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 feed.
The full archive is also available at youtube.com slash scotthorton show.
All right, guys, check it out on the line.
I've got Ray McGovern.
He used to be a CIA analyst, was the briefer for Vice President H.W. Bush in the Reagan years, and is the co-founder of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity.
And I don't know about at CIA, but certainly in this century, he's been right about everything.
And you can go and read the archives of the VIPS memos to the presidents in the archives there at consortiumnews.com, where this one originally ran, and we reprinted it at the Libertarian Institute as well.
It's called Twin Pillars of Russiagate Crumble.
Oh, you don't say.
Welcome back to the show, Ray.
How you doing?
Good, Scott.
Actually, it's crumble.
Oh, what did I say?
They tried to rumble with us, but it crumbled and it crumbled just about a week ago when these documents, these sworn testimony documents were released.
What documents were those, Ray McGovern?
They go back to December of 2017, if you can believe it.
And the key one, and I have to tell you that the New York Times and the Washington Post have avoided this like the plague.
They haven't even mentioned it, much less reported or commented on it.
But you know, there are a few of us around and my hat is off to Aaron Maté, who immediately, as soon as these things were published, and we have 53 transcripts, he homed in on the one in which Sean Henry was interviewed.
Now, most of your listeners would not know who Sean Henry is, but he's a big deal.
He was the head of what the cyber investigation unit called CrowdStrike.
And before that, he had spent a career working directly under Robert Mueller, the head of the FBI at the time, and he was his cyber expert.
So he retires in 2012 and then goes, heads up this cyber firm, which was coincidentally hired by the Democrats to look into the so-called Russian hack of the DNC.
Now, again, your listeners probably remember that that was the cornerstone.
That was it.
I mean, when the, quote, Russians hacked into the DNC and gave those destructive, those embarrassing emails to WikiLeaks to publish, well, they won the election for Donald Trump.
Now, I will concede that winning the election for Donald Trump is a pretty, pretty serious offense.
Well, I'm glad you mentioned that.
I think this is important.
You know, I was just interviewed on a friend's show, and one of the things we talked about is just how completely tribal politics have gotten here, where the only question is, whose side are you on?
And whatever facts fit with the agenda of your side, those are the ones that matter, and all the rest don't, and all this kind of thing.
That is just not the case with your analysis of the Russiagate scandal, and you can elaborate on this if you want, but you don't have to.
But I'll go ahead and mention that you have said on my show that you think that Donald Trump is the worst president of your lifetime, and then, so that would include even Harry Truman, the butcher of Asia, and Richard Nixon, the other butcher of Asia, and Bill Clinton, who burnt Waco to the ground, and lied about the Oklahoma bombing, and bombed Iraq from Saudi Arabia so much that he provoked Osama bin Laden into knocking our towers down.
And so, that's pretty big.
And George Bush, who exploited the knocking down of those towers to kill a million people or so.
And Barack Obama, who backed al-Qaeda in Syria until it blew up into the Islamic State, which he then had to go and launch another war to destroy.
So wow, you think Donald Trump is worse even than all of those presidents?
Really, Ray?
And you're still against the Russiagate scam.
Scott, I hate to let you misquote me, but I didn't say the worst president in recent memory.
I said the worst president in the history of the United States.
Oh man, okay.
There were pretty bad ones before Clinton and all of those other people.
Yeah, even worse than Woodrow Wilson.
Wow.
Okay, go ahead.
Well, how bad it is, is that some of my former colleagues, who, you know, at one point, maybe they're getting long in the tooth, but they were very perspicacious analysts.
And some of them worked for me in the Soviet foreign policy branch back in the 70s.
And some of them are PhDs in Russian history.
And one of them, for example, has said that James Comey is the best whistleblower that we ever had.
Okay.
Now, he printed that in Counterpunch.
I can't get in Counterpunch anymore because, well, they don't want to hear from me.
Not only that, but one of the fellows that I used to work on the PDB, the President's Daily Brief with, and he used to occasionally brief downtown as well as me, what he said is, you know, I just don't know what's happened to you, McGovern.
I feel compelled to denounce you publicly.
And having done that, I feel a lot better for when they come to investigate me for my former association with you, I will be on record as having denounced you.
Now, does that sound like the Soviets under Stalin, for God's sake?
Well, yeah, it does.
It's completely ridiculous anyway, you know.
Well, one, you know, it's really hard to find comic relief in all this stuff.
But if you read the comments under our articles in ConsortiumNews.com, there was one beaut just about a month ago, and he wrote, you know, there were these two people, two really committed Russiagate people who couldn't believe anything other than the fact that Russia hacked and that they lost the election to Hillary, and they died and went to heaven.
And they asked God, they said, no, no, God, tell us, you know, tell us the chapter and verse about how this all happened.
And God said, Putin and the Russians had nothing at all to do with the 2016 election.
They looked at each other and said, oh my, oh, God is in on this too, oh no, God is in on this too.
Putin got to you too.
He probably promised God a one fifth ownership stake in a Russian oil company.
Yeah.
So, you know, you've got to keep your sense of humor and all that stuff.
But it is very painful.
I mean, these old friends, for Pete's sake.
And you know, if it's not in The New York Times and this big story, Aaron Maté called it a bombshell, and he's quite right.
If this big story is not in The New York Times, well, my friends up there in New York that I went to college with, they won't believe it.
It can't be if it's not in The New York Times.
And this story has not been in The New York Times nor in The Washington Post.
And it won't be unless we can gin up a little support.
Because what we have here now is documentary evidence from the head of this cyber firm.
Now this cyber firm was hired by the Democrats, just as Christopher Steele was hired and paid by the Democrats.
And finally, he's asked these questions.
And this is in secret session.
But now it's been published.
And here's the transcript of the first question asked by ranking member Mr. Adam Schiff.
Okay.
You know who he is.
Most people do.
Quote, do you know the date on which the Russians exfiltrated the data from the DNC?
When would that have been?
Mr. Henry, the expert from CrowdStrike, paused, had to consult with counsel.
Then he says, quote, counsel just reminded me that as it relates to the DNC, we have no indicators that it was exfiltrated.
There are times when we can see data exfiltrated and we can say conclusively, but in this case it appears it was set up to be exfiltrated.
But we just don't know.
We just don't have the evidence that it actually left.
And then he's asked, you know, other questions here by other folks, and they're equally damning.
Stuart, Mr. Stuart of Utah.
Okay.
What about the emails that everyone is, you know, knowledgeable of?
He's talking about the DNC emails.
Were there also indicators that they were prepared, but not evidence that they were actually exfiltrated, Mr. Henry?
There's not evidence that they were actually exfiltrated.
There is circumstantial evidence, but no evidence that they were actually exfiltrated.
Wow.
Yeah.
So here's the, here's the classic.
Here's the classic.
Follow this carefully, listeners, because it's a, it's a master, it's a classic.
Okay.
Here we go.
Mr. Henry.
Sir.
This is a quote.
Sir, I was just trying to be factually accurate.
We didn't see the data leave, but we believe it left based on what we did see.
I'll say that again.
We didn't see the data leave, but we believe it left based on what we didn't, but what we saw.
Well, so they didn't see a data leave, but they, I mean, give me a break.
So this is, this is the cornerstone of the whole case of Russian hacking.
And as you know, Scott, we've been at this for three and a half years just saying, look, we don't see any evidence that there was any Russian hacking.
And of course they came back and said, oh no, no, we have this crowd strike, which James Comey described as a top of the line crackerjack outfit, even though it had to retract similar findings in connection with the Ukrainian howitzer that they said the Russians had hacked.
So it's pretty bad.
And when, when Comey was asked to explain why, why he didn't let the FBI go in there and get those, get those computers in the server, well, you know, he said, well, you know, you're right.
It would have been best practice to have physical access to the, to the, to the server and computers.
But we relied on, on crowdsite.
We asked at several levels, we asked the DNC, could we please come in and get that?
And they said no.
And so we worked out this deal that, now give me a break.
This is the head of the FBI talking, right?
He doesn't need anything but a letter from himself to come into my house and, and, and do what he wants.
And he's going to defer to the DNC and say, oh darn, yeah, but, but John McCain is saying this is an act of war, DNC.
Is it be embarrassing if I don't go?
No.
So what exactly are you saying, Ray?
You're saying that the FBI didn't want to examine this server because they wouldn't be able to vouch for these results themselves.
So they figured they would just go ahead and run with the hearsay from the CrowdStrike guys, huh?
That's exactly right.
And worse than that, would you believe that after all this advertising about how great an outfit CrowdStrike was, that CrowdStrike never gave James Comey a final report?
Only redacted, not even just interim reports, but redacted interim reports that end with trust me, at which Comey's answer was, okay, sure.
Because I want to.
So the fix was in.
Oh, by the way, I want to mention one more thing here from the transcript right where you left off.
It's Henry is being questioned by Representative Eric Swalwell and he's, this is the last quote that you read where he says, well, I was just trying, oh, I wanted to point out to the beginning of that quote that you read where he says, oh, counsel just informed me by whispering in my ear that I have to tell the truth about this one, that he doesn't want me to embellish, right?
I wanted to embellish, but my lawyer just told me I better really stick with the facts on this one is how is the preamble to his statement there, I think is important.
But then, so the last quote that you read, he says, well, sir, I was just trying to be factually accurate that we didn't see the data leave, but we believe it left based on what we saw, which was something else other than it leaving, I guess.
But then, so Swalwell says to him in response to that, he says, well, in the report that you provided to the DNC on August 24, 2016, is there any information that you've learned since that report based on dumps that have occurred that inform you any further as to your findings in this case?
Have you learned anything else based on anything in the public realm about what occurred?
And Henry says, well, I've heard the U.S. intelligence community say that this was Russia.
And so that's where you have the perfectly circular argument and the perfectly begged question.
And we all know that the intelligence community says that because he said that to the FBI and the FBI got the CIA and the NSA to not dispute it.
In fact, when you look at the intelligence assessment of January 2017, where the FBI and the CIA give high confidence to the claim that the Russians were the ones who took the emails from the DNC and the NSA only gives it medium confidence, which is just a paraphrase for, well, we'll take you guys word for it.
But this information is not coming from us.
Now, which one of those three agencies would know?
Well, thanks for asking.
You know, I interviewed Bill Benny, your friend on the show, and you're going to talk a little bit more about what he had to say.
But I know the most important part of what he had to say, as far as I'm concerned, was what he told me on the show in the spring of 2017, which was that no one in the world can tell you who hacked into that server except the people who did it and the National Security Agency.
And when it comes to the National Security Agency, they're not asking you, they're telling you.
They know because they can rewind and watch the whole internet, every packet per packet, and where it goes, if you're hiding behind 25 VPNs, that's nothing to them.
And they're the only ones who could know.
And by the way, I'll go ahead and mention here, too, that Jeffrey Carr, a computer security expert, renowned computer security expert, he came on the show, I'm pretty sure this was still in the summer of 2016 when I interviewed him for the first time about it.
And he said that essentially no one, not CrowdStrike, not the FBI, not the NSA, can examine a server and tell you who hacked it because it's too easy for someone to fake it and make it look like somebody else.
So even the NSA wouldn't be able to tell by examining the server.
They could only tell by examining all of their secret surveillance of the entire planet's internet that only they have access to.
Which is total, which is total.
And that's the key thing here.
Were there to have been a hack, were there to have been a release over the internet, NSA would ipso facto have that evidence.
They would know who hacked, they would know when it was hacked, they would know exactly to whom it was delivered.
That's the kind of dragnet coverage that was already in place in those days.
And so interestingly enough, in all these lawsuits that the rich family through the Democratic lawyers are filing these days, the lawyers defending against these suits are saying, look, Bill Binney, Ed Loomis, and Kirk Wiebe, all of them former NSA employees and members of veteran intelligence professionals for sanity, are saying that there was no hack.
And they're willing to testify to that extent, and they're willing to say, and they believe, and they know because they constructed the system, at least Bill Binney and Ed Loomis did, that there's no way that a hack over the internet could not have been, could not have been collected either by the U.S., 90%, or if it missed U.S. dragnet, then they're the Five Eyes, and there are other allies besides the Five Eyes that would have collected it.
So the absence of evidence.
Well, now, we know, my good friend Donald Rumsfeld learned at Princeton, that the absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.
And so if you have no evidence that there are weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, well, that doesn't mean they're not there, right?
But I don't, I don't buy that.
And we went further than that, of course.
And when it became clear from the forensics that veteran intelligence professionals for sanity did, and the FBI didn't, okay, then it became clear from the metadata and other things associated with, with the, the copy of this, of these emails onto a, onto a thumb drive or some other external storage device, and then we published all that.
So we told the president that on July 24th, 2017, that is President Trump, we said, President Trump, you should know that a lot of this is a crock, and we didn't say crock, you know, more formal.
We say you ought to really look into it.
As a matter of fact, you might have your CIA guy quiz his own people.
The CIA guy at that time was Mike Pompeo.
Well, guess what happened?
That's what Trump did.
He asked Mike Pompeo to interview Bill Binney.
And on October 24th, 2017, Bill shows up on the seventh floor in the director's conference room, the CIA, where I've spent countless hours myself.
And, and the first thing that Pompeo says is, Mr. Binney, you have to realize that the only reason you're here is because the president said that I needed to invite you to talk to me.
Now, what do you have to say?
Now, Bill is a plain spoken fellow from Western Pennsylvania, and he said, well, Mr. Director, I have to tell you that your people are lying to you up and down, and I can prove it.
Oh, what do you mean, lying to me?
And Bill, there were two other associates there, and Bill took them through some of the basics.
Now, guess what happened?
Zero.
Did Pompeo quiz his folks?
No, he's probably too, probably too afraid to.
Did he report back to the president?
We have zero evidence that he ever went back to the president and said, you know, I saw Bill Binney and this is what he said.
So who's part of the deep state, so to speak?
Well, Pompeo in some respects is.
And what we have here is a real, real serious situation now, because, you know, things are coming to a head.
This is a constitutional issue.
And there's a U.S. attorney in Connecticut.
His name is John Durham, and he's been tasked by the attorney general, Bill Barr, to get to the bottom of all this.
Now, why am I hopeful that the truth might possibly come out?
Well, the reason is pretty clear, and it's not clear to most Americans.
You see, back in, in 2016, it was abundantly clear that Hillary Clinton was going to win.
Now why do I say that?
Well, I say that not only because it's obvious, but also because James Comey put that in his book.
He says, quote, I was operating in an environment in which I was sure Hillary Rodham Clinton was to be the next president of the United States, period, end quote.
Whoa.
So what's that mean?
Well, that means that you should do everything you possibly can to prevent her contender from winning, that you can take liberties with the law and the regulations and everything else through the Fourth Amendment.
Because in the end, who's going to hold you accountable when Hillary is president?
You're not going to get indicted.
You're going to get promoted.
Okay.
Now that was the mindset.
Okay.
And what does that mean?
Well, that means that they didn't take the most rudimentary precautions to disguise what they were doing.
It was all going to come out well in the end and nobody's going to second guess them.
And so the evidence is abundant.
It's in paper, it's in computers, and John Durham has most of it.
John Durham has also interviewed the people who composed or helped John Brennan and Jim Comey prepare that assessment that you referred to before.
It was called the Intelligence Community Assessment, January 6, 2017.
The only correct word in that title was assessment.
It was an assessment.
We assessed this and we assessed that.
Was there evidence?
No.
We assessed that Putin did not know.
Was there evidence?
No.
How about Intelligence Community?
Well, Hillary Clinton immediately said, well, all 17 intelligence agencies have by this.
Well, that wasn't quite right.
Jim Clapper, the head of National Intelligence, while he was director, he said, well, no, it wasn't 17, it was only three, NSA, FBI, and CIA.
Actually, it was not those three, it was, quote, handpicked analysts, end quote, from those three.
Well, everyone in Washington knows that when you handpick the analysts, you handpick the conclusions.
And these conclusions, I might add, were called by President Obama two days before he left office.
That is, on the 18th of January, 2017, Obama said, and I quote, the conclusions of the intelligence community with respect to how Russia hacked and got those emails to WikiLeaks are inconclusive.
So we have inconclusive conclusions, but they were accepted as wholly rich as the Bible by the mainstream media and by everybody else up until now.
And we'll see.
We'll see if the truth can seep through, you know.
By the way, let me just mention that when that came out and people can check the archives, I interviewed you about it at the time, too.
And I'm sure we were laughing because the thing is a complete joke.
There's no evidence cited in there anywhere.
And all over the thing, I think even on the first page and all throughout, it says, disclaimer, just because we make a claim in here does not mean that we think it's true or that we have any evidence of it that we could show you if you asked.
Like, what?
And they just say that all over the place.
Hey, just because we judge something as high confidence doesn't mean we have any evidence of it.
You know, I'm paraphrasing, but basically they had that all over it.
And then it was like two pages of absolutely thin, meaningless gruel, followed by 12 pages of a years old report about RT hurt our feelings by reporting on fracking and the Occupy movement just to try to make the thing look thicker, which they didn't even need to bother because nobody read it except you and me anyway, I guess.
Yeah.
They were trying to put lipstick on a pig and this pig just wouldn't hold still for that.
You know, it's it was the worst piece of intelligence, quote, analysis, end quote, that I've ever seen.
I mean, consequential piece.
And you know, I was in the business for 27 years briefing the president's daily brief to Nixon, Ford and Reagan.
And I was at the end of my career in the on the product evaluation staff of the intelligence community, which reviewed all these memos before they went out and after they went out.
So I've seen a lot of these things.
And I have to tell you, that is the worst that I've seen.
And the consequences, of course, were that they allowed the mainstream press, The New York Times, Washington Post, to cite cite these conclusions as, you know, as the cat's pajamas.
Holy writ may be a better way to say it.
And Americans have been have been really confused and deprived of the real of the real McCoy on this.
It's very unfortunate.
And, you know, I was trying to think, how do I, how do I gently persuade Americans to listen to us now?
Now, ideally, we'll get the report, we'll get the text of the Sean Henry interview into the public domain.
Now, it's been it's been eight days and nobody has done that except us.
And Aaron Mattei, hat tip to Aaron, who was the first one to call our attention.
So as soon as he heard those memos were released, he started reading them.
And he saw right away that Sean Henry was equivocating.
But when when I was tasked to write, and I was really tired that night, and Joe Loria said, look, Ray, you know, just just you get you know what needs to be said.
Just do it.
So I was up half the night and I resisted doing it.
And he said, look, when you do it, Ray, no no victory laps.
OK.
OK.V.I.P.S.
You were right.
But let's, you know, play it down.
So Joe gave it a very anodyne title saying further evidence that there was no Russian hack.
My point is simply this, that given the what Barbara Tuchman used to call the cognitive dissonance, the the kind of attitude that grows from having been brainwashed, really is the word, for four years about all this stuff, you have to proceed gently.
I got some sustenance that you may may enjoy this from none other than Emily Dickinson.
Now she was a woman of small, of not many words.
So let me just read two little stanzas here.
Tell all the truth, but tell it slant.
Success in circuit lies too bright for our infirm delight.
The truth's suburb surprise as lightning to the children eased with explanation kind.
The truth must dazzle gradually or every man be blind.
Now as you pointed out earlier, there is an incredible division among people as to what to believe here.
We're hoping that gently bringing this evidence out, showing people that, look, CrowdStrike lied.
They said that there was a hack.
There was no hack.
And we can prove it wasn't.
And just generally telling people, look, why did they do all this unmasking of General Flynn?
And why is it the NSA has not been forthcoming in saying they don't have any evidence of a hack?
Well, all that stuff is gently coming out.
And I continue to harbor the hope that when John Durham gets finished, which should be another month or so, he's the attorney out there in Connecticut who's doing the work for Barr on how the Russian gate got started and who conducted it.
I think that there's some chance, I wouldn't give it more than 50-50, that people like James Comey and John Brennan and Jim Clapper will be indicted.
And that's why I suggested in this piece that you were referring to that if I were the attorney general, I would ask Comey for his passport.
I'd do the same with Clapper and Brennan because they are a flight risk as far as I'm concerned.
See, not me.
I would strip them of their passports and then exile them, banish them and their families from the United States forever, confiscate all their property and spend the proceeds on coronavirus treatments or something.
I'm just too nice a guy to throw all that.
I guess so.
And you know what?
I think you're a bit too optimistic about John Durham too.
I mean, we may, on the high end here, we may get a good report that has some facts in it, but he's not going to put any of these men in prison.
This is the same guy that let the CIA get away with torturing people to death in the Bush years quite deliberately.
He was the cover up prosecutor that they brought in for the, as I know, you know, yeah, it's good to remind people that that's why I said there's a less than 50 percent chance that this will happen.
It all depends.
You know, it all depends on all this screwy stuff with the virus and the election coming up.
It all depends on Donald Trump.
Now Donald Trump has done things like throwing Devin Nunes under the bus.
It was April of last year that Nunes said he was referring eight people for crimes to the, uh, for, to the justice department.
What happened to that?
Nothing happened to that.
Now why?
I think Trump is appropriately, I hate to say appropriately, but understandably afraid of what he calls a deep state.
Yeah.
Look what they did to him last time.
National security state.
Yeah.
So, um, you know, most people don't remember that before Trump ever took the oath of office, that is on the 3rd of January, uh, 2017, um, Rachel Maddow had a little, uh, set up a dialogue with Chuck Schumer and, uh, she said, no, Chuck, you have some, uh, you have some questions about the CIA and, uh, and the president.
Now he's been critical of the CIA.
What do you think about that, Chuck?
And Chuck says, uh, Rachel, I used to think that Trump was a pretty smart businessman, but he's done a very, very foolish thing.
Oh, what would that be, Chuck?
Um, he's, uh, he's crossed the intelligence community and they have six ways to Sunday to get back at you.
He's done a very foolish thing, period, end quote.
Now what happened?
That was the 3rd of January, 2017 on the 5th of January, all these big, uh, intelligence and law enforcement gurus assembled in the white house together with the national security advisor and, and, uh, people from the justice department and laid their plans as to how they were going to work this all out, you know?
And, uh, and that was when, uh, Comey was commissioned to go to Trump and to say, uh, look, uh, Mr. Trump, we have this intelligence community assessment, which pretty much says, uh, you owe your, your office to the Russians, but we have something even worse.
And, uh, uh, Mr. Brennan and Mr. Clapper, would you leave the room right now?
Because I have something very delicate to discuss with the president.
Mr. President, we have this, um, or what we call a dossier and, uh, we can't vouch for his accuracy, but they're very scurrilous things about your conduct, your behavior in Moscow and all that.
And it's going to, it's going to be released to the press because the press has it, media has it.
And we just wanted to let you know, we just want to let you know that, that we have it, that it's there.
Um, now Trump, he's from New York.
Uh, he, he works in the real estate circles.
Uh, he doesn't know how Washington works.
If that were me, if that were I, I would have said, Comey, I know this game.
I know this happens to all incoming presidents.
Would you do me a favor?
Go back to your office, clean it out, put it in baskets and get it out of there.
Because as soon as I become president, you're out of here.
You understand that?
That's what I would have said.
Instead, what did Trump do?
He tried to cajole.
He tried to get Comey on his side.
Comey was responsible for trying to prevent him from being president in the first place and then undermining him in the second place.
So, so what I'm saying here is that the background, the warning was open, it was contrived, it was clear as a bell, look, Mr. President, you're going to be in trouble if you continue to cross the intelligence community.
And what did he do?
Well, instead of, instead of reacting appropriately, in my view, and later he confessed, he said, you know, I, I really saw that as blackmail and I should have kind of reacted a different way instead of trying to befriend Comey.
So then the whole thing comes out and comes out in the press because once, once it's briefed to the president, somebody leaks it to, what was it, BuzzFeed or some of these other folks.
And so the president behind the eight ball from the beginning, and of course we're referring to the Steele dossier, and the Steele dossier was phony from the beginning.
It was contrived, it was contracted for by the DNC.
And it didn't make any sense on the face of it.
And it was the basis for at least three of the four FISA warrants that were obtained by the FBI.
And so bottom line for me is that the FBI was totally corrupted at the very top.
I mean, I, you know, I, I know that there are lots of lying officers that are doing their job, but at the very top, Comey, McCabe, and these people are running scared now and they should be because if John Durham is given his head and again, you're right, Durham does what he's told.
And so far I've been surprised at how, how, how on the offensive Bill Barr, his boss is saying that he doesn't believe, you know, the director of the FBI and that he's going after these big fish.
But it all depends on Donald Trump.
And on that, you're absolutely right, Scott, if Donald Trump says, hmm, I can't get out of my mind that, that Chuck Schumer warning, and I, you know, I know what happened to, or I think I know what happened to John Kennedy and, you know, these guys are, there's a lot at stake here.
So maybe I'll be careful and I'll tell Durham or I'll tell Barr to tell Durham, ah, don't put him in jail.
Find some other way to show them up, but don't try to put him in jail.
That's just too dangerous.
Hold on just one second.
Be right back.
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What's funny about all this too is the threat of Donald Trump from their own point of view was always so paper thin.
If they had just flattered him a little bit and said, here's the CIA Pentagon agenda for the next eight years, he would have rubber stamped it and it would have been fine.
He would have done whatever they said.
And whatever kind of feeling he had that, I don't know, I kind of want to get along with Russia, or maybe I want to stop backing Al-Qaeda in Syria, or any of those kind of sentiments.
They could overrun that.
They could override that just with a little bit of flattery and advice instead of taking him on in this way.
They overdid it so much based on the presumption that this guy really meant anything that he said or knew anything about the positions that he was taking beyond, you know, from our point of view, luckily, you know, regurgitating the best things that Mike Flynn had told him, such as, yeah, we really should stop backing Al-Qaeda in Syria, and we really should get along with Russia instead of continuing the new Cold War.
But Donald Trump would not have ever been that hard to handle if they had just approached him with, you know, a little bit of respect in the first place.
That's all he wants, is attention, positive attention from people, you know.
I'm sorry, let me add one more thing here, too, and I'll turn it back over to you, is that the whole group of these guys, this is sort of the second pillar that you're talking about in your title here, twin pillars of Russiagate crumble.
The other thing revealed in these House transcripts is that the Director of National Intelligence, James Clapper, the Attorney General, Loretta Lynch, Samantha Power, who I guess at that time was U.N.
Ambassador, but was cleared to know all of this stuff, and Susan Rice, who was the National Security Advisor, they all agreed that, under oath, that we have no evidence whatsoever.
We have not seen anything that would say that Donald Trump had colluded with Russia.
So they weren't, you know, disputing that Russia must have done the hack, but they all admitted that they had no reason whatsoever to accuse Trump or his campaign with collusion with the Russians on this.
And we could throw in Mike Morrell, who admitted the same thing publicly in, I guess, 2018.
He gave a speech somewhere where he said, yeah, I wouldn't get your hopes up too much for anything to really come of this, which was an early trial balloon for the Mueller report ending up falling flat the way that it did.
And so, but this was this testimony, Ray, was from December of 2017.
So they let this thing go on for, you know, at least another year and a half without admitting publicly that they knew that this whole thing is a red herring here.
Yeah.
Well, you're right, Scott.
And to your point about if they had reacted differently or if they saw Trump for being the clown that he is and not meaning really what he said, that's all true.
Yeah, I mean, look at his Russia policy since then, right?
He's put troops in Poland, put troops in the Baltic states and had them do a military exercises just yards from the Russian border, sent arms to Obama's Ukrainian Nazis that Obama empowered, but then was afraid to arm and invited Montenegro and Macedonia into NATO, sails our Navy in the Baltic and Black Seas, being provocative against the Russians all the time.
He's worse than Obama on Russia.
Well, yeah.
And why did he do all those things?
Because he was afraid, because he needed to defend himself against these spurious allegations that he and Vladimir Putin were best of friends.
Oh, yeah.
And canceling three great treaties too, the INF and the Open Skies and the START II treaty.
So if he were not under this pressure, it can be argued that he might not have taken all those extreme steps.
But what I was getting at is that the stakes here were and are unbelievably high.
What many people refer to as the MIC, the Military Industrial Complex, I have a new acronym.
It's the MICIMATT, and I'll spell it out if you have a pencil, M-I-C-I-M-A-T-T.
It stands for Military Industrial Congressional Intelligence Media Academia Think Tank Complex.
Now why did I say media?
Because media is the cornerstone of all this.
If media can't whip up this erroneous notion of what's going on, then there's a danger that Trump might actually be able to create a more decent relationship with Russia.
What would that mean?
Well, if you don't have an enemy, and now we have China as well, of course, if you don't have a construct which justifies, in quotes, the incredible expenditure of building and selling and all this arms, 60% now of our discretionary budget, well, then you run into real trouble.
These fat cats in Wall Street doesn't really make out as well.
Those were the stakes, and they couldn't be sure that he wasn't serious.
As they became sure, he became more malleable and more willing to, well, pull troops out of Syria.
I want to pull troops out of Syria.
But he did all these dastardly things, and now, apparently, they're not going to renegotiate Astort, too, which is really an abysmal thing, because the arms race will be completely uncontrolled now.
The Mickey Matt has never been stronger, and it's the military-industrial-congressional-intelligence-media-academia-think-tank complex, and it rules the roost.
That's what they're up against now, and whether Trump will take them on is very dubious, and that's why, as I said before, I give them less than an even chance that the truth will completely come out, and that people like Brennan, Comey, and Clapper will be, as they deserve to be, put behind bars.
Yeah.
Well, and they certainly do, and a friend of mine made the point the other day, because I think there's a lot of this sentiment that, like, are you guys still talking about Russiagate?
That's already over already.
But they dragged us through this for three years, pretending not just that Hillary Clinton didn't lose the election and it was instead stolen from her, but pretending that the president himself was in on it with the Kremlin, was guilty of high treason against the American nation.
And so it seems to me this is only fair, this is what my friend was saying, that it's only fair that as big of a scandal as this would have, as this was, despite the fact it was based on nothing, but really as big of a scandal as this would have been if it was true, that's how big of a scandal it is and should be considered, that it wasn't true, and that these men at the FBI and the CIA and the Department of Justice and the Obama White House conspired to falsely accuse a candidate, then a president-elect, then a president of high treason with the Kremlin.
I mean, having all of their property confiscated and these men banished from the United States forever is too good for them.
And they belong in the Supermax with Ted Kaczynski and Ramsey Yousef.
Well, your friend must have been talking to my friends because that's what I've been telling them.
You know, it's worse than that.
There was a conspiracy of which the president was a part.
But the president was different.
That was Obama.
It's becoming clear now, and it will become clear in the next few weeks if you have sources other than The New York Times, that Obama was kept advised of exactly what these guys were doing.
And that first became apparent about two years ago when Peter Strzok and Lisa Page were talking, both of them high level FBI employees.
And Lisa Page says, you know, I'm working for McCabe here, deputy director, and I'm preparing some talking points for him because the president wants to know everything that we're doing.
Well, I didn't make that up.
That's that's in the transcript.
So the president, Obama at the time, wanted to know everything that they were doing.
And just now we're getting more evidence of that with the release of some of these transcripts and other things.
So, you know, when people talk now, you know, I just wish Donald Trump would keep his mouth shut.
He coined Obamagate, you know.
Well, the fact that he coined Obamagate persuades me not to use that.
But Obama was in on all this.
And in a lawyerly way, he tried to exculpate himself a little bit two days before he left office by saying, you know, even though the intelligence community has conclusions that they say are conclusive, that the Russians hacked into the DNC and gave them to WikiLeaks, we find, that is, I find those conclusions inconclusive.
So that was the key.
We should have followed up.
Well, we did follow up on that, but no one was willing to tell us how much Obama was apprised of this.
Now we're likely to know.
And the sad thing is that this is likely to feed the hyper-partisanship that already exists.
So no one look at the documents themselves.
My God.
You know, we have documentary evidence of what went down.
And now we have it chapter and verse from the release of these 53 transcripts suppressed since December 2017.
So we're in for a tough couple of months, not only with the virus, but with this political situation.
And I'm, I think depending on how Trump feels, he's got to lash out at folks that he will fully authorize Barr and Durham to speak out the truth.
Problem is, very few people will believe it because everything is so partisan these days.
Yeah.
Well, and, you know, if Obama was so convinced that any of this was true at all, how come he got on the phone immediately to Hillary Clinton and said, you concede now tonight?
He was the one who made her do it.
I mean, in the telling, she would have waited.
She would have preferred to play Al Gore and dispute the election for months or whatever she could and claim that.
And as we know, they wanted to get Michael Morrell to brief the Electoral College so that and claim that the Russians stole the election so that they would throw it to Hillary or at least to the House of Representatives so that the House could give it to Paul Ryan or Colin Powell, which is, you know, they admitted that that was their plan.
That was in The New York Times.
I know every time I mention that, I know it sounds so crazy that I worry that I'm the one who sounds crazy.
So I always mention my footnote.
You can read it in The Post and The Times.
They wanted to get the CIA to brief the Electoral College to give it to Hillary anyway or to Paul Ryan or Colin Powell.
And and yet Obama, Mr.
Security Clarence himself, if he really thought the Kremlin stole the election for Trump, why would he have raced to tell Hillary, don't you even think about disputing the election result tonight?
Lady, make your phone call now.
Yeah, the word is sedition.
And, you know, when you go back to the Sedition Act of, I guess, the late 1700s, it's not a good reputation, but the word itself can be tokens.
What went on before Trump was elected and after he was taken in office, the the evidence is abundant.
And the question is whether anyone, particularly these very, very difficult people to prosecute, will be held to account.
And a lot will depend.
A lot will depend for our democracy on whether these people get away with it, because if the deep state or the national security state gets away with it this time and the same people remain around and their disciples in these intelligence agencies, it's going to happen again.
And it won't be too long before they come for you, Scott, and maybe even this whole guy as well.
Yeah.
Well, on the bright side, I'll be in the concentration camp with all my favorite writers.
So it won't be too optimistic attitude.
Yeah, I'm trying to keep it positive in these bleach water times we're living in here.
All right.
Well, listen, Ray, I don't know how to tell you how much I appreciate all your great work on this issue and coming on the show to talk about it with us for all these years.
Of course, you've been right about it all along.
And, you know, one of the absolutely indispensable journalists on this story as it's developed this whole time.
And so it ain't just me.
There's a lot of people counting on you to keep doing this great work.
So thank you.
Break in here and give credit where it's due.
I was not up to the technical aspects of this hack versus leak business.
Bill Binney was, Ed Loomis was, two former technical directives of NSA.
It was they that had the guts to draw on their previous experience and explain to us what really happened.
McGovern?
Well, Binney refers to me in a jocularly pejorative way as, oh, that history major, right?
I'm a history major, OK?
In other words, it's a real it's a real stretch for me to understand these technical things.
But I had not only the ability to understand them in a rudimentary way, but more important, I had trust, I had faith in these professionals who were trained, as I was, to tell the truth without fear or favor.
And it was that that persuaded me to try to be the Boswell to these guys and make sure that they got exposure.
Now, we're still behind the eight ball on that.
We still haven't got the exposure.
But maybe now that these transcripts are out, maybe we'll have a better prayer to get out into the mainstream media.
Yep.
All right, you guys.
Well, that is the great Ray McGovern.
He is at Libertarian Institute dot org with this one.
Twin pillars of Russiagate crumble reprinted with permission from Consortium News dot com.
It's also at Antiwar dot com in Ray's archives there as well.
Thank you very much again for your time, Ray.
You're most welcome.
The Scott Horton Show, Antiwar Radio, can be heard on KPFK 90.7 FM in L.A.
APS Radio dot com, Antiwar dot com, Scott Horton dot org, and Libertarian Institute dot org.
