Hey you guys, Scott here.
It's fundraising time again at the Libertarian Institute.
And I say again very loosely because we haven't even held a fund drive since the summer of 2019.
And the reason for that is because you guys were so generous in the great book and institute fundraiser of summer 19 that I felt terrible coming back to you again until the book was finished.
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And I got to be able to pay my guys and pay my vendors and keep this thing going.
So I need help from you.
It's myself, the legendary Sheldon Richman, the firebrand Pete Quinonez, the brilliant Kyle Anzalone, who also works for antiwar.com.
And of course we got Keith Knight, Tommy Salmons, Patrick McFarlane, and all your great podcast hosts there, plus all the best writers in the libertarian movement.
And very proud about the six books that we've published so far.
Three of mine, two of Sheldon's and one posthumous book of the great William Norman Grigg.
And we've got more great book projects coming up this year.
We're going to publish one by the great Brad Hoff about Syria and Richard Booth, the best journalist in America on the Oklahoma City bombing, is writing a book all about it for the Libertarian Institute as well.
And not only that, but now that enough already is done, we're going to try to make part of this fun drive an effort to raise money to buy extra copies of wholesale books so that we can send these to, I don't know, the few best congressmen and their staff, the best people in media, all the middle-ranked newspapers.
A stash, I like to send five or ten books to all the best peace groups so they have them for all their people and whatever.
Of course, the advantage of publishing these books at the Libertarian Institute is we get to do them however we want, but the disadvantage is we don't have a big marketing team and a big budget.
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All right, you guys, on the line, I've got the great Ray McGovern.
He was a CIA analyst for 27 years.
In fact, he was the head analyst, the chief of the Soviet division back when, and he was the briefer for H.W. Bush when he was the vice president in the 1980s, and he spent the entire 21st century long, anyway, opposing all of America's horrible wars, co-founder of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity.
Welcome back to the show, Ray.
How are you, sir?
Thanks, Scott.
I'm doing well.
You're a good man.
I really like you, and I really like the work that you do, and I was just sticking up for you the other day because some kook on Twitter, some very influential Russiagate pushing type, had you on the list of all the crazy QAnon people because you one time went on the Alex Jones show, and so somehow that makes you a QAnon supporter and follower in a long thread of him accusing essentially any former intelligence official, whoever gets anything right at all of being part of this madness, you know, you and Mike Flynn, you know, anyway.
I'm very happy to have you on the show because I know much better than that, and man, I love this piece.
Will Comey's words come back to haunt him?
Who's Comey?
What words did he ever say that might come back to haunt him, Ray?
I try to phrase these questions as broadly as I can for you, my friend.
Well, how much time do we have?
You've got 55 minutes, friend.
I'm kidding.
You're asking me to spell out Comey's lies, and I just wanted to, you know, know which ones I could fit in, in an hour.
Essentially we are at a giant stadium and the entire floor is yours.
Okay, yeah.
The most recent one, it comes out in a very flagrant way because it's in writing.
A group down south did a Freedom of Information Act request for this kind of information and lo and behold, after I think three years, they got a, well, they got an email that James Comey, the head of the FBI at the time, wrote to James Clapper, who is the national intelligence director at the time.
Okay, now the time happened to be the 12th of January 2017.
Now what Comey says to Clapper is, you know, we can't really verify, we can't really corroborate this business, what Steele is saying.
Steele, of course, is the fellow who, you know, who made up all that stuff about Russiagate and implicating Trump in all kinds of scurrilous, salacious things.
So what Comey says to Clapper is, you know, we can't really corroborate that.
The only trouble is that on that same day, January 12th, 2017, he signed a warrant.
He attested to the fact that, whoa, the information we have from Christopher Steele regarding Russian collusion has been, quote, verified, end quote.
He signed that request or application for a FISA warrant, that's a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act warrant, to be able to spy on Corda Page.
Now he can't really say on the same day that that information is verified.
And also in writing, tell the national intelligence director Clapper that, well, we're not able to, the quote is, we're not able to sufficiently corroborate Steele's reporting.
So what's going on here?
No, it sounds like a crime.
I mean, if you file an affidavit in front of the FISA court, that's a sworn affidavit under the penalty of perjury, is it not, Ray McGovern?
It's a felony, yeah.
It's a felony.
And the question is whether top dogs in the intelligence community would ever be accountable.
Now it doesn't look as though James Comey is going to be held to account, and we can explore those reasons later.
So it's quite understandable Americans would be asking themselves, well, Corda Page, who's Corda Page for God's sake, you know?
Well, Corda Page started working for the Trump campaign in March of 2016.
He was a sort of a bit player, a so-called foreign policy advisor, not much stature.
But wait a second now, he had contacts with Russians, Russians, Russians.
He had business dealings with them.
As a matter of fact, the CIA used Corda Page as, you know, kind of a source for information that he could glean from his contacts in Russia.
Now the CIA told the FBI that, but Comey said, you know, that doesn't matter.
We think he might still be a spy because he talked with Russians, he met with Russians, he knows Russians.
And so what Comey did was, of course, use what Steele, this Christopher Steele fellow from, he's an ex-spy for the UK, pretended to know something about Russia.
He served up all this stuff so that Comey could use it in this application for a FISA warrant, a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act warrant.
Now the question is, why is this important?
Well Corda Page wasn't the target, for Pete's sake.
Corda Page was just low-hanging fruit, as I say in my article.
It was easy pickings.
Trump, Donald Trump and other higher-ups were the real target.
Now what does that mean?
Well that means that by cooking up charges, suspicions against Corda Page, they could get a warrant to surveil Corda Page and under the rules, under the procedures approved most recently by President Obama, they could not only surveil Corda Page, but they could surveil anyone that Corda Page talked to or emailed, and they could surveil anyone that talked to those, anyone's that talked to Scott Horton.
In other words, okay, in other words, not Scott Horton, but Corda Page.
Now if Corda Page happened to call one of the president's folks or the president himself, ipso facto, the president or his folks are being surveilled.
This is the two hops theory, right?
Yeah, the two hops is what it's called.
And you know, my colleagues at NSA talked about when Obama approved the latest edition of this, and they said, man, the NSA people were ecstatic, because wow, that meant that they could get evidence from any number of hops.
And let's say Corda Page, Google, okay, Google would expose anyone who used Google, which is half the world.
Yeah.
Or if he called AT&T customer service on his cell phone, right?
Yeah.
Right.
So, so that's the rub here.
It wasn't spying on Corda Page, it was spying on the president.
Now hold that thought for just a second.
I want to clarify one thing with you real quick here.
Just it's kind of stupid, but I'm just curious about the jargon here.
Because if you're a CIA analyst, then I think we just call you a CIA analyst, right?
And then if you're a spy on the operation side, then you call the CIA officer.
And then that means a CIA agent is, people use those interchangeably.
Like agent means officer.
But when you say agent, or if you said agent, you would be referring more to someone who had been turned by an officer, right?
But then there's a lower level of classification, an asset, like say, Freeway Ricky Ross selling crack in Los Angeles in the 1980s, something like that, who you wouldn't call him an agent, or would you call, is it really that people conflate agent and officer, but they really should conflate agent and asset?
Those are really the same thing.
And that's what Corda Page was.
Is that correct?
Yeah.
When people travel to what was then the Soviet Union or Russia, and they meet with Russians, they are debriefed when they come back.
Sometimes they're briefed before with items that we, the CIA, really want to know about.
So they're not actually spies.
We don't use this terminology in a kind of legalistic way.
They're referred to as people who travel to Russia, people who kind of cooperate in terms of trying to find out things.
So they would just call them a friendly source or something that's not like an official term.
There's got to be an official term for it.
If not agent or asset, what is it?
Well, they're referred to often as assets, but not as agents.
Agents are usually paid by the CIA to do these things.
They may have paid some expenses for Corda Page, but he's not a...
An agent usually is a foreign national working under the direction of a CIA case officer.
The case officer is what we would call the CIA operations officer.
So the distinction is very blurry.
In this case, Page is an asset of the CIA, and essentially one that they can count on.
Not just that they talked to him before, but that they talk to him every time he goes to Russia kind of a thing.
Am I right?
Yeah.
He's an asset in that sense.
Sure.
Yeah.
He's an asset whenever he talked to them, but he's not under their direction.
So then now we know, and one guy was convicted and sentenced to a slap on the wrist for forging this FISA warrant to omit that fact so that the FISA court wouldn't know that this guy's a loyal American patriot.
What do you mean he's a spy?
Every time he talks to a Russian, he spills his entire guts to the CIA all about it, completely voluntarily.
He's a friend of ours, as the mob says, right?
And they cut that out in order to get this warrant.
As you say, not to spy on Corda Page, but to spy on the entire Trump campaign, including the president of the United States, or at that time, the major party already nominated candidate for president of the United States, and then later the president-elect and president.
Right into several months into Trump's term as president, these things were renewed three times, the last two when Trump was president.
So yeah, that's what they were trying to do.
And in that sense, even William Barr is correct in saying, yeah, the president was spied upon.
And you know, nobody really knows that, but that's the way it worked.
And this two-hop system is still in place.
So be careful who you talk to.
By talking to me, Scott, you are automatically a hop away from danger.
Oh, yeah.
Boy, am I in trouble.
I talked to Rick Ojeda, the guy who, the FBI agent who investigated the things he wasn't supposed to investigate about the Oklahoma bombing.
I'm screwed.
Yep.
Anyway, and that was a long time ago.
I've been two-hopping my ass this whole time.
You know, Scott, it's in one sense humorous, the degree to which this has gone.
But I avoided saying up front, like in my title, Comey lied again.
Should Comey be in jail?
Why?
Well, that's as far as I go on self-censorship.
But I didn't want Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, to delete my piece, which I wrote for you guys.
Right.
So, you know, it's really pretty, pretty bad.
And you know, worried to have done that, well, several of my friends have had their homes invaded at 630 in the morning.
Their offices ransacked by Max Blumenthal, for example, John Kiriakou.
I mean, it's gotten pretty bad.
So Max Blumenthal's house was raided in the morning.
Kiriakou.
His house was raided.
Oh, no, no, no.
Oh, I know about Kiriakou, but I thought you said Max Blumenthal's house was raided.
Is that what you just said?
Yes, it was.
When was that?
Say again.
When was that?
That was about, I guess, seven months ago.
I wrote an article on it.
Okay.
Was this over at the Venezuela embassy protest stuff?
Well, it was a whole bunch of things.
Max is a very outspoken reporter, as you know.
Sure, yeah.
And he was detained in Washington.
And while he was detained, they ransacked as they went through his stuff.
Oh, I see.
I was thinking, yeah, that was the...
I'm sorry.
I misunderstood.
Like, you know, night raid or early morning raid of his home while he was there kind of a thing.
And I didn't remember that story.
But you're saying they went to his house while they had him arrested from the protest.
I got you.
Yeah.
Which, by the way, and you talk about the Twitter memory hole, Paul Sperry, who is, you know, a conservative leaning, but a very mainstream reporter.
I mean, he's written for the Wall Street Journal.
He wrote for Antiwar.com back a long time ago on like, what do the Saudis know about September 11th type stuff?
But you know, he is a very mainstream, I don't know, very mainstream, but he is a mainstream straight laced professional journalist who's done, yes, a lot of great work debunking Russiagate at Real Clear Investigations and things like that.
But I mean, I don't know what their claim was of him violating rules.
But I've never seen and I follow him on Twitter.
I've never seen him argue with anyone there.
He just says breaking news.
This thing happened.
Follow this link to it.
And it's his own original reporting.
You know what I mean?
That's all he's doing.
He's promoting his own work on there.
And that's it.
He's not calling people bad names or even engaging in that kind of a way at all.
There's a very straight laced reporter.
And they just kicked him right off of the Twitter, which took them so long.
I don't know.
But yeah, things are getting pretty ugly out there, man.
Yeah, they are.
And so will James Comey be put in prison?
I wouldn't hold my breath.
You know, this gets pretty cynical.
Who are the people that are supposed to be looking after or overseeing James Comey and the head of the FBI?
Well, Senator Grassley from Iowa.
He's been head of the Judiciary Committee and now he's a ranking member.
How does he look at this?
Well, he wrote an email.
I mean, he's older than I am.
He still emails, right?
Okay.
So he says this.
He says, look, when Clinesmith, this lawyer who changed the CIA warning that Carter Page was indeed a CIA source, he changed it.
No, no, he wasn't a source.
And that facilitated the cover up with the application to the FISA course.
In other words, Clinesmith was a small fry, but he wrote, he changed the email from the CIA so that the FISA court would approve it.
Well, when he was sentenced, I mean, I had to pay more for standing up silently, turning my back on Hillary Clinton than Clinesmith had to pay.
He had to pay a hundred dollars, right?
And he's on probation for like six months or a year or something like that.
No jail time.
So what does Grassley say?
Grassley says, wow, this is no surprise because it's very rare that the FBI will turn on one of its own.
He says, you know, it's the old department of just us, J-U-S-T-U-S.
Okay.
That's what we're dealing with here.
Just us.
Now, I don't know if he got that from Bill Binney, but Bill Binney has been using that term for a decade or so.
But what does that say?
Okay.
That says that Senator Grassley, who's supposed to be monitoring, supposed to be overseeing the Department of Justice, realizes that it's really just the Department of just us.
As my friend George Carlin used to say, you know, it's a big club, but you ain't in it.
It's just us, the muckety-mucks at the top of the FBI and the DOJ, and nothing proves it better than this communication from Comey to Clapper saying, you know, we can't substantiate this, but I just told the FISA court today that it was verified.
Hello?
Wait a minute, Ray McGovern.
Did you say that you were old friends with George Carlin?
Well, he's from, I think he's from my neighborhood in the Bronx.
My old, yeah, maybe he's an old friend, but no, I didn't know him personally.
Oh, okay.
Because he's all of our old friend in that sense, but I just thought, actually, I thought about it and I was like, wait a minute, man.
You guys are a couple of Irishmen from somewhere in New York.
I don't know exactly, but maybe you guys are old pals.
I don't know.
I wanted to hear a story if there was one.
One of the highest compliments I've gotten after my speeches, Scott, has been, you know, you remind me of George Carlin.
Really?
That's great.
Yeah.
No, you know what?
You got a big heart just like he did.
I know that.
All right.
I'm sorry to interrupt.
Go ahead and talk more bad about these horrible FBI guys.
Well, you know, when I joshed at the beginning of this session as to how much time we had, I was recalling the first time that I was asked to speak on the falsified evidence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.
This was Peter Kuznick of American University, who was holding a teach-in.
He calls me up three days before and says, Ray, we want you to talk about the lies.
The intelligence that was distorted to justify the attack on Iraq.
And my first, I wasn't kidding, my first reaction was, well, how much time do I have?
He got it right away.
He laughed.
He said, seven minutes.
I said, I can't do it in seven minutes.
He said, well, do what you can.
OK.
And that was the first big teach-in.
Dan Ellsberg was the fellow testifying before me.
So when you asked me to tell you about James Comey's lies, my instinctive reaction was, how much time do I have?
He lied about just about everything.
One of my favorite ones is when he testified before the Senate Intelligence Committee, and Richard Burr, and he had clearly rehearsed his testimony.
So Richard Burr was the chair, and he said, now, Mr. Comey, this business about hacking into the Democratic National Committee emails, you didn't seize the computers, did you?
No, sir, I didn't.
Well, how do you know what happened?
What actually, who hacked it?
So, oh, well, we referred on a first flight outfit called CrowdStrike.
Well-respected, and my folks tell me that they just delivered the goods, OK?
Now, fast forward to May 7th of last year, when we learned from formal sworn testimony from the head of CrowdStrike that they detected no exfiltration of DNC emails.
As hard as they tried, they concluded there was no technical evidence that DNC emails were hacked, that is, electronically hacked by Russia, by anybody.
And they had the access to it.
So here's Comey saying this is a crackerjack outfit.
Here's Mueller just eating up whatever they say.
And what they really said, according to sworn testimony of December 5, 2017, before Schiff's committee in the House, he testified there was no technical evidence of exfiltration, although we saw evidence that the emails were being prepared for exfiltration.
What does that mean?
That means they were being assembled in such a way that they could be downloaded onto a thumb drive, put in somebody's pocket, and taken to WikiLeaks for publication.
We have been saying that since the 12th of December, 2016, OK, thanks to our two former NSA technical directors, Bill Binney and Ed Loomis.
They knew how the thing worked.
They had the help of slides and charts off the wall from Ed Snowden.
And, you know, they knew the principles of physics.
They knew that if there was any exfiltration, that is, any hacking, that NSA would ipso facto know it.
And the slight chance NSA didn't know it, then the others, people called the five eyes, the other four eyes would certainly have seen it.
So Comey has never been held accountable.
He also talked a lot about, oh, the Internet Research Agency.
This is a crowd of young people in St. Petersburg.
I bought a couple of ads on Facebook, and this was supposed to have affected people's choice in the election of 2016.
You know, it's male bovine excrement to be, you know, not to say BS out loud.
But we looked at the Facebook postings for that period, and the period went way beyond the election, after the election.
We looked at them and they, you got a pencil, they represented 0.00000046% of all the Facebook data that was out there during that period.
So we were being asked to believe, and the New York Times, of course, would never backtrack on this, that these Internet postings on Facebook also affected the election.
By the way, let me just throw in here as a parenthesis real quick that Gareth Porter, of course, wrote the definitive debunking of the New York Times coverage of that at consortiumnews.com, if anybody wants to look.
Mm-hmm.
Yeah, he did.
He had two articles on that, and he keeps going strong.
The other thing is this.
Most people don't know this, so I'll raise it.
The director of national intelligence, Ratcliffe, gave the Senate committee information about a decision alleged to have been made by Hillary Clinton on the 26th of July 2016, so right in the heat of the campaign, to vilify Putin, to blame him for just about everything, to say that Trump was in his pocket, and that that information in an intelligence report from the Russians, mind you, from the Russians.
Now, why is that important?
Well, because it was judged to be of such importance that it was briefed to President Obama, and then it was also given to the Department of Justice as a referral.
Find out who did this.
Find out how this information—look into it, okay?
Now, why is that important?
Well, when you do a referral to the Department of Justice, which is required if there's a leak, okay?
So the way I reconstruct it is that somebody in the intelligence apparatus saw what was going on, saw that nobody appreciated the fact that Clinton and her bunch had started this whole campaign against Russia, and decided, oh, here's a Russian report.
I can leak this, okay?
And then, you know, at least we'll get it out into the open that Hillary decided on the 26th of July 2016 to blame the Russians for just about everything.
Now she's trying to blame them for January 6th disturbances at the Capitol.
So that means that somebody surfaced this thing, and that's the only reason why there would be a Department of Justice referral.
So they briefed Obama.
They did a Justice Department referral.
It's in hard copy from the Director of National Intelligence.
And yet, do you see anything about this?
Do you see much about this in The New York Times?
No.
Do you see the testimony of the head of CrowdStrike?
Testimony going back to the 5th of December 2017 that there was no evidence that the Russians or anyone else hacked into the DNC computers?
Do you see that in The New York Times?
No.
Well, give them time.
Yeah, it's only been nine and a half months, nine and a half months, May 7th, 2020, that the Director of National Intelligence released that report.
So give them time.
Now, it wasn't the Director of National Intelligence.
It was Schiff himself.
Schiff kept all this testimony going back to December of 2017 secret until he was told by the Director of National Intelligence, look, you release those transcripts of the testimony of the head of CrowdStrike and others, or I'm going to do it.
And so on the 7th of May last year, Schiff released these things.
Not a word.
Not a word.
Not a word in The New York Times or The Washington Post that their whole edifice on Russiagate, which was built originally, at least, on Russian hacking, has fallen apart because the guy, the horse's mouth, the guy who knows, his name was Sean Henry.
He testified on the 5th of December 2017.
They had no evidence.
So what is Comey talking about here?
First rate, upper class, he called it, high class cyber security.
We relied on those because my folks, as he used to call them, my former folks, they told me that this was a crackerjack unit.
What male bovine excrement will come out of Comey's mouth and be replicated or at least reported in The New York Times?
So my beef here is this, that, well, you know it better than anyone, Scott.
Unless we find some way to force ourselves onto the pages of the computers of people who still believe The New York Times has all the news that's fit to print, they're going to keep believing it.
And it's very disheartening when I go back to New York.
You know, I grew up in the Bronx and we read The New York Times, as my Irish grandfather used to say, we read it black and white, in other words, every page, right?
And my parents wouldn't go to bed at night until they had finished reading it, unless they fell asleep.
If they fell asleep, there was a special place that they put the unfinished New York Times and they wouldn't dare open the morning's New York Times until they had finished the one from before.
So, you know, used to be able to get pretty good information.
There were more warmongers in that time, but we didn't know it.
Pretty good information, New York Times.
You can't do it anymore.
But if you tell somebody, like, I've told my friends, I go up there, I used to go up there, I say, look, the head of CrowdStrike has disavowed any notion that there was hacking by Russia or anybody else.
They look at me like I have three heads, you know?
No, that can't be.
I mean, hello.
It's not in The New York Times.
By the way, Ray, have you read Matt Taibbi's new book, Hate, Inc?
I haven't had a chance to yet.
You know what?
Get your hands on that and your eyeballs on that.
You'll love it.
And it's really he talks about how, you know, we were slaves under the old New York Times slash rather Jennings Brokaw monopoly on messaging in this country.
And then what happened was Fox News decided that actually we don't have to play it down the middle because rich people, old people skew rich and Republicans.
So we're just going to target them and sell them gold coins and stuff and make a killing on that.
And so instead of shooting for the broad audience of the whole country and then, you know, the Internet, not to blame the Internet, but with the advent of the Internet and especially with Facebook and YouTube and the way all the algorithms are set up, he talks about how everyone is just divided into these tiny little silos of information where everybody has their favorite guys that they get their information from and they don't get to hear the other guy's point of view at all.
So they're not even having the same arguments.
Even if they're talking about Russiagate, the right wing's messaging or narrative on Russiagate on one day is not really an answer to what the liberals are saying that day.
They're kind of off.
They might as well be on an island having their own kind of separate discussion.
So they're not really arguing back and forth.
They're only arguing with what they say the other guy says and this kind of thing.
And it's it's getting worse and worse to where like you're talking about the New York Times.
You know, they always lied, but they would always have to kind of fess up.
Remember when they pretended that the Russians started the war in Georgia in August 2008 and then in November they said, nah, we were lying.
That isn't true.
It's the Georgians did it.
You know what I mean?
It's just a few months later.
They had to admit it.
But in this case, no, as you say, they don't even touch the story at all.
They don't even admit it at all.
After three years of telling us all this stuff was true, they don't even admit.
And in fact, famously, the big story that came out in the end of January, very beginning of February 2017 in The New York Times, multiple Trump campaign officials had contacts with top Russian intelligence agents and all that.
That still doesn't have a correction appended to it.
Even after Comey himself said it wasn't true.
Just a few months later in the spring of 17, still in front of the U.S. Congress, they still don't have a correction on it.
And so people who want to believe in this Russiagate stuff, that it was never debunked, that, of course, it's all true.
I see it all the time on Twitter.
Liberals still believe.
I still want to know exactly what Putin had on Trump to control him the way he did that whole time, as though none of this stuff has fallen apart yet.
Well, when you have Hillary Clinton interviewing Nancy Pelosi and saying, Nancy, we've got to get to the bottom of this.
What kind of a hold Putin has on Trump?
I'd love to see the transcripts of their telephone call or calls, plural, on the 6th of January 2021.
I wonder what Putin was telling Trump while the riots were going on at the Capitol.
You know, I'd love to get that, Pelosi.
Yes, all roads lead to Putin.
Clinton, you know, what we need is a 9-11 commission type commission to look into this and see how beholden Trump has been to Putin, Nancy Pelosi.
Good idea, yeah.
And there are a lot of people in Congress that would approve that.
Now, the latest reports are that she's going to go ahead with this 9-11 type commission, as though the 9-11 commission did a service to our people.
It did not.
And two chairmen admitted that, as they put it, they were destined to fail.
They were not given enough money.
They were not given enough time.
They were not given enough access to secret information.
All of this, they said two years after the famous commission report.
So we're going to have another commission like this?
Yeah.
And what are they going to do?
Are they going to find the Russian hand behind the events of January 6th?
Well, if Hillary Clinton's still running the Democratic Party and Pelosi is so enamored of what Hillary says, yeah, there's a chance they'll say, well, there's an appendix here written by blah, blah, blah, blah.
And they say, yeah, we know there was.
It's so, so strange.
Now, let me just add one thing here.
It's not only my old college friends up in New York.
It's people I worked with in the agency and CIA.
Three years ago, I got an email from a really savvy guy.
We used to work on the President's Daily Brief together.
And he says, I don't know how you got put.
I don't know how you put yourself in Putin's pocket.
But I want to tell you that I have openly denounced you.
And now I feel relieved because I will not be followed or I will not be prosecuted because of my past association with you.
He put that in writing, not only in an email, but in a comment underneath one of my writings.
More recently and more specifically with respect to James Comey, another former colleague of mine, writing in Counterpunch, had a piece called Comey Whistleblower.
Here it is.
There's no better example of a genuine ethical leadership than Comey's role as whistleblower.
Why?
Yep.
I've been in the government for over 40 years, and he is a public servant in the best sense of that term.
Now, I have to say that this was back in, what, September of 19.
But still, my God.
So this narrative that they all cling to, that Hillary and Comey, they were all doing their job, completely dissociates themselves from the real information.
And so they don't know about CrowdStrike.
And they don't know.
They'll never know now that Comey lied to the FISA court unless the New York Times publishes it.
And when they do, they'll probably put it on page A-17, below three ads for really nice bras.
I used to work on Russian media.
I used to kind of try to read.
There was no automatic translation.
We used to get the Russian original.
I used to read Pravda News Vesti first thing in the morning.
And sure enough, I laughed.
There was one propaganda term they used that I used to really laugh at.
It was talking about Wall Street skia krava pizzoi.
Okay, Wall Street skia, that's Wall Street adjective.
Krav is blood.
Pit is drink.
So, Wall Street bloodsuckers.
You know, a young guy in my 20s, I'd throw up my hands.
Ah, come on, this is so ridiculous.
Wall Street bloodsuckers.
And then as I got older, and then as 2008, 2009 came by, and then as I began to understand how the world really works, not just the Russian world, but our own, I could realize that Wall Street skia krava pizzoi was exactly the right term to use for the people who are running this country as part of what I call the Mickey Matt.
I'm going to advertise that one more time, since lots of people are picking it up.
We used to talk about Eisenhower and the Mick, you know, the military industrial complex.
Now it's broadened out to the Mickey Matt.
That rhymes with Mickey Mouse, so you can remember it.
Here it is.
The Military Industrial Congressional Intelligence Media Academia Think Tank Complex.
Now, why do I say media?
I say media because it's in all caps and because it's the linchpin.
The other guys, the other parts of the Mickey Matt could not be so successful if they didn't also own and run the media.
And that's where we are today.
Yeah.
Hey, y'all, check it out.
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All right.
Now, so what about John Durham, the torture murderer cover-upper here?
He's been promoted to special counsel so Biden can't fire him.
And so maybe...
And, you know, we did read that he interviewed John Brennan for hours and hours.
They assured him, don't worry.
This is just an interview.
It's okay if you contradict yourself.
We'd never charge you.
But I believe that they would never charge him because look at the way they let this one guy get away with the FISA warrant thing and so far haven't gone after anyone else yet.
And he is the torture murderer cover-upper who served Obama in that capacity covering up Bush's CIA's torture and murder program.
And so I don't know.
That's my setup for the question there.
John Durham, he does have power to abuse.
If he wants to go after these guys, he could, right?
No, not right.
You know, I wrote an article for Antiwar.com.
What's the date here?
December 5.
It was a crucial date.
Nobody seemed to realize it except me.
But that was the day that Barr said, look, my guys have looked at the election results and there are no irregularities that would change what we know that Biden won.
My God, that was right in the middle of Trump just raised in hell, right?
What else did he say?
He said, now, as far as John Durham is concerned, I'm going to try to appoint him special counsel.
Sorry, Barr, no can do.
Special counsels have to come from outside the government.
Now, a couple of my lawyer friends were really helpful to me because despite what the New York Times and Charlie Savage and all those guys were saying, they pointed out that you can't.
You can't appoint a special counsel from inside the government.
And even Barr, when he appointed Durham, as he said, he will have all the duties and responsibilities of a special counsel as though Barr realized he can't.
He can't do this.
He can't appoint Durham special counsel from inside the government.
Now, what does that mean?
Well, that means that even though Durham is still around, he's going to have to be responsive to, I guess it's who is it, Garland, the new attorney general, once he gets confirmed.
And Garland is going to tell him what to do and what he can't do.
And he's not going to have the powers of special counsel because he can't.
He's within the government.
So this whole thing was just sort of window dressing.
Oh, yeah, John Durham's going to keep on the job.
And that's what your editors allowed me to say on the, what was this, December 5th.
Now, there's a discordant note yesterday when I saw that Jonathan Turley, whom I respect very, very much, still seems to think that Durham could come up with something.
And I have to talk to Jonathan Turley because I don't understand why he would say that.
I mean, hell, Biden's in charge now.
Biden was involved in all this stuff.
He, and as I say in my article today, he and Obama were fully briefed on this whole business, steel dossier, the whole nine yards.
Now, how likely is it that Durham is going to be saying, no, you go ahead.
Barr wanted you to be, you can't really be a special counsel, but yeah, go ahead and put the finger on all these guys that worked for us.
Comey, Clapper, Brennan.
So I may be wrong.
I'm not a lawyer.
And as I say, I need to check out with Jonathan Turley why he thinks that Durham is still still in operation.
But even if he is in his office, he's not going to be able to do anything that the attorney general working for Biden doesn't allow him to do.
That's my that's my brief on that one.
Yeah.
And you know what?
He must have just been brought on board to make this thing go away anyway.
You don't go after the leaders of the FBI and the CIA for framing the president for treason.
That's why they're the leaders of the FBI and the CIA.
You can have your little IG report and then that'll be the end of that, you know?
Yeah, I'm afraid you're right there.
Although, you know, we intelligence analysts have to look at open sources as well.
What gave me some hope that Durham might be able to do some things constructive was all the very strong statements coming out of Barr himself, sometimes out of Durham, for example, taking strong issue with the whitewash that Inspector General David Horowitz did on behalf of the Department of Justice, Department of Just Us and the FBI.
So, you know, they disagreed vehemently about a couple of things that Horowitz said, because Horowitz was in a bind.
You know, all he could do was ask various FBI officials, were you were you prejudiced?
Were you prejudiced against Trump?
And they said, oh, no, no, no, not me.
Were you biased?
No, no, no, no.
That's all he could do.
And so he reported that it was, as I say, it was a whitewash because of the restrictions on him as Inspector General of the Department of Just Us.
And so Durham and Barr both reclamed, loudly saying, no, no, no, no, these guys, look at the FISA applications, the stuff I write about this morning.
Look at them, 17 egregious errors, all in favor of throwing doubt on Trump.
You know, if there were like six and then 11, that would be something.
So, you know, it's really, really, really bad.
The intelligence committees, I mentioned Chuck Grassley and Judiciary Committee with overseership over the FBI and DOJ.
Well, you know, it used to be oversight.
Since 75, well, 78 was when the oversight committees were actually set up and running.
There used to be a modicum of real oversight.
Now it's overlook.
You know, they look up to the sky and let this happen.
And then Grassley has the poor judgment to say, yeah, I know the FBI will never go after one of their own.
It's Department of Just Us.
Well, what's wrong with you, Grassley?
You're supposed to be making sure that it's Department of Justice for all of us, not the Department of Just Us.
And as Carlin used to say, it's a club and we ain't in it.
Yep, that's certainly true.
And, you know, I don't know about Mickey, Matt, I hear you.
But at the same time, I don't think we need new jargon, right?
It's just the national security state, the arms industry, the spies, the generals and their golf courses, right?
It's easy.
Why make it needlessly complicated when it's just the combine, right?
That's what they called it in One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest.
Yeah, well, you know, my attitude is this deep state is what it is.
Unfortunately, Donald Trump said deep state.
I just like I like national security state because that's what it really is.
Right.
It's 1947.
In fact, to quote George Carlin, then in 1947, they passed the National Security Act and the industrial guys got in bed with the military and everything's been downhill ever since.
Yeah, but, you know, there's more to it.
There's more to it.
The media, the media is the new element.
I've been saying this is not so new.
I've been saying it for 15 years.
We no longer have a free media.
That is big.
Yeah.
OK, so we media in there.
And then, you know, these think tanks, my God, they're all paid by folks that are eager for arms, arms building, arms making.
And academia has been subverted by by money given to them to do the kinds of things the Pentagon want them to do.
So my idea was not to, you know, substitute for the national security state, which I too like, but to give people something more to think about, to say, well, it's the military industrial complex, but it's more it's Congress, for God's sake.
And as you know, Ike himself wanted to include Congress.
He wanted to make real make.
You know, Nick Turse, Nick Turse, who's the great African military adventures reporter now, he wrote a book called The Complex.
And that was he was coming from the same kind of point of view as you is that there's so many hyphens now instead of hyphens.
Let's just call it the complex because it's it comes it's right down to the tube socks and the boots and the buttons for the army uniforms.
And of course, academia, every, you know, and academia degrees that people aren't really cognizant of at all.
I mean, hell, you could throw in the video game industry, right?
Throw in everybody is in on this thing and is, as William S. Lynn said, a trillion dollars a year.
It's the biggest honeypot in the history of the world.
There's nothing like it.
And so you'd be crazy if you're in any business at all that's even possibly relevant.
You got to get that Pentagon contract or you're committing economic suicide.
Yeah, I'm reminded of a of a report about two months ago where the head of Raytheon, one of the main defense contractors, is quoted.
OK, and he says, and this is almost a direct quote, you know, it looks like there won't be any peace in the Middle East anytime soon.
So we're riding high.
Our business is going to flourish.
Our bottom line is going to be great.
End quote.
All right.
Whoa.
OK, was it?
Why is that so interesting?
Well, we have a new secretary of defense.
Now, I think he used to work for one of those big.
Do you know which which firm?
Yeah, he was sitting on the board of Raytheon.
He was previously the head of Central Command.
Then he went and sat on the board of Raytheon.
And now he's back in charge of the Pentagon again.
Oh, yeah.
Talk about revolving door.
Well, so I have more hope for Austin than that.
But that hope is not based on anything tangible.
So there we go.
Military, industrial, intelligence, correction, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
But I got it.
But the media's got all caps, you know, media's all caps.
Yep, absolutely right.
And and that's the thing of it, right?
Because so much of it is just a matter of what goes unsaid, too.
There's a famous old quote of Henry Kissinger talking about how he watches the nightly news back in the era of the dictatorship, or rather Jennings and Brokaw, and he would watch the nightly news always with the sound off.
He was telling them what to say.
It's not like he needed to hear how they said it.
He just wanted to see what order they covered the stories in, because that was all he really needed to pick up from them was the the amount of emphasis they were giving one story or the other.
And as you're talking about in the case of CrowdStrike here, if it goes unmentioned, then obviously it's unimportant.
You know, if the most important thing today is Ted Cruz being a lousy leader of men, then all the things that aren't being covered, it is implied there that they were not as important as this.
That's it.
These decisions are being made by real professionals who know what's important.
That's their job, the news.
And so when they say that, man, breaking story, obviously the whole country today is paying attention to the developments in these two pop stars relationship or whatever it is, then they are heavily kind of insinuating that nothing else going on is compared to that.
Or, you know, in all our Russiagate stories, them finally admitting that CrowdStrike didn't really know the Russians did it.
That's not really important.
You know, they don't have to say it.
They just have to not say it.
Nothing to see here.
Just move on.
Let me just add a little footnote here very quickly.
Sure.
If you haven't read Mary's Mosaic by Peter Janney, you really need to.
He goes back to the early days of CIA when a fellow named Cord Meyer, Mary Meyer's husband, ran covert operations to include the media.
And he points out that there were CIA influencers and CIA paid agents in all the main media talking about thousands.
Way back then, we're talking late 50s, early 60s.
So this is not something new.
And it's just as pernicious now, perhaps even more than it was then.
Well, this was Bernstein's probably biggest accomplishment outside of Watergate with Woodward was his piece on Operation Mockingbird in the 1970s, too.
Cord Meyer ran that operation.
A friend of yours ran that op, is that what he said?
Cord Meyer is the fellow's name.
It was a really big wheel.
He ran all kinds of covert operations, especially media.
As a matter of fact, he was one of my distant superiors during a tour I did as an intelligence advisor to Radio Free Europe, 68 to 70, to make sure that we didn't incite the Czechs, for example, or the Slovaks as we had the Hungarians back in 1956.
So I was there for the invasion of Czechoslovakia, and I was advising the head of Radio Free Europe, look, the Russians are going to do this.
We're not going to be able to intervene.
Please don't have your bureau chiefs incite people who are just going to be crushed worse than they are already.
So long story short, I was working for the covert action staff as an analyst, but Cord Meyer was my ultimate boss.
And I even had a session with him when I came back from Germany, and I had a bunch of complaints.
And he was startled that someone of my low rank, relatively low rank, would have complaints to a fellow as important as Cord Meyer.
Yeah, he ran the whole Mockingbird thing.
And that's very evident in this book that I recommend again.
Peter Jani, Mary's Mosaic is the name of it.
Great.
Yeah, that's going on my list, going on my pile as soon as possible.
And man, I get the feeling that, you know what?
Even after all these years, Ray, I really should sit down with a video camera and interview you all day one Saturday or something.
I think there's a lot that I still have to learn from you, man.
Well, I have the same feeling, not so much you, Scott, but here I am.
I'm 81 now.
I'm feeling at the top of my game still.
I know a lot of stuff.
And it's a little frustrating that I can, well, it's good that I can get stuff out last night as I did with Eric Garris and your antiwar.com publication.
But, you know, people actually listen more to things like what we're doing right now or watch video more than anything else.
I'll tell you one more vignette here.
First time I met Julian Assange, I'm in the outer room of the embassy, Ecuadorian embassy in London, right?
And he comes in and I'm right next to the door and he opens the door and I say, Julian, Ray McGovern.
And he looks at me and he says, well, I know, I know.
He said, oh, you read my stuff.
And he says, no, I don't read your stuff.
I see you on YouTube all the time.
Now, Julian was in his 30s at the time, so he's not the youngest of the young set, but the young set watches YouTube, they watch video and they don't have much truck with all these very carefully crafted articles I do.
But when they get on a program like yours, then there's a fair chance that somebody will listen or perhaps even watch.
Well, you know what?
I just put out this video series to go with my new book and I'll email you the link to the series and you're on the list to get the book.
But I haven't gotten my act together on that yet.
The guy that I made the video series with is a very talented filmmaker type.
And, hey, Gus, you listening?
What do you think, man?
We make a little documentary about the life and times of Ray McGovern and some things that he picked up along the way.
Man, that thing all sound like a good idea to me.
I'm sorry, I got to go, man.
I'm so late for Gareth.
But we're going to revisit this narrow topic here, Ray.
Well, that would be fun.
And good luck to you, Scott.
You're doing good work.
All right.
Thanks, buddy.
Talk soon.
Bye.
All right, you guys.
That's the great Ray McGovern, veteran intelligence professionals for sanity.
And, of course, ConsortiumNews.com and Antiwar.com and RayMcGovern.com.
The Scott Horton Show and Antiwar Radio can be heard on KPFK 90.7 FM in LA, APSradio.com, Antiwar.com, ScottHorton.org, and LibertarianInstitute.org.
