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.
We can also sign up for the podcast fee.
The full archive is also available at youtube.com slash scott horton show.
All right, you guys on the line.
I've got the great Daniel McAdams.
He runs the Ron Paul Institute for Peace and Prosperity with the great Ron Paul.
And of course, he is the co-host of the Liberty Report, their great daily YouTube show.
Welcome back to the show.
How are you doing, Dan?
Hey, Scott.
It was great to see you last weekend at the Mises event.
You gave a dynamite speech.
Thanks, man.
You do, too.
You mentioned color-coded revolutions that I didn't even know about.
Albania?
Man, I got to catch up.
Yeah, no, you're great.
That's why I have you here, because we have important things to talk about.
First of all, the coup d'etat in Bolivia.
So I seen on the TV that the leader there is an Indian and a leftist.
And so therefore, you know, representing Ron Paul and the libertarian types, that must mean that you are for whatever bad has happened to him, right?
That's right.
When the people marched into the streets, the regimes tend to fall.
So yeah, no, it's a classic.
It's a classic one.
You know, it's a classic.
And in fact, I'm going to write about this later, but my old friend, John Laughlin, who I worked with on the British Helsinki Group, reminded me of the person involved, the person who made the announcement that we recognize the presidency of a woman who didn't get a single vote for president.
And that was a man by the name of Michael Kozak, and nobody's ever heard of his name.
But he's the undersecretary of state for Western Hemisphere.
He was involved in he was in Belarus.
He was the ambassador to Belarus when we had a color regime change there that failed.
That was the denim revolution, right?
That's right.
The denim when I was in the middle of that one.
But he is also mentioned in Manuel Noriega's memoirs as the person who engineered his overthrow back in 89.
So this is a guy who basically 30 years of regime change in Latin America, and he's still in his position.
So the regime's changed everywhere except in the State Department.
That's right.
Well, I'm glad you mentioned John Laughlin there.
I don't know that much about him.
But I know that if I'm ever looking for how the Americans were responsible for whichever color coded revolution in the world, you just add his name to your search terms and you find it every single time.
So can you talk a little bit?
Go ahead.
As long as we're on the color coded type revolution here in Bolivia.
Talk a little bit about this Ukrainian template and how this works.
Denim revolution here, an orange one there and tulip.
I like that one in Tajikistan in 05 or so.
What's the deal?
Well, it's fascinating.
I don't know if you've seen this yet, Scott.
You may have.
But I just watched Oliver Stone's movie yesterday on Ukraine and I was, you know, I never have seen that, actually.
Oh, yeah.
It just came out.
It's brand new.
It's brand new.
He did something a couple of years ago, but this one is brand new.
And it is you can if you are an Amazon Prime customer, you watch it for free.
If you're not.
It's only a buck.
Ninety nine to rent.
Great.
But this is amazing.
He goes into the whole Ukraine thing.
The importance of the snipers and who were the snipers.
And that is so critical because everywhere there is a regime change operation that goes on long enough to get ugly.
You've got snipers.
You had them in Iran in 2009.
You have them literally everywhere.
Actually goes back to Albania, but that's a different story.
So he goes into who these guys were.
But the main takeaway is that the it was the Ukrainians who are interfering in the elections.
It's a great it's a great movie.
But this is the template we're seeing in Hong Kong, too, when violence ramps up.
It's all very important.
So where does Bolivia fit in?
Well, here's the other interesting thing, and I'm sure you saw this, too, Scott.
But Max Blumenthal's outfit had a great piece outlining how every single one of the coup plotters in Bolivia trained at the School of the Americas.
Right.
And and the head of the Bolivian military, the guy who tapped Morales on the shoulder and said, hey, guys, time to go.
He was actually trained.
He was involved in an FBI training program here in the U.S.
So you see, I mean, it's just they don't even try anymore.
I mean, you know, I thought you and laughed this morning when I saw the headline on anti war dot com Bolivia interim leader recognizes, which, by the way, interim leader's a little vague.
We'll get back to that in a second.
But Bolivia interim leader recognizes Guaido as legitimate Venezuelan leader as balance shifts.
It's comical, you know, and we I talked about this on the Liberty Report with Dr. Paul the other day.
And in his classic sense of humor, I said I said, yeah, this member of the Bolivian Senate, you know, went over there and declared herself president.
And Dr. Paul said, I wonder if any ex-congressman could go to Washington and declare themselves president.
I'd like to see that president president.
Hey.
Yeah.
No, I'm pretty sure that's against the rules.
But I mean, the fact that she endorsed Guaido, I mean, what does that buy her other than goodwill on the part of the the powerful American right?
I won't say the American right in general, but interested parties in Washington.
Otherwise, that just makes her look more the clown, certainly to me.
Yeah, but, you know, Scott, you know, you and people around you who listen to your show, you know, you sort of have you're at a disadvantage because, you know, a lot more than the average person.
The average person is going to say, oh, yeah, that Guaido, that's the great pro-freedom, pro-liberty leader that the evil Maduro is suppressing.
Well, and that's why I started with that crack about, well, if we're libertarians, we must always celebrate the demise of every left wing leader, right, is in other words, pantomiming, having no context, no understanding about what's really going on around here.
It's not about well, from our point of view, it's not so much about what's good or bad about the local leader.
It's about what our government is doing and what they have the proper right and authority to do, which is nothing along these lines.
Exactly.
And that was the sort of the key point that I tried to make in my my own, you know, half assed way in our conference last weekend, which is that you are you're serving as a conveyor belt for this narrative when you take up the CIA's points of view on these things, you know, and OK, you may you may just wake up every morning thinking, gosh, I really want the Venezuelan people to have a libertarian government, you know, that may be your thing that gets you out of bed every day.
But supporting a few thousand people in the street, most of whom are duped, is not the way to get it.
And in fact, if in places like Ukraine, where people were promised all manner of wonderful things five years ago, if they overthrew their elected leader, if you look at the numbers on Ukraine now, the people's lives are so much worse.
Corruption is so much worse than it was.
The revolution of dignity was a joke.
So if you actually do care about these people, run as fast as you can away from the CIA narrative.
Yeah.
And, you know, especially the Ukraine thing is just a head shaker there where, you know, the average American probably especially thinks of the European refugee crisis as being all I don't know if they ever make the connection here, but as being all people fleeing from Afghanistan and Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia, Libya, Syria, Iraq.
So there's something these countries have in common.
I'm not sure exactly the thread there, but you got refugees from Ukraine and a huge outpouring of people fleeing the country, the economic devastation from the war.
And all the Americans say is, oh, yeah, Russia invaded, Russia invaded, when what they mean is they sent some special operations forces across the border to help the people of the East defend themselves from attack by the West.
If they had wanted to invade, they could have marched to Odessa in a day and a half.
Come on.
Yeah.
And in in the same context, Scott, our, quote unquote, refugee problem was caused by Hillary's asinine idea to overthrow the Honduran government a few years back, if you remember, which is totally.
Exactly.
That liberated them.
Right.
It threw the country into chaos.
It allowed gangs and thugs to destroy what civil society there was, destroy the economy.
People in absolute destitution, in absolute desperation, made their way to the U.S.
And of course, when they got here, and I don't want to make this about immigration, but they were kicked in the teeth.
You know, thanks a lot, U.S.
You screwed up my country.
Now you kick me in the face when I want to come to yours, you know.
Well, they say, oh, Trump is such a racist, et cetera.
But there's footage of Hillary Clinton saying, what, the children who are fleeing Honduras that I personally destroyed?
Send them back, she says.
Yeah.
Cackle, cackle, cackle.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Exactly.
And yeah.
And you know, there's a whole funny story behind the MS-13, too, where they were refugees from Reagan's wars in the 1980s in El Salvador and Nicaragua.
And then they came to L.A. and of course, part of the blowback from the war was all the cocaine that the CIA sold in Los Angeles in order to pay what Congress wouldn't pay for the death squads down there, which then exacerbated the gang wars in Los Angeles in the 1980s to the level of real war and the LAPD adopting the counterinsurgency strategy and doing sweeps of fighting age males and mandatory minimums and all this horror show.
Well, so all those El Salvadorian refugees in L.A. were kind of brought in, you know, they lived on the poor south side of town and they got all brought into the gang wars.
Then Bill Clinton deported them all and sent them all back to El Salvador.
And down there, they had no LAPD to oppose them.
And they became the kings down there and became, you know, that much worse.
So they all have this whole role to play in all of this, too.
Then, of course, is the drug wars in Mexico.
And you could go way back, but just to the George W. Bush years, where he insisted that they militarize the war.
And you know, the Zetas were an army division that decided, hey, why fight them when we could just become them and we'll be the baddest hero, you know, heroin and cocaine cartel in Mexico and took over the thing.
And meanwhile, of course, the gun walking was part of this, right, where the CIA was backing the Sinaloa cartel against them, which isn't the Sinaloa cartel, the cartel of El Chapo and his son and all this stuff that they've been warring against lately.
You can't make this stuff up, Dan.
Yeah.
Yeah.
These are this is the I would I would I mean, I would be I would say the unintended consequences of regime change.
But I'm starting to wonder how unintended they are, you know, because every single time this happens.
Yeah.
I just feel upwards.
So, yeah, exactly.
We'll be talking in a year about the Bolivian crisis and all the refugees from the civil war there that our government caused and whatever other you know, now that the right wingers are in power, they don't create libertarianism, they'll create a much more of a fascist gangster type system.
And let me ask you this.
I'll finally shut my mouth after I ask you this.
You and Dr. Paul talked on the show the other day all about the lithium supply in Bolivia and how important that is to what's really going on here.
Yeah.
The largest reserves in the world.
And that is key.
And, you know, they had a Morales had an I had a had a agreement with a German company to exploit this.
And he changed his mind at the last minute, less than a week before the coup.
He changed his mind and awarded the contract to a Chinese company.
And this is very similar to what happened in Venezuela as well with oil.
So, you know, this kind of thing over and over, you see, what did Gaddafi do?
You know, he wanted to go on a gold standard and, you know, a lot of this stuff is sort of the purview of conspiracy theorists.
But you see the pattern over and over again.
And you have to wonder, you know, we I'm sure we both we both read Confessions of an Economic Hitman.
You know, that's that's recent history, not past history, I think, when it comes to these.
Yeah.
I mean, after all, I mean, even the minimal explanation that, you know, essentially it's just economics that in government, because it's a monopoly on these services, that essentially they can only fail upwards.
So why not fail?
It doesn't have to be that deep rooted of a plot to just say, hey, you know what, if this Libya war that we're doing doesn't turn out great and it turns out bad, well, yeah, what the hell?
That's OK, too.
We just have bad.
And then we'll move on to Mali.
We'll chase our jihadists on down to Mali and Niger.
Yeah, we'll just blame them for all being savages.
It's not our fault.
We tried to civilize them.
You know, the white man's burden.
But, you know, someone someone that's an exact quote of Hillary Clinton, by the way.
Yeah, because they failed to take up the opportunity that we gave them.
Exactly.
You know, someone said to me the other day, because I posted something about the thuggishness going on in Hong Kong, you know, where they beat a guy to death with a brick yesterday because he told them that he wanted to take the train.
And they said, you know, stop doing this.
Isn't there ever anyone that's authentic?
You know, you're always saying that we're behind all these.
Well, the thing is that Americans don't they can't view the west of the world as they view themselves.
You know, we have a very politically sophisticated, obsessed population here.
Yet how often do the people run to the streets to overthrow our government, which has done far worse things than the Chinese government has done to Hong Kong, etc., etc., etc.
We don't go to the street and do that.
We put our heads down and go to work.
Oh, the NSA is reading all my stuff.
Oh, wow.
That really sucks.
Oh, well, I got to go to work.
You know, we don't do it here.
But we expect everywhere, every corner of the globe, when someone does that, we celebrate it.
And I mean, I think a psychologist or psychiatrist should sort this phenomenon out among Americans.
We get so excited when people take to the streets, but we never get off our ass and take to the streets here when way worse things are done to us.
Right.
And you know, what's suspicious about the whole thing is when our government champions all of these movements as the path for liberty for the poor people of the world, we're like, oh, when the hell does our government ever care about liberty?
That's not the most hollow argument you ever heard in your life, that that's what they really care about, is freed.
I mean, just as you and Dr.
Paul were talking about on the show there, democracy means when a government is loyal to American goals, period.
It could be the Saudi dictatorship cutting off a lady's head for the crime of being raped.
And they'll be like, yeah, that's democracy.
That's America.
When the military overthrew the Saudi backed secular military in Egypt, overthrew the Islamist Muslim Brotherhood there, John Kerry said that's the restoration of democracy.
You guys talked about Donald Trump saying this is democracy, the military of Bolivia telling the president to get the hell out or else.
Yes, finally.
Thank you.
Democracy is saved.
And and the American people buy that by and large, that's acceptable and not obviously just a hollow excuse, a cynical excuse.
Exactly.
And they never do the follow up.
They don't because they don't care.
They're too caught up in the excitement.
And thankfully, there's a page called Antiwar.com, which I think you have a little bit to do with, Scott, that tells us the truth about how much they care about democracy.
This lady in Bolivia who declared herself president and was recognized by the U.S. as president said she's going to hold the votes as soon as possible.
But the thing is, the party with the most seats in both houses of their parliament is not allowed to run.
And definitely the president, Morales, is not allowed to run again.
So let's have a democratic election.
But let me tell you who gets to run.
You know, this is this is sort of a model of what happens in Iran to a degree, and we condemn that as non-democratic.
Hang on just one second.
Hey, guys, I ever tell you about LibertyStickers.com.
It's just nothing but anti-government propaganda for the back of your truck.
I invented most of them, the good ones anyway.
Anti-war stuff, anti-cops, making fun of all the candidates in the upcoming election.
LibertyStickers.com.
Hey, guys, check out the great lineup of podcasts we've got going on over at the Libertarian Institute.
There's me, Foreign Policy in Focus with Kyle Anzalone, Free Man Beyond the Wall with Pete Quinonez, a.k.a.
Mance Rayder.
Check them all out at LibertarianInstitute.org.
Hey, guys, don't you think it'd be cool if you could go to college, but Tom Woods was the dean of the thing?
Yeah, well, something like that.
Check out LibertyClassroom.com, where Tom Woods went and had his pick of all the best professors to teach their courses in the real history and economics that you didn't learn when you went to college the first time around, or maybe you didn't learn because you skipped your higher education altogether.
But here's some real American history and some real economics, the kind of stuff that you've been missing.
It's all at LibertyClassroom.com, and make sure to click through the link in the right hand margin of my website, ScottHorton.org.
In regards to what happened in Bolivia here, do you think that there was anything to the idea that the election was being rigged by the left here, or this was just an excuse that they took advantage of?
Well, I think Morales' real crime is, I shouldn't say it this way, but it's a little harsh, but stupidity.
He didn't see what was coming.
They never see what's coming until it's too late.
He sends all of his generals off for training at the School of the Americas, and then he wonders why they took orders from Langley.
There were some concerns about the way the elections, and the elections are all physical paper in Bolivia, from what I understand.
And it takes a lot longer from these remote areas to get the results back.
That's just a fact.
This is not high speed rail country.
So what happened is there was the opposition who declared before the election, we will not recognize the results, full stop.
This is what Mesa said from the beginning, before the election.
So when there was some dispute, they started doing what they said and not accepting.
That's when Morales called in the Organization of American States, which is wholly funded, 60 percent funded in the back pocket of Uncle Sam.
They were heavily involved in Venezuela.
They do the bidding of their paymasters, stupidly brought them in and they said, OK, guys, here's what you do.
You got to do this and that and the other.
And that delayed by 24 hours, the results coming.
And so, of course, then the opposition could say, aha, now there's shenanigans going on.
So the question is, was there any cheating?
I don't know.
You don't know.
Mesa doesn't know.
Nobody knows except, you know, the people that were directly involved.
But when you look at the other factors, when you look at the dumb things that Morales did and trusting these institutions, you know, they're always so naive and then they wonder what happened to them.
So it's all beside the point.
It's all beside the point.
Well, it is.
It sounds purely like the Ukrainian template, as Justin Raimondo used to call it there, where they do the same thing.
Isn't this the exact same thing they did in Serbia, in Georgia, in Ukraine twice, in all these color coded revolutions?
We mentioned Tajikistan and Belarus.
They tried it with the blue jeans there and all these different things.
That's what happens is the American side loses the election, but then they just refuse to accept that result, whether they stay in the streets for a week or two or whether they just announce the coup overnight, like in this case, essentially, that's the deal.
And then so but they get to obfuscate it by saying that there was a bad election and they're only setting things right, essentially.
But they do this over and over and over again.
And now 20 or 25 years after that started overseas, it's now here in the U.S. because it's exactly what's happening in Washington, the side that lost the elections is pulling the same shenanigans.
Well, and so, yeah, let's talk about that.
I thought it was funny the way you and Dr.
Paul were joking that here Donald Trump is like three cheers for a CIA coup.
He's in the middle of being on the receiving end of one.
This idiot.
But so, yeah, let's talk a little bit about that, because I got to say, I already agree with you and see it the same way that this whole thing from before he even took office, the FBI and the CIA launched this mission to try to stop him or overthrow him.
And barring that, at least as they told CNN to rein him in.
And here this same mission continues on.
It does.
It's incredible.
And, you know, people that are a lot closer to the to the intel community than me, people like Larry Johnson and Phil Giraldi, they've written quite a bit about the CIA task force, you know, which was apparently put together before Trump was elected to prevent him from being elected.
And absent that, as you say, to, quote, rein him in there, you know, there was a real danger that he might actually follow through with his promises.
They should have known better.
But there was a danger that we might get along with Russia.
And boom, there goes a lot of mansions in McLean and Clifton in Virginia.
There goes a lot of, you know, gazillion dollar a year jobs.
Can't let that happen.
So let's let's make a task force to prevent that from happening.
And most importantly, let's get a handpicked group of people to come out with an intelligence community assessment in January of 2017, which was a bunch of crap.
And let's sell it to a to a to a slathering, slaving media as the 17 agencies of the intelligence community have concluded.
Dot, dot, dot.
You know.
Yeah, man.
And so it really is its own hilarious phenomenon, almost as the mirror image of the level of hype about Russiagate is the deafening silence.
I mean, it's like being dead and buried 600 feet under the earth.
The silence about Russiagate now and Donald Trump's high treason with Russia now and even the obstruction where they were like, yeah, never mind our false accusations of treason.
It's his obstruction of the injustice of that investigation.
That's what we're going to impeach him for.
They even dropped that.
Never even mind.
That's been months since I talked about that.
But now it's on to Ukraine gate.
And after all, I think you'd admit probably, wouldn't you?
I don't have trouble admitting that it seems like he was caught red handed doing something quite unethical here in the manner in which he was holding up this arms deal.
Dan, what do you think?
I don't know.
I mean, I may disagree with you a bit on that.
I mean, we don't know what we have to.
We're doing what the witnesses do, which was speculating as to his motivations.
And we don't know.
All we have is the transcripts, which doesn't show anything impeachable in any way, shape or form.
We have a lot of people who heard something from someone who heard something, who may have heard something, who had their feelings hurt.
And that's what's happening today with his former ambassador.
She was recalled as an ambassador.
And the fact of the matter is, when you're an ambassador, you're a personal representative of the president.
He can recall you for whatever reason he wants.
He has that right and that authority.
And the same is true for the people that worked under him, people like Vindman and people like the so-called whistleblower.
The president wants to change policy.
That's his purview.
You know, I don't like a strong president in areas that are not constitutional.
But with some oversight that, of course, Congress should but doesn't do, the president does have the right to change.
Who's to say that he can't change our policy toward Ukraine and toward Russia?
You know, so these are people who are heavily involved in the coup and they see the fruits of their labor being undone and they have a freak out over it and they want to impeach the president.
You know, that's that's at least that's how I see it.
Yeah.
Well, and even if you take the worst case interpretation of, you know, his sort of attempted extortion here, doesn't seem like there's any clear cut felony necessarily.
He's just saying if you accept the premise that he is essentially clearly stating, you know, no weapons and no White House meeting unless you investigate Hunter Biden as unethical or outside of what should be within the realm of politics or statesmanship or whatever as that is.
I don't think that's a clearly impeachable felony or, you know, there's a clear statute necessarily against that.
And to me, you know, that whole question becomes entirely moot and null and void.
The moment I found out that the whistleblower, as they call him here, Eric Ciaramella, used to work for John Brennan and they make a big deal about the fact that he worked for Biden, too.
And I think that shows politics and loyalty.
But the fact that he worked for Brennan means that he worked for Brennan.
And that means that this whole thing represents a continuation of the plot against the president that included the entire Russiagate hoax.
And that means that this is even if they caught Trump in a clear cut felony, I want to let him get out.
Well, depending on what it is, I guess.
But certainly falling short of that, he's absolutely got to get out of jail free just for the fact that we have to presume I don't think it's a provable fact, probably, but we have to presume that Ciaramella was sent there to find something on Trump at the earliest opportunity that you can you think you can make a thing out of a thing.
And after all, Trump's Trump.
He's going to do something wrong sooner or later.
But if that was Ciaramella's actual mission there, which I think we have to presume it was, then cancel the whole damn thing yesterday.
That's my point of view on it.
Yeah.
And, you know, Larry Johnson, who, you know, who's written a lot about this task force, he speculated that Ciaramella may have been in.
Recruited into the task force from what Johnson wrote, it was basically a hand selected group of people who could either join the task force or not, it was up to them.
But if you joined, they held out the possibility of promotions and all of the things that go along with that.
So he may have been sucked into that.
And I forget whether it was Vindman or Ciaramella, but one of them had been had been sent away from the NSC staff.
And here comes here comes President Trump's national security adviser bringing them back.
So how much was he in on it at the time as well?
You know, the plot thickens.
But, you know, on the point, you know, it's easy to sound like a Trump supporter.
I'm not.
I didn't vote for him.
I'm not a supporter.
But I didn't see anything in the transcripts where he said, hey, investigate this guy or you don't get any dough.
In fact, the favor was look into the origin of the attack on my campaign in 2016, which is, you know, there's nothing, you know, that has anything to do with, quote, dirt.
That's the media's term, nothing that Trump said, but that has nothing to do with dirt on a political rival and everything to do with them trying to dig up dirt on him, the previous government in that country.
Yeah, exactly.
And a lot of it's just a goofy way that Trump talks.
You know, you remember that from from W as well.
You know, they talk in this, you know, crazy circular fashion.
Trump's the worst.
And so the way he chews up his words looks like it.
But, you know, maybe he did want it.
Maybe he did think that Biden, you know, was that was the guy and we got to undermine him.
Even if that's the case, I think Buchanan has had a piece recently.
But but why isn't this something that we'd want to know about?
We we busted their country into shreds.
And then Biden sends his dopey son over there to make a few million bucks off of it.
Seems like a pretty legitimate thing anyway.
Well, and you know what?
Because someone listening might presume that, yeah, but Biden was just the vice president sitting there doing nothing.
But that's not true.
We know from the secretly recorded get this leaked by the Russians, presumably.
And and I'm thankful for it.
The recording of Robert Kagan's wife, Victoria Nuland, on the phone, she was essentially the ambassador to the European Union.
It's a long title, but, you know, deputy assistant secretary of state for European Affairs, something like that.
And then she is on the phone busted with the ambassador to Ukraine, Jeffrey Piatt plotting the whole thing and saying, we got to bring in Biden to glue it all together.
He's the one who's going to make it happen.
Yeah, exactly.
And who did who did who did she work with?
Who did Nuland work with?
Well, she worked closely with with Charmelo and Vindman.
They were working together on the Ukraine.
They were they were somewhat glued together.
They were glued together.
Amazing.
Here you have the architect of the Ukraine regime change, looking at the evil fruits of her labor, you know, in jeopardy.
Of course, they're going to do whatever they can.
Of course, this is all still self-inflicted by Donald Trump that, oh, of course, he's so lazy.
He can't even just figure out that there's such a thing as the national interest to read and that he could have staffed his government with people who somewhat agree with him on any of this stuff.
I would have made sure that all of Victoria Nuland's people were out in the new government.
I mean, man, that wasn't a standing order.
Anybody who works for Robert Kagan's wife has got to get a job in the private sector now.
And I don't mean as a contractor.
Anyway, let me ask you about Kent and Taylor, because I want to go back to what you were saying about these guys, essentially their opinion.
And it was so blatant, wasn't it, in the hearing the other day that, listen, this is America's foreign policy and we will be damned if we're going to let some president tell us that our priority is not bringing Ukraine into NATO and sticking it to the Russians.
Who the hell is Donald Trump to try to change our position on that?
That's what it comes down to.
That's what it comes down to.
And here's the real tragedy.
Talk about how dopey Trump is over this whole thing.
It's both parties as well, because both parties, Trump included, all of them, they all agree with the regime change.
So this disagreement is kind of theater in a way, the theater of the absurd, because they all agree on the policy of going around busting countries up that favors one party or the other here.
So they don't disagree on the big things, that's for sure.
Right.
But which also helps to explain why the Republicans are so horrible at defending Trump on all of this stuff, even though he's their guy, is because their bias is so strongly toward the CIA and the National Intelligence Establishment that, you know, they can say Brennan is out of line doing this or that maybe, but they can't just say that the entire organization over there in Langley is way the hell out of line.
And how could they for a minute think, and the FBI counterintelligence division too, how if there's such a distinction, how could these people think for a minute that they have the right to do this?
This is absolutely crazy.
And going back to the beginning of this task force, if in fact that's what it was, which I should build in a caveat that I think even, Jesus, I'm blinking on his name, Dan, say it again, Larry Johnson.
I want to call him Charles.
I'm sorry.
Even Larry Johnson saying he has one source for this.
And if confirmed, it's not 100 percent, but it sure is the best explanation for what we've seen here, that this task force was put together by Brennan in the spring of 2016, right as it was clear that Trump was going to sew up the nomination and that they needed to go ahead and launch a covert action to ensure Hillary Clinton's election over him, essentially, at that point.
And that's the origin of all of this.
Certainly not a crazy conspiracy theory.
The simplest working hypothesis, I think, the Occam's razor explanation for what's behind.
Certainly Russiagate, if not also Ukrainegate, which has grown out of it.
But I think probably that too.
Yeah, I share your concerns, you know, about a single source and it's a secret source.
But, you know, I've watched Larry's writing for quite a while now.
And, you know, he's in my mind, he's built a track record of being accurate.
So I do tend to put that caveat in as well.
But you're right.
It's a perfect explanation.
It explains the key to the whole thing, which is that ridiculous intelligence community assessment, which is something they invented out of whole cloth, because the whole reason the intelligence community does an NIE is because it's a community wide assessment of a country and every different agency has their input.
And I'm not a big fan of big government or any government, to be honest with you.
But if you're going to do a product like that, they do.
The redundancy does help.
You know, remember that the 07 NIE on Iran, it was State Department's INR that took a footnote and said, hey, we object to some of these things.
And they turned out to be not but the Iraq, sorry, the Iraq NIE.
And they ended up being right about it.
So there is a system and it does work fairly good for government on this.
And they wanted to go around that because they didn't want anyone to take a footnote or to or to raise a question about this assessment.
I think it was Brennan himself who said it was a handpicked team.
He did.
He was totally open about handpicked team.
Right.
And that on the face of it, DIA wasn't included.
But who are our government's greatest experts in the Russian GRU, their military intelligence branch, our DIA?
But they weren't allowed in.
They were excluded.
And in fact, even they apparently all really disliked their former leader, Flynn.
So they probably in just in terms of whose side are you on?
They probably would have liked to go along with this.
I don't know if they would have told lies.
But apparently, Brennan wasn't willing to take that chance that they might say, I don't know if this really is true or not.
So you're left with the farce of a couple of witnesses a couple of days ago.
Their big beef is that you're right, that the president wanted to change policy and we can't allow that.
It's not in our national interest to change policy.
And besides, we're jealous because the president never met with me and gave me a pat on the back.
Yeah, right.
So this is what it comes down to.
And, you know, I was just crazy listening to this guy talk about how the Azov battalion, he didn't name them, but that was who he was talking about.
These right wing militias, like the right sector in Azov battalion, that they're like the Minutemen, George Washington's Minutemen who heroically fought the American Revolution to expel the British Empire from our shores.
And I'm going and no one in the audience is laughing.
Nobody's saying anything about how that same Congress, John Conyers, had got them to pass a resolution to ban American direct aid to any Nazi forces that might happen to be allied with the government we're backing in Ukraine.
And that then after passing it, they rescinded it because the Obama administration made it clear that, yeah, no, that's who we're backing is the Nazis.
So we need you to get rid of that resolution for us.
And that really happened.
You can look that up.
It's in The New York Times and The Washington Post, you know, but they really called them the Minutemen, Dan.
The Minutemen.
I mean, is that such a big ask?
Please don't give our money to Nazis, you know, since what is that controversial?
But, you know, in every regime change, the U.S. has to work with the most despicable group of people, the jihadists in Syria, the Nazis in Ukraine, violent thugs in Hong Kong, corrupt military in Bolivia.
Everywhere you go, they work with the absolute dregs of society because those are really the only kinds of people that will willingly harm innocent victims, innocent civilians, you know.
So that's why you see over and over again.
And that's why one of the reasons we're against regime change is that we are actual humanitarians.
We don't like innocent people being slaughtered and killed and having their country ruined.
Yeah.
And, you know, in a limited constitutional republic, it doesn't seem like there's very much chance that your CIA would dare to take on your president this way.
And I guess they wouldn't really have the front between Ukraine and Russia to fight about in Washington, D.C., would they?
Yeah, exactly.
You know, and Jim Bovard had a good piece in USA Today a couple of days ago talking about how the media and and unfortunately, the Democrats on the left are all gaga over the deep state now.
Thank God for the deep state, said Laughlin, you know, and Brennan was laughing next to him.
And, you know, Brennan followed up by saying, well, the difference is that our intelligence community are acting and they tell the truth, which is, of course, is a lie, as Bovard pointed out.
You know, in every single instance, that's what they do.
And even Pompeo admitted that's what they do.
It's no secret.
So, yeah, be careful what you wish for.
Yeah, well, you know what, too?
I think the great analogy here is the revolution, the short-lived revolution in Egypt in 2011.
And, you know, I know that the NED participated in that, in helping to build up the left side of that revolution in the years leading up to it because they didn't know what they were going to do after Mubarak died because his son is such an idiot.
But at the same time, though, I mean, you had the entire left and right in town and country and every city in a real people's revolution that grew up there at the beginning of 2011.
And they succeeded in overthrowing their American-backed dictator.
And they succeeded in thwarting Obama and Hillary's effort to put his head of the secret police in as the runner up there, Omar Suleiman.
And they held elections and the right wing won barely the Muslim Brotherhood.
They won the parliament and the presidency by just a couple percentage points.
And then the liberals, such as they were, but, you know, the labor union left and the more secularist and big city types and whatever, you know, formed the anti-Muslim Brotherhood left coalition, if you can call it that.
I'm oversimplifying in American terms, but that's pretty much right if you consider the Muslim Brotherhood to be the conservative right, of course.
The religious right.
But then the liberals instead of saying, all right, we want a parliamentary democracy over our military dictator and we might have lost this time, but better luck next time.
Instead, they all just dropped out and went and kept the protests going in Tahrir Square.
And and essentially were the pressure from below for the military to say, well, see, the the Muslim Brotherhood, the people just don't want them and won't accept their illegitimate rule.
And so now we have to overthrow them.
And so the liberals gave up their chance to ever run for election again just to get rid of the conservative party's victory this one time.
And now they're back under the new Mubarak dictatorship.
And that's the same kind of compromise liberals are making in America now that I prefer the CIA to the American right winning elections and having policies that I disagree that strongly with.
It's not worth it.
Like you're saying, careful what you wish for.
When these guys think of this, Dan, you know, we were outraged.
I remember you being outraged at the time.
It is absolutely outrageous on the face of it, no matter your politics, the way that Brennan at CIA tried to sit the Justice Department on Dianne Feinstein's staff.
She was the chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee, and they tried to accuse these guys of breaking the law and spying on the CIA when they had every right to every bit of material they had.
And CIA was only mad that they had accidentally turned over to them the real secret history of the torture program that they'd written for Panetta that they didn't mean to turn over.
Oops.
So then they tried to get the Justice Department to go after her staff and indict them for, you know, like Espionage Act charges and stuff.
And and so and people were saying, oh, my God, I can't believe how out of line the CIA is.
There's some other big news that week that kind of washed it away.
But for the people who paid attention, this was like a signpost on the road to hell right here that the CIA would be would dare to take on the chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee in that way.
But then so what's this then?
This must be a thousand times that they're willing to take on the president United States like this is kind of unbelievable in a way.
Yeah, and they want you and I to shut up because neither of us really like Trump very much at all.
Right.
You know, and you know, so this is this is the way they do it.
And it's it's not about Trump.
You're right.
It's about the next person who may be elected.
And I'm pretty sure I can't really know for certain, but I'm pretty damn sure, Dan, that the roles were reversed here and it was the CIA, for whatever reason, trying to get rid of Hillary Clinton through these kinds of false accusations and setups and whatever that I would defend her to.
Is I don't care who wins the election.
Whoever wins the election is a better man than the CIA when it comes to this kind of thing.
The only exception to that I can think of is when they debunked all Bush's propaganda about Iran's nuclear program in 07.
But that still wasn't falsely accusing him of high treason with the Kremlin and trying to drive him out of power and all this kind of thing.
That was them telling the truth and shutting him up.
So, well, you know, there was a time when when when retired CIA directors and top officials, when they retired, they would just sort of go off to cultivate flowers or vegetable gardens, what have you.
But now you have this celebrity former CIA officer, people like Mike Morell, who was acting, who came out in support of Hillary and literally said in The New York Times that President Trump is a Russian agent.
Before the election, you have people like like Brennan who were overtly, overtly partisan and political.
So they've they've learned that they can parlay their former position in the intelligence committee into big bucks going on TV and saying, wink, wink.
Hey, I know the truth, but I can't tell you.
But let's just be enough to say that we know he's an agent, you know, this sort of thing.
So times have changed a lot, unfortunately.
And that's and, you know, we're sort of wallowing in that now.
Yeah, it was funny.
You mentioned that quote from John McLaughlin, another former acting director of the CIA, saying, thank God for the deep state and all that.
He said, we answer to a higher calling.
Uh-huh.
And that is what exactly your loyalty to the agency.
I get it.
OK.
Yeah, the truth, the truth will set you free, as they claim, you know, and, you know, it's, you know, Pat Lang has written about how we should abolish certainly the covert side of the CIA.
You know, I think, you know, on the analytical side, there are smart people that are involved.
But but certainly when you have that power to do these things, there's just too much room for bad things to happen.
And now it comes to our shores, you know, and I've said it before a bunch of times.
But when we were watching the regime change operations in the 90s, we were all saying, you know what, if this stuff keeps going on like this, it's getting bolder and bolder.
It's going to come home.
It's going to come home to our shores.
It's exactly what we're seeing.
So we've become the banana republic.
Yep.
Yeah.
And as you say, just as a lot of wise people told you was exactly what was going to happen.
Just wait till the dollar really breaks.
As your friend Dr.
Paul keeps warning all the time, year in and year out, at some point people are going to lose confidence in this currency.
And that'll be the beginning of the real crisis.
Then God knows what's going to happen then.
Then we're going to have to find Bob Higgs down in Mexico and see if he'll let us live with him.
Exactly.
He's got also be a bunch of, you know, MAGA hat wearing guys wishing they hadn't built that wall.
Yeah, exactly.
All right.
Absolutely.
Listen, I can't tell you how much I appreciate all of the great work that you do four days a week on the Liberty Report with Ron Paul and seven days a week over there at the Ron Paul Institute for Peace and Prosperity.
That's ronpaulinstitute.org.
And thank you so much again for your time on the show, too, bud.
Thank you, Scott.
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.
