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.
All right, you guys, on the line, I've got Aaron Maté, and he's, of course, at the gray zone, and he's got his very own substack as well, which is maté, just spelt like mate, substack.com, and at both places, you can see his new piece.
With Clinton lawyer charged, the Russiagate scam is now indicted.
Welcome back to the show.
How are you doing?
I'm good, Scott.
How are you?
I'm doing great.
Really happy to have you here.
I'll tell you what, I agree with you that this Russiagate thing is important.
It seems like maybe kind of it's not, because Trump isn't the president anymore, and they dropped it, you know, quite a while ago.
All the accusations, I guess 2009 was mostly the last hurrah for the thing, and it seems like it's kind of going in the memory hole.
Some stuff that happened, but what's the big deal, Aaron?
What do you think?
Well, it's true that it's kind of gone away, but I think the reason why is because it served its political function, which was basically to constrain Trump from deviating too much from the bipartisan national security consensus that he challenged when he ran, at least rhetorically, on the campaign trail in 2016, when he criticized, you know, U.S. policy in Iraq and Syria.
And it also served its political function in basically letting the Clinton-Biden wing of the party avoid any kind of reflection and responsibility for their loss in 2016 by blaming it all on some giant Russia conspiracy.
And now that Trump is gone, it just doesn't have the same political utility anymore.
But unfortunately for the people who perpetrated Russiagate, there's now this investigation ordered under Trump into the origins of the Russia investigation that's being carried out by John Durham.
And we need some, you know, for people who care about accountability, you know, you're weaponizing the intelligence community to undermine an elected president, and perpetrating this like, you know, multi-year psy-op against the U.S. population to convince them that Russian bots were invading the country, and the reason why we have Donald Trump is not because of a dysfunctional society, but because of Vladimir Putin's machinations.
You know, it's important that we get some accountability.
And as part of that, Michael Sussman, this Clinton attorney, just got indicted for something pretty serious.
You know, like the case shows that there was, it's new evidence that there was a deliberate scam plot perpetrated by the Clinton campaign to basically manufacture the appearance of Trump-Russia ties.
Yeah.
All right.
I'm going to ask about that in just one second.
But I got to add in here too, though, that I wholeheartedly agree with you that even the investigation itself, I mean, these aren't your exact words, but the investigation itself was part of the plot against him.
When, as we know now from all the late releases of documents, that the FBI was already satisfied how untrue all this was before they went on with the special counsel investigation.
And then they carried on the special counsel investigation for two full years before letting the American people know that, oh yeah, no, we don't, we're not pursuing an angle that the president of the United States is a Russian agent.
We don't see any evidence of that.
I remember when Jason Leopold put out a story about Michael Cohen, Trump's lawyer, Trump told him to lie to Congress and that's impeachable and that's going to be a big one.
And then Mueller put out a statement saying that's not true.
But then, and that was one of the, I guess the first real time he had commented, Mr.
Tight Lips on the investigation for two years straight.
But then if he can debunk that, then he could have let the American people know that he was not investigating, that the trail had not led to the idea or the fact or the suspicion that the president of the United States was a pro-Russian trader who was sitting in the chair behind the Resolute desk in command of our nuclear submarines.
It's not right.
He could have said that all along.
Well, we're going after some low-hanging fruit online to the FBI about inconsequential matters.
But rest assured, American people, your president is not guilty of treason.
He didn't say that.
He waited two years to say that.
And that, to me, goes to show the nature of the entire thing here, that it was all meant, the investigation itself was part of the plot against him.
They weren't looking for facts.
They were hemming him in by having the investigation itself.
And in fact, that's what the FBI told CNN.
Well, if we can't remove him with the 25th Amendment, at least we can hem him in.
OK.
Yeah, I look, I mean, Chuck Schumer said it best just shortly before Trump was inaugurated in January 2017.
He went on The Rachel Maddow Show and they were talking about how Trump was basically raising questions about the Russian hacking allegations.
And Schumer said that, you know, you shouldn't mess with the intelligence community because they have six ways from Sunday to get back at you.
You know, so that was and that's that's what was was happening.
It's not because it's not like the intelligence community was offended by Trump's, you know, sexism or racism.
They just saw him as an unsuitable steward of the U.S. war machine.
And he wasn't a member of the club and he actually was saying some uncomfortable things about members of the club like the Clintons and the Bush family.
I mean, he humiliated two political dynasties while also criticizing things like the interventions in Libya and Syria and both to constrain that and constrain his behavior in office and also to stigmatize his criticisms of the national security state.
It was very convenient to basically attribute his entire presidency to Russia to make it seem as if you're saying the things he's saying and now all that's Russia propaganda.
It was an effort to it was basically a disinformation effort aimed at the American public to stoke fear of Russia and undermine the inconvenient parts of Trump's presidency for the bipartisan war machine.
And that perfectly dovetailed with Democrats who were just humiliated that they lost to this reality TV show host, this this buffoon, you know, this guy who was not a member of the club.
So there were just a huge array of powerful interests.
There was just there was a convergence of of of of motives here.
And so they kept it going exactly as you say, just not because they were genuinely investigating anything because they there was no Russia conspiracy.
I mean, try to find even any Russians in Russiagate in terms of actual contacts between Trump campaign people and Russians.
There's Constantine Kalimnik, who was working for a long time with Paul Manafort as as his business associate in Ukraine, and their policy actually was pro-Western.
They were trying to move away Ukraine away from Russia's orbit.
And also Kalimnik himself has deep State Department ties.
He was in regular contact with a bunch of U.S. officials, including all the supposed polling data that was like, you know, there was a certain point in which that was like the smoking gun proof, supposedly a collusion.
Kalimnik was sending all that polling data to U.S. colleagues as well, just to like talk about the campaign.
And he was trying to argue that Trump hadn't heard that angle, that he was sending the same stuff to all others.
And this is the same guy, correct, who who had been who had worked at the International Republican Institute led by John McCain, correct?
He spent 10 years at the I.R.I. heading their Moscow office.
And so according to the Russiagate narrative, now all of a sudden we have to believe that the guy who was working for a congressionally funded organization, you know, headed by, you know, John McCain, chaired by John McCain, and then was also in regular contact with the State Department, was a trusted actually informant for the State Department who would actually meet with him about Ukrainian politics.
Oh, man, I wish I had my soundbites queued up where I could play John McCain and say, we can vet these guys.
We know how to vet these guys.
Or he's talking about Syria, of course.
You know, if John McCain can vet somebody, then this Kalemnik guy is not a Russian spy.
Well, in this case, you know, we're supposed to believe that this guy was like a secretly a Russian spy, which is so even even though there's zero evidence for it and all the evidence that they put forward for it is a joke.
And actually, some of the evidence they put forward is false.
As I reported earlier this year, you know, they they said, you know, Mueller is like big, big proof that Kalemnik might be associated with Russian intelligence.
Of course, Mueller didn't even directly allege it.
He just insinuated he said that this guy has Russian intelligence ties, which like whatever that means.
I mean, ties is the most ambiguous thing you can say.
But his big piece of evidence was that Kalemnik traveled to the U.S. on a diplomatic or on a Russian diplomatic visa in 1998.
That's like one of the big pieces of evidence that Mueller has.
I showed that to be false.
I got Kalemnik's actual visa from that exact date, and it was a regular U.S. visa.
And and, you know, when I followed up with the State Department to try to get the record of the visa to see who was, you know, like what happened here, they told me that that record had been destroyed.
They don't have it anymore.
So so the State Department record of Kalemnik's visa doesn't exist anymore.
And the visa I have, which was Kalemnik's, says it's a regular passport.
So that that's what Mueller had.
And, you know, on this polling data thing, there's a footnote in the Mueller report, which is where so many of the interesting tidbits are.
A footnote acknowledges that Kalemnik sent this polling data that caused so much dumb Russiagate controversy to all these State Department American contacts.
But of course, that's inconvenient information to the narrative.
So it just gets ignored.
But the point is, Russiagate barely had any Russians because the whole thing was a scam.
And so they kept it going for way longer, for, you know, just for way longer than it should have.
And first of all, it never should have happened in the first place.
The opening of the investigation was ridiculous, but they knew early on they had nothing.
And at a certain point, Mueller switched it to obstruction of justice because they knew they had nothing on collusion or conspiracy.
So then it became, did Trump obstruct justice?
And of course, what happened in the end, they also knew they had no obstruction case.
But of course, they couldn't say that because that would then make their whole exercise look even more ridiculous.
So they just declined to issue a call on it.
And they claimed some weird interpretation of like, you know, of the law and the rules that it wouldn't be fair to Trump to accuse him of obstruction of justice because a sitting president can't be indicted.
It was just such a farce.
But it served its purpose.
You know, Trump was hamstrung, you know, to the extent he was serious about pursuing better ties with Russia.
He certainly didn't.
His administration radically increased tensions with Russia, with other policies, as we've talked about before.
And he was ultimately defeated.
So, you know, it served its purpose.
But again, now we still have to deal with all the stuff that happened and all the dirty tricks that were pulled to make this thing look look genuine.
And this Durham indictment is the first sign, really, of some accountability in that direction.
Yeah.
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It's called The Great Ron Paul.
You can find all of these at Libertarian Institute dot org slash books.
All right.
Now, you know, I really wish you would write a book about this.
There's so much to, you know, in the very origins of this thing.
It seems if I understand it right, based on, you know, especially Taibbi's work about the Cambridge Four and all of that stuff.
It really does seem to me that this all kind of started with an FBI disinformation program in the very first place.
Like the very first people to even utter the word Russia or have anything to do with any of that was essentially people who were trying to set up the Trump people.
I mean, Trump had said, well, we want to get along with Russia and things like that.
So the topic had been raised, obviously.
But you know, it's really difficult if you don't just, you know, keep a Russiagate calendar on your desk when you have 10,000 stories coming out from all different directions like this to keep the timeline really tight on where exactly all of this story came from in the first place.
And it seems like at least a very significant part of it really came directly out of the Clinton campaign and the lawyers that they hired.
But which parts?
And I think this is one of the major things that we're learning about now, right, is on this Alphabank supposed scandal.
This is one that they just kind of made up, it seems like, right?
Yeah.
Look, first of all, for all the major components of Russiagate, you have a Democratic Party tie.
You have a Democratic Party, basically, like you have someone from the Democratic Party generating the allegations.
So collusion that comes from crowds, sorry, that comes from Fusion GPS in April 2016.
The Clinton campaign hired Fusion GPS to do the Steele dossier, and, you know, which can which like a fabricated collection of so-called intelligence reports alleging this ridiculous Trump-Russia longstanding black male conspiracy relationship.
And Democratic Party operatives also generated this whole fear mongering about Russian social media bots.
Facebook initially reviewed, you know, Russian memes and accounts on its pages, and it concluded that it was just basically commercial activity, just normal troll farm activity, like targeting certain demographics to build an audience.
And then the Russian hacking allegation, the allegation that Russia hacked the DNC server and gave emails to WikiLeaks, that came from CrowdStrike.
Another Democratic Party contractor also hired in April 2016, the same month that they hired Fusion GPS.
And so this Durham indictment gives us a window into the collusion part, because not long after Fusion GPS was hired to do the Steele dossier, Michael Sussman, who is an attorney at Perkins Coie, which is the firm that hired Fusion GPS on the Clinton campaign's behalf, Michael Sussman began working with this unnamed tech executive to basically pursue this theory that Trump and Russia were secretly communicating via a bank server, between a server associated with the Trump organization and a server used by Alphabank, which is a major bank in Russia.
And what comes out from this Durham indictment is that the tech executive worked with a team of researchers to, you know, put together data that could make this theory look credible.
But the team doing this themselves expressed doubts.
They said that we said that there's really nothing here and that if people subject this to scrutiny, they're going to know that this is just, there's nothing to see here.
And even this tech executive acknowledged that the whole thing was a red herring, but they still pursued it.
And Michael Sussman still then went to the FBI in September 2016 and presented it to them as if this was all credible and said that this team of concerned cybersecurity researchers had come to him after uncovering this troubling web traffic between Trump and Alphabank.
And so he was giving it to the FBI in the hopes that they would investigate it while also, you know, were talking to the media in the hopes that the media would report it.
So it's clear that this was part of an effort to both plant this one more Trump-Russia story in the FBI and also plant it in the media before the election.
And that's what happened because shortly before the election, Slate, a reporter at Slate called Franklin Foyer, who's now at The Atlantic, put out this big story about this Trump-Russia bank server.
And the New York Times also reported on it too.
And then as soon as they did, the Clinton campaign came out with a statement saying, Look, it looks as if cybersecurity researchers have uncovered a Trump-Russia bank server and the Trump administration has to answer.
You know, this was put out by Hillary Clinton on Twitter and Jake Sullivan, who's now the National Security Advisor, put out a statement too.
But what they were concealing is that they had planted this story.
So this was a scam.
And where it now becomes criminal is that Sussman's been indicted by John Durham for concealing from the FBI that he was really acting on behalf of the Clinton campaign and like billing them for his time, while instead claiming he was just there, you know, just sharing information he had come across and was not doing this for any partisan purpose.
And it also becomes potentially criminal because Alphabank alleges, this hasn't been subject to a criminal indictment yet, but Alphabank alleges that some of this purported web traffic between a Trump server and Alphabank was spoofed.
It was concocted.
And regardless, I mean, whether it was concocted or not, the theory is so dumb because really the web traffic, whether it was genuine or not, it wasn't even between a Trump server.
It was between a server that the Trump campaign uses for marketing, for like to spend spam emails about its hotels.
So whatever it is, the link was extremely tenuous.
Now it might even have been fabricated, but regardless, there was nothing there.
And for the first time we're getting in a indictment, we're getting an act to do with the Trump Russia investigation.
We're getting an actual conspiracy, not the conspiracy involving Trump and Russia because none existed, but a conspiracy to gin up the appearance of a Trump Russia conspiracy by Clinton campaign affiliated actors.
And what was the date on when they first started shopping this story around?
They were discussing it amongst themselves in July and August of 2016.
And that's when, you know, Steele was working on his dossier.
That's when that's when Fusion GPS still started reaching out to the FBI, trying to get them to investigate Trump Russia ties and get them to look into what they were supposedly uncovering.
And that was when the CrowdStrike accusations came out, too.
All this happened at the same time.
So basically in April 2016 is when Perkins Coie hires the Steele, is when Perkins Coie hires Fusion GPS to do the Steele dossier.
That same month later on is when the DNC supposedly discovered that it's been hacked.
And at the very end of April, the firm CrowdStrike is hired by Perkins Coie, not the DNC directly, but also by Perkins Coie to investigate the supposed hack.
And in June 2016 is when CrowdStrike comes out with the allegation that Russia hacked the DNC.
And so it's just all very coincidental that the same month that Perkins Coie hires Fusion GPS to investigate Trump's supposed Russia ties is when Perkins Coie also hires CrowdStrike, who soon after comes out with the allegation that Russia was behind the hacking of the DNC.
And as we've talked about before, it wasn't until May 2020, after Russiagate was pretty much over, after all the investigations were over, that we learned that CrowdStrike privately did not have any evidence that these alleged Russian hackers actually took anything off the server.
Because in December 2017, CrowdStrike's Sean Henry went before the House Intelligence Committee and he admitted under oath that CrowdStrike did not have any concrete evidence that any data was stolen off the server.
Any data was actually exfiltrated.
All they had was, in his words, circumstantial evidence.
But that testimony was buried throughout the entirety of Russiagate and we only got it in May 2020.
So nearly three years after Sean Henry admitted it under oath.
Well now, I'm confused because I know it was April Glaspy Day.
That's how I remember.
It was July 25th, 2016, was when I interviewed the computer security expert Jeffrey Carr, who debunked all of this stuff then.
But I'm trying to remember why it took me until July 25th if the accusations originally came out in June.
Well, because it's probably because right around then is when Wikileaks released the DNC emails.
And so I get that must have been it.
Yeah.
And then that was when Carr started talking about it.
So people can go and find that interview in the archive.
And it's, you know, the guy's a A-level computer security expert.
And he says, let me tell you something.
No one on earth can examine a server and tell you exactly who broke into it.
That's not how it works.
OK.
Exactly.
And then he said, but there's one organization who can tell you exactly what happened here and only one.
And that's the National Security Agency, because they monitor the entire Internet.
And if it was a Russian at the GRU going through 15 different, you know, VPNs and whatever it was, they can rewind the whole Internet and go back and look at a part they weren't watching before.
If they want to, they have total control over it.
They built the thing, you know, or participated in the building of it from the ground up and have all their backdoors into everything.
And they can tell you for sure who done it.
And then, as I know, because this has been a whole other level of your argument, another major piece of your argument is when you look at the reality winner document and you look at even the John Brennan intelligence assessment that they put out three days before Trump's inauguration there, they admit that the National Security Agency only gives this narrative medium confidence.
In other words, whatever you guys say, but we're not vouching for it.
And so, I mean, there you have it right there.
Yes.
And so, by the way, so and guess who hired CrowdStrike to investigate the DNC server?
Hillary's lawyer, right?
Didn't you just say that?
That it was.
But guess who specifically it was?
It was Michael Sussman.
Yeah, it was Michael Sussman.
So the same guy who had just been indicted for lying to the FBI about who he was working for when he came to them with this scam narrative about Trump Alphabet ties is the same guy who hired CrowdStrike to investigate the DNC server and which shortly afterwards came out with the allegation that Russia did it.
And look, the allegation that Russia did it had a very useful purpose.
It served a, because when the emails came out, they were embarrassing to Hillary and the Clinton campaign, the DNC.
They showed that, you know, the DNC was basically biased against Bernie Sanders, that Hillary Clinton was saying one thing in public, but then another thing to Wall Street behind closed doors.
And so when all this came out by accusing Russia of doing this, it flipped the narrative from being about the contents of the emails to about being this like foreign led, you know, espionage campaign trying to undermine Hillary and stop her advance to the White House.
Right.
So it just, and this was while secretly the Clinton campaign was paying for research to gin up fake ties between Trump and Russia.
So there are just so many coincidences here.
So look, it's possible that Russia did it and that it's just a coincidence at the same time that the CrowdStrike caught Russia doing it.
The Clinton campaign was the same people were also hiring Christopher Steele to write fake reports tying Trump to Russia possible.
But you know, given how much fraud there has been to perpetuate the Russia gate scam, given how many so-called bombshells have consistently fallen apart because they're based on lies, I just, you know, and given how many times evidence has come out that undermines the official story.
I mean, every single time I've gone through it, like the Mueller report, when it came out, you read it closely, they show that they're not actually all that confident in the Russian hacking claims.
They start using qualified language.
They say that, you know, Russia appears to have stolen the emails.
They don't say Russia stole the emails.
Their timeline doesn't make sense.
So, you know, Julian Assange came out and said that he had Hillary Clinton related emails in early June 2016.
And then according to the Mueller report, it's only after then that Julian Assange first makes contacts with Guccifer 2.0, who Mueller suggests gave Assange the email.
So according to Mueller's timeline, Assange would have had to have announced that he has the emails before he made contact with the entity that gave the emails to him.
And of course, we know that Mueller doesn't even know for sure that Guccifer 2.0 gave Assange the emails, because he acknowledges that it's possible that Assange got the emails directly through an intermediary in person.
So Mueller has no idea how Assange actually got the emails.
And he actually, and he doesn't know, and as Sean Henry admitted, they actually have no idea if even these alleged hackers, whoever they were, even took anything off the server.
So there are just so many holes in the story.
And now you have the fact that you have a Clinton lawyer who hired CrowdStrike, which generated a hacking allegation, now being indicted for lying to the FBI while he was pushing a scam, ginning up fake Trump-Russia ties.
It's just one more piece of evidence that this whole thing was a scam.
And, you know, hopefully we'll get a report from Durham showing, giving us more detail.
Because there's so much we still don't know.
For example, I've been trying to get the CrowdStrike reports for many years now from the U.S. government, because the public has never been able to see the reports that CrowdStrike did.
They did at least three.
Like what is the basis for their attribution to Russia here?
What is the basis for their claim that Russia hacked the emails?
Supposedly they're in these reports, but the public has never been able to see them.
Why can't we see them?
And I've been trying to get them.
And didn't Comey say that, well, you know, the FBI didn't really examine this stuff.
We just took CrowdStrike's word for it and went from there.
He basically did say that.
He said, you know, normally we don't like to do this, but my people told me that they're a very respective cybersecurity company and that, you know, they gave us a copy of the server so we didn't need to really go in.
But yeah, he admitted that normally it's not how we do things.
Yeah.
But yeah.
So they did basically.
Well, you know what?
We don't know the full extent of what they relied on, how they relied on CrowdStrike, because we have not been able to see any of the underlying evidence.
We know that CrowdStrike was used, but we just don't know what they found and what the FBI relied on, what they didn't, because the evidence has been kept from us.
So why?
The question is, why can't we see it for ourselves?
So one thing I hope we get out to the public are these CrowdStrike reports.
Let's see them.
Yeah.
Let's see what this private company found.
Yeah.
Hey, Jason Leopold, there's some redemption for you, buddy, Mr. FOIA ninja.
Get that stuff released, man.
Now, so I was talking on the phone with a friend of mine the other day, and we were joking about how Trump is such a dummy that he never once, Mr. Twitter, never one time said, hey, look, everybody, even the liberal nation magazine, aka you, says that I'm not guilty that this that this Russia stuff is BS.
Go read it.
He never once said that because he didn't know that because, you know, the nation is a periodical.
That was Anthony said, well, the nation's a periodical.
He doesn't know about stuff like that that whole time.
And, you know, Ray McGovern had said back during the time that all he should do, he's the president of the United States.
He should just declassify everything.
No, I don't know.
This never got any coverage.
And damn Bob Woodward for waiting to put it in his book.
He should have put this in The Post immediately.
But it's in the first Woodward book on Trump.
I think Rage is the title of it.
No, no, no.
I forgot.
Rage is the second one.
Anyway, but he says in there, Trump's lawyer, Dowd, said to Trump as soon as he's inaugurated, I guess he said, or as soon as the special counsel takes over.
That's what it is.
So in March or so, 17, he says, listen, Trump, is there anything to this Russia stuff at all that I need to know about here?
And Trump is like, hell, no, this whole thing is stupid.
And his lawyer says, OK, I'm going to give everything we have, all of the campaign documents, every scrap of paper.
I'm going to turn it all over to the special counsel.
And Trump goes, fine, do it.
Which that right there is like, oh, man, you know, if that had been part of the narrative all along, then that would have been different.
And instead, they just buried that part of it.
No one ever really discussed that part of it, where Trump said, give them everything because they hope that would get them off their back.
You know, but then when that didn't work, he's still the president.
He could have fired every single person.
He could have fired the top 15 people at the Justice Department.
And then at the same time, as Ray McGovern urged him to do, declassify everything, hand it right over to The Times, The Post, The Journal and Politico and NPR and tell them, do your worst.
Give it all to them.
But shut down the investigation.
You only get to be president for four years, probably you're a guy like Trump.
You're not going to let them do a special counsel investigation against you for years like this.
But he did, because that's what a dummy he is.
When all he had to do was fire a caller, but then order everything released so that the people can judge for themselves, because he knew all along, just as you and I knew all along, that it wasn't true.
So what the hell did he have to lose to do it that way?
But he's just too dumb to have thought it through.
He was too busy yelling at somebody to think about it.
You know?
Well, you know, I don't actually agree with you.
I don't think he was too dumb.
I think a few things here.
First of all, if you fired Mueller, someone else would have taken over.
I mean, as soon as a special counsel is appointed, that's that's an investigation.
That's a special counsel investigation, whether Mueller is leading it or not.
So in the same way that firing Comey was, you know, wouldn't didn't really actually probably prolong the Russia investigation, which I think Trump even knew it would.
But I think, look, there's a few things.
One, I mean, you're right, his lawyers advised him to cooperate fully because they knew there was nothing there.
And they tried that.
What they didn't maybe anticipate is that the Mueller team and, you know, people, people like Andrew Weissman, they weren't there to do an actual investigation.
They were there to basically try to lend some credibility to this fake Russiagate narrative.
Because in the case of Andrew Weissman especially, and he's a partisan hack, I mean, now he's an analyst at MSNBC and he's repeatedly fueled the collusion innuendo by being dishonest.
And he brought all these really stupid prosecutions that were totally baseless, as all of them were just, you know, getting people on trivial perjury charges or whatever, going after Manafort for his Ukraine finances, which had nothing to do with Trump or Russia.
But they made it they try to make it look as if it was.
And so, you know, this investigation would have gone on regardless.
And I think the strategy of full cooperation was actually smart because it made, you know, it gave the Mueller team sort of like no, like they couldn't complain that Trump wasn't being cooperative because, you know, as you say, they were like they gave him everything.
They even let Mueller, Trump's lawyer, speak to Mueller.
And that's actually who became Mueller's key witness in an attempt to fuel obstruction stuff.
But of course, it didn't even work in the end because they knew they had nothing there because as they also had to acknowledge, Trump wasn't guilty of the underlying crime that was being investigated, which was a Trump, which was a conspiracy with Russia.
But also in terms of him being stupid, I just think he was scared.
I think he got intimidated.
And I think like the constant impeachments where he needed to keep the support of some Republicans to keep him in office, I think he just got far from being stupid.
But I think he got sufficiently intimidated into going along and he knew that if he declassified, he would he would provoke the ire of the national security state and they could hurt him.
You know, as we talked about before, Chuck Schumer said, you know, the intelligence community is six ways from Sunday to get back at you.
I think that was very much on his mind.
I think he wanted to, you know, at least last one term.
Yeah.
And maybe he even was concerned for his safety.
It's not unreasonable given, you know, the power of the national security state.
And there's been reporting that's come out since after after Trump left, I interviewed Cash Patel, who was a senior official in the Trump administration, had a bunch of different roles.
And, you know, before joining the administration, he was a staffer on the House Intelligence Committee.
And it was basically his work that helped unearth, along with his colleagues, that helped unearth the surveillance abuses in the Carter Page investigation, where the FBI was lying, was basically relying on the Steele dossier to spy on Carter Page and concealing the fact that it was paid for by the Clinton campaign from the FISA court.
So it was Cash Patel who found that out.
And then Patel went on to serve in the Trump administration and he was instrumental in getting out a bunch of material of declassifying a lot of information.
But there was some stuff that he wanted declassified that other people like Gina Haspel, Mark Esper, other officials fought.
And basically, after a long standoff, Trump sided with the people who didn't want to declassify, even though obviously it would help Trump, his public narrative.
But ultimately, he backed down.
And this was at the very end of his administration.
So this was even after, you know, the two, actually, well, actually, no, sorry, after the first impeachment failed, but this was while the second impeachment was going on.
So I just think he was trying to preserve himself and not piss off too many powerful people.
I think that's, that was the main motive.
And even at the end, when he ordered stuff declassified, it's, you know, there was, it just, it didn't, it didn't, all of it didn't get publicly released.
Somehow John Solomon, who's a conservative journalist, got some of it, but a lot of it didn't get out.
And so I don't attribute that to stupidity.
I just attribute that to him being scared.
Yeah, well, you know, on this and a lot of other things, he never could close the deal.
You know, never could, you know, it seems to me like my example of him never once tweeting out your articles in the nation goes to show that he didn't even have a guy on his staff who was in charge of telling him, like, what's the latest on the Russiagate hoax?
You know what I mean?
Like he wasn't even up to date on what the hell was going on with the thing.
You know?
I agree that the, his administration, look, there were, it was, look, he was hated by the Republican establishment.
So the people willing to work for him, it was a pretty small pool and they weren't very experienced.
I mean, you talk to people who are on his 2016 campaign and basically that was just Trump freestyling.
It was mostly just Trump.
Everything was just off, you know, and so it wasn't a very smooth operation and in terms of tweeting out my articles, the problem from their point of view is I also, I also, every time, I think every time would make a partisan argument too, that I thought all this Russiagate stuff was actually a big gift to Trump because it was turning his resistance into a bunch of conspiracy crazed, deranged, you know, fanatics.
True.
But look, I mean, if I'd been on his staff, I'd have been saying, boss, you gotta tweet this that even the nation admits it's all a hoax and type it in all capital letters and then tweet that out six times.
You crazy?
I don't care what else, Mate, what other point he makes in there about universal health care, whatever it is, you know, because that's the whole point, right?
Here's a guy who's not a Trump guy who is also not going to sit here and carry water for the FBI and the CIA and the Clinton campaign when they're lying about the elected president.
And this is the thing that people should have got right away, is that no matter what you think of Trump, he won an election.
The FBI and the CIA, they're not even described in the Constitution anywhere.
They are to be subordinate to him, full stop, period.
You don't.
This is like a COINTELPRO op that you would launch against, that they would launch against the Black Panthers in Oakland.
And they did it to the president of the United States.
That's absolutely intolerable, no matter who the president is.
And if they'd done the same thing to Hillary Clinton, I'd have took her side, which is really saying something, because I'm a really anti-Hillary guy.
I totally agree.
And it's a point that, unfortunately, a lot of people couldn't process because they were so consumed by fear of Trump and the shock of him of him winning.
And so the Russiagators took advantage of that, took advantage of people's fear of Trump, and they used it to normalize a really cynical playbook where you're weaponizing the national security state to undermine the elected president, whatever you think of him.
And it sets a very dangerous precedent.
And look, look what happened to progressives, and this is exactly what people like me and Max Blumenthal were warning about during the 2020 primary when Bernie Sanders was doing well early on.
It was very early on.
And so on the eve of the Nevada caucuses, what happened?
We got this leak saying that Vladimir Putin wants to install Bernie Sanders, and that predictably helped stir this frenzy about Putin and Bernie, and it probably hurt Bernie.
And so that was because, and the reason it was successful is because progressives and liberals had helped normalize this Russiagate playbook where we're just going to reflexively believe whatever the national security state tells us, especially if it's about Russia.
And we're naturally going to see Russia as this buggy man, this monster under the bed that can like, you know, install a president in the White House and we have to fear whatever we're told is Russia's agenda.
It's like, it's really, it's just, it's classic McCarthyism, but it's, it's worked.
It's been successful.
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Well, of course, he wasn't man enough to debunk it all along, which he should have.
He should have said, everybody, you know me, I'm so left, I'm independent of the Democrats in the Senate and and I'm no Trump guy.
But I'm telling you, I'm not impressed by the CIA and the FBI's case here so far.
He should have been saying that and citing you all along anyway, and not because the truth is the truth.
And that's important.
And then that would have helped him, because then when they came out and said that against him, he could have said, oh, yeah, right.
We all saw this coming from a million miles away, just like you did.
And because I remember in real time that you guys were predicting this.
And when it happened, you said, see, we told you this was what was going to happen, especially that was Blumenthal's narrative right at the time.
But that could have been Sanders narrative, but he didn't do it.
You know, he had said he went along.
It's so sad because what are these emails show?
These emails showed that Bernie's rival, the Clinton campaign, were biased against him.
And not only did these emails show that, but shortly after that, Clinton lost.
So you have both a record of electoral failure where they lost to this reality TV show host and you had these revelations that they were trying to undermine Bernie.
So you had a perfect opportunity for Bernie to like take the reins of the party and say, you know, these people, they lost to Trump and they were biased.
They tried to sabotage, you know, our movement and through the rigging and bias.
Instead, what did he do?
He propped up the narrative that was used by the Clinton wing to distract everybody from what these emails actually showed and from the lesson of their loss, which is that their legacy was a failure.
He propped up the Russiagate narrative instead.
So basically he helped prop up the thing the Clinton campaign was doing to avoid talking about the embarrassing emails and talking about their embarrassing loss to Trump.
It's so, um, it's pathetic really.
At the time I thought maybe, you know, Bernie was making it, he was like a, it was a strategic calculation because if he goes, if he goes anti-Russiagate, then they're going to just accuse him of being a Putin puppet too and he doesn't want that to undermine his chances.
But really if he had done what, you know, as you had said, as you had said he could have done, he would have really taken a huge safety blanket away from the, from the Clinton campaign.
He could, and he could have really like charted a different course where instead of trying to undermine Trump with his dumb Russia conspiracy thing, you actually try to undermine Trump by putting forth a different political agenda and you're not normalizing this playbook of using the national security state, which naturally made a lot of Trump supporters defensive and support Trump, um, you know, and, and being like naturally protective of him and like, which thus kind of closed people off from hearing any kind of dissenting point of view.
So it was a perfect storm that totally benefited only one party, which is the Clinton campaign.
And it's just so sad that Bernie went along with that.
Yeah.
You know, part of what you're talking about too, and, and you know, in the background of this whole discussion, now that we're a few years out looking back on this as you know, this now relatively short period of time, uh, that we're no longer in the middle of, you know, this whole Russiagate scandal, it goes, it's just unavoidable how completely silly and ridiculous this thing is.
And I remember I got this wrong, but I was telling my audience in the summer of 16 that this Russia thing can't last because I mean, look at who you're talking about.
You're talking about Donald Trump.
He's a mega star.
They call him right.
Like bigger than a superstar.
He's as famous as all the famous people ever combined at the same time.
He's a real estate tycoon from Manhattan and he happens to be probably the most transparent individual person as far as just looking at him and knowing what he's thinking and what he's about in every kind of way that you could imagine.
I mean, this is a guy, I first saw him on Robin Leach lifestyles, the rich and famous in like 1983 or something.
He's been in a, he's been in 10,000 cameos, right?
Like he's the most, uh, anyway, the idea that somehow he's a commie agent from the Kremlin or whatever, like, and I know that they're not the commies anymore, but ultimately it's the same algebra, his type scenario is what they're trying to push here.
And it's still the Kremlin and all of that.
And it just seemed to me at the time in the summer that this is so ridiculous and it didn't stop him from winning, right?
He won the election anyway.
And then, but boy, was I proven wrong that it was going to somehow Peter out.
And I guess they had to double and triple down just because of what trouble they'd be in since he won anyway.
And uh, and they had done all of this to try to set him up in the summer.
So now they had to, that was one of the main reasons I guess they had to continue this whole thing.
But just anyway, back to the question of just how crazy it is now.
And look at this story where like, you know, if it was Schwarzenegger, if he'd been born in America and Schwarzenegger ran and they go, oh yeah, no, he's the secret agent of the Russians or the Chinese or whoever you would say, no, he's not.
He's the guy from the movies.
We all know him.
You know what I mean?
You don't need to know every business deal to know that Schwarzenegger is not compromised by some foreign power.
Same thing with Trump.
The whole thing is just crazy.
And to think that they got away with perpetuating this thing for three years straight and even to this day, I see you fighting with ridiculous Marcy Wheeler on, on Twitter still insisting on this garbage.
It's just incredible.
Well, it's funny.
I mean, you look at media throughout the Russiagate thing and people like Marcy were on MSNBC regularly even on progress about what's like democracy now, my old home, whereas my point of view, which was just simply all I was doing was looking at the available evidence.
Like we'd get these indictments so often and we get court filing.
So there was a lot of available evidence and all of it consistently showed that there was nothing to support any of this conspiracy stuff.
But the dominant media narrative was that there really was something there.
Mueller was closing in.
So media across the board just featured all these conspiracy theorists like Marcy Wheeler, people who were ignoring and distorting what was actually in the available facts to spin it into this grand conspiracy tale.
And voices like mine, which were, you know, just pointing out that there was nothing there.
It was like, I, it's like, you know, I, I got to be in the nation magazine, um, to, to debunk this stuff.
That's kind of the closest this really got to the mainstream.
And it just so it was, it's so ridiculous to look back on because as you say, it was so stupid.
This idea that the president is a Russian puppet blackmail victim, how that was like the dominant belief of like grown up adults who are all educated and work at these well-established media outlets.
But that's what it was.
That's what was in style.
It, it, it speaks to how you can't just understand, understand politics, you know, based on, you know, uh, like the merit, the merits of arguments, but there's a lot of social psychology involved in it.
Just, this was the club to be in and this was the way to be.
So that's how so many people acted and you look even now that this Michael Sussman story.
So after wall to wall coverage of every single Russian gate development for, you know, more from two years, every court filing, every court hearing, you know, every possible bombshell would dominate the news cycle.
Now this Michael Sussman indictment where the first time we have an actual evidence of a conspiracy, it just goes in the other direction showing that the conspiracy was the one that concocted the fake Trump Russia conspiracy theory.
Look how, look how it's getting covered now.
The MSNBC has barely touched it.
If you, if you look at like Rachel Maddow who was do rushing it every single night, she, she covered the story by covering it the night before the indictment came out.
So she was doing it based off of the New York times story, which was based on leaks from the Sussman camp.
So Rachel Maddow spun it the way the Sussman camp wanted the story to look, thereby avoiding all the damning information that came out in the indictment the next day.
When you look at, you know, places like Democracy Now and whatever, you can go to every liberal progressive outlet, they're ignoring it.
Even though we have evidence for the first, you know, like in a court indictment of a conspiracy involving the Clinton campaign to manufacture what was once the biggest story in the country for more than two years.
It's just, um, our media has become incredibly partisan, uh, and, um, dishonest across a wider spectrum in, in ways that I, that I, I haven't seen before.
Yeah.
And look, I mean, the blowback from this is already legendary and this has been going on for 30 years, but this is, you know, Russiagate is not an insignificant part of the overall massive failure of America's centrist liberal establishment here, along with their wars and along with the rest of this.
They wonder why, you know, the, for example, the arguments about the germ have become all so partisan.
Well, geez, you're the same guys who lie about everything.
So I guess we're supposed to take your word for this on, on this, you know, uh, most important issue, you know, and people just don't and, and it isn't like, um, they're wrong to not right when, when so much of the official pronouncements, even about the germ, not to get into specifics, but just, you know, uh, so much of that is wrong, even by their own standards when they later correct it and that kind of thing, that there's not a lot to believe in there.
And especially in the aftermath of things like this, things like pretending Saddam Hussein was making a nuke to attack your hometown with, um, you know, in order to, to get into, um, you know, these, you know, further decades of war and, and things like this and, and just the level of dishonesty.
They just think that, you know, it's all about messaging.
You got a message to the people, right?
You know, like you're saying social psychology, but there's blowback when people feel like they're being manipulated, you know, but they don't take that into account.
You know, where's that go in your little algorithm about how to correctly message what we're supposed to think and feel like.
And now it's like really undermining their authority over everyone, which is, you know, the good part.
I'm sorry.
I'm just renting.
Let me ask you a good question.
What do you think might be the future of Durham's investigation here?
More indictments.
Are they going to make this guy squeal on somebody else and really build a thing here?
This is just one last little kind of deal.
He's not going to squeal.
There's no way.
Because he's, you know, he's there to do a job, which is, you know, pursue the Clinton campaign agenda and to get, you know, I don't think there's just like a single count indictment on a false statement charge is not enough to get someone like him to, to squeal.
So I don't expect that.
I think you'll probably see, well, you know, look, it's, it's not good to predict, but if I had to, I would guess that you'll probably see maybe some more charges on this Alpha Bank thing, possibly more charges on giving false information to the FBI.
Maybe if they can prove that someone actually faked traffic between this Trump marketing server and Alpha Bank, maybe you'll get them for that kind of computer fraud thing.
But I think it's, it's hard.
It's a hard thing to bring criminal charges over because I mean, either you get them on perjury, but otherwise I, to me, this is all just intelligence misconduct.
And that can be, accountability for that has to come in a public report.
And that's what I'm really hoping comes out of this Durham thing, which we get up an actual, an actual honest public report with no redactions because so many of the, of the reports so far have been redacted.
I think the redacted parts will tell us from like the Mueller report and also from the Senate intelligence report just will probably show more evidence that this thing was a scam.
I think that's why they're redacted personally.
But regardless, I hope that Durham gives us a report and that we're allowed to see it and that we're allowed to especially see information on what led the, what led U.S. intelligence officials to conclude that Russia hacked the Democratic Party emails, gave them to Wikileaks as part of this sweeping interference campaign to install Trump.
What is the actual intelligence for that?
Because I think there's every indication that there's nothing there and that some of that was just basically embellished or even fabricated.
And I want to see it.
And the public has a right to see it given how much this narrative dominated our politics for so long.
So I hope that's the, the product of the Durham investigation is a really comprehensive final report.
And on the plus side, this indictment, look, it's one count on false statements.
It could have just been one page, but it's 27 pages.
And the narrative of the 27 pages is that the Trump-Russia collusion thing was the product of a scam.
So hopefully that's a good sign that we'll get more reports and information like that from Durham in the coming future.
And by the way, everybody, the entire 27-page charging document is linked in Aaron's piece there at The Gray Zone and at mate.substack.com.
With Clinton lawyer charged, the Russiagate scam is now indicted.
Thank you very much, sir, for your time.
Thank you, Scott.
Really appreciate it.
The Scott Horton Show, Antiwar Radio, can be heard on KPFK 90.7 FM in LA, APSradio.com, Antiwar.com, ScottHorton.org, and LibertarianInstitute.org.
