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.
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The full archive is also available at youtube.com slash scotthortonshow.
All right, you guys, on the line, I've got Peter Van Buren.
He used to work for the State Department for 24 years.
God, can you imagine being a government employee for 24 years?
He wrote the books We Meant Well, about Iraq War Two, and Hooper's War, a novel of World War Two, Japan, and about moral injury there.
And he's a regular writer at the American Conservative.
He keeps the blog We Meant Well, and we republish a lot of what he writes and link to a lot of what he writes at antiwar.com.
Welcome back to the show.
How you doing, Peter?
Oh, Scott, it's a pleasure always to be here.
I always enjoy our conversations.
Cool.
Yeah, me too.
You know, so I'm really interested in this whole impeachment thing, and you have been writing a lot about it.
The very latest here I see is Marie Yovanovitch, the poster child of FS Proud, hashtag FS Proud.
And before that, we need to hear from the whistleblower now.
So, but before we get into any of that, let's talk about Russiagate.
Did you see the news last night breaking CNN, so you know where the sourcing came from, kind of a style of a thing, that at least one FBI official is under investigation for changing, editing documents that were apparently submitted to the FISA court as part of the application for the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act warrant against Carter Page?
Well, I'm, you know, I'm shocked, shocked to find that gambling is going on in this establishment.
We're going to know a lot more in about two weeks when some version of the inspector general's report comes out, which should shed a little more light on all this.
But you know, for people that are listening to this program, and certainly for the two of us, to have some sense that the rest of the world has caught up and understood that the investigation into the Trump campaign, the FISA warrants, were in some ways, you know, completely bogus is not particularly surprising.
For those that are joining us a little later, because this has been going on for well over three years now, basically the United States government through the FBI and probably other agencies spied on members of the Trump campaign.
And they did this under the guise that the Trump campaign was colluding with Russia to destroy democracy or something like that.
They needed a way to open the door legally.
Now, the government was probably surveilling a lot of these people without warrants long before this, but at the point where they thought they might have to introduce some evidence into some court somewhere, they were going to need some legal surveillance to back up what they thought they already knew.
They needed a patsy, and the first one that came along was Carter Page or George Papandopoulos.
I'm not sure who came first, but it doesn't really matter.
Somebody had to come first.
And once they had a warrant on one person, and the FISA court is where you get these secret warrants.
Once you had the warrant on one person, that would roll up inadvertent surveillance, you know, pretty much everybody else.
And then you could certainly dig up stuff in the course of working one warrant to justify getting other warrants.
So Peter, point of clarification here real quick for the audience who are not familiar with it.
You know, the Fourth Amendment standard is probable cause, particularly describing the places to be searched or the persons or things to be seized, probable cause.
Whereas for a FISA warrant, the standard is an objective, reasonable belief, and which is a much lower standard of evidence.
Essentially it's, I have a reason to have a hunch is essentially the standard for a foreign intelligence surveillance act warrant based on the theory that this person is an agent of a foreign power or of a foreign terrorist group.
And then the Fourth Amendment doesn't apply.
Now we're in the game of spies.
And so, and we're talking about an American citizen here, Carter Page, who they're doing this to on the pretense that they believe he's an agent of a foreign power.
And so this isn't just, they lied to get a warrant.
They lied to get a warrant in a way that they could never get a warrant on an American citizen without this kind of lie to back it up or some real evidence to back it up along those same lines.
Do I understand that right?
Yeah.
The other things that are important here are that in a FISA court, and FISA stands for Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, and it goes all the way back actually to Jimmy Carter.
And believe it or not, when it was first created back in the 1970s, it was supposed to fix a problem where the government was surveilling people without affording them any kind of rights.
And this was to create a certain minimum dual track of due process so that the FBI couldn't just say, Hey, we think that guy's a spy.
Let's open up an investigation.
And it's become perverted into essentially what in modern times is an end run around the protections of the Fourth Amendment against unwarranted search and seizure.
But that's all water under the bridge.
The idea here is that the FISA court is a secret court and you, the person who's being potentially under surveillance are not present in that court, nor are you represented.
So in other words, if the government wanted to open a FISA investigation against you, Scott, you would not know it was happening.
You would not be present.
Only the government would present evidence claiming that they had a reason to do this.
And you or your lawyers or anyone would not have any opportunity to question that.
So it's a one sided thing to begin with.
The fact that the government had to still jerry rig a process that already rigged in their favor suggests how nefarious this FBI agent's actions were.
And hopefully we'll know more details when the IG report comes out.
But the thing that is most of concern here is not Carter Page, who none of us can remember, but the fact that once you start surveilling someone, you also inherit the permission to surveil.
I think it's down to three jumps now.
The idea would be that, Scott, you call me while they're surveilling you, so they also pick up me.
But maybe in our call, I mentioned, hey, I'm going to call a cousin, Fred, and tell him secrets.
And the FBI doesn't have to get an additional permission to surveil me talking to cousin Fred.
Cousin Fred is only two jumps from you and so forth.
And so by picking somebody inside the Trump organization, the Trump campaign organization at that time, they basically opened the door to a vast number of people inside the organization.
And any of the information gathered there can become information that's used to get a new warrant to enlarge that group of people being surveilled.
And so that's why this is important.
Not because of Carter Page.
He was just the right guy in the right place as far as the FBI is concerned.
I'm very much looking forward to this report and hope it includes enough details that we can really understand how this all got started, and particularly the role that the Steele dossier played and the role that foreign intelligence played in all this.
And this may be an interesting segue into our talk about the Ukraine.
Not yet, though.
There's no rules that prevent foreign governments from spying on Americans.
That's kind of how spying is done.
If the British Secret Service wanted to spy on you here, Scott, in America or in Britain or on the moon, there's no law in America that really prevents that, particularly if you are overseas or if they're working from overseas.
There's also nothing that prevents the British government from sharing that information.
There's a lot of suggestions that some of the work was done on the initial spying on the Trump campaign staff was done by the British, and this was part of the trigger.
So this would be an interesting, if the Pfizer report, the IG report shows that the British government or another foreign government was involved, as many believe, that would be an interesting contrast to this question about foreign meddling in our democracy.
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I want to make something clear here, just not as a disclaimer to pander to anyone, but I just don't want people to be confused.
It's the same as when I defend Saddam Hussein or, you know, the Ayatollah or whatever on the facts that I'm not a Trump partisan.
And I in fact, you know, would like to see him punished for various things.
But that's a separate and different question than this whole thing about Russia gate and Ukraine gate, which I see as just simply a hoax, a put on by people even worse than Trump, the CIA.
I think that John Brennan is the one that started this whole thing.
And right now I'm going to ask you to speculate a little bit.
There's a report and it's an avowedly single sourced report.
It's not pretending to be authoritative, but it's Larry Johnson at Patrick Lange's blog.
He's a former CIA officer and he says he has one source that says that John Brennan set up a task force in early 2016 for the purpose of framing Donald Trump's campaign for ties to Russia and all of this, that that was the origin of this whole thing was to try to stop this guy who at that time was already the presumptive major party candidate for the Republican Party that year.
And I wonder whether you think that that makes the most sense to you as the explanation of how all of this started here.
Well, I haven't read that actual article, so I'm just going on what you you've told me there.
But let me answer it by playing with some words here.
And rather than say John Brennan set up a task force to what, where did you use blackmail Donald Trump to frame him, to frame the campaign?
Let me let me change some words around.
America's senior intelligence officer was picking up chatter that one of the candidates may have had longstanding connections with a foreign power and felt it prudent to at least begin some exploratory work into that question.
So my version sounds very legal and good and kind of thoughtful and intelligent.
And your version sounds scary and evil.
But both of them end up doing exactly the same thing.
So I have little doubt that what you said or what Larry said was is true in some sense of the word.
But I'll just kind of put different labels on it all and make it sound like what government people would be claiming, regardless of what their motives were, evil or pure.
And then it's suddenly all OK, because turn around, my God, we've picked up chatter from the British that one of our candidates may have connections to the Russians.
We shouldn't do anything about that now.
It's just no big deal.
Of course not.
Somebody's going to say we need to start poking around the edges, do some exploratory work, see if there's anything to see.
And you can take that same set of actions and spin it in different directions.
And the spin and the reality are based on the motivation of the people and what they hope to accomplish.
If you say they hope to prevent a Russian intelligence asset from gaining access to the White House, you're a hero.
If you say you want to throw the election to the Democrats, then you're a traitor.
But in the end of the day, you're kind of doing the same thing.
And this is where we are with Ukraine is we're parsing out words and we're playing with words to try to take a base thing that we can just we'll give it a neutral term.
We'll call it blue.
And we're trying to say blue is evil or blue is not evil.
But blue is still blue.
And that's the kind of thing we're in here.
And this is where a lot of these investigations and the IG reports and even the impeachment hearings themselves are going to end up messing up our country.
You mentioned that you don't support Donald Trump.
And I don't support Donald Trump.
In fact, I like to hope that I am thinking bigger and further than Donald Trump.
In other words, what we do to Donald Trump or what happens with Donald Trump, how this presidency concludes, whenever that is, however it is, is going to stay with us.
It's going to become part of America and the politics of America and the way America works.
And if we settle for, well, the means justify, the ends justify the means, Donald Trump is a bad guy.
We got to get rid of him.
And if it requires getting our hands a little dirty, getting our hair messed up a little bit, you know, that's worth it because of what we're going to accomplish.
And I don't believe in that at all.
I'm thinking way bigger than this, way past this.
I like to hope I am, I should say.
And saying, let us not do something that is going to harm the country in the longer term by creating precedence, by empowering the wrong people.
In this case, what we refer to as the deep state.
That's what I'm very, very concerned about here.
All right.
Well, so let's talk about the Ukraine thing.
So if we, my speculation is, or it's my presumption, I guess I'm not saying I really believe this, but I think I must presume that since the whistleblower, Eric Cherimella, used to work for John Brennan, that he was sent there to find some dirt on Trump.
The reality is that this president that the CIA and FBI dislike so badly, he's really is a bad person.
And he's the kind of person who would make what you could call a grievous mistake in not just leaving Ukraine matters to his attorney general, and instead bringing in Giuliani and giving Cherimella something to use, something to turn over to the Democrats, something to make hay out of.
If the guy was there to find some dirt on Trump, we're talking about Trump.
You don't have to wait very long.
He'll do something that will be enough to serve as a pretext for the next kind of a scandal.
So I want to ask you a bit about the actual testimony as it's come forward and whatever we actually know about the Ukraine deal.
Personally, I'm absolutely against arming Ukraine one bit, and I hate Joe Biden and his crackhead son.
And so I'm not invested at all in this narrative that, oh no, we're holding up an arms deal and all this kind of thing.
At the same time, though, it does seem like he's crossing a line and mixing Democratic and Republican politics with foreign policy in a way that is beyond customary.
When you say he was mixing domestic and foreign politics, you're talking about Biden as vice president?
Well, you know, I mean, Reason magazine's just been horrible on this, but they made a great point today that when this story first broke, that Trump said, yeah, I was expecting them to investigate the Bidens.
Why wouldn't you?
They're so corrupt, those Bidens and whatever, this kind of thing.
He was very clear what he wanted from them.
It seems pretty clear to me.
He wanted them to reopen the case against Burisma, which of course, there's plenty of corruption there just on the face of it, but he wanted them to do so in order to hurt the front runner on the other side, seemingly.
I don't know.
Anyway, you don't think so?
Or you don't care?
Or what do you think?
These get all very, very complicated things, and this is what I was saying before about let's just designate it as something neutral, blue, and then we can try to talk about it.
Yeah, exactly.
So that's what I'm asking you.
Blue.
Is it over the line or not?
Yes, but let's go back to Joe Biden and his son.
Joe Biden was vice president of the United States.
He with he used the full force of the United States government to to to shift Ukraine's policy.
His son was deeply involved in what any other situation we would call a sweetheart job where he was getting a lot of money to do nothing for a foreign company.
We all know if that was one of the Trump, if that was Eric Trump or Ivanka in the same situation, we would be literally losing our brains out over this.
If a Ukrainian company hired Eric Trump for whatever it was, $50,000 a month to do nothing, we would lose our minds.
It would be zombie in the zombies in the streets.
But yet we're pretending now that that didn't that's nothing.
It's not significant that the vice president of the United States was using foreign aid to influence that country's policies, internal policies in a way that could have advantaged his son.
And we know, in fact, even worse, that he was an integral part of the mission to overthrow the elected government of that country.
In February of 2014, we have Robert Kagan's wife, Victoria Nuland, who was essentially the ambassador to Europe at the time, on tape saying we got to get Biden to glue it together and make sure NATO in that call.
I'm sorry.
She said something about NATO in that call, if I remember well, I mean, the famous quote is F the EU.
In other words, the Germans are taking too long to facilitate this coup.
So we're just going to go around them and do it.
And she, in fact, says there's a guy named Robert Sary at the U.N.
They're working with him and then they're working with Vice President Biden to glue it all together.
OK, so the bottom line is, is that Joe Biden did some stuff that if we pulled it out of the context of this election and change the names from Biden to Pence, from Hunter Biden to to Eric Trump, we'd be going insane over this.
And that's simply a blue.
That's a set thing.
The fact that it's this election in this environment and we're pretending that nothing happened is beyond our understanding.
But in a neutral sense, it's a blue.
OK, then we go forward here and we're now with Donald Trump and.
Trump let's assume the worst, I guess, is the way to put it.
So Trump once said it's Trump ordered or commanded or influenced or something that we're going to withhold this aid until the Ukraine investigates that blue thing.
I'm not sure you can argue that's inherently wrong.
I think.
Again, just look at it as a blue thing.
Did the vice president of the United States.
Was he involved in something nefarious or bad or naughty?
Pick your favorite word.
Let's look into it.
On the face that there's nothing wrong with that.
I think American voters would like to know if one of the front running candidates was involved in something naughty like that.
Well, you know, the narrative is, oh, yeah, Trump cares a lot about corruption.
All of a sudden in this one case on the planet Earth from the neutral, you're getting into that.
Now, the fact that Trump would.
So if the investigation shows that that Biden did something naughty, obviously that benefits Trump, the candidate.
But I don't think it's very hard to go back and find presidents starting from, say, washing George Washington forward, who made foreign policy decisions with an eye on how they were going to affect his domestic standing politicians.
Presidents do that all the time.
The actions they take overseas oftentimes will help them domestically with with the next election or with their legacy or to get candidates from their own party elected.
They also, in most cases, seem to benefit the United States.
And I would argue that in what we're doing right now, we're taking this this blue thing.
Let's investigate what Biden did in Ukraine.
And if you're a Democrat, you're trying to say it was done simply to help Trump reelect himself for interference in our election.
And if you're a Republican, you say it had absolutely nothing to do with anything but telling the American people who Joe Biden really is.
And no one is willing to say it had elements of both, as have the majority of foreign policy decisions any president has ever made.
And that is objectively as this is possible to do.
I don't see that as an impeachable act.
I just can't see it as it's certainly not bribery because nothing happened.
And it's certainly not anything else.
It's just sloppy foreign policy, arguably.
And but to say that there's no benefit, I was involved, for example, and I don't want to get it.
I cannot get into details.
But when George Bush took us to war in Iraq in 2003, you remember that one of the things was he was desperate to get foreign governments to contribute to the invasion, to try to recreate the coalition that was so successful for his daddy.
And nobody really was interested in joining us in 2003.
You know, the British were the only ones who were enthusiastic.
The usual suspects, you know, threw in a few special forces or a medical unit or whatever.
But Bush was, for some reason, very, very adamant that the Japanese had to contribute something to this invasion.
And I was a participant in the process of getting the Japanese to agree to do that, which they did not initially want to do.
And things were offered.
Deals were made.
What we would call quid pro quo were bartered.
And in the end, the U.S. did some things, and the Japanese sent a small, small contingent who stayed far, far away from the fighting for a very short period, enough to check a box that the international coalition included the Japanese.
Now, to say that that whole thing was done simply to benefit George Bush's political position, you could make that argument.
I could.
To say that there was some benefit to the United States, to say that there was more international participation in our foreign policy adventures, I could make that argument.
But nobody was sitting in that office saying, Jesus, I wonder if Bush is going to get impeached over this.
Yeah.
Hey, if he ain't going to get impeached over starting a war for no reason, line us into it.
He ain't going to get impeached for bribing the Japanese for helping.
Right.
And that's it.
Nobody in that office was, we didn't sit there and talk among ourselves about whether we needed to report this or whether this was a quid pro quo that was going to lead to impeachment.
That's not what was going on because it wasn't that thing.
Well, but you know what?
I mean, that is a great metaphor.
Maybe you should have.
Maybe that was the kind of corruption that could have helped to even stop the war from starting.
What do you think?
Well, in that instance, I don't think the Japanese participation would have done any, it had no effect whatsoever.
Well, but I mean the, the dirty tricks and carrots and sticks that the Republicans were using to get them on board, that might've been a story, huh?
Maybe.
But I hate to break this.
And then, you know, if you have a breaking news logo, go ahead and get that ready.
Because the US does not go around the world handing out foreign aid simply because we're such darn nice people.
Every single dollar that we distribute has a quid pro quo built into it.
Whether you can see it or not, whether it's an immediate thing like the, the, you know, the aid is being dropped off at your main port on Tuesday.
Before that happens Monday night, you need to do this, whether it's as direct as that or whether it's part of a longer term relationship where, hey, you know, we've been financing your government for a couple of years.
You'd be surprised if we need, if we call on your help for a UN vote one of these days.
Yeah.
Do you remember the guy?
I mean, I hate Godfather references today because they're, they're so overdone, but I mean, you remember the scene in the Godfather where at the beginning he does a favor and he says, you know, I may never call on you.
I may, someday I may call on you for a favor or that day may never come, but remember this.
And every single dollar in aid has quid pro quo on it.
That's how this is done.
I mean, it's kind of how it's been done since the ancient Greeks, right?
I mean, this is also surprising.
If I see one more headline that says, you know, so-and-so proves quid pro quo, it's like, yeah, okay, yes, yes.
And it's also, you know, the sun rises usually from the Eastern side.
This kind of thing is where we get ourselves in trouble beyond Trump in that we are creating these odd standards that someone will pull out of their hat at another bad time.
Yeah.
All right.
Well, listen, I'm sorry we got a little bit of a late start today and I am all out of time for this one, but I really urge everybody to go read what Peter Van Buren is writing over the American Conservative Magazine.
We need to hear from the whistleblower now and Marie Yovanovitch, the poster child of Hashtag FS Proud, which both of which are great articles here, and I'm sure there's more coming too.
Thank you, Peter.
Appreciate it.
Thank you, Scott.
All right, y'all.
Thanks.
Find me at libertarianinstitute.org, at scotthorton.org, antiwar.com, and reddit.com slash scotthortonshow.
Oh, yeah, and read my book, Fool's Errand, Timed and the War in Afghanistan at foolserrand.us.
