And there were no terrorist incidents that everyone had feared.
So he gets on the next plane, goes back to Moscow.
And on the 23rd, that's the day after the coup, he gets together with his generals and his national security advisors, and he says, what are we going to do now?
We can't let Ukraine get into NATO.
We've been telling the U.S. that for many, many years.
And what about our sole, our only warm water naval port, naval base in Sevastopol, in Crimea?
This goes back to Catherine the Great, for God's sake, during the time of our revolution.
We can't let that go into NATO's hands.
So what are we going to do?
Well, one of them says, well, you know, when I was a boy, I remember Crimea was part of Russia, not part of Ukraine.
How did it become part of Ukraine?
Somebody said, well, that was Khrushchev.
When Stalin died in 53, Khrushchev came into power, but he wasn't really as strong as Stalin.
So he said, what can I do to gain more popularity?
I'm a Ukrainian, maybe, yeah, let's give it, I don't know what we'll do.
We'll give Crimea to the Ukrainian, sorry, the Ukrainian Federated Republic, and it won't make any difference.
We all rule everything from Moscow.
And so, yeah, let's give that to you, that they did.
How do you do it?
Ukaz.
You know what an ukaz is?
You get a piece of paper and you make an order, and that's how it happens, okay?
No respect given the views of the people in Crimea at the time, but as I say, it was a non-part.
There was a distinction with other difference, one might say, whoa, it didn't matter then.
But when the Soviet Union fell apart in 1991, December, then it started to matter.
Why?
Well, because, you know, these independent countries, well, here's an independent country, not Russia, that has Russia's main naval port.
Well, they worked out an amicable agreement, a long-term lease where the Russians could not only have their naval base there, but also, I think it was 30,000 troops there to guard the base and, you know, do the unnecessary security.
And so, what happened on the 23rd of February, the day after the coup, we're talking 2014, was it was explained to Putin how it was that Khrushchev had ceded Crimea to the Ukraine, and so the question was how we get it back.
Now, Putin, if you agree with everybody else's stereotypical view of Putin, he would have signed a new cause and said, all right, from now on, Crimea is part of us.
Well, no, he didn't do that.
He said, well, how do the people in Crimea feel about this revolution for integrity?
Of course, he didn't use that word.
That's an American word, just come into vogue, actually.
So how do they feel about this coup, these actually proto-fascists that have taken over the government in Kiev?
Well, the answer was they hate them, and they're all Russian-speaking.
They would jump at the chance to rejoin Russia.
And so they said, well, let's have a plebiscite, and they did within a month, and they were reincorporated into Russia.
Now, that was the thing that, you know, if you're looking at Victoria Nuland and she's saying, well, the best thing that could come out of this coup is that we get Ukraine into NATO and we take over Sevastopol, the naval base.
The next best would be for the Russians to retake Sevastopol, and then we can accuse them of aggression, invasion, violating all the norms of conduct.
And exactly, that, of course, is exactly what happened.
Now, our allies in Europe, Central Europe and Western Europe, were kind of, you know, bending toward our ukaz, or our diktat, and say, okay, well, yeah, this is terrible, violating the object.
They're invading Ukraine.
Well, they didn't invade Ukraine.
How did they take over Crimea?
Well, it was these little green men in uniforms without insignia.
Who were they?
Some of the 30,000 troops that, under a bilateral agreement between Russia and Ukraine, were entitled to be in Crimea and were there to protect the naval base.
So they went around to the ministries there in Crimea and said, now, look, we know that you have no real instructions from Kiev.
We have instructions from Moscow.
Would you please step aside?
We don't want to, we don't want any trouble.
You know, the diascasts were taken over.
Now, contrary to the impression fostered by our media, nobody died.
Nobody.
I heard that there was a professor one time who was speaking and said, oh, I'm so mad at the Russians.
All those thousands have died in taking over Crimea.
I said, where do you get that information?
She said, wow, it's all over the place.
I said, yeah, that's the problem.
Would you believe that not one person died?
No, no.
Well, you can believe what you want to believe, but that's the fact.
Not one person died.
One person, I think, was wounded, but there were no fatalities.
So that was the little green men.
It was a very artful thing because the way they proceeded was in such a way to avoid open firing against Ukrainian authorities.
Now, the folks in the Donbass, the eastern part of Ukraine, almost all of them of Russian extraction and part of Russia for all intents and purposes, economically and ethnically, well, they didn't want any part of the new coup regime.
You know, call it a revolution for integrity if you like, but it was a coup and they made clear what they're going to do with Russian speakers and they wanted to join NATO.
And so they resisted being taken over by the national government.
That's what we have in the eastern part of the Donbass now.
And did the Russians help those people?
Yeah, sure they did, just as we would help Canada if it faced something like that.
They sent in some volunteers, sent in some weaponry.
Also they sent in some foodstuffs, and that's pretty well documented.
So that's the situation after the coup.
And then the next thing, and I'll quit after this one, the next thing that happened, and we're talking February, March of 2014, well, in July, on July 17th, MH17, that is the Malaysian airline, Flight 17, was shot down over Ukraine, 298 people killed.
John Kerry gets up the next day and says, the Russians did it, the Russians did it.
We have, and this is a direct quote, we have imagery, we have trajectory information, we know exactly when the shot was fired, and it was exactly at the time when that aircraft went down, the Russians did it.
Now when did he say that?
He said that on the first Sunday opportunity, when he could hit all the talk shows.
That was the 20th of July.
Now long story short, for some reason, John Kerry has never been able to reduce that information.
Not at the UN, not to the people who are supposed to be doing the investigation on what happened.
There's this trajectory, this imagery, and by the way, Scott, I have no doubt that US satellites were just beamed on this area, it being the most priority conflict that was going on at the time.
So whatever evidence there is, is available, so why do I suspect that John Kerry has not given it to the Dutch or the Malaysians or to anybody else?
Well, I think it's because it doesn't exist.
I think it's because it's not the first time that John Kerry lied, and indeed, my former colleagues in the CIA would not prepare an intelligence assessment for Kerry, and he had to issue something called a government assessment, a new animal, a new genre, which means, pure and simple, that it was prepared by political hacks in the White House.
So that's the real bone of contention, and what I'd like to just end with is this, that the Europeans are usually pretty flexible.
They'll bend to whatever diktat the US wants, but they were very reluctant to do real full-scale sanctions against Russia for, quote, invading Ukraine, end quote.
And so it was the MH17 shootdown that was really, really, what's the word?
It was exploited by the United States to harness all the Western countries into doing real painful sanctions.
That, by the way, helped or hurt those countries just about as much as it hurt Russia.
Russia has recovered from those things for the most part.
They have lots of possibilities to do that.
For the former, growing apples in Italy or Poland, not so much.
So people are still suffering, but are still willing to adhere to what the US wants, and that is to isolate Russia and to make sure that they blacken Russia for these three things.
Seizing Crimea, supporting the people striving for independence in the Donbas, and the people who cruelly shot down MH17.
So that's where we are, and that's why Russia all of a sudden became a real, real enemy, and Ukraine became, as Pat Buchanan jocularly says, a critical ally.
I'll add one more thing while I have the floor here.
I want to quote a prominent commentator on one of the main TV networks.
I think it was just last night.
Here it is.
Russia poses no threat to the United States.
If we're really being honest here, Russia poses no threat.
Too many careers depend on keeping our assumptions exactly where they were before the Soviet Union fell.
When fighting the Soviet menace consumed the lion's share of our federal budget.
Guess who that was?
Tucker Carlson.
No flaming liberal he.
And then you have Pat Buchanan today putting things in some perspective.
What I try to do in my piece was to educate people, people who thought that maybe Ukraine was an island in the South Pacific when all this went up there in 2014, and to tell them, look, there's a long history to Ukraine.
It has a unique role in Russian and Slavic culture, its whole nationhood, its history.
It couldn't be more important to the Russians.
And of course, my brother chided me this morning for not pointing out that, well, the Russians lost 26 million people during World War II.
I'll say that again, 26 million.
That's what Putin says, others say 27, 28.
That's a lot of people.
How many did we lose?
About 445,000.
So these Russians, they know what war is like.
They lost hundreds of thousands just in the war for the Crimean Peninsula alone.
So think about the Alamo.
I'm a Texan.
I think about what the Alamo means to me.
I know you're a New Yorker, so if somebody tried to take West Point away from you, I think you'd probably have an idea or two about that.
Yeah.
But that's nothing compared.
Imagine if we had lost hundreds of thousands of men defending West Point before, you know?
Yeah.
Well, just take Stalingrad.
The Russians lost a million and a half people defending Stalingrad, and the Germans suffered exactly the same magnitude of casualties.
This was as we were sort of preparing, well, maybe we'll put troops in London and maybe we'll get in.
I don't diminish Normandy, but that came after the war had already been won, after all the millions of Russians had spilled their blood and turned the Nazi forces back.
Indeed, Normandy would not have been possible if the Russians weren't tying down the finest German armies around Stalingrad.
Hold on just one second.
Be right back.
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They got what you need over there at TheBumperSticker.com.
Let me ask you about this though, because here's the thing of it, is I know what you say is right, because I've been talking to you all along, and anybody can check that archive.
It's from 2003, and it's nothing but Ray McGovern after Ray McGovern after 100 other brilliant guys like you, getting all this stuff right all along.
But you know what?
In Washington, D.C., they never hear anybody say this.
They never hear anybody say, come on, that was no street revolution, that was a coup.
It does come out occasionally.
Even Henry Kissinger kind of said, well, yeah, I don't know.
Just here or there.
I think he said that to a German paper once, five years ago or something.
But in other words, the important point of what I'm trying to say is that everyone in D.C. agrees that this is all Russia's fault, that Russia, as they said in the impeachment hearings the other day, Russia invaded Ukraine.
As even a critic at the American Conservative wrote, they annexed a large swath of Ukraine.
Huh?
Are you talking about Crimea?
Are you saying they annexed the East?
Because no, they didn't.
In fact, when the people of the East of Ukraine begged to be annexed and held a referendum asking to be annexed, Putin told them no.
He could have absorbed them without even sending in any troops.
But anyways, what you're saying is such a minority view.
And it's, you know, when I was in high school, I had a, there was a book about the Kennedy administration called The Dangers of Groupthink.
And it was all about how they almost got us all killed in the, if I remember it right, it was the one that was all about the, how they almost got us all killed in the Cuban missile crisis, just because they kept telling each other how smart they were.
And then, you know, essentially, luckily, finally, they figured a way out of that, sending Bobby Kennedy to give away the store, thank God, right?
And pull the missiles out of Turkey and all that.
But anyway, that's what it's like, right?
It's like an entire city full of George W. Bushes.
None of them know nothing about nothing except that they're really, really smart and that they know what to do.
Well, you know, you're exactly right.
And you know, I'll say this for like the umpteenth time.
You see a lot of change in 50 years in Washington.
But there's one change that dwarfs all the other changes I've seen in importance and significance.
And that is that we no longer have a free media.
And let's face it, we don't have a free media.
And so we're at a point where the CIA director under Ronald Reagan, whose name was Bill Casey, at the first cabinet meeting, and I know someone who was there and reported this, when it became Casey's turn, he said, and I quote, we will know when our disinformation campaign is successful, when everything the Americans believe is false, period, end quote.
Well, you know what?
Maybe there are a couple of us left here, Scott.
Maybe you and me and some others.
But most Americans have been treated to this steady fare of Russian aggression, Russian interference, Russian this, Russian that.
And even the people like I watch Marie, she's a very nice, she's a very nice person, a very excellent witness.
But you know, these people, even high ranking ambassadors like that, they believe what they're told.
And what she said repeatedly was, well, the entire U.S. intelligence community tells us that it was the Russians that hacked into the DNC and interfered with our election.
And so what more proof do you have in that?
Now, I feel sorry for her.
I mean, no one has told her, apparently, that the entire intelligence community, well, that's a wrong kind of label because it wasn't the intelligence community.
It wasn't even these three, these three agencies, CIA, FBI, and NSA.
It was hand-picked analysts from those three who did this bogus thing saying Putin himself ordered the hacking of the Democratic National Committee and gave the take to WikiLeaks to expose, to hurt Hillary Clinton.
Now, there's no truth to that.
Yeah.
You know, it's funny about that narrative here.
Even years later, I heard the funniest thing on National Public Radio where they said, the Russians, they still say it in the starkest terms, the Russians attacked our election in 2016, we're told by the intelligence community.
So in other words, they put in the most stark terms, but they still have to admit, even at NPR News, they still can't help but admit that they've yet to see any evidence of this demonstrated in any way.
But hey, the CIA says so, right?
What's your problem?
Yeah.
So, you know, that was the tactic that really worked up until now.
CrowdStrike has come up now.
CrowdStrike is the cyber outfit that the DNC hired to look into the, quote, Russian hack of the DNC.
Now, the FBI director, James Comey, for reasons best known to him, did not seize the computers of the DNC or the server or anything like that, preferring to rely on CrowdStrike.
And when he was asked about that before Congress, he said, oh, yeah, it's true that best practices would have required us to, you know, get physical control, but we really trusted CrowdStrike.
Well, guess what?
CrowdStrike never gave the FBI a final report.
What is this business about the research and the detailed examination that CrowdStrike did to show it was the Russians?
They didn't do anything like that at all.
They did no forensics.
They gave no final forensics to Comey.
And the parallel to Iraq War II is so complete that like, hey, there must be some real evidence back there somewhere.
We're waiting.
We're going to find out.
They must know secret things that they can't tell us yet.
And then, nope, comes down to it, they didn't even check because they didn't want to come up empty, obviously.
Well, you know, here you have McCain and others saying, state of war, state of war.
The Russians have committed an act of war on us, act of war.
And so Comey, you know, he sits back and says, well, let's let this DNC hired firm take a look at this.
And of course, the reason that all that happened is because there was no Russian hack.
And we can prove that from our own independent forensics.
All right.
Now, let me- One second, because there's a couple of things there.
The most important thing, I think, is that in the current context, the CrowdStrike controversy is about a total red herring.
But we need to bring that up to make sure that people don't mistake what you're talking about with that.
What you're talking about is CrowdStrike never proved that Russia did it.
And what they said were indications that Russia did it were a joke, like we found some Cyrillic letters in this kind of garbage.
But as you said, no final report, et cetera.
The red herring is that Trump got it in his head somehow, according to that transcript, that the hack was done by Ukrainians and that now the server itself is in Ukraine.
The Democrat server is in Ukraine.
I don't know where he got that, but probably from Rudy Giuliani or some other complete numbskull who has no idea what they're talking about.
It's no surprise that Donald Trump is off on some tangent when that's absolutely not the point here.
And I don't know where that thing is, but I've never heard anyone give any real indication why anyone should believe it's in Ukraine, of all places.
It never was in Ukraine.
And even if it was Ukrainians that hacked it, then still, why would it be in Ukraine now?
That doesn't, I don't know.
Anyway, but that's not what we're talking about.
And so I wanted to make sure that that's clear, I think, you know.
Let me pursue that, though, OK?
Because it's a red herring, but there's a degree of reality to it.
Does anyone know where that server is?
The answer to that is the president doesn't know.
You don't know, Scott.
I don't know.
But somebody does.
OK.
Now, where is it?
Nobody knows that.
Now, I grant you, the president is our worst enemy.
I mean, he's with Putin in Helsinki, and he says, oh, where's that server?
Where's that server?
Putin's looking at him, and the press is looking at him.
Well, it's a legitimate question.
Where is that server?
And why isn't the FBI and the NSA hot on the trail of whoever took that server and put it somewhere?
So it's a legitimate interest of the president.
I don't know where he got the idea it might be in Ukraine, but it's likely, as likely as not, that it's somewhere.
And what he wants to know is, do the Ukrainians, maybe it was Giuliani, said, well, maybe Ukrainians have it.
So you ask them, do we have the CrowdStrike?
But the CrowdStrike thing is real.
And one other thing on this.
When Deputy Assistant Secretary of State Clark Kent, I think, no, no, not Clark, George Kent, was testifying two days ago, he was asked about CrowdStrike, and he said, what's that?
And the questioner said, well, you don't know about CrowdStrike?
No, I never heard, no, don't know about CrowdStrike.
Well, you know, why do I point that out?
Well, I point that out because, you know, it was in that conversation between Trump and Zelensky.
You would think that a person with normal curiosity would have looked into what this odd thing CrowdStrike was.
But to me, it shows the very parochial, the very delimited purview of bureaucrats in the State Department who know a lot about Ukraine, a lot about how to play politics in Washington, but really don't certainly listen to Antiwar.com or read it, or Consortium News.
Their purview is circumscribed not only by the mainstream media, but by their preoccupation with their duties, which are considerable, I don't dismiss that.
But if for a Deputy Assistant Secretary of State, and this is George Kent, hadn't heard of CrowdStrike, you know, that is really a kind of reflection on how narrow the outlook of these people is.
And that came through in Marie Yovanovitch's testimony today.
She didn't know a lot of things about things that most people who are paying attention did know about.
Well, and the most amazing thing about Kent's testimony was where he said that all of the Ukrainian militias that went to go fight in the East were directly comparable to the Minutemen who helped George Washington win the revolution against Great Britain in our great revolution here.
And he's talking about the Azov Battalion, the proud grandsons of the Galatian SS?
Really?
I think there are a lot of Minutemen squirming in their graves these days.
That was something else to see, him saying it that way.
And I love always on C-SPAN, you know, or CNN, whichever, the crowd shot in the background of the kind of out of focus blobs in the background.
But nobody busted out laughing.
Nobody said, what?
Are you talking about the right sector, really?
Well, it came up in a recent discussion I had and they asked me for proof.
I said, well, go look at their insignia.
I mean, go look at their flags.
They have the Hakenkreuz, the swastika on their flag, for God's sake.
And actually one photo that I remember Bob Perry had covered was actually a red flag with a black swastika on it from their quarters.
So it's real enough.
And it's almost like comparing the freedom fighters of our revolution to the folks there fighting the Sandinistas in Nicaragua.
How about Jelani and the Al-Nusra Front up there in the Idlib province?
They're pretty revolutionary.
God help us.
One thing that came out today is the odd, you know, I'd say it's almost Orwellian fact that one cannot pronounce the name of the, quote, whistleblower, end quote, that is far from a whistleblower.
In short, as I see it, Russiagate fell flat.
They needed something to start impeachment proceedings.
They would do Ukrainegate, and they enlisted this CIA analyst, of all things, into this IG report, which even the inspector general, Atkinson, said, you know, his views have indicia of political bias.
Wow.
Give me a.
Indicia.
The signs of political bias.
Well, yeah, he worked for Biden.
He was put in place by Brennan.
I mean, hello?
What more do you need?
So Atkinson himself takes this thing forward, makes, or actually the whistleblower makes Schiff and his people aware of what's going on, and it goes through the system.
And now we can't even mention his name, even though it's available in various, well, I think Rand Paul had it this morning, and it's available everywhere.
So everyone is so afraid of, what, being roped in, having the D.C. police surround you like they have John Kiriakou.
That's the funnest part of this whole thing to me so far, is the clampdown on this guy's name, Eric Cherimella.
As you said, it's already been published.
And you know, there's this site, heavy.com, that whenever there's a school shooter, they go and immediately ransack his Facebook page and then say, here's five fast facts you need to know about this guy who's brand new in the news here.
Well, that's what they did with him.
They went and got five fast facts all about, in other words, the cat is all the way out of the bag.
It's not just that one article at Real Clear Politics.
As you said, a senator mentioned it, but then everybody else is still pretending.
And I was trying to think of a parallel, like, what if after Cheney and Libby leaked Valerie Plame's name to Dick Armitage and all of that to get that into the media back then, what if after her name was out, they just kind of pretended like you're not allowed to say her name and you can't publish it in the Post or the Times or say it on TV, even after it was already out?
Even after Novak had already said it once on CNN, right, or whichever it was.
That's absolutely absurd.
And yet here we are.
And they're like, yeah, absurd.
That's our business.
And they're really doing it.
As you say, it's effective, too.
They're getting the media to refuse to talk about who this guy is.
And then meanwhile, oh, look, he used to work for John Brennan.
Tell me that you're amazed by that fact, Ray McGovern.
Well, you know what?
John Brennan got his start in the exact same way as this whistleblower.
I'd say a name if I could pronounce it as he did.
Now, what do I mean?
The real the real skivvy on John Brennan.
It's just chair a mella.
That's all easy.
OK, I'm not going to say it now that you're not going to trick me into saying it's got I don't want to go to jail.
OK, so I'm marching poor old Ray away.
John Brennan, OK, was a failed analyst.
He went to his branch chief and said, I think I should be a senior executive service member.
And she said, and not only is that not going to happen, John, but you're fired.
And so in those conditions, you have, I think, 60 days to find another job or else you're out.
OK, well, the PDB staff, they had brought in the people that they brief on various versions of the PDB and they had a very low level tranche of people in the White House that they needed somebody to brief.
Nobody really important, but, you know, it had to be done.
OK, so John Brennan lucked on to that position.
Now, who is down there in the White House as the intelligence supervisor, a fellow named George Tenet.
George Tenet and John Brennan hit it off just so well that when Tenet became deputy director, he brought Brennan back to the White House, back to the CIA headquarters.
And Brennan's career zoomed.
He became Tenet's executive director when Tenet was director.
And then he spent, I think it was three years in Saudi Arabia as the, get this, the chief of station, not knowing anything about operations.
So Brennan started the same way as Caramella or whatever his name is.
And so there's this irony there.
But you know, for the inspector general, not only to send this thing forward with this very weak caveat that there were indicia of some political bias when he knew damn well that the guy had worked for Joe Biden, who he was trying to protect.
But also, since Caramella, I know I'm pronouncing it wrong, but that may save me from a jail sentence, Caramella was there and he was getting hearsay.
And the regulation said that if you just get hearsay, secondhand information, that you have no, you don't have no right to do an IG report.
And guess what Atkinson, the IG did?
Well, he changed the rules.
Yeah.
He changed the rules.
He said, well, you know, no, no.
From now on, we'll let hearsay information be the basis for an IG complaint.
Well, you know, moving the goalposts after the, after the touchdown or after the extra point, I mean, that doesn't happen anywhere, least of all in the legal profession.
But that's what Atkinson did.
So you can see where Atkinson's either naivete or indicia of bias lie.
You know- Wait, on that one point though, you're just joking around, right?
You don't want the audience to think that they could actually be prosecuted for saying this guy's name.
You know, well, I'm kidding, of course.
I know the name.
I would say it if I could pronounce it.
But, you know, and I'm not afraid, as you know, of speaking out.
I mean, of course not.
And I mean, an important point to bring up is they have, they're training the AI at YouTube and at Facebook to automatically expunge any mention of this guy's name.
I mean, it is really kind of nuts.
So I just didn't want, I wanted to make sure that people knew that you were being facetious about that and that they didn't think that, oh man, is that really a thing that I could get in trouble for that?
Yeah.
Well, yeah.
So facetious, but not to disguise my chagrin.
Yeah.
It'll certainly get you fired from your corporate media job.
No question about that.
It might get you, I'm, I actually am concerned that possibly they'll remove my YouTube account over it or whatever.
I don't know.
They probably won't kick me off the whole internet, but- Well, you know, as I watched my friend John Kiriakou surrounded by five police cars two weeks ago, my good friend Medea Benjamin surrounded by five DC police cars yesterday with the presence of mind to photograph and live stream the whole business.
So she didn't have to spend, she didn't have to go to jail.
What happened with Kiriakou and with Benjamin?
Well, Benjamin, as I say, yesterday was surrounded by these police.
None of them I knew.
He's arrested me and he's arrested Medea more times than me.
And he said, well, you know, we have a complaint here from Debbie Wasserman Schultz that maybe you shoved her or something at a public meeting.
And so we have to take you in and have to arrest you.
And to her great credit, of course, Medea said, no, you're not going to do that without my lawyer being here.
And all I know is that it eventuated, I think, in the fact that they finally went away.
But these DC police will do whatever they're told to do.
And Desi Wasserman Schultz was accusing Medea Benjamin of assault?
I mean, did she actually lay hands on her?
Do you know?
No, no.
There was some pushing and shoving at this, and Medea, to her credit, has video.
So they're not going to be able, and Medea is the most nonviolent person I know.
Okay.
Yeah.
I'm sure she would not throw a punch.
I could see her, you know, being shoved and shoving back kind of thing if she had to.
I haven't seen her do.
But before we finish, Scott, I wanted to widen this thing.
And say what happened with Kariakou, who also was arrested recently?
Yeah, this is not well publicized, because John didn't make a big deal of it.
But he was on the streets of Washington.
They surrounded him.
They took him in custody.
They put cuffs on him.
And meanwhile, I think it was something like 13 FBI types raided his house.
Now, what was that all about?
I don't know for sure.
But I'm told that the Arlington County Police was told by the FBI that they had to do this because they thought there was some incriminating evidence on his computer.
Now, that happened, okay?
That happened to my NSA colleagues many, many years ago.
They do that, and that doesn't make it clear.
It doesn't make me afraid.
But this whole business about the being facetious, yeah, it's facetious.
But things have reached a point where people are worried about their jobs or their livelihood or other things.
They have to be really careful.
And Stefanik, the Republican congressperson from New York, read four minutes' worth of Nunes, not Nunes, but Schiff's declarations two months ago saying, we have the whistleblower.
He will appear.
He will be here tomorrow.
We have him.
Mutual agreement is going to appear.
So she read that into the record.
And of course, she was not able to ask Schiff, because it's against the rules, what happened?
How come he's not going to appear?
But if he's the guy that touched this all off, he works for the CIA, he'd put in there by Brennan, he has indicia of bias because he worked for Biden, give me a break.
This guy is being taken seriously.
The reason his name is kept out of the news is because as soon as people see his career and what he's done and what he's not done, and his collaboration with Ukrainian people who are trying to put dirt on Trump during the campaign, they'll be able to see.
But that's going to come out.
The question is whether the mainstream media will play it and will give it due attention.
What I want to mention here is that things are coming to a head.
And this is the background story.
The inspector general of the Department of Justice is about to issue his report on Comey and McCabe, Comey being the director of the FBI, McCabe is deputy, and how they handle these applications for surveillance on Carter Page.
Now McCabe has already testified that without the Steele dossier, there would have been no FISA, that is Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act application.
So they knew that this Steele thing was concocted by people in the employ of not only the DNC, but also the FBI.
They knew that it was phony.
They went ahead with it anyway.
That's a felony.
And now we know that Durham out there in Connecticut has changed things into a criminal prosecution.
And we know who the criminals are.
We know what Mueller and Comey and Brennan and Clapper did.
How do we know that?
Because everyone was sure that Hillary is going to win.
And these guys didn't take rudimentary precautions to keep their trail, to put some, you know, red herrings over their trail.
It's all out there.
People know about it.
And so this is coming to a head.
People say that the Horowitz, the IG, the Department of Justice, which has purview over the FBI, that his report would be out either just before Thanksgiving or just after.
My guess is after, because now they're giving people a chance to review what is said about them.
Now, here was an interesting thing in the Washington Post today.
People are complaining about being given a chance to look at what's said about them in this report, but they can't take notes and they can't reclaim it.
They can't do a memo back to the IG.
They can just see what's being said about them.
Well, if you want to let this thing finally get out, and it's been two years in the making, then you can't, you can't, you can't take corrections from the perspective of people being criticized.
So long story short, I expect that there will be criminal referrals.
If the president of the United States has the cojones to take on Deep State, there will be grand juries assembled.
There will be criminal convictions and very, very senior people.
And we know who they are.
We know who signed these FISA applications.
It includes Comey, McCabe, Rosenstein, okay?
Even the attorney general.
Now you're dreaming, man.
You know, here's the thing.
Maybe a couple of the lower hanging guys are going to get busted for a leak here and there.
But you're talking about John Durham is the guy that helped complete the cover up of the CIA's Murder Incorporated, Torture Incorporated under George W. Bush.
You're exactly right.
How loyal is he going to be to Trump, the president, versus the establishment system that he serves for real?
You know?
Good question, and I share your skepticism.
And I actually think that's actually kind of funny, just for the irony of it all.
I hear Donald Trump is the most powerful man in the world by far, but why is he the most powerful man?
Because he has the Department of Justice and the CIA.
But if he doesn't have the Department of Justice and the CIA, and he can't make the Department of Justice put the CIA back under his control somehow, then what is he except some idiot in a room somewhere, which is exactly what he is.
Because they refuse.
They're not part of his administration.
That was made clear in the testimony this week, right?
The president can't change foreign policy on us.
No way.
We refuse to accept that.
We'll drive him out of power first.
Well, all I'm saying, Scott, is two weeks from now we're going to know whether the president chickens out, as he has done on innumerable occasions over the last three years.
Chickens out and says, no, the deep state is too powerful.
Tell Dorham to give people a slap on the wrist, and let's get back to business as well as we can.
That, I think, as you point out, the deep state usually wins these things.
But what I'm saying here is that with Bill Barr, John Dorham, Dorham's going to do what he's told, right?
If Bill Barr tells him, go ahead and do it, he's going to do it.
Now, if Donald Trump tells Bill Barr, I don't know, these guys are pretty powerful.
I want to at least, don't do it, then it won't be done.
So your skepticism is a really well-taken point of view.
You're right, though, that he probably, Barr would probably not refuse Trump if Trump really insisted.
And after all, they're guilty as hell, these traitors.
So why not?
Yeah, well.
It's not like it's trumping up charges about poor, innocent Hunter Biden.
Sorry.
Poor guy.
Yeah.
Well.
All right.
Listen, I better let you go, man.
I got another one in one minute from now.
So here's as good a place to stop as any.
But thank you so much for coming back on the show and talking about this stuff with us, Ray.
You're most welcome, Scott.
All right, you guys.
That is Ray McGovern.
You can find his latest at antiwar.com.
It's called Ukraine for Dummies.
There was no excuse for Congress's ignorance of Ukraine.
Here's a guide to help.
And it's a great one-on-one for you guys on that.
All right, y'all.
Thanks.
