For Pacifica Radio, November 24th, 2019.
I'm Scott Horton.
This is Anti-War Radio.
All right, y'all.
Welcome to the show.
It is Anti-War Radio.
I'm your host, Scott Horton.
I'm here every Sunday morning from 830 to 9 on KPFK 90.7 FM in LA.
I'm also the editorial director of Anti-War.com and the author of the book, Fool's Errand, Time to End the War in Afghanistan.
You'll find my full interview archive, more than 5,000 of them now, going back to 2003, at scotthorton.org, and I do about five to 10 of these a week if you want to check the full archive there and keep up.
That's all at scotthorton.org for you.
All right, you guys, introducing Aaron Maté.
He used to be with The Real News.
He's a regular contributor at The Nation, and he also writes for RealClear Investigations at realclearinvestigations.com.
He also hosts a show called Pushback at the Grayzone Project website, and that is at thegrayzone.com.
Welcome back to the show, Aaron.
How are you doing?
Hi, Scott.
How are you?
I'm doing great.
Appreciate you joining us again on the show here today.
So real big one here at Real Clear Investigations, the Brennan dossier, all about a prime mover of Russiagate.
So all about Obama's former director of the CIA, John Brennan, and his role in the origin of Russiagate here.
Let me ask you this.
What was the origin of this article?
Well, you know, for a long time, it's been clear that the Russia investigation was basically a scam.
We had all these leaks coming from the intelligence community, sowing suspicion about Trump and members of his orbit and their supposed nefarious contacts with Russians and Russian officials.
There were stories in The New York Times, for example, in February 2017, saying that the US had intercepted communications between senior Trump campaign officials and senior Russian intelligence officials.
But yet a few months later, even James Comey admitted before Congress that that was a false story.
So you had an obvious effort to, you know, sow a climate of suspicion around the Trump camp and Russia.
And as the evidence began to unfold, it became clear that it was entirely baseless.
And so then the question becomes, all right, well, who was responsible?
And then you have to look at, you know, who was there.
And a key player all along, if you look at the facts and, you know, I wasn't the first person to notice this, people like Professor Stephen Cohen of NYU in Princeton and others have pointed to the seemingly outsized role that Brennan plays.
And so my piece is just a deep dive at how Brennan keeps showing up in all the core tenets of the Russia investigation.
Okay.
So now I'm sure you're aware of this report and it is a single sourced report.
It's Larry Johnson, the former CIA officer at Patrick Lange's blog, Six Semper Tyrannis, and he's a former DIA official himself, Lange is.
And he says it's just a single source report, so he's not claiming to know that it's true, but he's saying it was worth repeating that the way he heard it was that Brennan had created a task force essentially for the purpose of framing the Trump campaign for some kind of illicit tie with Russia here.
And it seems to fit, but, and I'm asking you to speculate before I ask you for all your facts here, which isn't fair, but I wonder if you think that that's really the simplest explanation here, or did they really start with a reasonable suspicion and they're just so paranoid about the Russians, their imagination got the best of them somehow, possibly?
I definitely believe that there was no reasonable suspicion.
The official predicate that we've gotten, that George Papadopoulos might have heard from this professor, Joseph Massoud, that the Russians have damaging information on Hillary Clinton, and that that was the predicate for this investigation, that is definitely, or I can say with confidence that I believe that that's false.
It just doesn't make any sense.
The, the actual tip that the FBI got was so weak, it was qualified.
And of course it proved to be baseless.
And then you, the fact is you have all this suspicious stuff going on that actually even predates Trump campaigning.
And this is where Michael Flynn might've played a bigger role here than we realized, because, you know, there is a lot of talk about how despised Flynn was inside the intelligence community.
And it looks like there were efforts to entrap him that possibly began before even he signed on with the Trump campaign and before even Trump nominated.
So you have now a Russian woman named Svetlana Lokhova, who, she was invited to a dinner that Flynn attended in Britain a few years ago, I think in 2014.
And at that dinner, she was introduced to a few people, including Stefan Halper, who later shows up as a informant and asset used by the FBI in the Russian investigation, and basically not long after Trump's victory, amid this effort to paint an air of suspicion around the Trump campaign, Svetlana's name is leaked for an article.
It was in the Guardian and also in the Wall Street Journal that basically tried to claim that there were suspicions that Flynn had an affair with a Russian woman, which was her, and that this showed he was potentially compromised by Russia.
And what actually happened in reality is that Svetlana and Flynn spoke very briefly and might've exchanged some emails.
But meanwhile, the people around Stefan Halper were encouraging her to actually meet with Flynn and were trying to talk to her and actually gave her name to other journalists in a bid to sort of push a suspicion.
So we don't know exactly when that aspect began, but that could have been basically something that was already running when Trump announced his candidacy, and then when Trump appointed Flynn as his national security advisor, it really drummed up.
So that's one avenue.
But what I also know about Brennan is that he says that he passed on information to the FBI and he said that his concerns about Russian contacts with the Trump campaign were a basis for the FBI's investigation.
And we got a clue that the current review undertaken by William Barr and John Durham might be looking at that when there was a New York Times piece that recently broke the news that their inquiry has turned into a criminal one.
And they include a very ominous line.
They say that Durham has been asking interview subjects, quote, whether CIA officials might have somehow tricked the FBI into opening the Russia investigation.
Unquote.
So to me, if that reflects an accurate suspicion on Durham and Barr's part, if that New York Times account is accurate, that to me points to the concerns that Brennan himself has publicly taken credit for.
Hey, I'll just letting you know that we're doing a big end of the year fun drive at the Libertarian Institute at libertarianinstitute.org slash donate.
We've got some great projects in mind for the new year, including the publication of my next book, Enough Already, Time to End the War on Terrorism.
Sheldon Richman, Pete Quinonez and I also plan on bringing on more writers, hosting an event or two, and some other big ideas we're working on as well.
So help the Libertarian Institute make the new year a huge one for the advancement of freedom at libertarianinstitute.org slash donate.
And thanks.
I'm talking with Aaron Maté, writing this time for RealClearInvestigations.com, the Brennan dossier, and of course the breaking news from last night and pretty clearly a limited hangout by the accused in the friendly pages of CNN.com.
They announced that one of the FBI officials, they said, and I'm not exactly sure what they mean by that, but that sounds higher than agent to me, an FBI official had changed some documents that were submitted as part of the FISA warrant application to the FISA court for the warrant against Carter Page.
So if the CIA tricked the FBI counterintelligence division into pursuing this, it sure sounds like they picked it up and ran with it if they weren't in on it all along.
Well, yeah.
And, and one indication of that, the fact that the FBI ran with it is the fact that they used the Steele dossier to begin with as part of their investigation and minimized and actually basically concealed the fact that it was funded by Trump's opponent, the DNC.
So certainly Brennan is not the only person to blame here.
He just happens to show up at pretty much every single stage, including by the way, the, the out, the core allegation that Russia interfered to begin with, because it's Brennan who delivers this envelope, the supposed secret envelope to the white house in early August, claiming that his mole in the Kremlin has just blown the whistle on a Putin plot to order an influence campaign and to elect Trump.
It's interesting that this intelligence comes after the FBI has already opened up a probe of Trump, Russia contacts, and not months before when Putin would have had to have ordered this operation because, you know, we've had by this point, Russian social media trolls have been posting ads that of course were juvenile and no one ever saw, but we're supposed to believe that that was part of a massive influence campaign.
And also by that point, August, 2016 months earlier, the democratic party emails had been stolen.
So for Putin to have ordered a operation, certainly this mole likely would have heard that before he ordered the operation or at least around it.
But then the mole's intelligence only comes in after the FBI's investigation has been opened and there's some detail in a book by Greg Miller, a reporter with the Washington post called the apprentice, where he points out that Brennan is the one who handled all the intelligence that was initially used from this mole, this supposed Kremlin source and other sources that, you know, generated the claim of Russian interference.
And they, uh, Miller notes that Brennan ordered up the raw underlying unprocessed material material that hadn't been vetted for its accuracy.
And he stayed up late into his office, poring over it and generating something.
And I spoke to John Kiriakou, the former CIA analyst who said that this was very unusual and reminiscent to him of the same kind of process that led to the phony intelligence used to justify the Iraq war by the CIA.
Yeah.
And now he publicly said on TV, not just as an unnamed source and a leaker for the newspapers and that kind of thing, but he said that he knew that there was secret information here that showed that these men were guilty.
They're going to be indictments.
He knows it's true.
And that was a huge part of the whole deal was he is the former director of the CIA.
He must know everything.
And so when Trump met in Helsinki with Putin, and I guess didn't accuse him right to his face of fixing the election in Trump's favor, John Brennan said, it's treasonous.
And people took that to mean that he didn't just think what he saw on TV looked treasonous, that he knew that there was really something behind that.
And just you wait till Mueller lets us know, because again, his position and he really strang the left half of America, except with some exceptions, but certainly the liberal Democrats of America, along with this stuff for years, two and a half, three years almost.
He did.
I mean, so not only does he play an outsized role behind the scenes during the investigation, by the way, there's other things to talk about during the late summer.
He has this really pivotal meeting with Harry Reid that actually makes the collusion allegations public in a very bold way during the campaign, contrary to some myths.
But we can talk more about that.
But yeah, listen, it's extraordinary.
And I've talked to, you know, former CIA officials who even share the concerns about Russian interference and believe there might even have been something there to the Trump-Russia thing.
But even they were just taken aback at how out there Brennan was in calling Trump treasonous.
And it's unprecedented for a former intelligence official in his position to say stuff like that and to predict, you know, as you mentioned, a wave of indictments.
I mean, he did that in the last weeks of Mueller's testimony.
He was predicting that Mueller was going to have a grand finale of indictments that was going to criminally charge people inside Trump's circle, including even members of Trump's family.
And of course, all that proved to be wrong.
So, you know, for every step of the way, everything, you know, so Brennan is meeting with Harry Reid in August 2016.
And Harry Reid even says that he believes that Brennan had an ulterior motive and that ulterior motive was to get the collusion allegations out to the public.
And that's what Harry Reid did.
He wrote these two letters to FBI Director James Comey, basically accusing him of sitting on information, explosive information about Trump-Russia contacts and Russia using Trump to undermine American democracy.
So that was generated by Brennan.
Another thing generated by Brennan is this so-called intelligence community assessment that gets released in January 2017 that accuses Vladimir Putin of ordering this influence campaign to elect Trump.
And that helped cast the policy suspicion over Trump's presidency and, you know, raised and which was then followed soon after by the publication of the Steele dossier, which, by the way, were apparently Brennan wanted to include as an appendix to the ICA.
But he lost out on that battle.
And remind me, in that so-called assessment of that was produced by, as Brennan called them, a handpicked team of guys, did they allege collusion between Trump and the Russians there or that was just giving the Russians the credit for the election or the blame for the election?
Exactly.
No, they did not allege collusion at all.
But, you know, they also alleged that there was this Russian effort to elect Trump that was followed very soon a few weeks later by the publication of the Steele dossier, which of course did accuse Trump of collusion.
And the publication of the Steele dossier was preceded by efforts by Clapper, Comey and Brennan to brief Trump on the Steele dossier, which then gave media outlets a news hook to justify publishing it, which is exactly what happened.
And it looks like it was James Clapper who leaked to CNN, you know, if you read some of the testimony that's come out from from an investigation conducted by House Republicans, it looks like it was James Clapper who leaked Trump being briefed on the Steele dossier to media outlets, which then gave BuzzFeed an excuse to publish it.
And yes, as you mentioned, that intelligence community assessment, it's important to point this out.
It's often portrayed as the consensus of all the U.S. intelligence agencies.
In fact, it was the product only of three, the CIA, the FBI and the NSA.
But even there, that's misleading because as House Republicans on the intelligence community noted when they came out with the report in March 2018, they noted that it was Brennan who managed the entire process.
They said that the it was unusually constrained and that Brennan drafted that CIA analyst, drafted that report and only merely consulted with the FBI and the NSA.
So even the role there of the FBI and NSA has been overblown.
And so it was basically a CIA document.
And if it's a CIA document, then that means it was Brennan because it was Brennan who oversaw it.
All right.
So here's a departure for a moment.
It's again, Aaron Maté writes for The Nation and for Real Clear Investigations.
And of course, politically speaking, you're doing pure journalism here, but politically speaking, you're a progressive and there are other progressive journalists and leftist journalists like Matt Taibbi and Glenn Greenwald and many others, in fact, who have never believed in this Russiagate thing and have made really quite a big deal about debunking it, even though that would be, as they say, against interest, since the further left you are, the more you must hate and fear this president, it would seem at least.
And yet you're dedicated to debunking this story, you know, in effect on Trump's behalf, sort of, or it could be seen that way.
So I wonder if you could explain to people why it is that this is so important to you, Aaron, that you get to the bottom of what's behind this fraud, this Russiagate fraud that was perpetrated on us here.
Sure.
Well, there's there's two things or two main considerations.
One is a journalistic question and one is a partisan question.
You know, as a journalistic question, it's not difficult.
Basically, the facts are the facts and the facts matter.
And as journalists, we're supposed to follow the facts no matter their partisan utility.
And if you're not doing that, if you're if you're trying to follow the facts and shaping them and interpreting them in a way that benefits your own partisan affiliations, then you're not being a journalist, you're being a party activist.
And I firmly reject that, you know.
Now, on the question of politics, I also don't hide the fact that I am leftist and I am progressive.
And from a political point of view, I can't think of a bigger gift to Trump and the right wing than what Russiagate was.
It was this ludicrous conspiracy theory filled with, you know, baseless innuendo and all these wild beliefs that Vladimir Putin is controlling Trump, that Trump and Russia were communicating via a secret server, that Putin had a p-tape and was using that as compromise over Trump and all the sick stuff that dominated mainstream media and political circles for, you know, three years.
I can't think of a bigger gift to Donald Trump and and the right wing than channeling the opposition to him into this moronic conspiracy talk.
I mean, what could be a bigger gift?
So people want to tell me that somehow challenging Russiagate is doing Trump's bidding.
I think they have it in reverse.
Anybody who engaged in promoting Russiagate was handing Trump the biggest gift he could ever get, because instead of having a resistance where people are actually challenging him on his policies, and there's so many to challenge, there's the tax bill, the largest upward transfer of wealth in U.S. history, the assaults on Central American migrants, although to the credit of the resistance, there was some opposition to that.
But I think there could have even been even more.
The assault on the health care system, Trump's foreign policy, these murderous sanctions on Venezuela and Iran, you can go on and on and on.
The ongoing support for the Israeli occupation of Palestine.
I mean, you know, I could do a long list.
Instead of organizing around that, you have a resistance that is focused on a on proving a conspiracy theory and in the process totally sidelined.
You know, you remember in the first days of the Trump administration, we had these protests, we had the Women's March and we had people going to airports to oppose the Muslim ban.
Well, what happened after that?
Basically, we got told that our heroes were intelligence officials and that Robert Mueller was going to save us.
And that we had to basically sit as spectators of this, you know, played out intra-elite battle.
And all the energy of the initial Trump months, I think, was sapped.
And to illustrate that, one of the biggest protests of the Trump era against Trump was about the job safety of Jeff Sessions.
A day after Jeff Sessions, someone liberals rightly loathe, and I certainly do, too, a day after he was fired, MoveOn and other liberal groups held massive rallies opposing that because they were concerned that his firing meant that Robert Mueller's job was in trouble, which, of course, was not the case.
So I can't think of a bigger gift to Trump than Russiagate.
And you have to look at also the other consequences, too.
And by the way, on top of the gift to Trump that was handed by diverting attention, then you have the additional gift of after it all collapses, which, of course, it always would, because going back to the question of evidence, the evidence was never there.
So when that collapsed, he gets another gift and he gets to claim vindication.
And then you have the consequences like, you know, of the fact that Russiagate also served a very anti-progressive agenda.
It helped drum up tensions with Russia and justify a more hawkish posture.
It helped push Trump into a more hawkish posture, despite what he ran on.
And the biggest illustration of that is look at his policy on Ukraine.
When Barack Obama was in office, and you've talked about this, Scott, on your show, I believe, Barack Obama, after helping to start the proxy war in Ukraine, he resisted pressure from the Beltway, from Beltway hawks, to further inflame it, to send lethal assistance, to send more weapons.
And he held to that position in the face of, you know, a heavy bipartisan pressure.
What happens when Trump takes office?
Well, Trump has been campaigning on having better relations with Russia, but now he's facing allegations that he's a Kremlin asset.
So, and now he's facing the same pressure that Obama faced.
And I think, you know, you can't discount that context of him being accused of being a Russian agent from his decision he made, which was to reverse Obama's policy and approve that military assistance.
And now, by the way, we have a whole new scandal, outrage, because he briefly paused it for, you know, a month or so before he eventually released it.
So it's encouraged, you know, dangerous tensions between the U.S. and Russia.
It's emboldened the sort of Cold War hawkish mindset that the intelligence officials who have pushed this whole thing embody.
And I can't think of anything more anti-progressive and reactionary than that.
And that's just, you know, one of the many reasons why I oppose it.
Yeah.
Well, and it's important, too, to think about how right-wingers feel about this, to see the Democrats willing to lie or at least, you know, blatantly believe and repeat whatever John Brennan tells them is true to these ends, essentially to overturn the election.
I mean, if it's true that Donald Trump's guilty of treason, like they all expected to find out in the Mueller report, well, next would be impeachment and removal from office.
In other words, democracy means when the Democrats win.
And if they don't, they'll team up with the secret police to falsely accuse you of high treason in order to drum you out of power.
I mean, that sounds like the kind of thing that the CIA would be behind in, say, I don't know, Bolivia or some other Latin American country where, in fact, Donald Trump cheered the CIA coup last week while he's in the middle of one, which I think is hilarious in a dark, horrible way.
But that is really a black mark against the Democrats from now on, that they're willing to clearly do anything to make up a case.
As you say, they skip over plenty of really good cases they could make against him, like say, ignoring their war powers resolutions and continuing the war in Yemen that was never authorized in the first place.
They could convict him and put him in prison for that.
But no, instead, that's our friends at the CIA and the military doing that.
We don't want that.
Instead, let's go after him over something he didn't do.
And with, I mean, the ultimate false charge, right, that someone is an agent of the Kremlin, not just a foreign power, but of the Kremlin.
It's pretty amazing.
And it's it will be no surprise if he wins reelection over this issue, possibly as one of the biggest issues is look at how desperate the Democrats are to cheat when they lose.
I totally agree.
And, you know, if I have to choose between respecting democracy, even if it means respecting the victory of someone who I don't like, between that and handing to intelligence officials the right and the authority to decide who the president is, it's not even a question.
And it's ridiculous that people have gone the other way.
And it shows a certain contempt for voters and for democracy on the part of the national security state elites and the Democratic Party elites who have driven this.
And that's part of the reason also why I've been so opposed to this, too, because it's so obvious what function this serves on top of generating, you know, dangerous tensions with Russia on behalf of those who profit from those tensions, the military industrial complex.
This also totally benefits the neoliberal wing of the party that lost in 2016 and doesn't want to accept that reality, instead wants to blame everybody but their own failed legacy.
And to me, the obvious lesson of the Democratic Party in 2016 was to go more to the left, to, you know, give people an alternative to Trump when Trump claimed to be a working class champion.
But at least he paid attention to working class concerns, even though I think it was disingenuous.
At least he paid attention to it.
Democrats could have gone the direction of pointing out why Trump's promises were false and why they had a better alternative, why they had real answers to why people don't have jobs and why people are suffering.
Instead, they doubled, they embraced a conspiracy theory and they embraced intelligence officials to do the job that they themselves could not do in 2016, which is beat Trump.
It's crazy.
And of course, as you know, it's it's establishing a terrible precedent because what happens if Bernie Sanders gets the nomination and Bernie Sanders wins and what happens if Bernie Sanders comes in and the CIA and whoever else doesn't like what he's talking about in terms of, you know, ending support for the Israeli occupation or ending the US support for the Saudi bombing of Yemen or making or, you know, entering back into the nuclear deal again, anything else, you know, we've established a playbook that the CIA and other intelligence officials can follow to undermine an elected president.
And we've done so with liberal consent, which is just incredibly dangerous.
So it it actually blows my mind at this point that people can still think that opposing Russiagate and all that it entails is somehow synonymous with supporting Trump.
Yeah.
You know, this really gets right to the heart of it.
There's a to me it's a good analogy is what happened in Egypt in 2011 through 13 there where all sides, town and country and left and right and Giza and Alexandria and Cairo and everybody got together to overthrow the American backed dictator Mubarak and then they held elections for parliament and the president.
And in both cases, the right wing candidate, the Muslim Brotherhood candidate won barely.
And instead of saying, OK, better luck next time.
Come on, all left leaning types, which were basically centered around the labor unions in Cairo and this kind of thing.
Come on, let's get it together and form some parties and get ready to participate.
We created a democracy.
We overthrew a dictator and created a democracy.
Can you believe it?
Come on, let's get together and we'll beat the Muslim Brotherhood next time.
Instead, they just stayed in the street and complained and provided the pressure from below for Fatah al-Sisi, the head of the military, to go ahead and overthrow and cancel the democracy and arrest the Muslim Brotherhood and massacre their supporters in the streets and reinstitute the military dictatorship for all time.
And now the liberals will never have a chance to stand for election ever again.
And that's the American liberals right now doing the exact same game right there, saying we better just let the national security state decide, because in the short term, we don't like the right winger.
Yeah, I you know, I don't I'm not as familiar with the details of Egypt quite as you are.
But yeah, I do remember.
I mean, it was obviously there was a lot for about Morsi that I didn't agree with.
But then you look at the fact that, you know, some of the Gulf states also were pouring in hundreds of millions of dollars to undermine his government.
And it's just it's a poison chalice that people are drinking from to endorse this measure.
That's, you know, a politician or someone we don't like, that it's legitimate to undermine them by relying on other nefarious forces.
It just doesn't work like that.
Either you believe in democracy or you don't.
All right, you guys, that is Aaron Maté.
He is the host of Pushback at the Grayzone Project.
That's thegrayzone.com, Max Blumenthal and the guys over there.
And then he also writes regularly for The Nation.
And this one is at RealClearInvestigations.com, the Brennan dossier, all about a prime mover of Russiagate.
Thank you again, Aaron.
Really appreciate it.
Thank you, Scott.
All right, y'all, and that has been Antiwar Radio for this morning.
I'm your host, Scott Horton, editorial director of Antiwar.com and author of the book Fool's Errand, Time to End the War in Afghanistan.
I'm here every Sunday morning from 830 to 9 on KPFK, 90.7 FM in L.A.
See you next week.
