All right, y'all, welcome to the Scott Horton Show.
I am the Director of the Libertarian Institute, Editorial Director of Antiwar.com, author of the book Fool's Errand, Time to End the War in Afghanistan, and I've recorded more than 5,000 interviews going back to 2003, all of which are available at scotthorton.org.
You can also sign up for the podcast fee.
The full archive is also available at youtube.com slash scotthortonshow.
Okay guys, introducing Paul Robinson from irrationality.wordpress.com.
Welcome to the show.
How are you doing?
I'm fine.
Thank you for having me.
I really appreciate you joining us.
So first of all, can we just talk a little bit about the books in the margin here and what you've written and the background of your expertise on Russia issues?
I want to apologize for having you on only for the first time now, because I've read quite a few of your things over the last couple of years here.
But maybe you can sort of introduce yourself to us since I did such a lousy job of it.
Okay, yeah, I'm a professor at the University of Ottawa in Canada, and I've written a number of books on Russian history, military history, various aspects of defense policy, and so on.
And I also keep a blog, which you mentioned, Irrationality, which is mainly focused on Russia, but also talks about the sort of irrationality of foreign and defense policy more generally.
Well, and you do have a lot of fun at the expense of the people who push these ridiculous narratives, which makes it always interesting to read too.
In fact, the headline here, Proof of Collusion at Last, is sort of a key to the spirit of the thing, which makes it very readable and enjoyable.
I really like it.
And because it all is so absurd and outrageous, and you seem to have a real knack for that.
But there's really important news in this.
We were just talking with Aaron Maté on the show earlier, well, I was, I don't know who this we is, about, you know, part of the renewed Russiagate story coming out of the release of the Senate report is the rumors about this guy, Konstantin Kalimnik, and then therefore, and thereafter, his relationship with Oleg Deripaska, the supposedly bad guy, and also his connection to Paul Manafort, the American lobbyist for dictators who ended up helping to run, well, ended up being the manager of Donald Trump's presidential campaign in 2016 for a short time there, which featured in the Steele report and in the fables of all of our TV news people as a central aspect to the Russiagate conspiracy that never was there.
But now, so you have major developments in terms of the relationship, learning about the relationship between this guy Kalimnik and Paul Manafort during their time in Ukraine previous to the election season of 2016.
Is that correct?
That is correct.
So what has happened is that some emails, apparently several hundred emails by Konstantin Kalimnik have been leaked to a business magazine, online business magazine called BNE IntelliNews, and they ran an article detailing what they had found in these emails.
All right.
And so then it was, they're all FSB agents and the manchurian candidate are president?
No, I think that, but there's a lot of crazy nonsense, as you said, spoken about there.
So the allegations which have been put forward from a very early time and were repeated in the U.S. Senate report that Kalimnik is an agent of the Russian intelligence services and that through him, the Russians were suborning Paul Manafort and thereby suborning Donald Trump.
What we already knew was that when Manafort had been working in Ukraine for first prime minister then president Viktor Yanukovych, he had in fact been very much pushing for Ukraine to move in a Western direction.
So in the mythology, Yanukovych is always portrayed as this pro-Russian Ukrainian politician and all those around him, these various oligarchs, Oleg Deripaska and Akhmetov and so on in Ukraine are all described as pro-Russian and therefore Manafort is part of this big pro-Russian conspiracy in Ukraine, as it were.
But in fact, when he was in Ukraine, what Manafort was doing was essentially trying to, but he was hired really to change around Yanukovych's image because Yanukovych had this image as being a sort of a rather sort of thuggish politician and they wanted to turn him into something more, you know, polished and Western.
And as part of that, Manafort started pushing him in in a pro-Western, particularly pro-European Union direction and urged upon him that he should take Ukraine towards the European Union.
And we already knew this, but people kind of ignored it.
But what we now get from these emails of Kilimnik is that we really get confirmation of all this.
We get a lot of emails from Kilimnik to Manafort discussing what they are doing together to push Yanukovych as president of Ukraine to move away from Russia and towards the European Union.
And of course, this was a policy which was very much, you know, against the interests of the Russian Federation.
So what we get proof of here is that when he was working in Ukraine, Manafort and also Kilimnik were working not for Russia, but against Russia.
But this is something which is, of course, never mentioned.
All right.
Well, so let me ask you this.
We'll get back to Kilimnik and and the National Republican Institute and all that in a second.
But do you have any real explanation of why Manafort was working so hard to represent America's interests in Ukraine at that time?
Well, I think he was doing what he thought was, you know, the best sort of PR management job for his client that yet.
But Yanukovych had a sort of problem of this, you know, thuggish Donbass politician, not democratic and so on.
And therefore, he was trying to sort of bolster his image and so on and so forth.
Of course, he may have genuinely believed in it or he or something else.
I don't know.
I don't have any particular explanation for it.
Are there any indications that he had association as just even a sort of an informal asset of Western intelligence?
No, we don't.
What we do know is that as part of this program, which he and Kilimnik were doing with Yanukovych, they established a lot of contacts with Western politicians through what they called their sort of backdoor channel.
And I mean, it was quite interesting.
If I can read this little paragraph here, I think this would, you know, explains a lot of this.
He says that Manafort and Kilimnik set all gears in motion to achieve this aim of getting Ukraine into the European Union Association Agreement and Manafort held a succession of meetings with top U.S. foreign policy officials, including members of the U.S. National Security Council, such as Daniel Russell with Larry Silverman, director of Office of Ukraine, Moldova and Belarus affairs, and with U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine, John Tefft.
So you can see that Manafort and Kilimnik were actually lobbying the U.S. government very hard while Obama was president.
But again, this is something which isn't mentioned or what's ever mentioned is the contacts between Manafort and Kilimnik and Trump, whereas they were actually, you know, much closer contacts, of course, between between the two and the Obama administration.
And it sounds like you're saying that they were really lobbying the Obama government that, hey, listen to us.
You can work with this guy at the same time that they're telling Yanukovych, hey, you really need to move toward the EU on this and sign this new trade deal.
They were sort of working pretty hard on making this marriage happen, right?
They were indeed.
They were working very hard to to get people to on the Western side to accept Ukraine having an association agreement with the EU.
The reason they had to work so hard was because there were many people within the EU who didn't want such an agreement with Yanukovych because they had a very negative image of Yanukovych.
So what Kilimnik and Manafort did was they set up these backdoor channels where they tried to find influential politicians, lobby them, right, and then get them to pressure the EU to accept Ukraine.
And again, it says here that as part of this program, they particularly lobbied the then foreign minister of Sweden, Carl Bildt, and then foreign minister of Poland, Radek Sikorski, who, of course, were probably the two most Russophobic foreign ministers in the European Union at that time.
So the idea that these were people working on behalf of Russia seems very, very odd.
Interestingly, also in the list of people they were trying to lobby here is U.S.
Vice President Joe Biden.
Far be it from me to stop you there, but go ahead.
Well, I mean, all I've got is what this report says.
It just says that Manafort and Kilimnik created a back channel for Yanukovych for Western politicians, including Carl Bildt, Radek Sikorski and in the U.S.
Vice President Joe Biden.
But beyond that, we don't really know.
Well, so we do know I can chime in a little bit here about the importance of this trade deal at the time.
And, you know, I was a little tongue in cheek when I used the term marriage for making the deal, because Yanukovych used that terminology.
He said he showed up at the I think at the signing and then was met with these new ultimatums that if you're going to sign this deal with the European Union, you cannot sign one with the Russians.
And by the way, you're going to have to take on all this new IMF debt, which, of course, we know means we're going to gangsterize you out of all your most precious resources in the name of paying off your debts that we're foisting on you here.
And he said, well, I feel like a bride who was who showed up at my wedding to be greeted with a prenuptial agreement.
And I got to say, the romance is a little bit lost here.
I don't think I'm going to do it, which I thought was great.
And I don't know if that's the exact translation, but pretty close, I think.
And and then this is what led to the revolution, supposedly the coup d'etat, the Maiden Uprising, however you want to characterize it, that culminated in the coup of February 2014 there.
And so I wonder, do you have any particular details about their role surrounding that actual event there?
No, I don't.
We don't have any particular role, no particularly large on what they were doing.
I mean, in essence, all we really know is that Manafort and Kalimnik were working very hard to persuade European and North American politicians to get the EU to give this deal to Ukraine.
The problem was that the deal the EU was actually willing to give was not a particularly good one, because if you want to have an association agreement with the EU, you in effect have to accept to abide by most EU rules, which therefore requires you to do a whole load of sort of deregulation activities to end all sorts of subsidies and other things which you're doing in your own economy, which would have been pretty fatal for large parts of the Ukrainian economy, particularly for eastern Ukraine, which was Yanukovych's own power base.
So so basically, Yanukovych said, I'm only willing to do this if if you give me a lot of money, because this is going to have some very negative effects on us.
And the EU was not willing to cough up more than about, I think, about 500 million dollars, which, you know, really it was sort of chicken feed.
And at the time, the Ukrainian government was due to pay some large debt repayments.
It needed a lot more than 500 million dollars up front.
And then Putin came along and offered him an immediate loan of three billion and some more to follow.
So, of course, he went with that and told the EU to to go away and think again.
I'm sorry, I guess I had that wrong.
I thought that they were offering sort of, you know, like a villain's debt that, yeah, we're going to give you one of these real nice infrastructure loans, which is about the scariest thing the IMF could say to somebody.
Right.
The real problem was they weren't offering cash at all.
What they were offering was some degree of additional access to EU markets and visa free travel to the European Union.
So this would benefit certain parts of Ukrainian population, those who wanted to travel to Europe and also perhaps the agricultural sector of Western Ukraine, which would find it a little easier to export some agricultural products into the UK, into the EU.
However, the cost of that was to abide by a whole load of EU regulations, which would have had and to open up the Ukrainian market also to EU goods, which would have had a very negative effect on other parts of the Ukrainian economy.
And that's why Yanukovych wanted some degree of compensation for that, which the EU was not willing to give.
And then, OK, so and I guess I am just going from memory back then that was it Putin was willing to just give him some money or that was a loan, too, but it was it was a loan.
It was a very low interest loan.
Yeah.
So essentially.
And then, you know, it's worth being specific for a moment there, I guess.
Right.
If I have it right that you're referring to the kind of decrepit what was left of old Soviet industry in 1990s era industry in the Donbass in the Far East that was due to be decimated by, you know, advanced productive capacities out of Western Europe and so forth.
Right.
That's exactly right.
So you so you had really the old the old heavy industry, coal mining, steel, fertilizers, this kind of thing, which is very concentrated in eastern Ukraine, which is Yanukovych is sort of power based.
And they were the ones who really were likely to suffer most as a result of the EU association agreement.
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All right.
And then so now what about this conspiracy between Manafort and Oleg Deripaska to take these very fine, highly secret polling data and use them to rig the election?
Well, I mean.
It's a very.
Strange sort of allegation, not not because it's untrue.
It is known that Manafort shared Republican Party polling data with Constantine Kilimnik, but it's not classified information.
It's not it's not a state secret.
So we don't know why he he chose to do this because he's not seen fit to tell anybody.
But but it wasn't it's not a crime to share your own private polling information with somebody.
So what use this.
Could possibly have been to the Russian Federation or why how they could have used it to undermine American democracy, whatever, is something of a mystery to me.
So I think this is a huge sort of mountain out of a molehill.
It really is classic conspiracy kookery where you have to accept each not quite proven narrative for argument's sake in order to make any one of them make sense where, well, if you know that they're doing everything they can to influence the votes, you know, by Facebook things and whatever, then this must be connected to that.
But if you don't accept that fake premise, then this doesn't go anywhere.
Yeah, exactly.
You've got to believe in the fundamental assumption that they're up to no good and trying to in some way destroy American democracy for any of us to to make any sense.
If you don't accept the premise, as you say, then none of it really makes sense at all, because each none of these individual items amount to anything.
Really, they only amount to anything if you put them all together through a very, very suspicious sort of conspiratorial lens.
Right.
At which point you go, wow, look at all this stuff.
I mean, it's amazing.
There's just so much evidence here, you know, because when you look at each piece of evidence, you say, well, this is crap, you know, excuse my language.
Well, listen, you know, I think that being a conspiracy kook for argument's sake is totally warranted a lot of the time, too.
But you've got to understand that what you're doing is speculating and using your imagination to see and maybe you'll find an avenue of investigation.
But still, facts are facts and speculation is speculation.
By all means, speculate.
Just don't get carried away and jump to conclusions and forget that this trail was a speculation, not based on real facts.
So maybe if you want to check and see if Donald Trump is a traitor and add up a few things, well, did Cohen go to Prague to pay off the guys who bought the ads and things?
Well, geez, you know, the last 10 threads of this thing didn't really go anywhere.
I guess it doesn't add up after all.
That's the thing.
You got to be able to get there even if you want to try it out and see if it's right.
You got to be you got to allow yourself to be disproven.
Yeah, well, I don't think they are.
Instead, they kind of like leave it hanging as if just the suggesting of it is proof itself.
I mean, a classic example of this was a book written by the British journalist Luke Harding, who really is a little bit of an extremist on this sort of issue.
And his sort of rhetorical technique is to sort of ask a question, right, and then leave a double space right in the book or starting a new paragraph.
And then, you know, it's like, aha, double space.
Right.
And that's proof.
Somehow, it's not it's not.
But that's he does it repeatedly.
And and and when he does this over and over and then he thinks he's constructed a case, but he hasn't.
He's just made a bunch of suggestions.
Yeah.
And which don't really amount to anything.
Right.
And I mean, the parallels to Iraq, too, are so obvious that it's all if you don't really want to believe in it, it's completely ridiculous.
Saddam Hussein is an atheist.
He's not in bed with Osama.
And he certainly isn't trying to get nuked off the face of the earth by attacking the USA.
And this just whole thing is wrong.
He couldn't possibly be a threat to Americans.
You want to say he's in your way in determining things over there.
Fine.
But don't tell me he's coming for me in Central Texas.
You know, it's the same level of kind of just.
Well, really, they did it.
What they did is Saddam Hussein.
Right.
Just pile on the accusations.
It doesn't matter if none of them are true.
You still got 50 of them to wade through and sift through and try to deny.
And so you look like now you're siding with the bad guy.
Yeah, but at least, you know, with with Saddam Hussein, you you you had the fact that, you know, he had attacked Kuwait, he had had these weapons.
Right.
So there was there was a sort of like a credible.
Core underneath, you could build the conspiracy theory on, right, whereas in this case, there really doesn't seem to be much of a critical, credible core apart from this possible DNC hack, which, you know, may or may not have been done by Russian secret services, although it's never been demonstrably proven.
But if you accept these computer analysis word for it, when you've got your tiny little base, you can construct the theory on.
But it's a much smaller base than you even had with Iraq.
So I think this is, you know, even even more fantastic.
And people were spreading this even before the election, of course.
I mean, I I read a little piece about this and I think like September, October of 2016 before the election saying, you know, what are the Democrats up to?
Like they've decided to run Hillary's campaign on Russia.
Right.
Right.
You know, my this was the plan.
This was the theory even before they had any evidence.
Right.
My first take on this on the show was I interviewed the computer security expert Jeffrey Carr, July 25th of 2016, April Glaspie Day.
So it's easy to remember, you know.
And and he said, look, there's no way that any forensic expert can look at this server and tell you with certainty who hacked into it.
It's too easy to fake it.
And it's too impossible to prove whether it was faked or not or how or what.
And so that's just it is what it is.
That's the nature of the beast, says there's only one group of people in the world who could tell you for sure.
And that would be the NSA, because they have the godlike, omniscient surveillance capability of every packet on every wire on this planet.
And they could tell you they can rewind it and tell you and look at who did what.
But no one else can.
That's it.
And so and now, as you're saying, that's the big one that they've been.
That's the one thing that's still unproven.
But, gee, sure, it could be true after everything else has fallen away.
The only thing left is still it could be true.
And even then, no reason to believe it at all.
Well, you say the NSA could find it out, but as far as we know, the NSA haven't looked.
Right.
It's just been this CrowdStrike company.
Yep.
And that's it.
And they gave it, NSA gave it medium confidence, meaning if they did go rewind the Internet and look at it, they didn't find confirmation of what they were told to look for there.
But I guess we don't know whether they did or not.
No, we don't.
We don't.
So, you know, but as you say, there's one thing at the core of this, which which which could be true, but we don't we don't know.
But all the rest of which has been being constructed on it is, you know, it's circumstantial, it's rumor, it's just speculation.
It really doesn't.
And in many cases, you know, it's been thoroughly investigated and it adds up to nothing.
So the Senate report goes into detail about all pages and pages and pages about, for instance, Trump's endeavors to build a tower in Moscow.
And at the end of it, you know, he doesn't build a tower in Moscow and it doesn't really matter at all.
Right.
I mean, there's nothing suspicious comes out of any of this, like 30 pages or whatever they spend on talking about this damn tower.
And yet they still put it in as if it's a sort of method of argumentation where you just pile stuff on.
Right.
Right.
And even though each individual thing is unproven, just by piling them all on top of each other, you create the impression that it amounts to something.
Right.
And in the Mueller report, and I haven't read the Senate report's version of this, but in the Mueller report, it was an FBI informant, Sattler, who was the one who was really pushing for, hey, let's get this tower project thing going.
And then he never even made any progress anyway.
And I don't know.
I'm not saying that I know he was acting on FBI orders, but at least I don't know why we would take any of his activity seriously whatsoever when we know he's already compromised by the feds for years, apparently, before this.
Well, I mean, exactly.
And so much of these other things don't amount to much in the Senate report.
They start at one point repeating rumors and they say, well, there's a guy who overheard two people in an elevator say that when they spend several pages talking about this guy who overheard someone on an elevator, it's really, you know, very silly.
And by the way, I heard Aramonte bring this up on his pushback show the other day that Gates, who was, I guess, Manafort's partner here, that he was the one.
I'm not sure if he was the one who had actually even provided this evidence in the first place, you know, that Gates or, you know, that, yeah, I can testify the fact that Manafort did pass on this information, that he had an explanation for it.
That was that Manafort was trying to impress these guys that just here's something that proves that I have access, that I'm not just, you know, some figurehead on the campaign or whatever, that I have juice with these guys.
And that so later on, when I come to work for you as a private lobbyist, that I have some connections with these guys.
I'll be able to lobby on a powerful level and I'll be worth my price.
And that was it.
I mean, there was nothing for the Russians to do with that data anyway.
Yeah.
And, you know, as you say, it could be a very simple sort of explanation like that.
And if we just go back to this, you know, these emails we began with from Konstantin Kalimnik, you know, once you investigate what Manafort did, you know, when he was in Ukraine and once you investigate what Kalimnik did when he was in Ukraine, it is impossible to sustain this idea that they were acting on behalf of the Russian government because they spent years in Ukraine actively pushing the Ukrainian president to pursue a policy which was directly against the interests of the Russian government.
Right.
And, you know, we we have firm proof of that.
And if after that, you're still trying to say that, you know, Manafort and Kalimnik were, you know, trying to suborn Trump on behalf of the Russians, then you've got to be in something of a fantasy land.
Yeah.
Well, and, you know, I always said, and this is just speculation, I don't know if Jason Leopold can issue a FOIA for this or what, about whether, in fact, Manafort was ever an asset of the CIA.
I mean, it sounds like this is a guy who has represented and worked for, they call him the lobbyist for dictators.
He's worked for all kinds of sovereign regimes all over the planet.
It's almost impossible to believe that he doesn't have an understanding with the U.S.
State Department and U.S. intelligence agencies, that he knows where their lines are so that he doesn't cross them and that maybe if they need to know a thing or two, he would tell them.
And this kind of thing, he's made an entire career of this.
So, of course, you know, I can't prove this, but it seems almost like it must be true and and is to be disputed.
Well, I mean, there may be something to that.
I mean, obviously, I have no idea.
We do know that Carter Page had who was another one who was fingered for being a Russia agent, was, in fact, reporting on things, I think, to the FBI.
Right.
So what was it?
The CIA?
I can't remember.
But he was certainly, you know, passing on information to the American authorities.
Right.
And yet even so, there was this huge effort to portray him as being a Russian agent to the extent that the FBI went to.
It must mean the CIA he was he was telling things to because it was the FBI who insisted on bugging him.
But, you know, it a lot of these, you know, accusations made against these guys are clearly preposterous.
And you didn't need a lot of brains to work it out.
So, for instance, in the Steele report, this infamous dossier, there is this claim that Carter Page had been bribed by an offer of like one percent of shares of of Rosneft, the Russian oil company.
Well, one percent of Rosneft is like a billion dollars.
Yeah, I thought it was even more than that.
I might get the numbers wrong.
I always I thought it was 19 percent or so, like almost a fifth of whatever it is.
But if you actually added up what this purported bribe was worth, it was like, you know, billions.
It was insane.
Like no one who thought about this for more than a second could possibly have taken this seriously.
Right.
It was an obvious joke, you know, from the start.
Yet somehow people believed it because they wanted to believe it.
So I think what what what is motivating this is people, you know, Trump, you know, understandably, in some ways, has driven a lot of people crazy.
Right.
Yeah.
And, you know, they're searching for some explanation of why this cataclysm has happened.
And therefore, they seek some sort of external explanation for it, because the alternative is to recognize that somehow they're responsible for this disaster.
You know what it is, though, too?
It's just like George Tenet said to George W.
Bush.
It's a slam dunk.
And he wasn't talking about, yes, it's a guaranteed fact they have weapons of mass destruction.
That's his defense.
I didn't say they definitely had weapons and that that was a slam dunk.
I said, it's a slam dunk that you can use all this shit I just gave you to shovel onto the American people to the point where they will have to go along with this.
It'll work.
It's enough to work.
And I think that's what it is.
They didn't want to believe.
They pretended to believe because they were trying to do anything they could to stop this guy from getting elected.
And then after that, they even wanted to try to prevent him from taking office after the election.
This sounds so nuts.
I forget it sometimes.
And I worry that people think I'm nuts when I talk about it.
But it's right there in The New York Times and The Washington Post.
No secret at all that the Democrats were pushing and people inside the government were pushing to have the acting CIA director, Mike Morrell, brief the Electoral College that the Russians stole the election for Trump and that they should give it to Hillary.
And if not, that they should throw it to the House so they can give it to Paul Ryan or Colin Powell to prevent Donald Trump from becoming president.
All based on this.
But I think they've said it so, but I think they've said it so many times now, they believe it, that I certainly get that impression.
So it may have began as a tool, but by now it's a religious faith.
But you know what?
The one that you just brought up, I brought that one up to Aramonte earlier in the day.
It's one that the first time I picked up the Steele dossier, that's when I quit reading it.
I just laughed and said, you've got to be kidding me that they're going to offer these brilliant Russian schemers are going to offer Carter nobody page.
All this money, billions of dollars, if only he will seize control of America's sanctions policy single handedly somehow.
And I mean, the ask in the first place is ridiculous.
The payoff is beyond a cartoon.
This whole thing clearly isn't right.
It's completely worthless.
Even Bob Woodward, Mr.
Conventional Wisdom, he took a look at it and went on TV and said, this is a garbage document.
There is nothing in here of value.
Nothing.
Yeah, well, I think, you know, that was obvious, you know, I thought it was so worthless when I when it came out on my blog, I didn't come.
I wrote a spoof.
Yeah, I just I just spoofed it.
It wasn't worth commenting directly on it.
And I spent some time when I was young as a as a military intelligence officer.
So, you know, I have read, you know, intelligence documents and so on.
And you know, but when someone is, you know, seriously writing these things, they tend to like hedge their bets a little bit.
You know, possibly there's probably that this was kind of a giveaway for me with the Iraq business.
Like it was so certain.
And I thought that's, you know, no, no, no honest intelligence reports can be written that suddenly.
And when you read this stuff and it was just to me as a former intelligence officer, it was just obvious garbage.
But people people wanted to believe it because they were so appalled by by Trump.
And you know what it is, too.
They needed some explanation for him.
Yeah.
And it's and it's not just mass hysteria, but it's mass entertainment, too, that whether you're pretending to you're afraid of Saddam Hussein or you're afraid of the, you know, Manuel Noriega, whoever they're throwing at you, you know, it's fun for a day or two to freak out about something, you know, a couple of years at a time.
MSN, MSNBC, you know, it's ratings shot up as a result of the whole, you know, Russiagate fiasco.
The fact that, you know, Rachel Maddow got everything completely wrong was irrelevant.
People people tuned in and it's been, you know, good for business and people have sold a lot of books on this stuff.
You know, I mentioned Luke Harding earlier, you know, his his, you know, nonsense book Collusion was topped a New York Times bestseller list.
You know, there's, you know, there's careers to be had here, there's money to be made, there's, you know, Pulitzer Prizes to be had won and so on and so forth.
And so, I mean, this is, you know, really the way, you know, media and democratic societies work, you know, that they're profit driven.
Right.
And, you know, unfortunately, that is we we we pay the price for that sometimes.
You know, we got a little bit of a reprieve after the Mueller report where even Rachel Maddow's ratings kind of went down and they sort of, oh, yeah, well, yeah, obstruction of justice.
And yeah, they didn't let them investigate it well.
And yeah, kind of.
And then they went with the impeachment on the Ukraine gate, but that just didn't really have much of an effect in terms of, you know, politics or public relations or anything.
It's already forgotten.
They didn't even mention that he's the impeached president at their own convention, the Democrats.
And so it sort of felt like, well, you know, Russiagate is dead finally.
And but let's keep talking about it, because this still is such a big deal that they dared to falsely accuse the president of high treason like this and the CIA and FBI way outside the line, what they should be allowed to get away with here and this kind of thing.
And yet now here it's back again.
Marco Rubio puts out some stupid Senate report.
And now, you know, 99 percent of people won't read the thing, as Aramonte was saying on the show in there.
All it is is the same stuff about Kilimnik and Roger Stone that's already been debunked or that there's at least no reason whatsoever to take seriously at all.
And and then that's it in a thousand pages.
But it comes with a bunch of certainty.
And, you know.
And so it's all back, it's renewed, you know.
And it's it's something you can't kill, but you know, the question is whether it will have done them any good.
And we'll find that out, of course, in November.
But it has been a horrible distraction from, you know, your country's real problems for these past four years.
And, you know, whether the Democratic Party has benefited from this is up for grabs because it's not clear yet, you know, who who's going to win the election.
Trump is, you know, he's he's still in it.
Right.
I mean, I'm I'm not going to predict who's going to win it.
Biden looks slightly more likely than Trump at the moment.
But Trump could win again.
And certainly they haven't knocked him out with any of this stuff.
Right.
And in the meantime, they've not been talking about.
Anything else, all the real problems that American society has, so, you know, to me, it looks like a very strange form of political strategy, actually.
Right.
And, you know, what's funny, too, is even from the Democrats point of view, they can ignore all that problems of society stuff, but still just talk about really bad things about him that are true, which are plenty, you know, just swing and miss every time.
It's crazy.
Yeah.
I mean, he's not he's he's screwed up on so many in so many ways that he he's quite an easy target.
But you attack him with something so extreme that he ends up looking perhaps even slightly sympathetic because, you know, you know, you accused him of being Hitler when he's really just, you know, something, you know, not very nice, but not like that.
Yeah.
Well, you know, the thing of it, too, is who did it?
It's the FBI counterintelligence division and the and the CIA.
And then, you know, later, the rest of the Justice Department all going along with this whole thing against the elected president in this way.
You know, I don't think it says anything good about him at all to say that they can't be allowed to get away with that, you know, that, you know, canceling the results of a Democratic election.
They don't like the Electoral College.
Tough.
That's the Constitution.
Sorry, CIA.
You don't get to object to that.
You know, it's like when the CIA in fact, think about when the CIA was spying under John Brennan, was spying on Dianne Feinstein and referring her staff to the Justice Department for prosecution for daring to investigate his agency's torture, where talk about out of line like the CIA is its own separate and co-equal branch of government here with the U.S. Senate taking directly taking on the chair of the U.S. Senate Intelligence Committee like that is absolutely unbelievable.
And then so if that's true, well, then what's this?
Right.
This is like a thousand times that taking on the elected president, United States like this and what amounts to some sort of failed push.
Right.
Well, I mean, the essence of any democratic system is accountability.
And one thing, regrettably, you know, the American political system lacks is a proper system of accountability.
I mean, one saw this, of course, in the aftermath of the Iraq fiasco, where, of course, you know, no heads rolled, not just, you know, in the intelligence world or in government, but among journalists like, you know, all these journalists who regurgitated all this stuff about weapons of mass destruction, all these think tankers, they're still there.
They're still writing the op eds.
Right.
They're still the ones being consulted.
They're still the ones influencing public opinion.
No accountability at all.
Similarly, you know, in the torture and during the war on terror, you know, where where's the accountability for any of that?
I mean, none at all for the illegal wiretaps done by the NSA, for what Mr.
Snowden revealed, which has now been said by a court to have been illegal.
No one has ever held to account really for any of these things at all.
And that that really does cast doubt on the democratic, you know, claims of the system as a whole.
Now, one person who perhaps could hold people to account would be the president.
But the president, you know, not just this president, but previous presidents haven't wanted to.
And I think Trump's particular problem he has is he's actually in many ways quite a weak president in in the way that, you know, he tends to buckle in to to pressure from within the system and from the bureaucracy.
You've seen this in his foreign policy, where, for instance, you know, he said, I'm going to withdraw troops from Syria.
And, you know, a little while later, he's saying, oh, we're going to go seize the Syrian oil fields or whatever.
Right.
So so he he he he has the problem.
But like from the beginning, he was himself.
There was Trump and there was no one else.
No one else was no team, no, no, no sort of depth to his his campaign.
So when he came into office, he didn't have anybody to fill any positions.
He you know, he couldn't hold these people accountable because then who would who would take over what he had?
Nobody.
Right.
And so therefore, he has always been working with people who essentially don't agree with him.
And he's never really had the courage, as far as I can see, to.
Tell them where to go.
Yeah.
Well, all I had to do was be smart enough to figure out how to use Google and go look up the Cato Institute and the National Interest Foundation and go, OK, here's some right wing doves.
Hi, right wing doves.
Introduce yourselves.
Here's your jobs.
You're appointed.
You got a good, you know, 20 or 40 of them or something.
He just made Will Ruger the ambassador to Afghanistan.
So thank God for that.
But does he have time to actually see what you're all through in any real way?
And did he bother to ask Mr.
Ruger, hey, do you have 15 or 20 friends that we could staff the National Security Council with and some of these cabinet departments and things?
He is the president of the United States, after all.
But now he's going to ask Mike Pompeo, well, who do you think we should get from the Heritage Foundation and the American Enterprise Institute, Mike?
Yeah, so his choice of people is very poor, I think, you know, and this is something you can legitimately criticize him on.
Whereas, you know, running after saying he's a Russian spy or something is just is just absurd.
But that's not that's not what's done.
We don't see like endless criticisms of his people and said it may be except for Pompeo.
But instead you get these articles, right, which will say how and it was one in the press today saying how, you know, the.
The only thing restraining Trump, but all these great people around him, you know, Mattis and all the rest of them, but, you know, they weren't great people, actually.
Right.
And when they talk about restraining himself is preventing him from restraining American foreign policy.
Yeah.
I mean, so like stopping him from withdrawing from Syria or something.
Right.
You know what?
Why was that?
Why does that make them the grownups in the room?
I mean, stopping him from making peace with Korea.
Yeah.
Hey, by the way, so many of the so many of the criticisms of Trump are so off base, you know, so many things he's done wrong, but they're not the things that people criticize.
Right.
Hey, I got to show you this footnote, too, just in case you hadn't seen it.
It's in the Daily Beast yesterday.
The article is Trump's troop withdrawals or troop withdrawal is a disingenuous election year ploy, officials say it's by Spencer Ackerman.
And then the quote that you're looking for, I won't read the whole thing for you, but the paragraph you're looking for, Ackerman in the beast, it's scaring the shit out of the president.
And that is what they call it's they're explaining themselves.
Former Trump administration officials.
This is what we call it.
It's an agreed upon strategy that any time he tries to do anything, we tell him you could look weak like Barack Obama if something bad happens after you withdraw.
And that's what they use against him, like a whip every single time to get him to back down on leaving from anything.
Yeah, and this way, Trump's a little bit like LBJ.
I don't know if you've ever heard those tapes of LBJ talking with his aides about and congressmen and so on about what he should do in Vietnam.
And what it comes down to, he knows it's a really bad idea to send more troops in.
Right.
And everyone tells him this isn't going to work.
But then they say, but, yeah, if you know, if you don't do it, those Republicans are going to whip your ass and you're going to look weak.
And that's why he does it, because he doesn't want to look weak.
Right.
And this is this sort of obsession with face and manly hood and everything else, which is so damaging to politicians.
The problem is that the kind of person who becomes president is the kind of person who obsesses about that kind of thing.
Right.
And therefore you've got a sort of structural problem.
Yeah.
And, you know, you take the example of Obama where he made the the calculation that he would look stronger if he rolled over for Petraeus and let him triple the war that he was completely opposed to.
He even entertained the idea in 2009 of just calling it quits altogether and pulling everybody out.
But then, nope, Gates and Petraeus and McChrystal will all resign and then he'll look weak.
But he could have right then and there said, actually, I'll look strong.
I'll face these guys down.
I'll say, no way.
This is never going to work and I'm not going to do it and I'm not going to give in to you.
And that's what makes me such a great and strong leader.
And he could have turned it around.
It would have been fine because the only real organized opposition against him on that level at that time was McCain, who he had just beaten by a solid eight points or whatever it was.
And he could have just said, listen, you know, this is why the American people chose me and not Senator McCain to make these decisions.
And so that's it.
Sorry, Senator, but you don't get your way on this.
And people would have cheered for that and he would have looked strong.
Right.
He didn't have to insult the generals or whatever, but he just had to say, I disagree and I'm the boss, not you.
That would have made him the most alpha dog out of them all.
And instead, he rolls over, lets them triple the war and lose it anyway.
Yeah, I mean, I think there's an unwittingness to admit that, you know, you can be strong by by walking away.
So and that there's virtue in giving up.
Right.
For some reason, people don't want to accept this.
But it but it is, you know, obvious truth.
I just go back to know your Aristotle.
Aristotle says, you know, courage is not like.
It's a mean between recklessness and cowardice, like there's a time to be brave and there's a time to run away, right, you have to use your brains, true brain, true courage is.
Is.
Using your brains as well as, you know, your brawn, and unfortunately, now with the war on terror and all this, you know, support the troop stuff, right, people don't want to be seen to be, you know, saying no to the soldiers and the generals have been elevated into these glorious people.
Right.
Despite the fact they haven't won a war in 20 years, right, that they've been elevated into some moral paragons of virtue, right, who you cannot criticize and you cannot criticize the military.
But in the end of the day, you know, the soldiers pay for this with that for their lives.
And, you know, in fact, that may be that may be the most important positive contribution of Donald Trump and, you know, his entire presidency is you could not have ever come up with a better psi op against the right.
And I mean that in a nice way to get them to say that, yes, our Republican president is right.
These stupid wars are stupid and horrible and wrong and we want them over.
And we're not afraid to say it anymore.
We're following our leader to say it now.
And wow, even the generals care about themselves and their money more than they care about their enlisted men.
I'd buy that.
And he's made that OK.
It's a Republican president who's saying that.
And now the Democrats, of course, have become, you know, military worshippers.
Yeah, man, they're lost causes anyway.
But, you know, the real support among the people, you know, the liberal people of America, never mind the power mongers, but the liberal, you know, half of American political society, they're not for war.
They may not be great antiwar crusaders, but they're not really hawks.
If anybody's hawks among the population, it's the right.
And Trump has told them, nah, you don't need to be, which is the most important thing in the world, really, when it comes to the near medium term future, I think, you know.
Well, I, you know, I'm slightly less optimistic than you on that because, you know, going back to saying about democracy, I mean, America, like all Western states, is not.
I mean, it's not undemocratic, but it's not fully democratic either.
I mean, and, you know, what the people think on these matters is not necessarily entirely relevant.
What matters is what elites think.
Right.
That is the case.
The the the blob, as you know, it's so often called right, is almost completely dominated by.
I don't want to use neoconservative as a word, but that sort of mode of thinking of American exceptionalism, the need to use force, the need to maintain American prestige, the need for American leadership in the world, the need to to have a very large military and bases everywhere.
This is, you know, pretty much orthodoxy.
Right.
Right.
And they're so isolated from dissent.
Yeah.
But, you know, so this is the thing, right?
Is people can think it's rubbish, but I don't think it matters particularly.
Well, it matters in one way.
Right.
Is it.
So this is the intermediate step where they have completely isolated themselves from the rest of public opinion on the most crucial issue of all, whether their sons are going to go off across the world to fight or not.
People don't vote on that.
You know, people don't vote on foreign policy, generally speaking.
Right.
So therefore, this this can remain very immune from democratic accountability because at the end of the day, the average voter.
Is not going to vote on war or peace.
You're right.
We're screwed.
So we we can't even make a marginal difference.
Get it.
I'm going home now.
Well, I listen.
No, I hear you.
You're totally right about that.
It is a matter of organizing mass unorganized power in a way that can't really be done.
Unfortunately, sorry.
But, yeah, that's the truth of it.
I'm afraid so.
All right.
Listen, I'm sorry I've kept you so long, but it's been great talking with you.
And I love your great blog.
It's irrationality.wordpress.com to read Paul Robinson here.
And the article that issues specifically is proof of collusion at last.
Thanks very much for your time, Paul.
Appreciate it.
OK, that was my pleasure.
Have a good day.
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.
