All right, y'all, welcome to the Scott Horton Show.
I am the Director of the Libertarian Institute, Editorial Director of Antiwar.com, author of the book Fool's Errand, Time to End the War in Afghanistan, and I've recorded more than 5,000 interviews going back to 2003, all of which are available at scotthorton.org.
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The full archive is also available at youtube.com slash scotthorton show.
Yay, on the line I've got the great Ray McGovern.
He used to be a CIA analyst.
In fact, he was the chief of the Soviet Union Analysis Division there back when they used to brief Reagan and Bush in the 80s, the older one, and he's been an antiwar guy this whole century long and great on everything.
Welcome back.
How are you doing, Ray?
I'm doing fine, Scott.
Thank you.
Very happy to have you back on the show here.
And so we're picking on the Russiagate conspirators, Comey's Amnesia Makes Senate Session Unforgettable is the title of your latest piece at antiwar.com.
And then brand new out, I think this morning, you remind us that Patrick Lawrence, who at that time was the only worthwhile thing whatsoever going on at Salon.com, wrote all about on July 25th, April Glaspy Day, July 25th, 2016, that, ah, look, the Democrats are making up a bunch of crap about Russia, and saw it from the very beginning.
And I like to brag, of course, that that's the same day I interviewed Geoffrey Carr, the computer security expert who came on the show and talked about how there is no way in the world they could know that Russia had done it.
The only people who could know would be the NSA, but certainly not an after the fact forensic examination of a server.
No one could tell you for sure, because anybody can leave fake fingerprints.
And that's how it goes.
And so, yep, some of us knew from the very beginning then.
Are you kidding me?
You're going to tar Donald Trump with being alger his?
Donald Trump, this guy, really?
Anyway, so there you go.
Let's start with that.
Who's Patrick Lawrence, our old friend?
I hadn't talked with him in a while, but he's writing at the, is he still writing for The Nation?
He used to be one of the regulars at The Nation.
But then when he wrote things like, well, things disparaging the Democratic Party and throwing light on the bogus Russiagate story, he was like, oh, this is really, really sad commentary on so-called liberals or progressives.
It was just too much for them.
The staff was in a revolution.
They complained that you can't do this, it can't be.
Hillary Clinton was gypped, was tricked out of the election, and it was the Russians that did it, the Russians, the Russians, the Russians.
And so he was like, oh, can you imagine?
He got it right.
He interviewed all of us, did the forensics with the help of Bill Binney.
We got really tired about all the questions that Patrick Lawrence asked us.
I mean, he wanted to be really sure, and he was.
He was right on target.
And so he was let go.
I got to say, I skipped this part.
I really should have read the headline here of this first piece that he wrote for Salon back then.
How the DNC fabricated a Russian hacker conspiracy to deflect blame for its email scandal, which is just perfect.
And that's the latest news, of course, is that Brennan briefed Obama that they had intelligence where they were spying on the Russians, and the Russians were telling each other that, hey, Hillary Clinton is cooking up a scandal against Trump and implicating us.
And so we need to be on the lookout for that.
And Brennan thought that was so important that he let Obama know, which just goes to show that they all knew all along, the Democrats and the cops and the spies all knew all along that they were lying, that this whole thing was a hoax.
But yeah, let's pretend to be concerned and investigate it and look at it and authorize FISA surveillance of American citizens, CIA assets, and let's lie and pretend they're not.
And this whole, this goes right to the heart of the hoax.
And in that, it was, this was the key, was it was at the heart of it.
It was Hillary Clinton and her staff who had decided this is the narrative we want to push.
And it went from there.
Yeah, you know, I would go a little farther and say, not only were John Brennan and the president and everyone else involved in this national security state aware, but they were participants.
I mean, conspiracy theory, well, it's half right and half wrong.
The wrong part is theory.
It was fact.
And Patrick Lawrence saw that from the beginning.
Yeah, it was a conspiracy, but it was a conspiracy in which Hillary Clinton, the Democratic Party and the home, the deep state, if you will, were all deep, deep into it.
And we can see that from Comey's testimony and his forgetfulness and his amnesia.
And when he says, you know, it doesn't ring a bell, give me a break.
It should ring lots of bells.
It rang a big, big bell for Patrick Lawrence on the 25th of July, 2016.
Patrick told me, he says, you know, I just had a cup of coffee and I just had this, I mean, it just came right off the top of my head.
I mean, this is so bogus.
Who's going to believe Robbie Mook coming on TV when NSA, as you point out, is the only person or the only place where they could be sure of the Russian hacking.
And as your listeners probably know, since I've mentioned this before, the whole thing came apart five months ago.
OK, now when I say five months ago, on May 7th, testimony was declassified because Adam Schiff, the head of the Intelligence Committee in the House, was forced to declassify.
Now what was it?
It was the testimony of the head of CrowdStrike, a fellow named Sean Henry, who used to do all the cyber stuff for Bob Mueller when he was head of the FBI.
Anyhow, Sean Henry was under oath asked now, when did, no, Adam Schiff asked him, when did the Russians exfiltrate that?
And Henry looks at his lawyer and then he says, well, you know, actually, we have no forensic evidence that it was exfiltrated.
Exfiltrated, of course, a fancy word for hacked.
As a matter of fact, you know, we we we usually get that kind of thing.
But in this case, we don't have any technical evidence that it was hacked actually by Russia or by anybody else.
Now, I'm talking about the DNC emails.
Well, look, there's only one thing you omitted there, which is important, which is in brackets, lawyer leans over, whispers in ear and then, OK, well, I got to admit, we don't have any proof that they did.
Which I thought was important there that he was being instructed by counsel, don't lie about this to these guys in this moment because he could get in trouble.
Yeah.
So what's my point here?
My point was that Adam Schiff did that interview with the House Intelligence Committee on December 5, 2017.
That that audience to seven, 2017.
All right.
Now, how long did he keep that secret?
Well, he was not forced to release it until May 7th, 2020.
That must be a record.
OK.
And anyway, it was declassified in May of May 7th.
So let me ask you something, Ray.
How come Devin Nunes couldn't have leaked that?
I mean, especially from the House floor, he's protected from arrest and whatever.
He had access to that, didn't he or not?
Well, he did.
He was right there.
Yeah.
That's that's a really good question.
You know, these guys are really afraid.
They're really afraid of the intelligence community and they're really afraid to divulge anything that the intelligence community says is classified.
It doesn't matter if they're a representative or they're a senator.
They can go after you anyway.
And they do, whether it's surreptitious or politically explosive stuff they reveal.
So that's the only way I can explain this.
But it's still, you know, very convincing.
These guys knew since December of 2017.
That's just as Mueller is getting started.
OK.
And they had the struck email that said there's no there there.
OK.
So there wasn't any there there.
And now we know that even the Russians got onto the Russian analysis says, you know, it looks like Hillary Clinton gave the official order to tie Trump to this Russian hacking and they're off and running.
Well, you know, if you look at that point in time, Scott, let's do July 2016.
All right.
The previous month, June 12th, 2016, Julian Assange announces that he has emails relating to Hillary Clinton pending publication and quote, whoa.
Oh, well, they knew that is the DNC knew that if Julian Assange had DNC emails, my God, they would show that Hillary stole the nomination from Bernie Sanders, pure and simple.
The first five people on the DNC quit as soon as that was released.
OK.
Now, how much time did they have?
Well, we're talking June 12th.
Right now, June 25th was when the Democratic National Convention was starting.
So they busied themselves and they try to figure out how how they could counter how they could obfuscate the release of these emails whenever it came.
Now, Julian painstakingly went through them.
He doesn't publish anything that has the you know, he doesn't completely recognize as documentary.
And so it took him to the 20 until the 22nd of July to publicize these very, very, very damning emails.
And then the Democrats are all ready because the story was, why did the Russians do this?
The Russians, why did the Russians give that stuff to Julian Assange?
Why the Russians, the Russians, the Russians?
And nobody, this is the important point, nobody paid any attention to the content, to the content of the emails, which showed, as I said before, Hillary and the DNC stole the nomination from Bernie Sanders.
So it was a magnificent diversion of attention and it worked.
And it was easy to see through that right from the start.
I mean, you know, I like to point out that Bill Casey, who is head of the of the of the CIA under Reagan, at the first cabinet meeting, he said two things.
One is well known, quote, we'll know when our disinformation program is complete, when everything the American public believes is false.
OK, we know about that.
Now, how do we know about that?
Because Barbara Honegger, a good friend of mine, was there.
Now, he also said this.
I'm astonished to discover that 80 percent of the, quote, intelligence, end quote, that the analysis side of the CIA produced was based on open public sources like newspapers and magazines, end quote.
You know, OK, what's the point?
The point is that anybody who reads more than The New York Times could have figured out that Russiagate was bogus from the start, not only because of the technical things that Bill Binney and his former NSA technical directors adduced as evidence or a lack of evidence, but also because it made incredibly good sense.
And, you know, just to put another fine point on this, I was at a sort of a group meeting at the Center for American Progress.
I guess it is the old, the old Hillary Clinton think tank.
OK, now this is a couple of months after Trump came in and Jennifer Palmieri, who is Hillary's PR person, said, you know, this Russiagate thing, we got to play it to the hilt.
You know, when it first came out at the convention, I went around with my golf cart and I tried to sell it to the to the media.
And it was really hard because nobody, I had trouble, I had trouble believing it.
But then, and this is important, when we go back to Brooklyn, their headquarters, then intelligence people came to us and showed us the evidence and and journalists who were really plugged into intelligence.
And then we were off and running.
And then the Obama administration would confirm part of this.
And then so this is all we got now, folks, play it to the hilt.
Russiagate, Russiagate, Russia did it.
I mean, I was astonished.
Now, who else was there?
This guy, Jonathan Weiner.
Now, he's going to be interviewed by the by one of the Senate committees now, he was Hillary's hatchet man for Libya and for other things.
And the word is that he played a real strong role in the Steele dossier.
So a lot of that's going to come out in the wash now.
The only problem is there's only three and a half weeks left to do the wash.
It's going to be too late.
Yeah, well, and I don't know if you saw this where Trump is raging on Twitter that, hey, Barr, are you going to indict somebody or what?
And by the way, including you should indict my current opponent for presidential Biden, which Biden is guilty of conspiracy in this whole thing, pretending to believe that the already designated national security adviser of the president elect of the United States of America could possibly be guilty of violating the Logan Act for telling the Russian ambassador not that he would do anything for him.
Just please don't overreact to what Obama did to you.
Oh, yeah.
Yeah.
No, that's speaking of high treason.
And so Biden does belong in irons for that.
But yeah, a little bit too late.
And it's clear that, OK, I won't say it's clear, but it's pretty obvious.
I could be wrong, but I don't think so.
That Durham and Barr are playing the exact role that they've played their whole careers, which is covering for the institutions.
And you might think, I guess the contest was right.
Is Barr an ideological presidentist enough in a like David Addington way?
We're like, no matter who you are, if you are the president, man, you're the king of America and you can do whatever the hell you want.
And I better obey that.
Or is he just a man of the state?
And ultimately his job is to admonish a couple of CIA and FBI agents and officers.
But never take on the institutions themselves or put them in check or in any real danger of prosecution for daring to take on, in essence, doing exactly what they accused the Russians of doing, destroying our democracy, destabilizing and undermining Americans' confidence in their vote and their sovereignty over their leaders and all of these things.
Well, I think there's another element here.
Barr is one of these aficionados of the unitary executive.
As you say, he thinks the president should be able to do about anything, but he's also afraid.
He talks, you know, he's got a big hat, but no cattle.
He talks big and Trump talks big.
And he says, we've got these guys, we're going to, Trump says, I have a chance to get the deep state right now and you, Barr, you, Barr, have a chance to go after them and make history.
OK, oh, that's big talk, Barr says.
The president was spied upon.
Oh, well, that's big history, too.
Now, it's all going to peter out.
It's all going to.
Now, I would love to be wrong on this.
And I'd love to come back three weeks from now and say, my God, they stepped up to it and they revealed what really happened.
But I don't think that's going to happen.
And I think the major factor here is fear, because, you know, I'll just remember, remind people that as soon as Trump was elected, as soon as he was inaugurated, Chuck Schumer arranged to go on Never Eat Chill Meadow on the 3rd of January 2017.
You know what, Ray, let me play the clip.
I have it here embedded from your article.
And it's worth it.
It really is worth hearing.
So here we go.
This is it's not very long.
It's a minute latest statement, latest tweet, as you were just saying.
President-elect's latest unsolicited pronouncement on the intelligence community.
This was his tweet just a little while ago tonight.
And you see the scare quotes there.
The intelligence briefing on so-called Russian hacking was delayed until Friday, perhaps more time needed to build a case.
Very strange.
We're actually told intelligence sources tell NBC News since this tweet has been posted that actually this intelligence briefing for the president-elect was always planned for Friday.
It hasn't been delayed.
But he's he's taking these shots.
This antagonism is taunting to the intelligence community.
You take on the intelligence community.
They have six ways from Sunday at getting back at you.
So even for a practical, supposedly hard-nosed businessman, he's being really dumb to do this.
What do you think the intelligence community would do if they were?
I don't know.
But I from what I'm told, they are very upset with how he has treated them and talked about them.
And we need the intelligence community.
We don't know what's going to look at the Russian hacking without the intelligence community.
We wouldn't have discovered it.
I think he has an agenda to try to dismantle parts of the intelligence community.
I mean, this form of taunting, hostile.
Whether you're a super liberal Democrat or a very conservative Republican, you should be against dismantling the intelligence.
Wow.
That speaks volumes, doesn't it?
It sure does.
And listen, I want to I want to mention one more thing before I let you go off on a tear here.
And that is and this is coming up from another interview later today is where I found this is this article at the Quincy Institute where he cites this tweet by Michael McFaul from the Obama government saying Trump has lost the intelligence community.
He has lost the State Department.
He has lost the military.
How can he continue to serve as our commander in chief?
And so then that's it.
You know, all these people in flyover country like you exist simply to pay taxes and give them your sons to use up as cannon fodder.
You're not even in the equation at all.
The government is, you know, we, the national security state, in order to form a more perfect national security state, decide who gets to be the president and how far of a leash we give him.
In fact, this is one of the top headlines on antiwar.com today is Trump says he wants out of Afghanistan by Christmas.
The military says, screw you, belay that order.
We're not listening to him.
We don't care what he says.
And you know what?
We'll wait and see after the election.
Like he's just some guy like the headline was Ray McGovern tweets that he wants the troops home by Christmas, not the president of the United States of America who happens to be the highest link in the chain of command says so.
Well, I would treat that because I believe that.
But I would be just as much disregarded as the nominal commander in chief.
Your point is well taken.
And there's lots of evidence who's running this country.
And it ain't Donald Trump.
You know, just go just to go back to Schumer and Maddow.
The more I think about that and the more I I write about that, it's very, very clear that this was a setup and this was a warning to the president elect.
Look, don't cross the intelligence community.
OK, and this is not the first time this kind of thing happened.
When Obama came in.
The head of the CIA, General Michael Hayden warned him, look, you cross the intelligence community and you're going to you're going to regret it.
Nobody will cooperate with you, is what he said.
OK, now, interestingly, Obama didn't invite and even invite General Hayden when his successor was nominated.
Hayden was banished.
And of course, he's he's he's kind of retaliating for that ever since.
But the important thing is that was the third of January.
This is the last warning that the deep state would give Trump.
Now, he's not experienced in Washington.
He's come in and he's not even president yet.
He probably flipped this off or didn't nobody told him about it.
But on the 5th of January.
Oh, by the way, let me just say that recently released voicemail or not voicemail, but texting between Peter Strzok and others indicate that the FBI workers were really, really wondering whether the FBI will ever get their act together because they knew that the that the meeting that Trump was going to have with the heads of the intelligence community was scheduled earlier and that the president and his advisors did delay it precisely for the reason that Trump alleged.
Namely, they didn't have their act together.
OK, and this is the same conversation right in these text messages where they're buying some kind of malpractice insurance or something.
What's that about?
Well, you know, the FBI folks, a lot of them say, well, that's not unusual.
Well, it's sure as hell is unusual because of the stated reasons.
Oh, my God.
We're in this now.
We better get the, you know, we've cooperated.
We've signed the documents.
We better get malpractice insurance.
So so a lot is available now that not many people know about.
Well, in the event, what happens is this.
They're not ready.
And so the president convenes a meeting on the 5th, so two days after Schumer and Rachel Maddow.
And he says, look, what we could do, what we can do now.
First, there's this Flynn problem.
We got to.
I mean, Flynn knows where the bodies are buried, for God's sake.
Flynn has said he's going to do an audit on the intelligence community.
How are we going to get him?
My God.
Well, however we get him, we do it by the book.
Right.
They do it by the book.
We know what happened to Flynn.
All right.
Then the other question is, well, did you come up with that analysis about about Trump and Russia?
We did, sir.
What did you find out?
We found out that Putin himself personally ordered the hacking of the of the DNC emails and gave it to WikiLeaks.
That's what we found.
Oh, wow.
OK.
Are you sure about that?
We're sure.
OK, well, go ahead and brief, brief Trump on that tomorrow.
So now to the 6th of January, 6th of January, the three musketeers, a group of three, James Comey, James Clapper and John Brennan and the NSA fellow, Admiral Rogers, go into brief Trump, the president-elect.
And they tell him, now, Mr.
President, we've just released, we've just published this document, which says, in effect, that Vladimir Putin actually helped you win the presidency, which you probably wouldn't be.
But so that's out there.
You should know that.
And then Comey says, now, gentlemen, I have something very personal to tell the president about.
Could you please leave the room and the others leave?
Comey.
Mr.
President, this is a little awkward.
This is unsubstantiated, not confirmed, and it's pretty scurrilous.
But we have this report and it says that you were cavorting with prostitutes in Moscow and all kinds of other things.
And Trump, taken completely by surprise, says, what?
What was this?
And Comey tells me, I was there for a day, for God's sake, I was with a group.
Come on, this is crazy stuff.
And Comey says, well, just so you know, Mr.
President, just so you know, as a matter of fact, the press has this now and it's likely to come out.
But we want to let you know that we have this called a dossier, just so you know.
Now, bear in mind, Trump is a real estate guy from New York.
You know, he didn't know anything about Washington.
If it were I or you, Scott, I dare say, we would have said, Mr.
Comey, thank you very much indeed.
We know that this is J.
Edgar Hoover tactics on steroids.
Would you please go back to your office, clean it out, because you're out of here as soon as I'm president.
I mean, it's very clear what happened.
It took Trump four months to acknowledge in an interview with The New York Times that, yeah, Comey was trying to hold us over as leverage.
OK, I never understood why.
You know, they went through this whole thing about, listen, I need your loyalty and all that.
Why would you want to keep Obama's head of the FBI?
Just ask Giuliani who to hire from the Justice Department or whatever.
You know, I never understood why he kept Comey at all.
Well, I think the answer is this.
When you're a real estate salesman in New York, you have ways to induce cooperation and nobody can really resist your blandishments.
You're a pretty, you know, pretty effective guy.
And so you try to cajole this fellow.
You don't realize what the stakes are.
Not not in Washington anymore.
And so you kind of say, well, let's get this guy on my side.
I wouldn't want to I wouldn't want to fire him because Trump didn't know everything that he knows now.
So he spent four months trying to cajole Comey.
Of course, Comey would not be cajoled or the more so since he had his tracks to hide.
That's what he did before the election.
And so Trump tried to play along.
Then when he saw that Comey, when Comey was playing this game that I just described, then Trump fired him.
And then he stupidly said, I fired him because of this Russian thing.
And everybody said, aha, aha, aha.
Yeah.
Destruction of justice.
Yeah.
What he really meant, of course, was Comey's blandishments.
Comey's J.A. Gohova type tactics where he said, now we have this stuff, we have this dossier, Mr.
Perry, just so you know, just so you know, that was the Russia thing, in my view, in any case.
So so Trump is his own worst enemy and not understanding how Washington works and then blurting out things that would be better said by others or left unsaid completely.
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But now, so you know, we get, it's such a complicated story and there's so many different facets to it in the forest and trees, things get in each other's way.
But you know, the bottom line here is that the entire investigation here from that set up, uh, right before he took power through, you know, I guess what it was in May or April or May when they appointed the special counsel and then two years of the Robert Mueller investigation.
All of this was part of the hoax.
All of this was just them pretending to take this seriously, pretending to investigate this.
And you know, I'm reminded when you're talking there about, you know, the early Trump days there that in Woodward's first book fear, um, he has the whole part and he trashed the dossier.
You might remember he was like, this is a garbage document.
Woodward did.
He's like, look, I'm a real journalist.
I looked at this thing and I threw in the garbage can where it belongs.
Give me a break.
But anyway, um, in the book he talks about how Trump's lawyer Dowd went to, I think it's, uh, is it Andrew Weissman who is the right hand man of Mueller in the thing?
That's correct.
Um, and he said, listen, here's the deal.
You be fair with us and we'll be fair with you.
And he went to Donald Trump and he said, look, I'm your lawyer.
You can tell me, but you gotta tell me.
I gotta know.
Did you do this at all?
And Trump went into rage.
Hell no, I didn't do anything.
The whole thing is big, stupid, fake lies, obviously.
So he says, well, okay.
But I, then I want to turn over every scrap of paper we've got to Mueller.
I want them to knock this out as fast as they can.
And so we're going to give them everything.
Are you okay with that?
And Trump says, yes, I'm okay with that.
Give them everything.
And so they gave them everything.
They hired a writer truck to come and get the boxes of documents of every scrap of paper from the campaign.
Here's everything we've got about everything here from the very get go, which is all you needed to know about.
Can you imagine if Donald Trump had done it, that's how he would have handled it at all?
I mean, that is all you need to know.
That was all Woodward needed to know, to know that there is no there.
Of course there isn't.
This whole thing is stupid.
And they kept this going.
And look, remember, Ray, we spent a year saying, man, they kept this going for three years.
Well, now they brought it all back again.
So now it's four years and they're still pushing this stuff.
It's crazy.
Well, that they can do that because they control the media, of course.
You know, when you talk about Strzok, Peter Strzok, who is the deputy head of counterintelligence at the FBI, this exchange of emails that he had with his with his lover, who happened to be the counsel to the deputy director McCabe, it's it's it's very rich in detail.
And among the things he says after looking into possible Russian ties to the Trump campaign for five months, mind you, five months.
Mueller is appointed to do his job and Strzok says to Lisa Page, you know, Lisa, I don't know.
They want me to join the the Mueller task force.
But I don't know.
I did simply waste it.
You know, there's no there there.
There's there's no there there.
Now, that was before, before he joined the thing.
And then when they found out his his history of being completely pro Hillary and anti Trump, they fired him.
But there was no there there.
That came from Peter Strzok.
So how did Mueller how did Mueller get appointed?
Well, we all know that the head, the former head, the head of the FBI, James Comey, right after he was canned, he leaked some documents to The New York Times to an intermediary to embarrass Trump.
And that was enough to what to to what?
To get Mueller appointed.
Now, this is not McGovern speculating.
When when Comey was asked why he leaked these these documents or his conversations with the president, he said, well, I wanted to I wanted an investigation.
I wanted I wanted a special counsel appointed.
That's why.
And thank you, Jesus.
Two days later, Bob Mueller is appointed.
Bob Mueller, James Comey's best friend forever, was appointed special counsel.
Now, the other thing is two years, almost two years.
Why?
Well, one of the things that's occurred to me belatedly was that there were midterm elections coming up during that period.
Right.
And even though most people like you and me had it all figured out, Mueller is not going to say anything to lift the cloud off Trump before those crucial midterm elections.
And what happened?
The Democrats won big in the House and took it over.
And the rest of this history, the rest is more obfuscation, more Adam Schiff fooling around.
So, you know, Mueller's thing was was from the get go a corrupt sort of thing set and set in train by the people who still had to cover their tracks as to what they had done before the election as well as after the election.
And of course, he came up.
Maybe the amazing thing is that he refused the blandishments of Andrew Weissman and others to go farther than the evidence allowed.
And he said, well, there was no evidence of conspiracy.
Conspiracy is a crime.
There was no evidence of that.
Now, you wouldn't get that from The New York Times even today.
No, no, no.
He had all these contacts with Russians and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
But so so Mueller is in this deep and and now it's coming out, really, a lot of the detail as to what Mueller was given by the president, as you pointed out, and how Trump felt vindicated.
And I wondered when when the Mueller report came out, I wondered how the mainstream press would be able to deal with this.
And now we know they just ignore it or they say it was Russian disinformation.
That was one point that I'm sorry I meant to have you elaborate on this at the beginning when we were talking about this, you know, not the very latest, but second to very latest news to come out on this is these documents, not just the document, but the fact that Brennan briefed Obama and they're saying, oh, this is just Russian disinformation, but that's only if you beg the question and presume your conclusion that they did it and they're just trying to somehow spin away from that.
But if you believe that, then you have to believe that the Russians knew that the CIA was spying on them and then deliberately, you know, put this disinformation out on there, which I guess is plausible.
But it would imply that the CIA are damn fools who in this case are were damn fools and thought that they had some great signals intelligence on the Russians when really they were having their chain jerked around by the Russian side.
But sure doesn't sound like that to me.
You just take the thing at face value.
Makes perfect sense that they were they were saying the same thing that me and you and Jeffrey Carr and Patrick Lawrence and Robert Perry and all these other people were saying at the exact same time, which was, oh, the Democrats are making up this stuff.
And then it was important for Brennan to explain this to Obama.
Right.
That not because it you know, I don't think that was like his backhanded way of letting Obama know that Hillary was making this up.
They'd have had that as a separate conversation.
The point was the Russians think this.
The Russians are concerned that they're being framed here for whatever that's worth.
The president needs to know that.
And that was why he briefed him.
Right.
Well, I have a kind of an alternate interpretation of this, knowing what I know about how the system works and being very clear on the fact that Brennan and Comey and Clapper and the NSA guy were in this up to their knees.
Here comes this report.
Now, it cannot be ignored because according to to Senator Graham, at least, it's an intercept.
OK, now, I think one doesn't need to go into extra conspiratorial interpretation here.
The Russians just learned what Patrick Lawrence learned the day before and published on.
And they have some sort of special source in Washington that says, yeah, this is now formally approved by Hillary Clinton on the 26th of July 2016.
OK, now, what's Brennan going to do with this?
Can he ignore it?
I don't think so.
There are enough honest people within the CIA who said, look, Mr.
Brennan, are you not going to tell the president about this?
I mean, there are enough honest people, I think, that said, you know, you've got to tell the president.
So it's just CYA, in other words.
Well, yeah, so Brennan goes down to the White House and with a smirk, with a smirk, how do I know that?
Well, the Peter Strzok, Lisa Page text exchanges indicated that the President Obama was being filled in on all of this.
He wanted, quote, to know everything we're doing, end quote, according to Deputy Director McCabe's major counsel, Lisa Page.
He wanted to know everything we're doing.
OK, so here's Brennan.
He goes to the president.
He said, look, the Russians are on to this, too.
We have to go through the motions here.
I just want to let you know this, it's available.
It could get out in some way.
So we better cover our dear ears and make sure we do a referral to the Department of Justice.
We'll tell James Comey, whoops, hey, you better look into this.
And then if Comey doesn't, well, we're off the hook.
It'll be Comey's problem.
And that's exactly what happened.
It was ignored by Comey.
There was no investigation.
Were they going to investigate themselves?
So I'm even more cynical but less conspiratorial on this.
I think it was a matter of, whoop, this hit the fan.
It had to be dealt with and they couldn't just bury it under the rug.
They had to go through the motions, not only to tell the president, but also to ask the Department of Justice to do a referral to investigate, knowing full well that nothing would happen because the investigators were the culprits.
Yeah.
And the bastards.
Hey, man, so now back to Trump's ranting tweets, he says full declassification, no redactions.
I want it all out there right now.
I want these traitors to hang.
Rah, rah, rah.
That's not a direct quote, but pretty much.
And so but the thing of it is that he's the president.
But just like with Afghanistan, so what?
He can yell and scream and fling his magic marker around, but they don't have to do what he says, apparently.
And in fact, I read a thing that pointed out that, yeah, guess who was the CIA station chief in London at the time that the Cambridge Four were coming up with all of this garbage?
Why?
It was Gina Haspel, who is covering bloody Gina, the torturer, who's covering who's now the CIA director and is covering her own behind.
Yeah.
Yeah.
It makes me particularly proud that I got thrown out of the Senate, the Senate Intelligence Committee nomination procedure when I came up and very gently and said, look, you guys know that she's headed the torture program, that she led the first waterboarding outfit there in Thailand back window up.
And then I got thrown out.
She's she's, you know, bloody Gina is what she was known as.
And now we see that she was chief of station London.
That means the highest intelligence community, not just not just the CIA person to deal with the British government.
And we know what happened exactly after she well, when she was there, she was there from 2014 to 2017.
And of course, late summer of 2016 is when all this went down.
We were talking about July 26, according to the Russians and so forth.
But we talk about July 25, according to Patrick Lawrence.
But here, what happens?
Well, Stefan Halper, the utility infielder, not not infielder, utility government operative, so-called, begins to fool around with Carter Page and George Papadopoulos immediately after that.
OK, and what happens?
The FBI launches an investigation.
I mean, you know, they they launched the investigation, I think was the 31st of July.
So it all hangs together.
The only problem is that nobody will put it together for The New York Times or The Washington Post.
And so it's as though it doesn't exist.
It exists and it does come close to sedition.
And that's big.
And the big problem that I see is that, you know, I would not wish four more years of Trump on the world.
But when he loses this, all this stuff will be swept under the rug.
The FBI director will go to President-elect Biden and say, and now President-elect Biden, this is a little awkward, but and none of it is confirmed.
But we have this dossier on you and, you know, where the press might get it.
And so the national security state will escape unscathed.
Comey will smirk and so will James Clapper and John Brennan.
And that's a big, big price to pay for an election that could have been the scenario for revealing all this that happened.
And again, you know, it's really a conflict that I have.
How should should I keep telling the truth about this on the on the chance that it might hurt Joe Biden?
Well, sorry, you know, I took a solemn oath to to support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic.
That oath has no expiration date.
And last time I checked, you know, it's still operative.
And that's what I keep doing.
And I think the American people are, if they're able to to get this information, they would be able to handle it.
It's sort of academic because nobody's going to publish what McGovern or Scott Horton say.
Well, yeah, sort of like the Walsh report came out after it was too late, like, look, here's some Iran-Contra stuff.
Oh, well, anyway.
Yeah, on with the future.
Yeah, of course, Bill Barr had a big hand in that.
And so, you know, Barr makes big noises when he says the president was spied upon.
He is correct.
OK, now, is he willing to follow through?
No.
They did indict one guy, but what they didn't do was anything, you know, I forgot all the legal terminology or whatever, but they didn't set it up where this guy is flipping now on his superiors who made him do it.
This is who the guy that deleted the message from the CIA analysts that, yeah, Carter Page works for us.
I wonder if Brennan, he must have not been in on that.
But anyway, they deleted that out.
Oh, yeah.
Whenever he met with the Russians, he would come and debrief us because he's an American patriot and everything in order to get that FISA warrant.
And the FBI lawyer who changed that, he got in trouble.
But they didn't do it in a way where, you know, there's pressure on him to, you know, we're going to give you a longer sentence unless you testify against somebody else or anything like that.
It's sort of a closed cul-de-sac kind of a case, the way they set it up, from what I understand.
Yeah, I'm glad you mentioned that, Scott, because that's one of the big unknowns.
He pleaded guilty.
OK, so what does that mean?
Normally, it means that he's going to sing, right?
He's going to say, well, you know, I did it, but Comey told me to do it or McCabe told me to do it.
Now, I'm willing to be surprised.
You've heard my negative attitude on all this.
But today's Friday, right?
It could be that John Ratcliffe, the head of the National, well, he's the director of national intelligence.
We'll have the cojones to do what Trump has authorized, and that is to release more information.
And he really is a new, younger Trump guy and not like Dan Coats, the old senator, you know, in that position.
So he really might do it, right?
I think he's more likely to follow through than Barr or Durham.
Yeah.
Well, you know, Barr is the key.
If he authorizes Durham to go ahead and do an interim report, which is very much what Devin Nunes, the ranking member of the House Intelligence Community, wants, then, you know, I would be pleasantly surprised because the American people would at least have a shot at what really happened.
Now, as you know, from what I've said before, I think they're all going to chicken out.
And of course, the big the biggest chicken of all is Donald Trump.
He's got to worry about what happens to him after he's president.
And, you know, did you know that the intelligence community has six ways to Sunday to get you?
Get at you?
Well, they do even after your president.
So I think they are going to cave in in fear.
But what I said was Friday, usually Friday, a big bombshell comes out.
And I do not want to exclude the possibility that, well, that Bill Barr would say, look, Mr. President, what do you got to lose at this point?
For God's sake, let's let Durham do an interim report just so we get this stuff out.
I don't exclude that.
I don't think it's likely.
Yeah, well, I mean, if it's put to him as a choice, look, either we can issue a bunch of indictments or we can do a PR thing, but we really don't want to indict anyone else.
So let's just tell the truth about it.
I don't know.
It's a pretty lame position for the president to be in when these guys clearly committed crimes in order to do this.
And the whole thing is, you know, again, as you said, it comes close to sedition.
Like, I don't know exactly what the terminology is there.
And for the Lysander Spooner fans in the audience, these people like Ray actually did owe allegiance and took their sacred oath to the law, the Constitution that creates their authority.
Not that the FBI or CIA are in the Constitution anywhere or anything, but, you know, their constitutional, their authority is derived from the Congress and the presidency described in the Constitution.
They are bound in loyalty to that.
And for them to take on a major party candidate for president, to even dare to conspire with the Hillary team on pushing this thing forward in the summer of 2016, never even mind the years of continuing hoax and pretended investigation after that, for them to even think for a minute that they could try this ought to be a red alert for everybody that, you know, this is what it looks like when your republic becomes an empire and then kills itself.
Well, you heard Chuck Schumer and Rachel Maddow decrying the the rudeness and the chutzpah of people criticizing the intelligence community.
Can you imagine Trump criticizing the intelligence community and Trump saying bad things about NATO and saying that maybe he didn't want to war with Russia?
Oh, my God.
You know, this is a threat.
So Trump was such a buffoon.
No one expected him to win.
And this is key.
You know, why did Comey, why did Brennan and Clapper feel that they could get away with this?
Well, the odds were nine out of ten at one point.
That Hillary was sure to win.
And when you actually don't don't believe McGovern on this, Comey writes this in his book.
I'll quote it, quote, I was operating in an environment in which I was sure Hillary Clinton would be the next president of the United States, period, end quote.
Well, if you're operating in that kind of environment, you take all kinds of liberties with the law and the Constitution.
You help her win and then you get promoted or you're allowed to stay in place and you get a lot of plates on.
You don't get indicted.
Right.
Whoops.
She lost.
OK, now what's the problem now?
Oh, my God.
They were they were so into this thing and so convinced she would win that they did not take rudimentary, rudimentary security steps to hide their tracks.
The tracks are out there.
John Durham has them.
Bill Barr has them.
That's why they feel so confident in saying, yeah, the president was bugged.
And yet the tracks remain hidden because the the power of the intelligence community, as Chuck Schumer accurately described it, is prevailing here.
These guys are all afraid.
And you've got the national security state on steroids as Joe Biden comes in, sleepy Joe, and tries to deal with them.
This is really pretty important stuff.
Yeah, it's perhaps less important than that.
Trump not be around for four more years, but at least the American people will be deprived of all this.
And when you write another book, Scott, you'll get they'll get a little bit of the right scoop on this, but it will all be OBE overtaken by events.
Yeah.
Well, you know, I don't know, man, I'm not so sure that Trump is going to lose as you are my model for this still.
And I could be wrong and things could change.
I mean, this almost self-inflicted kind of careless sweeping of the virus through the West Wing here is this self-inflicted October surprise is one example of how quickly things can change in politics, although I'm not sure how much that changes things for Trump.
But I look at it on the model of 2012.
A lot of people hated Obama, but a lot of people loved him and nobody loves Mitt Romney.
And the same thing here with Biden.
In fact, I read a thing in Politico, which is the Democrats, where they're saying, listen, I mean, their strategy is in plain language that we're hoping antipathy for Trump can overcome the total lack of enthusiasm for Biden.
And man, trying to overcome an incumbent with that in when the economy is bad, but the bubble is on the upswing at the moment.
And you have a level of dedication for Trump, who probably is, frankly, the most famous person who's ever lived.
Right.
In terms of, you know, comparing him to Elvis or whoever, whatever superstar, you know, he's that level of star in pop culture and then president, too, in the age of, you know, the mediatization of everything.
And I don't know, man, you're right that the state is on Biden's side.
No question about that.
But that's part of how Trump got elected in the first place.
Right.
It was people were sick and tired of the consensus that John McCain and Joe Biden and the Bushes and Clintons all represent.
Yeah, I think the new factor, of course, is the virus and the fact that, what, 210,000 people have been killed now.
And Trump is has proven himself a terrible leader on just about everything.
So don't get me wrong.
I'm not arguing for him.
I'm just Howard Cosell calling the score here.
But no, I think I think it's really good that we have this back and forth.
His taxes are another thing.
You know, I regret to say it, but American citizens, to the degree they're informed at all, don't care much about killing hundreds of thousands of people that don't look like us.
But they do care about cheating on taxes when you're a millionaire.
OK, that's big.
And even though the evidence is not complete, they've been told that story.
So for what it's worth, I think that he's going to lose.
And the problem I have is what he does when he loses.
And this is really big because it really is unprecedented, at least in my historical review.
If he refuses to concede and if he's already packed the Supreme Court with yet another of his devotees, then we could be in for a really, really tough situation where we have armed, armed gangs supporting Trump and we have the rest of us who don't don't necessarily carry a weapon and all we have is the printed word or our voice.
It's going to be really, really difficult in January if this is the way or January in November, December, in January, if this is the way it pans out.
That's what I worry about most.
Yeah, you know, there's a lot of talk and it's funny because even just yesterday, Nancy Pelosi was saying, you know, meet me back here tomorrow.
We're going to have a big discussion about invoking the 25th Amendment, only the excuse that Trump has the germ when clearly he's got a light case of it, or at least he's got a very successful treatment for it.
And she wants to pretend to believe that this can be she's going to and under the 25th Amendment, you've got to get the cabinet to go along with it.
And what is she even talking about?
It's and, you know, there's this whole thing, the transparency, the election transparency initiative for you, exactly what's called something like that, where, you know, there as as Rosa Brooks, the law professor at Georgetown University, put it in her piece in The Washington Post about it under their scenario in any situation other than a Biden landslide, they fight and the Democrats refuse to concede and they call it Trump stealing it.
And they point at armed right wingers and pretend that that's the coup when actually they're the ones doing the coup and like a color coded revolution and attempted one in Belarus or something where and they're even saying that they would have they accused Trump of this, but they say themselves that they would have the Democratic controlled state legislatures in the Midwestern states defy the vote and send Democratic electors to the electoral college.
And if that didn't work, they would even get the West Coast three states to threaten to secede from the union.
And and try to and this is Podesta, Hillary Clinton's campaign manager and all leaders of the Democratic Party essentially saying and I'm not sure I can imagine Biden really going along with this, but essentially saying if they don't win outright that they will do everything they can, as Hillary Clinton said, that Biden should refuse to concede the election under any circumstances.
So I'm not sure who's gearing up to steal this thing more than the other, you know, from here.
It looks like about a wash, probably, you know, if we have one more minute, I just want to point out from my Russia background that Vladimir Putin almost certainly has his strategic rocket forces on alert.
Why do I say that?
The president of the United States is on steroids.
He acted like he was dominated by steroids and putting out, what was it, 47 tweets in one hour.
He's not reliable.
People talk about taking the nuclear football away from him.
They should.
And so this is really, really, really, really dangerous because when Putin and the rest of the Russian authorities cannot be confident that the president of the United States won't thrash out as he does politically or even try to use some of his armed forces to force an incident over the Black Sea or wherever, that's really.
Now, do we know that they're on alert?
No, we don't know.
Would we know?
No, we wouldn't know because everybody is damn scared to leak anything because they'll end up like Julian Assange with life in a maximum security prison.
Yeah.
Well, let's hope we don't get all blowed up.
I'm with you on that, Scott.
Yeah, man.
Yeah.
And, you know, let's hope tweeting is the worst of it.
But you're right.
I mean, those things can cause a lot of rage and anxiety and crazy kind of reactions in people.
Although it doesn't seem like he'd be on that treatment over a very long period of time here or anything.
So anyway, but anyway, you're right about the one more minute.
We got to go.
But thank you so much for spending an hour with us.
It's been great talking with you as always, Ray.
Most welcome, Scott.
All right, you guys, that's the great Ray McGovern.
He's at RayMcGovern.com and he's also at Antiwar.com here.
Comey's amnesia makes Senate session unforgettable.
Oh, yeah.
And I forgot the latest one is Trump orders Russiagate documents declassified.
So what?
I got a I totally forgot.
I even asked you, did you notice that he had ordered the thing to class?
Yeah.
Anyway, you wrote a whole article about it.
I approved it.
We're running it at Antiwar.com and I am officially as old as you somehow now.
Right.
But no, no, don't even say that.
All right.
Take care, buddy.
Love you, man.
All right, you take care.
The Scott Horton Show, Antiwar Radio, can be heard on KPFK 90.7 FM in L.A., APSRadio.com, Antiwar.com, ScottHorton.org and LibertarianInstitute.org.
