All right, y'all, welcome to the Scott Horton Show.
I'm 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 the brand new Enough Already, Time to End the War on Terrorism, and I've recorded more than 5,500 interviews since 2003, almost all on foreign policy, and all available for you at scotthorton.org.
You can sign up for the podcast feed there, and the full interview archive is also available at youtube.com slash scotthortonshow.
Hey guys, on the line, I've got the great Jim Bovard, jimbovard.com, and amazon.com slash jimbovard.
No, that's not it, but check out all his great books on there, from The Farm Fiasco all the way through Public Policy Hooligan, and my favorite, I gotta say every time, Attention Deficit Democracy.
I don't even remember what the hell's in there anymore, but man, it's so good.
Hey, welcome back to the show.
How you doing, Jim?
Hey, Scott.
Thanks for having me on.
Hey, congratulations for all the great reviews on your new book.
I'm glad to see it going gangbusters.
Cool.
Thanks very much for that, man.
I was joking last night, I was about to skate the vert ramp, and Eric Gares is like, dude, check out Mondo Weiss wrote this great review of the book.
So I was looking at it, and I was feeling all proud because I love Phil Weiss, you know, and I'm reading this thing, and I'm like, yeah, and they're like, ah, I shouldn't be all swole head before I get on the 11 foot because I'm gonna break my head.
I'm gonna talk myself back down again.
You're not that cool, dude.
Okay.
I don't want to get broke off, man.
Good, good, because a lot of fans would be disappointed if you busted your head.
It does happen from time to time.
You should have seen me last Sunday.
God dang.
Listen.
Anyway, thank you.
And yeah, that was great.
And everybody check it out at MondoWeiss.net.
Phil wrote this great thing about essentially just the Iraq War II chapter and the role that the neocons played in pushing us into the god dang thing.
So I'm real proud of that.
It's the spotlight today on antiwar.com.
So thanks for saying that.
Now let me give you, or yeah, now I'm going to take a chance to talk about this article, which I don't know which day we ran it on antiwar.com, but I know that we did.
And I think maybe it was the spotlight, but I don't remember.
FISA and the still too secret police at the American Conservative Magazine.
This is a huge one.
Although if people probably are watching cable TV news in that cycle, they might not have noticed it at all.
But first of all, what is FISA, Jim?
FISA is a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.
This is a law that Congress passed in 1978 in reaction to the illegal spying by President Nixon, President Johnson, President Kennedy, practically going all the way back to Franklin Roosevelt probably.
It was an attempt by Congress to put a leash on presidents being able to surveil people and claim national security.
What Congress did was create basically an exemption from the Constitution as far as the warrant requirement.
The Constitution says the Fourth Amendment, you have to have a reason and usually a warrant before you surveil somebody's phone call, somebody's this, somebody's that.
But FISA made a narrow exception for foreign intelligence cases.
And it was later expanded to include terrorism.
And part of the trouble nowadays is that almost anything, almost anything, and probably including antiwar.com is considered a terrorist or a suspected terrorist rather, but simply because they suspect you, I mean, okay, turn on the turbos.
Yeah, man.
Well, so this has happened antiwar.com in the past.
They pretended to believe that Eric Garris and Justin Raimondo of all people who, you know, two guys who every day of their life has been on the public record since 1971 or something, somehow were agents of a foreign power and then use that excuse to spy on antiwar.com.
And but then, so you're saying, yeah, they were just trying it out then and now they're getting going for real?
Well, it's, I mean, the, it's one of the clearest lessons of the Trump era is that we cannot trust this.
There's a court, a special foreign intelligence surveillance court, which is supposed to oversee this, these, these wiretaps.
But it's a lot more than a wiretap, because if the feds, if the FISA judges give their approval for a search, then the FBI can go out and round up the telephone, cell phone, email, do a computer surveillance of the person's home, workplace vehicles, and physically search anything, including their residence, vehicles, computer, safe deposit box, and of course, the U.S. mail.
So it's not like it's, well, we're going to take a look at some of your emails.
No, it's like your whole, your whole bloody life is pulled into this vortex.
Man.
All right.
So now, if I remember the way this works, I mean, these are all just terms of art anyway, right?
But that, you know, the Fourth Amendment restriction is you have to have probable cause to believe.
In other words, your honor, we have a specific articulatable reason to think we are going to find evidence of the crime that we are investigating if we are to look in this place.
Whereas then for the FISA court, it's just a reasonable belief.
In other words, if you're trying to quantify it, it might not reach 50 percent, but man, we kind of, we're playing a hunch, your honor.
How about that?
And that's essentially good enough.
Is that about right?
No.
It was a good summary of the Fourth Amendment.
But you know, the thing that happened under George W. Bush, who's now a hero to the liberal media, was that after 9-11, the Bush administration, I think it was Stellar Winds was the operation name of the program, but they started to vacuum up all kinds of people's information.
And it came to a, there were internal fights and some people were pushing back and saying, look, it's important to have a reason.
It's important just to have a name of who you're surveilling.
As one of the federal officials who was opposed to the program said, the Bush people could not even come up with a name, the people who they wanted to target.
Instead, it was this vast dragnet of people's communication, their email, what they did on the Internet.
And it's an interesting thing.
I was talking to someone recently and the person was saying, well, you're not really in any danger, you know, unless you're in contact with terrorists.
So I said, well, sometimes I get emails or phone calls from Moscow or Tehran, the person says, yeah, well, you're screwed.
So, you know, and I'm sure that antiwar.com gets a lot of foreign communications and, you know, to see how Congress reacted to the Bush crime spree on surveillance, Congress passed a law in 2007, which basically authorized NSA to go after almost any foreign contact that people—if someone had foreign contact abroad, then boom, well, yeah, maybe they're a terrorist.
Or it was even worse with the authorization that Robert Mueller, the hero of the liberals in the Trump era, signed off for the FISA court.
The FISA court said that the telephone records of all Americans could be considered as potential evidence of terrorism.
So the FBI and NSA were entitled to vacuum up everybody's phone records from 2006 to about 2012 or 2013.
Edward Snowden blew the roof off that.
But the whole fact that you would have a federal court, well, a pseudo court, that signed off on the FBI and NSA seizing everybody's phone records simply, well, because, well, it might be tied to terrorism.
I mean, this is such a load of crap.
Some days I almost get cynical.
You never, dude.
I don't believe that for a minute.
I taught her on the edge.
Yeah, man.
Hey, so— I always keep my Norman Vincent Peale book here right next to me.
The power of positive thinking, is that it?
Thank God.
It changed my life.
Yeah, man.
That guy was Donald Trump's pastor.
That's true.
That's true.
And that's why he never apologizes and never gives in.
Always stiff arm forward.
Yeah, well, it's kind of funny.
That was a book that my father would always praise.
And I think he gave it to me when I was about 15 or 16.
And that was about the time that the Nixon administration was going to hell with Watergate and Vietnam was falling apart and their wage and price controls and everything like.
So I'm supposed to think positive about this son of a bitch?
Man.
And so, I think about how bad things were then and how deep into the future we are now from that catastrophe and how, well, other than Vietnam, how much worse everything has gotten in so many ways.
Well, you know, there's other sides of the ledger too, but yeah.
So you're reminding me here of when Greenwald first published the very first piece at The Guardian on this Snowden leak.
And it was a general warrant by the FISA court to Verizon Wireless.
We want everybody's phone records, a general warrant.
And you know what?
I really don't know a damn thing about the 19th century and whatever the hell.
And I do know that Woodrow Wilson and Franklin Roosevelt and others and Richard Nixon, as you mentioned, Kennedy, had all these abuses.
But I don't think I had ever read the term general warrant in any of my reading of American history except in the pre-revolution days under the authority of the British king.
They would have general warrants.
And I was raised to believe that was one of the things that the colonists had revolted over.
Do I know what I'm talking about here?
Is that right?
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Well, it was a general warrant is a proper term to use for for what the NSA was doing after 9-11.
And the thing that's really appalling is you have all these judges, you know, all these guys wearing bat suits signing off on this BS.
And, you know, and even before that, there were a lot of scandals of the FBI giving false testimony to the FISA court to get these search warrants to go after people who they wanted.
And it's a scandal that keeps repeating.
Back in the around 2006 or 2007, there was an expose that the inspector general found the FBI agents were massively violating the Patriot Act with these national security letters that went in and vacuumed up thousands of Americans' personal data illegally.
The inspector general said it was complete outrage, a violation.
Congress went nuts briefly.
And what does FBI Chief Mueller do?
Doesn't prosecute anybody, doesn't fire anybody.
Instead, the FBI created a new Office of Integrity and Compliance.
And what's and what's funny is that the FBI was caught doing a lot of abuses recently.
The FISA court recently admitted to that.
And what did the FBI do?
That basically did the same thing.
Well, you know, we're going to have some education for the agents and we're going to be a little more careful and, you know, it just goes on forever.
I mean, the FBI is never held accountable for when it violates federal law, which is, you know, that's not what I learned in high school, a civics class.
OK, hang on just one second.
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You know, Will Grigg and I joked one time.
I forgot who was bringing it up, but I know it was with him.
We talked about this on the show where I forgot which Tom Clancy movie it was with Harrison Ford as Jack Ryan, the hero, and the movie ends with him.
I think it's the drug war one.
How dare you, sir, and all that.
The movie ends with him walking up Capitol Hill with a bunch of documents in his hand, and it's like, dun, dun, and then we all know that truth will out and justice will be done, and the law will be enforced, and those who broke it will go to jail.
You don't even need to see that part because now the credits are rolling, and we all know how that goes.
Once he goes to Congress and tells the truth.
I think Will's point was there was a time where that was believable, but not anymore.
They couldn't even end a movie like that now.
People would just laugh.
I hope you're right.
Certainly, people that listen to your program would laugh, but one of the fascinating things about Daniel Ellsberg's memoir, Secrets, was Daniel Ellsberg went through the details of all the members of Congress who he contacted, and wanted them to publicize or to make public some of the Pentagon Papers.
Nobody would do it.
Everybody chickened out except for Sandra Mike Gravo of Alaska.
Which is just amazing because, of course, it's right there etched in stone, if anything is in the Constitution.
As far as I know, they have always obeyed this, that the executive branch cannot arrest a congressman or a senator for anything other than causing a breach of the peace, as they put it, an actual violent felony that they have committed that has nothing to do with politics.
I don't know about, again, I don't know about all 19th century everything, but I can't think of a time where an American president would have dared to arrest a senator for putting something important on the public record.
If anyone has the immunity to do that, it's an American senator can do that, but no.
Well, yeah.
I mean, something like this ties into what the House Majority Leader said in 1971.
He said that there was so much fear on Capitol Hill of the FBI.
I mean, it was, yes, it was very evident that the members of Congress basically cowered at any possibility of doing oversight.
And it turns out that the guy who had the courage to say that then died in a mysterious plane crash a few months later.
Oh, really?
Who was that?
Oh, Christ.
I'm trying to think.
The House Majority Leader, Cookie Roberts, I think is his daughter.
Oh, you know what?
I remember.
I know who you're talking about.
He was a Texan, right?
I think it was from Louisiana.
Hale Boggs.
It's what Hale Boggs said in 1971, that there was pervasive fear of the FBI on Capitol Hill.
Hale Boggs was the House Majority Whip, the number two guy in the House of Representatives who was a Democrat from the South, and he was very courageous in challenging the FBI.
And he'd been on the Warren Commission, and he was one of the few members of the Warren Commission who was honorable and said, you know, the evidence here really doesn't point to what you're concluding.
And shortly after Hale Boggs came out and courageously said that Congress was afraid of the FBI, Hale Boggs died in a mysterious plane crash in Alaska.
Man, ain't that something, huh?
And a message was sent, even if it was just an accident, though it probably wasn't.
God dang.
That was one of my old bumper stickers, was the National Security Agency blackmailing your congressman since 1952.
Oh, that's a hoot.
How could any of these guys really be free agents when they're all compromised for one thing or another?
And the FBI's got them by the short ones, everybody knows, all of them.
Always have.
It really is no different than like an internal security force that you would think of from some foreign totalitarian state in the old world or something, right?
We got one of those.
Yeah.
And it's I mean, it's a huge problem with the, you know, folks that go into politics don't do not tend to have strong moral compasses and it doesn't take take much to make that compass completely, you know, go haywire and fear will do that.
And it's sad to sad to see how few members of Congress have the courage to challenge federal agencies unless they're being cheered on by, you know, 20 million people.
So there are some good members of Congress.
Thomas Massey.
It's great to see what Rand Paul has been doing with Fauci.
So he's impressive.
Yeah, that was interesting.
Well, that's a whole other topic we don't have time to get into here, but hey, I think it's important here, Jim, to mention, as you do in the article, that they used, they abused this Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act in order, you know, at the core of the premise of their entire argument of the frame up of Donald Trump for treason with Russia in rigging the election of 2016 by using this power against Carter Page, who it turned out was actually working for the CIA all along.
And every time a Russian ever said anything to him, he went straight to his CIA handlers and told them everything because he was a loyal American patriot, not a traitor at all.
But they treated him, they pretended to believe.
In fact, one FBI agent got in trouble for this.
I think an official slap on the wrist, but a conviction for altering an email to delete the CIA saying, yeah, no, this is our guy from their application for a surveillance warrant against him.
And this is at the core of their entire frame up of the president, which is, it's huge scandal.
It's just incredible that it's funny because people forget, people are so thankful it's over, people forget how insane that was the way they ran that thing.
Actually, it's a whole lot worse than that because you had the FISA court that was grossly negligent in approving the surveillance of the Trump campaign official and then extending even when the evidence came back that there was no justification for it.
And it was evidence from that that helped propel the special counsel, which never did not find substantive evidence of any collusion with Russia.
But that's something that roiled American politics for three years.
That was probably a significant factor in Trump failing to get reelected.
And that was because of the FBI playing politics.
And the FBI assistant general counsel admitted to falsifying key evidence to get that FISA warrant.
But the FISA judge, the chief judge says, well, let's just give him probation.
I don't think he meant anything bad.
Federal prosecutor was outraged that the guy did not get any jail time because this had completely disrupted American politics with all kinds of false charges.
And this was the deep state doing a lot to topple Donald Trump.
Trump did a lot to screw himself, but you had deep state agencies in there pulling all the strings and telling a lot of lies and exploiting these things like FISA and other laws and angles and working the press corps like they were a bunch of—no, I shouldn't say that in the right way.
Milking the press corps and having them eat out of their hand.
So there are so many levels of BS here.
And it's an outrage that there's not more outrage about the role of the FBI in American politics from 2016 onwards.
And there's no reason to assume that it's over now.
I mean, if you see how the FBI is helping frame the controversy around January 6, it's like, yeah, you know, there are a lot of federal agencies that screwed up massively, you know, to see how things went down that day.
So, yeah, man, I'm so sorry that we are so short on time because there's so many more angles of this conversation to take here.
But I think it was a previous piece of yours.
You talked more about that, kind of the dawn of this new FBI domestic anti-terrorism campaign against essentially the not-inside-the-Republican-party right in America and what that portends for libertarians as we've been threatened by John Brennan, the murderer and traitor, to be perfectly scientific about it.
But so one of the most important things you did in there was you said something along the lines of, listen up, libertarians, you don't have to actually be doing anything to get in real trouble.
So if an FBI agent talks to you, don't say anything other than that you only speak with law enforcement through professional legal counsel, period.
Fifth Amendment.
Don't talk.
Don't even say what day of the week it is because they will nail your ass.
Right.
Something like that.
Yeah, something like that.
It was a satisfying...
Last month, I gave a talk to the Maryland Libertarian Party and I was setting it up and I was proud that I got the audience to chant.
I said, what do you say if the FBI comes and starts asking you questions?
And the audience chanted, shut the fuck up.
Yeah, great.
That's absolutely right.
And you know, because it can be so tempting because they're just human men, right?
So you look at them, you go, look, guys, here's the truth, okay?
And you want to talk yourself out of it like you're dealing with a human, but you're not dealing with a human in the...
You are in the literal sense, but importantly, you're dealing with an agent of the state.
And that's different.
You can't reason with that.
That's what lawyers are for, period.
Well, not only that, but people don't realize if they talk to the FBI, it's not their words that could get them in trouble.
It's what the FBI agent says a day or a week or a month later that he heard them say.
And FBI agents have had false recollections, shall we say, many, many times that have screwed...
I mean, that's what happened to General Flynn.
So, you know, people also need to use their common sense and not be talking about blowing shit up.
If somebody says something about pipe bombs, get the hell away.
The person's radioactive.
They're probably an informant.
People need to be on guard.
And, you know, people don't need to be talking about doing violent revolution because you're just setting yourself up.
Absolutely right.
All right.
And listen, I'm so sorry we're out of time because there's so much to talk about, but I got to go.
But thank you so much, Jim, for doing the show again.
Hey, have a great time in Pittsburgh.
Thanks.
Appreciate it, bud.
All right, you guys, that is the great Jim Bovard.
And he's at jimbovard.com.
And you can read all his books, find all the links there.
But also, you can read the text of that speech.
And I don't know if maybe he has the audio there.
And then this extremely important article is at theamericanconservative.com.
Please help make this viral on your social media and what have you, if you can.
And read it and weep, too, man.
It's a nightmare here.
FISA and the Still Too Secret Police at theamericanconservative.com.
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.
