All right, y'all, welcome to the Scott Horton Show.
I am the Director of the Libertarian Institute, Editorial Director of Antiwar.com, author of the book Fool's Errand, Time to End the War in Afghanistan, and I've recorded more than 5,000 interviews going back to 2003, all of which are available at scotthorton.org.
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All right, you guys on the line, I've got the great Gareth Porter.
He wrote all those books about Iran and stuff.
Welcome back.
How you doing?
I'm doing great.
Thanks, Scott.
Glad to be back.
Happy to have you here.
Of course, he's writing at the Grayzone and we have his gigantic archive full of everything he ever wrote for everybody at antiwar.com.
You can find that.
This one is also at the Grayzone.
It's called Dark Web Voter Database Report Casts New Doubts on Russian Election Hack Narrative.
Welcome back to the show, Gareth.
Well, I'm glad to be on the show and glad to be talking about this story, which I think people will find very interesting.
Good.
Yeah, I'm very happy to have you do it.
And on one hand, I'm kind of, I sort of anticipate that some people listening might think, why always with the Russiagate?
Isn't that over?
Didn't that end three, you know, a year ago when the Mueller report came out and the whole thing fell flat and even the Democrats dropped it and started trying to talk up obstruction of justice because they didn't have a single bit and nothing about Russiagate actually in there to hang on to.
And then even the impeachment was all about this Russiagate Jr.
Ukraine holding up an arms deal thing, but had nothing to do with collusion with Putin to steal the election.
And then, but, but here we are.
It's not your fault.
It's not my fault.
We're still talking about this.
They keep bringing this back up like all the debunking never happened and like everybody knows that Russia really did steal the election in 2016 somehow anyway.
Yeah.
The problem here is that there are more, there's more than one part to Russiagate as a political myth in the United States.
And I think the part of it about, you know, the, the notion that the Russians had something on Trump and that there was coordination or whatever you want to call it, that is dead.
The Democrats, as you correctly put it, did not bring it up, have, have basically ignored that for months now, for many months.
But what hasn't been dropped, what is not dead is the idea that they interfered with the election through A, the IRA, the internet research agency in Moscow, in St. Petersburg, excuse me, through their social media posts.
And B, the one that I believe has always been even more poisonous and has bothered people much more is the idea that the Russians tried to hack into at least 21 state web sites that store information about elections and about, even more important, about the voter registration databases.
Or even possibly tried to get into all 50 states.
And this, this has always been, I believe, the part of Russiagate that was far more toxic politically, that, that got into people's heads much more deeply and has had much greater, you know, that's why it's had more legs, I believe.
And it's still very much alive.
You hear people talking about it constantly.
And I think that this, this is really what this story is about.
And you know, the fact is, as we'll get into in a little bit more detail here in a moment, that, that there is no evidence whatsoever that the Russians had any role to play in any effort to hack websites that, that were state, you know, state websites that had voter information on them.
And I think that's the bottom line here that really is, is fundamentally important to understand.
Right.
I mean, that's the whole thing of it, right, is when computer geniuses talk to reporters and then reporters talk to us, it's a really bad game of telephone, even if they're not deliberately lying.
So, in fact, I think even the, at some points, at least, even the Department of Homeland Security had added a lot of disclaimers that said, well, you know, we don't really think they broke into anything.
We just had, you know, somebody with a Russian IP address was looking at our site, you know, was scanning it for whatever was on the public face of it.
Kind of a thing.
I would not, I would not let them off that easy.
In fact, that the Department of Homeland Security did accuse Russia, Russian intelligence, or they don't say intelligence, they say Russian government, in effect, of being behind the efforts to hack and indeed the Illinois one they're blaming on Russia.
So the Russian government.
And only very recently have they begun to step away from that, even though it's not explicit.
I think one can read between the lines of more recent DHS statements that they have now they're no longer taking that line.
Well, I didn't mean to.
Yeah, I didn't mean to downplay, you know, the size of their claims in the first place.
But I just thought that they had had, if you looked closely, that there were these kinds of disclaimers included all along to that.
Or at least maybe on follow up questions that what exactly what kind of hack are we talking about?
Well, they looked at our website.
Oh, OK.
I think you're right to use the word disclaimer if it's if it's used very broadly.
But what they did do in their initial statements was misleading, because in their testimony before the Senate Intelligence Committee in 2017, they said a potential they said was a potential Russian hacking.
So that was a clue that, in fact, they weren't ready to say outright that they did it.
But but they managed to convey over and over again that the Russians were behind it.
So that's why, you know, I am very firmly convinced here that that the DHS was carrying out a deception operation politically.
They didn't have any evidence to support it.
They didn't, in fact, believe that they could make the case that that Russia was behind these.
But they did, in fact, convey that to the public.
And that's why this lie has had such political legs for so long, really, since since really August of 2016, when they first did a an intelligence report, a draft intelligence report that was then leaked to to networks that published stories that conveyed the lie.
And ever since then, it's basically nothing has really been done to try to to to show the American public that it was wrong and to indicate to the American public that was wrong.
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Well, and I like the as you mentioned in your piece here, the New York Times story, Russia targeted election systems in all 50 states.
Oh, yeah.
At the worst.
That's the worst.
Absolutely.
Yeah.
And if you're already a Russiagate truther and you hear that, well, then you know what that means.
Right.
They're using Cambridge Analytica to brainwash you into opposing the Democrats when you probably used to love Hillary Clinton until the Russians told you not to.
Right.
Right.
This is this is the most complete and most absurd extension of the lie that DHS began.
So let's go back to to the story that I've written about, which helps to further refute the lie.
Basically, I think it adds another layer, because what what happened was that Commercant, this independent Russian paper, published an article that cites a dark Web statement by a hacker, a professional hacker who is offering the Michigan voter registration database as well as other state voter registration databases for free to anybody who's interested.
And so that's a bit of a twist on this story.
And the reason is now that the hackers who had basically gotten these databases in the past or maybe they were they were acquired in other ways, not by hacking, but by getting them from legitimate through legitimate people who ordered them from the states directly, which you can do.
It's part of the story here that they had used them forever.
Whatever uses they had found for them, basically to sell them on the dark Web to whom they sell them to scammers, people who are engaged in scamming vast numbers of people on an industrial scale.
And they use these this personal information to attract people or to to identify people who are most likely victims for their scams.
So so that's how these databases have been used for profit by people who acquired them from professional hackers, criminal hackers.
You got to appreciate, too, how your security force is the weak link in the chain of your privacy and your personal information.
And if some scammer wants to get your mom's maiden name and your former address and all of these kinds of things, the best place to get it is from the government, the people who supposedly are in charge of protecting you and your security and your privacy.
Well, there's there's another there's another wrinkle here, which I haven't gotten to yet, which which came up when this story was published, you know, by Commercant.
Immediately the state of Michigan secretary of state responded saying, look, we we have already we've we've issued these or we've made these available to the public, these voter databases.
But we have deleted all information that's personal so that it can't be used for that purpose.
And therefore, they're saying, you know, this is a doubtful story.
I mean, that was the implication.
And then DHS itself and FBI weighed in with a tweet citing Michigan and adding their own view that, well, this this is, you know, not likely to be reliable.
And people the public should not rely on this kind of story because we have not seen evidence of any any effort to get into or successful effort to get into databases, state databases this year.
Well, the story itself actually cited something that would have happened before this year.
So that wasn't really relevant.
But in any case, you know, there was a difference of view here about, you know, whether this story was significant.
And in fact, the fact is that it was significant because it was making a point that people were unaware of that these databases had been used, whatever the source was, to basically they were being sold to, as I say, the scammers for years.
And now they, you know, whatever uses they had been able to find in terms of selling them to scammers had been exhausted.
And now they're just making them available for free.
Right.
And I'm sorry, we're we're right out of time.
I got to run.
But just to to finish up here, when the head of the FBI is telling the Senate yesterday that, yeah, the Russians are trying to rig the election for the sitting president, everybody, this is the kind of stuff that he's referring to, right, this and the PeaceData thing, which is the subject of our next interview with Peter Van Buren here, this PeaceData.net scam, all this.
This is the kind of thin gruel that he's relying on to make these declarations again.
Right.
They don't have anything.
So just one just one point here that I want to make sure people understand that that the fact that these databases have, in fact, been made available by the states themselves is very significant.
And people don't really understand this.
And it raises the question, you know, what point would the Russians have in trying to break into these state websites if they can get the information for free through the states?
Well, they're trying to take control of your precious bodily fluids, man.
Right.
And so trying to take over the world.
This is just another reason to to believe that there was absolutely no motive for Russia to do anything of the sort.
It's the missile gap and the bomber gap.
Yes.
They're out to get us, Gareth, I'm telling you.
They're going to they're going to cross the folder gap into there's another one, the folder gap.
They're going to move right into West Germany any day now.
I know it.
There was this wonderful quote, which will take me 10 seconds to relate, which is that the FBI head of counterintelligence being asked by the Senate committee, well, what would the Russians do with this?
And he was clearly stumped.
And he said, well, they would look at it to find out what these databases consisted of.
Yeah.
In other words, he just turned around in a circle and stood there.
No comment.
Yeah.
That's that's rich.
All right.
Thanks very much, Gareth.
Appreciate it.
Sure.
All right, you guys.
That's the great Gareth Porter.
I'm sorry I had to cut him short, but I'm late.
But this is called a Dark Web Voter Database Report casts a new doubt on Russian election hack narrative.
It's at the gray zone.
And of course, linked in the viewpoints at Antiwar.com as well.
The Scott Horton Show, Antiwar Radio can be heard on KPFK 90.7 FM in L.A.
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