3/4/22 Peter Van Buren on the War in Ukraine and the Origins of Russiagate

For Pacifica Radio, March 6th, 2022.
I'm Scott Horton.
This is Anti-War Radio.
All right, y'all.
Welcome to the show.
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All right, introducing one of my favorite guests, and I know y'all's too.
It's the great Peter Van Buren, formerly a State Department official, wrote a great memoir of his time in Iraq War II called We Meant Well, which is also the name of his great website where he writes all of his brilliant pieces.
And he's a regular writer also for the American Conservative Magazine here.
And his new one is called More Questions About Russiagate.
Welcome back to the show.
How are you doing, Peter?
Always a pleasure, Scott.
All right.
So, we have a limited amount of time, and I think we're going to talk more about this article in the second half that'll be available on my website later over there at scotthorton.org.
I want to talk more about the war up front here.
But I want to start with this article about Russiagate, because I think that now I see how important it is, Peter Van Buren, that you have Americans who are absolutely terrified out of their minds about Russia because of Russiagate, who are now off on why we need to make things worse in Eastern Europe, because this isn't to them about the Donbass at all.
This is about the American almost fascist dictatorship that we just barely avoided.
And so, you know, the fate of all mankind hangs in the balance.
Might as well be talking about Harry Truman and Joe Stalin and the dawn of the old Cold War right now.
I'm afraid.
Now I turn it to you, sir.
Well, you raise a number of points, and the most important one is that at the center of all this is this irrational fear of Vladimir Putin.
He's become our horror crux.
We place all of our fears, whether that's fear of Trump or fear of our democracy or fear of world war, we just hide them inside of Putin, and he arises on call.
Having the benefit of a few years of age here, I grew up in the Cold War.
I was born prior to the Bay of Pigs, and my earliest childhood memories are of my parents whispering about this and then the Cuban Missile Crisis and not really understanding it, but going to school and doing nuclear drills at school and hiding under our desks.
I grew up through the Cold War.
I went to East Germany and crossed the Berlin Wall as a student, and then I joined the U.S.
State Department, and I was there for the end of the Cold War, we were told, when the Berlin Wall came down and the Soviet Union dissolved, and I watched it all being quietly reconstructed.
It was almost as if we didn't know what else to do, and today it is with such great sadness that I realize we're right back where we started.
All we need now is for someone to declare the new Russia, the new evil empire, and someone after that to pronounce a new axis of evil between Russia and China, and we'll be just right back where we started.
Having lived through the Cold War and the nuclear threat and the constantly shifting evil that was coming out of the Soviet Union, most of which was made up, some of which was sadly true, I wouldn't wish that on anyone, and I'm now watching a new generation of Americans being indoctrinated into the realities of living in a permanent state of warfare with Russia.
We'll call it the Cold War knowing that it pops up hot at any moment in time, and that you and I on a broadcast called Antiwar.com are now sitting here as one of the few voices saying maybe it's not a good idea for the United States to get militarily involved in the Ukraine.
The same way we sat here and said that about Iraq 20-something years ago, the way we said that about Afghanistan, Libya, Syria, you and I are going to have to stop meeting like this.
I know.
Seriously, it's just nuts, and, you know, I think I may have told you this before in another context, Peter, that this is my mental disorder, right, is that as the years go on, I still relive the year 2002 over and over again in parallel, the year of the lie, the fear and the peer pressure and the just blatant dishonesty, and it's kind of the same thing here where you actually have people like Brent Scowcroft and George Kennan and Paul Nitze and Robert McNamara saying we should not expand NATO, we're picking a fight with Russia for no reason.
You know, communism is gone, the Soviet Union is gone, they pulled the Russian army way back behind the Ural Mountains.
It's over.
We won.
Why are we going to kick a man when he's down?
And they said that 30 years ago and ever since, and yet we're supposed to forget that history and say that, no, what happened was, as Connelisa Rice said, Vladimir Putin changed.
He was, you know, kind of scary, but okay, but now he's evil and bad, and so he's acting badly because that's what bad evil people do.
And then and we're supposed to settle for that.
Let me for the kids in the audience, let me let me back up a step here and say what Scott was referring to, of course, was the year and a half of propaganda that was aimed at the American people by the George W. Bush administration to convince us that we needed to go to war with Iraq.
And that propaganda was, I don't even want to say aided and abetted.
It was basically created by a newly evolved mainstream media that felt that it needed to take partisan positions and found that partisan positions were remarkably good for its bottom line.
People love to hear folks on the evening news not being rational and thoughtful, but screaming their heads off and demanding that the world has to rid itself of Saddam Hussein.
And it worked.
But I think the thing that's very interesting now, when I look back at that year and a half is, you know, how long it really took.
Because 2003, kids, there was no social media.
We certainly didn't have what was going on now, where a handful of large tech companies control all of the media that we can access and censor it and edit it so that it tells the right story.
We did not have the ability of foreign governments, as the Ukrainian government is doing, to reach directly into our brains and press propaganda against the cerebellum.
In 2003, it took the full effort of the U.S. government and the American media, working hand in hand, a year and a half to convince us that war was not only necessary against Saddam Hussein, but was going to be the primary function of our generation.
And it worked.
And the war started and the war continued, and we all kind of know where that ended up 20-some years later.
But now, only, what, six months after the horribly embarrassing finale of the Afghan war, as the United States crawled out of Afghanistan, leaving behind American citizens, leaving behind a destroyed, failed nation, only six months after that embarrassing and shameful ending, we're now at the precipice once again over a country that we don't really understand exactly why we have to fight to the death.
The Ukrainian government, however, and this is what's different from 2003, the Ukrainian government and its supporters now have direct access to us.
They are pumping propaganda through social media and with the aid of the mass media as well, directly at us and claiming that we must have a new war.
I just read George Packer in The Atlantic, who was one of the big cheerleaders for the Iraq war, and he now has written an article claiming that the most important task confronting democracy, meaning the free world, us, today, is to protect Ukraine.
And it's just the same words, and they're not even trying hard.
And today, the propaganda is so transparent that you don't even have to try to think your way through it.
It's obviously false, supermodels holding toy guns and the ghost of Kiev and all these other stories, but that's not the point anymore.
We have become so dulled to the process of thinking that we don't need to be challenged anymore.
We just need to be stimulated.
We're fully at the point of the dog who salivates when the bell rings, thinking food is coming.
So all we need now are these stim darts launched at us.
You know, we just went through one last night, the Russians were going to blow up some nuclear plant in the Ukraine and bring apocalypse to Europe.
You wake up in the morning, it turns out, well, none of that was actually true either.
Each day, you make a note there, you're going to be hearing about some Russian atrocity any day now, kids killed in a hospital, mass rapes, something like that.
There's going to be an atrocity created that will be the next step in this process.
We did that with Saddam, if you remember, in Gulf War I, his soldiers were ripping babies out of incubators, and we needed to stop that, and it all turned out to be lies.
But now we don't even have to convince people.
We simply have to stimulate them.
As they said in Jojo Rabbit, it's not a good time to be an anti-war guy.
Yeah, man.
You know, all the narrative building, you're right about it, it is, it's just completely crazy.
And, you know, I interviewed the great Ben Freeman, real nuts and bolts and bean counting expert on foreign lobbies and their influence in Washington, D.C., and of course, that means he specializes first and foremost in the Israel lobby and the Saudi lobby.
But he did this huge study about the Ukraine lobby and said there they put more money in by far than anyone he's ever seen.
They put the Israel lobby and the Saudi lobby to shame.
Now, as he said, they're way ahead in the race anyway.
They've got, you know, very deep grooves already in D.C.
The Ukraine lobby is new at this, but they're just dumping hundreds of millions of dollars in to propagandize, as he puts it, to focus directly on the most important congressmen and senators and their staff, the think tanks and the media.
And it's just they got K Street.
They got these professional lobbyists.
You mentioned the babies and incubators.
That was the Hill and Knowlton public relations firm on Madison Avenue in New York City that came up with that.
But who the hell are we to compete with that?
We're nobody.
We're just the American people.
Ukrainian lobbies have far more influence than we have over our government and their foreign policies by just a million miles, I guess, at this point, Peter seems.
I just want to reiterate, though, what's what's new this time around, and that is the amazing ability to reach directly into our homes and the willingness of our own media to just act as a free flow pipeline.
I think one of the things missing was that during the 2003 run up, most of the propaganda had to still kind of work its way, you know, if you imagine water dripping through a filter, it still had to get to us all.
And we were not in a position to sort of contribute to it.
But now it's almost as if the propaganda has been crowdsourced.
The Ukrainian, whoever's working, whoever the Ukrainians have hired, puts up something true or false about, you know, the Russians are raping babies.
They put it out in any form of media.
It doesn't even have to hit the mainstream media.
It just has to show up anywhere online, including social media.
And then Americans, many of them well-meaning people who listen to NPR on the way to work, will then amplify that free of charge through their own personal networks.
And this direct lobbying, if you will, is far more insidious because that way the Congress people are getting it from top and bottom.
They're being directly lobbied by the K Street firms who are taking them out for dinners and things like that.
And then they come back to the office and there's 20,000 constituent emails demanding war with Russia.
And that's on us.
We're not just passive anymore.
We ourselves are participants in our own propaganda.
They've really done it this time.
They've taken it full circle where we are our own propagandists.
Yeah.
No, it's so true.
Oh my God.
Don't look at Reddit.
I mean, just, oh, it's just a nightmare out there.
And because it is, you know, your peers telling you, I think maybe it's more credible than same old people got sick of hearing it from Dan Rather and Brian Williams and these kinds of people.
They're like, sure.
No, everybody knows it's true.
Look how many upvotes it has and this kind of thing where it's, you know, all very reinforced.
Now hang on one second.
We're talking with Peter Van Buren, but we got to do a little bit of fundraising here.
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All right.
Now again, it's anti-war radio talking with the great Peter Van Buren.
WeMeantWell.com is this great website and he also writes for the American Conservative Magazine and we're talking about the war in Ukraine.
Now you're a career foreign service officer before you got fired for telling the truth about Iraq War II.
So why don't you tell us what you know and what you think the people of Southern California need to understand about the real context of the conflict in Ukraine?
Well there are a lot of layers.
You can talk about the American side, you can talk about the Russian side and they have nothing to do with each other.
Basically on the American side, this is clearly an attempt to raise up the old flag and gin up the Cold War again.
Lots more defense spending, lots more voting, lots more patriotism.
They're either with us or against us.
For a guy like Joe Biden who doesn't have a whole lot going for him politically right now, a war is a sad attempt to kind of buff up his statistics.
We'll see if it'll work.
I doubt it will.
I think it's going to backfire on him because I don't think at the end of the day there's anything Joe Biden can do that's going to influence Putin and his actions on the ground.
And at the end of the day, Biden is going to be left as the president who helped reconstruct the Iron Curtain over Europe.
We went from tear down that wall, Mr. Gorbachev, to I'm sorry, there's a new wall across the Ukraine Biden.
So I don't think that's going to work.
On the Russian side, this is something that has been foreseen since we tore down that wall, Mr. Gorbachev.
Everyone including Russian experts like George Cannon and Jack Maclock predicted that NATO expansion was eventually going to turn around and bite the United States in the ass, that the Russians simply would not be able to tolerate a giant foreign army sitting on its border.
Imagine Mexico joining the Warsaw Pact in 1970.
That's kind of the case.
And that Putin was eventually going, Putin or some Russian leader, was eventually going to have to address that.
And that is what Putin is doing.
He is cleaning up the mess that the United States made when it redrew the borders of Europe after the Cold War, particularly the border with the Ukraine and particularly with the NATO border, if you will, which now extends all the way through Poland.
And there's nothing that's going to stop Putin on this.
Militarily, it's all over.
I mean, anybody who wants to talk about Ukrainian partisans versus Russian tanks, this is not a hearts and mind campaign.
This is not Afghanistan or Iraq or anything else.
This is simply Putin breaking things to establish a buffer zone in the Ukraine.
And he is not interested in or worried about hearts and minds.
One of the great reasons, if you're a strategist, that you enable these refugee safe quarters that are allowing people to leave Kiev and other places to head out of Ukraine is it depopulates the place, which is fine with Putin.
He doesn't want to have to occupy a bunch of angry Ukrainians.
Let them go and he'll be happy to find some Russians to take their place and create this buffer zone.
It is it has happened.
It's already done.
The only question is, at what point will Putin call it a day and whether or not anybody on the NATO side will take stupid pills along the way and actually end up enlarging this war?
If you want to go back and blame it on somebody, you can blame it on the U.S. Senate, who insisted on expanding NATO eastward against all warnings, including from the State Department.
Not that I have to say something nice about them, but occasionally it's it's necessary.
Who said, don't do this.
Blame it on the the Clinton administration, who early on decided that Russia was going to be a capitalist free for all and imposed all sorts of the most predatory capitalistic practices which the Russian gangsters were happy to pick up on.
And let's not forget, as we talk about coups and regime change and God help us when those words come out, the last regime change that Russia had is what put Putin in power 22 years ago.
So we better be careful what we're asking for here.
Now, what do you mean by that?
That was an American plot to have Putin replace Yeltsin.
No, no, no, no, I'm not implying that.
What I'm saying is, is that when you talk about regime change, you're saying that we're going to open the door to chaos and hope the right stuff happens.
It's not something that can be engineered to the point where you're not going to worry, for example, about a period of instability in the nation that holds the second largest stockpile of nuclear weapons.
I got you.
So in other words, you're saying when they did the regime change of keeping Yeltsin in power in 96 with all that money and all of that help to rig that election, that Putin was the consequence of that when Yeltsin promoted him later.
Yeah, it backfired.
And that's the same thing about these people who are talking about Lindsey Graham said we should assassinate Putin.
Half of American government is talking about regime change.
God bless them.
The Council of Foreign Relations is advocating regime change in Russia.
What I'm saying is that that was W. Bush's like calmest guy, right?
Richard Hoss.
Yeah, yeah.
I, I, I, I have to, uh, well, I'm not going to say anything about Richard Hoss.
I'm sure he's a nice man if, if you get to know him and he's sedated, but that's not the point here.
The point is that once you, you crack that door open, you cannot control what happens.
And the fact that, that the last regime change put Putin in power is a good example of that.
There's plenty from around the world.
In terms of Biden, I think, you know, he, he's a dead man walking.
He's, he's actually overplayed this to the point where it's going to end whatever functional presidency he may have had left.
There's not going to stop Putin.
These sanctions are certainly not going to stop Putin.
They're not going to stop Putin any more than they did when he attacked Georgia, when he attacked Crimea.
They're not going to stop Putin because he didn't stop him from going after Ukraine.
And the new sanctions are going to be just as ineffectual, just as they were ineffectual in say, oh, Cuba, Venezuela, Iraq, Iran, Syria, um, North Korea, and all the other places that we've been sanctioning for 70 years without actually causing any change to happen.
Biden, I think is going to regret those, those words.
All right.
Now, here's the thing.
Me and a few other people got it wrong and said that, uh, we didn't think that Putin was going to invade.
Now I'm the same guy who warned you for years that Putin said I could be in Kiev in two weeks and that this was a real problem and we better not push it.
But this time around, I thought that, you know, it was more of like, uh, the boy who cried wolf kind of thing.
And part of the reason I thought that, I thought that our current CIA director being a career foreign service guy, and in fact, the former ambassador to Russia and the guy who wrote the memo, and yet means and yet to Connelisa Rice on February the 1st, 2008, that he would guide Biden through this well.
That look, man, I know this guy Lavrov and I see eye to eye with him on, or, you know, understand him.
And here's the thing, what we got to do to make a war not happen.
And I just thought that, you know, there were indications the way Biden had said blithely.
And I thought, believably, Peter, that we're not bringing Ukraine into NATO anytime in the next 10 years.
Anyway, he reportedly had told Putin that on the phone on December the 30th.
And, um, he had said mid range missiles in Ukraine, we're not putting mid range missiles in Ukraine.
And then in writing, they said, we'd be happy to invite your officers out to check out our anti-missile launchers, the MK-41 missile launchers in Poland.
No Tomahawk missiles there, only anti-missile missiles.
You don't guys don't have to worry about that.
We'll set up a new verification regime.
So I thought, eh, sounds like they're trying to placate him enough.
But now I think that I was being naive and stupid.
And that actually, like always, the American empire is worse than I think.
And that, Peter, they wanted this to happen.
They didn't want a way around it.
They wanted to see Russia in their eyes, bite off more than they can chew so that they, as they keep saying it, I mean, as I started doing the research, I just found take after take after take going back the last three, four months about how we're going to bog them down and bleed them to bankruptcy like we did in Afghanistan in the 1980s.
We're going to arm up these stay behind forces and they're going to, and then we're going to give them javelins and stingers and it's going to be awesome.
And you may have seen Hillary Clinton blabbing and blabbing and blabbing at length about this.
Well, her designated secretary of defense nominee, if she'd been elected, Stratavus, the former Supreme Allied Commander of NATO forces in Europe, he's been saying the same thing.
So she's not just musing and daydreaming.
This is what they're talking about doing.
And I think now that maybe this is what they wanted to happen, possibly just to make sure that, look, if Germany wants to be that good of friends with Russia, we rather kick Russia right the hell all the way out of Europe than allow that friendship to get any closer.
Even though that's the worst thing in the world that anyone could ever possibly do is try to drive a wedge between Germany and Russia.
But I think that the Americans are the worst people in the world.
So what do you think about all the crazy things I just said?
There's a lot to unpack there.
First of all, never trust the state department.
They tell their bosses what their bosses want to hear.
And so a guy who writes yet means yet for one boss.
And the guy who says, let's go get him, Joe, for a different boss.
That's just standard State Department practice.
We're trained well in that.
So don't ever believe a State Department person.
I've heard a lot of people talking about this.
You know, this is the new Afghanistan.
The first answer, of course, is how that end up working out in the long run, according to Hillary Clinton.
There are some unintended consequences.
But anyway.
Yeah.
Anyway.
Three thousand dead Americans.
Yeah.
The other thing, though, is is very, very simply, Afghanistan is not Ukraine.
To begin with, what is happening in Ukraine is an old school war to grab territory simply to occupy their physical territory as a buffer zone between NATO and Russia.
There's no need to create any kind of allegiance.
There's no need to win any hearts and minds.
There's no need to do anything with the people other than ignore them, move them out of the way or kill them.
They're just accessories to what is necessarily in Putin's mind the need for physical space.
So the object object of the war in Ukraine is completely different than what the Russians had in mind when they entered Afghanistan, which was to create a new client state there with a puppet government and all that.
Unlike Afghanistan, Putin's supply lines are very, very short into Ukraine.
All this garbage about the Russians don't have gas.
Most of the Russian troops are within 70 miles of the Russian border.
You can drive a gas truck to them in an afternoon if you really wanted to.
And the same thing goes.
The supply lines into Afghanistan were halfway around the world and always hindered the Russians progress.
In addition, Afghanistan was a mountainous country.
And of course, the Russians famously were ambushed as the Americans were again and again and again by the Taliban, who worked the mountains like a weapon of their own.
Ukraine is flat.
It is the war that the Red Army has been training to fight since 1945.
Massive tank columns supported by air power across flat ground.
In addition, unlike Afghanistan, Ukraine is a modern nation with a modern infrastructure and big cities.
That's what this nuclear plant business was all about.
If you're going to control the country, you're going to control its infrastructure.
There was, as Donald Rumsfeld famously said of the American effort in Afghanistan, there's nothing to bomb there.
You can blow up mud huts all day and not really accomplish anything strategically.
But in a modern country like Ukraine, if you control communications nodes, if you can control key bridges, if you can control power and water plants, then you can control the country.
And the Russians are perfectly capable and have an army that was designed to do that, albeit it was supposed to flow through the Fulda Gap into West Germany and do it.
But they're happy to repurpose those old Red Storm Rising plans to put them in the Ukraine.
Last but not least, Putin's plan is already well underway.
He's got the Ukrainians moving out of Ukraine.
A million plus people have already fled to Poland.
The country is becoming lopsided as more and more Ukrainians cram into the western portion.
That suits Putin just fine.
He would love to have a big empty space in eastern Ukraine.
If people want to stay there and live in the cities, he'll control the utilities.
Cities can always be encircled or besieged, starved out, or if necessary, as the people of Grozny and Aleppo just leveled.
Now what about the Americans baiting him into doing it deliberately?
Oh, one more thing to add to that.
Zelensky, the president of Ukraine, said in Munich in February, eh, maybe, I'm paraphrasing, eh, maybe we'll make some nukes.
And Putin then said, aha, weapons of mass destruction.
That's a direct quote from his declaration of war.
Weapons of mass destruction.
I gotta go in.
And I wonder whether they're playing Putin like a fiddle, not that he's not getting what he wants in the way you describe, but that these idiot Americans think that this is what they wanted to see happen.
That haha, regardless of all your arguments against how much sense it makes, they think it makes sense.
That we're gonna arm up a right sector Azov Mujahideen to fight these guys and it's gonna be awesome.
Yeah, if that, if the Americans really did that, I, I, they've miscalculated completely.
This, as I said, this is not Afghanistan in, in any way whatsoever.
The United States is nearly powerless to affect things on the ground in the Ukraine.
And the more that the U.S. saber rattles and threatens and, and the more the U.S. dramaticizes this, um, the more it's just gonna look bad in the ending.
I hate to say something good about Barack Obama, but man, did he get it right in 2014 when he announced essentially that, sad as it is, the Crimea is not an American interest and basically said to the Russians, you win, you got it.
Um, and we will talk of this no further.
Yep.
And he knew good and well that if he and Biden hadn't overthrown the government in Kiev, then the Russians wouldn't have taken the Crimean peninsula.
Sorry.
Hang on just one second.
Hey guys, anybody who signs up to listen to this show by way of Patreon will be invited to join the Reddit group and I'm gonna start posting stuff over there more.
That's patreon.com slash Scott Horton show.
Thanks.
Hey y'all.
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All right, now go ahead homeboy.
Where would you like to pick up?
Oh, I thought you were right in the middle of something when I interrupted you there.
I was just going to agree with you as I usually do.
Yeah.
Well, and I'm sorry I don't ask you questions.
I'm just ranting and raving here, but I want to hear what you think about all of this stuff.
And I hadn't read you on this current crisis.
I don't know if we've talked about native expansion and things like this in the past.
I've been writing more for and we can continue this as part of the interview.
I've been one of the things that's challenging, Scott, if you take an anti-war position in America, of course, is finding outlets in order to to to have an anti-war position.
That is something that has really not been welcomed in the United States for really since September 11th.
We have been full on war all the time.
We were pretty warlike before September 11th, but that pretty much canceled it.
And so as I look for places to write, oftentimes I'm looking for new boundaries.
And so one of the places that has picked up some of my writing is The Spectator.
And it's one of those- Oh, great.
I didn't know that.
You know, you need an email list, dude.
I'm too busy to keep track of all this crap.
Oh, yeah.
I mean, I prefer to, I want to, I'm not, I'm not a big lover of devoting so much of my time to self-promotion.
I probably should- Just put me on it.
I should probably lose a few pounds, get some hair plugs and, you know, try to, try to find a way- Too late for the hair plugs for you, buddy.
TV more or something.
See if any of your contributors would want to throw a few bucks for, you know, Cryo or something for me.
Botox.
But nonetheless, The Spectator has been picking up some of my pieces.
They're behind a paywall, unfortunately, for some of our listeners, but stuff does find a way to my blog at wementwell.com eventually.
So you may not be at the razor's edge of my thinking, but you'll be in the murky closet behind that at any given time.
The thing that is just so dismaying to me is how I have shapeshifted without changing a single point of view.
I have, as an anti-war person, I have gone from being a Hillary Clinton supporter to a Hillary Clinton hater to a Republican apologist to a Putin lover to a tool of the Chinese Communist Party.
I just find myself labeled in ways that are inexplicable to me.
Used to be kind of a respectable thing to oppose war.
You know, Neil Young used to sing about it.
Probably would have been on my side at one point in my life, but now I don't know where Neil Young is anymore.
I expect he would think that I was a Putinist or something like that.
And I just find this so saddening that I can't hold onto a position without everyone accusing me of taking a different side somewhere.
It tells you how effective the propaganda has been.
You know, one of my own kids just texted me an anti-Putin joke, and it's like, my kids, by God, I was propagandizing you guys from age zero.
You know, as I was changing your diapers, I was humming Woody Guthrie songs, and you're now sending me Putin jokes?
You know, what has the world come to?
Well, I mean, the thing is, what they're doing is pretty brutal, and as you describe it too, you know, I was, I argued in my speech that, look, man, essentially, here's all the reasons why he did it.
I say in there that he's, what he did was not reasonable, but yes, it was rational.
It's not that he's gone mad and decided to conquer Eastern Europe for conquering's sake.
It's that the Americans have put him in this position and spent way too much time explaining, you know, and too much length explaining, you know, how it was.
And yet, so then one guy on Twitter says to me, all right then, tough guy then, so what was he supposed to do?
And you know, my solution is, well, not kill a bunch of people, I don't know, it ain't never that, but it's the same kind of thing.
I was kind of just making this argument about the war in Syria where, look, I was against Russia's war in Syria, but not nearly as much as I was against America's war in Syria, and because I know that it was the Americans who put the Russians into that position, and as John Kerry said, hey, they didn't want a Daesh government in Damascus.
That was why they finally intervened at the end of 2015.
So it's like, yeah, what they did, they exploded a lot of people to death.
It was all screwed up, but that was not the chip on my shoulder at the time.
My problem was America had made them do it, made them do it, and so, but at the same time, what they were doing was pretty damn brutal, but it's also true that I don't know what other options they had, but I'm not a military strategist or whatever.
Maybe there was a better way, but it's still true that, I mean, these guys too are pretty brutal in the way they explode people, man.
Yeah, there's no question about that, and, you know, anybody who thinks that war is surgical or any of those kind of terms really has never experienced these things.
I think one important point, and if I learned, I didn't learn a lot in my 24 years at the State Department, but I did learn this, and that is that irrationality is far less common than the media or the government propagandists would have you believe.
I never really was involved in any kind of serious big headline level negotiations.
I sat in the back of the room for a couple of them and took some notes, that kind of thing, but I was never at the table for anything that important, but I was at the table for all sorts of things that go on between governments that aren't newsworthy at all.
Treaties to negotiate how we handle each other's prisoners, for example, or when we can import stuff into other countries, and they, you know, stuff like that that is just the day-to-day minutiae of diplomacy, and what I found is across the board, from repressive governments to democratic governments, whatever, irrationality just does not pop up as often as you think, and this idea that Putin is out of control and irrational and who knows what he's going to do next is just part and parcel to the American way of preparing our people for war, the mad dog of Libya, the crazy guy in North Korea.
Democrats tried to do it by claiming Trump was mentally ill.
It's an old, old game that we play where we have to demonize our opponents, claim they're mentally ill, and therefore what we're doing is actually more like an intervention than going to war.
And so this idea that Putin was tricked into it or goaded into it, you know, that may have been somebody's intentions, but at the end of the day, you ask yourself where's the juice, where's the squeeze?
In other words, what was Putin going to gain potentially at what loss?
And basically, he was invading Ukraine meant he was going to gain this physical buffer zone that he wanted, and the risk to him was essentially zero, so more wimpy sanctions, and I really, really doubt that getting his black belt taken away by the World Taekwondo Association or the handicapped Russian athletes not being able to compete at the Paralympics, I don't think that works into his calculations.
It's the same thing, not to get off our topic though, but it's the same thing that makes me absolutely certain that China will never invade Taiwan.
They have everything they want out of the current relationship, which is one of the most fiscally delightful relationships in the world, and they have absolutely nothing to gain by changing the flag that flies over Taipei.
So, wait a minute, I don't want that to be a brief aside, I don't want you to talk about that until you're done talking about that, but I want you to address the fact that it looks to me like it's the same damn thing.
They got a security threat right on their border, and we keep making it worse.
We give these guys F-16s all day.
We haven't been harming the Ukrainians like that, and maybe the Chinese are going to say, oh no, we better preempt this threat before it gets worse here, so you tell me why it's so different then.
No, no, no.
Oh, it's dramatically different.
Right now, China is Taiwan's largest trading partner, and Taiwan is one of China's largest trading partners.
The amount of commerce that goes back and forth is in the multi-billions of dollars and growing all the time.
In addition, nobody wants to, why would you want to mess with that, the goose that poops out the golden egg?
There's way too much money involved to think about much of anything else.
In addition, China is deeply, deeply tied into the world system.
Sanctions could crush China.
Imagine a sanction that said no more Chinese ships docking in the United States.
Sorry, guys.
Hope you can eat the iPhones, because they're all the food you have left.
Russia has been working vehemently over the last decade or so to get out of the world system, or at least insulate itself from the world system.
The Panama Papers show that Putin's money is in banks in the Caribbean and in Central America.
Chinese money, well, they're the second largest foreign holder of U.S. government debt, and the amount of real estate the Chinese government owns abroad is staggering.
They are part of the world system, not in a position to antagonize it, even if they would say somehow we don't need all those billions of dollars anymore.
First up is that famously Taiwan is an island.
You can't drive into it the way that you can with the Ukraine.
Any attempt to attack Taiwan would require launching the greatest amphibious invasion in human history.
It would be estimates, military estimates are roughly the Chinese would have to land as much as 10 times the number of troops as went ashore on D-Day, and they'd have to do it against Taiwan's rocky western coast, not any flat, nice beaches there.
Lastly, the United States, and this is an arguable point, but the United States has made it as clear as they can without saying it clearly that it will definitely intercede on Taiwan's behalf.
The U.S. itself coined the phrase there is only one China, and Taiwan is a part of it, as part of saying that the United States will, I can't remember the exact wording, but it says look with great concern on any moves that appear to be ballistic.
And the point here is that the Chinese government is getting 99.9% of everything it wants out of the current status quo with China, United States, and Taiwan, and no one can really point to what that extra 1% might be.
Lastly, the other thing that's going to happen is that a Chinese invasion of Taiwan would occur in a much larger context.
Look, the Europeans would love for the United States to simply shut the hell up about things and let them and Russia work this stuff out in their own funny little way.
That's what's going to happen anyway.
But they'd love the United States to stop saber-rattling on their behalf.
What would happen in Asia is that a Chinese invasion of Taiwan would almost immediately spur South Korea to go nuclear, and probably Japan out of their own fear for China, particularly if the United States held back in any way.
Meanwhile, the Russians and the French have long ago understood the big bear is going to be sitting over there, and we might as well deal with them in our own way, because honestly, who really cares what happens to Ukraine in a global strategic way?
So I don't think the situations have anything at all in common.
The last point I'll make is that the China-Taiwan situation has existed basically the way it has for 70 years, through the changes in government on the Chinese side that brought us from Mao to Deng to Xi.
The Chinese have gone nuclear in the middle.
The Chinese have fought the United States in Vietnam and Korea, and none of this spilled over anywhere.
Taiwan has converted from a military government to a democracy in the middle of all this, and the status quo has held.
Putin, meanwhile, has fainted at Ukraine how many times, actually invaded Georgia and the Ukraine in recent years.
What happened in the Ukraine is essentially something that started when the wall fell and NATO started expanding east, and finally found its conclusion last week when the actual invasion kicked off.
Nothing like that going on in Asia.
Yeah.
All right.
And now, speaking of conquering a buffer zone and all this, are we talking about the Dnieper River or the Romanian border, you think?
That's not fair, because it's the future, and what the hell do you know about the future?
But still, I'm asking you.
It's too dangerous to know too much about your own future here, Marty.
I've actually got an article that was just turned down by Responsible Statecraft that I think may appear on the American Conservative saying, how does this end?
And there's two endings here, realistic endings.
The first one, which is what I think is more likely to happen, is that the Russian forces right now are attacking south, past towards Kiev, and they're attacking north out of Crimea.
And they're going to link up south of Kiev, encircling the city, bypassing the city, and that will cut the country in half, Ukraine.
It will create a de facto East Ukraine, West Ukraine.
And I'm going to suggest that that's going to be enough for Putin.
What happens to the city of Kiev is a separate issue.
It's going to really depend on whether Zelensky wants to die with the last Ukrainians on the barricades or not.
The Russians, I think, would be equally happy to bypass Kiev.
They'd be equally happy to level it and turn it into rubble.
They don't really care, because Kiev is not what they want.
What they want is their buffer zone, and rivers are great places for buffer zones.
So I think that Putin will get stabilized, he'll find all the little nooks and crannies that are strategically helpful to him, and he'll settle the army in about halfway across Ukraine, and then declare a humanitarian ceasefire, or whatever words make it sound really nice.
He'll then quietly be negotiating with NATO, perhaps secretly, that basically the western portion of Ukraine is yours to do anything you want with, except militarize.
The eastern part of Ukraine is mine, and that's the new status quo.
We don't have to call it east and west, or anything like that, if that's going to disturb you in the west.
But basically, the status quo will be a divided Ukraine there.
A worst-case scenario would be that Putin realizes there's nothing going to stop him from Kiev up to the Polish or Moldovan borders, and he might as well, while he's got the tanks there, might as well just push all the way through and stick his thumb right in NATO's face.
And, you know, you wanted to put tanks on my border?
How does it feel?
Yeah.
Well, and Odessa's a major prize there, and that's pretty far west.
Yeah, but it's south.
It's more important that it's south.
There's nothing to defend Odessa, because Putin can strike, he can turn his, the army that's advancing northward now can turn west and cut off Odessa, and then he can also attack from the sea.
Odessa is toast.
And he may take that just because ports are good to have, but again, it's easier to resupply.
But what he really wants is that buffer zone.
He doesn't need western Ukraine for it, though he may take it.
The worst possible situation, of course, would be some form of NATO intervention that turns this into the new next Syria, or new next former Yugoslavia, or whatever, where basically fighting goes on for a very, very long time until there's not much left of Ukraine, but dead people in mud.
See, I'm real worried here, too, that, you know, this war is a government program, man.
And even if all goes well for Russia, and they seize all the east of the country, now they have left an entirely, you know, a country that's almost entirely dominated now, which it has been, I know, for the last eight years, but before that, you know, at least in power, sort of, there was like a 50-50 split, and a reason to share, call it a two-party system in a way, with their completely crooked regular elections that they held, and also coups.
But so now, they're leaving a rump state that's just dominated, presumably, by the most reactionary ethnic Ukrainian forces, without any tempering influence from more Russian-leaning people in the east of the country anymore, and so now, you know, as you say, well, do whatever you want, just don't militarize, man, he's got a bunch of people really mad that he just stole half their country right there, and so in the logic of a government program, then don't you just have to also shoot yourself in the foot and do another stupid, worse thing than you already did by solving the problem you created by creating another one?
So now, you conquer and crush them, so they're not a threat anymore, but now you got yourself an insurgency and all this kind of thing?
You know, the people who are talking to Putin, you know, his advisors are saying those things to him.
Do we want to try to cut this off and kind of create a easily defended frontier, or do we want to go in there and try to crush the insurgency before it starts and move all the way to NATO's border?
And that's basically what Putin is weighing through right now.
I think that the thing that's different from what the United States is envisioning or the people who want to see this as a new Afghanistan is the political purpose, and that's what you have to look at ultimately.
What is Putin trying to accomplish?
And since we're going to say that he isn't really interested in hearts and minds and converting the Ukrainians to his cause or anything, then really at that point, he just has to break stuff.
And insurgencies, you know, can be broken.
It's a violent, ugly, terrible process, but it can be done.
You just have to want to do it bad enough.
In the end, many times, you know, the United States in Iraq didn't want to start blowing up cities.
That wasn't in line with our political purpose of creating a new democracy in the heart of the Middle East, yada, yada, yada.
But if you don't care about any of that, then you can blow up cities.
And certainly if you're Russia and you've already removed yourself largely from the world system anyway, you know, that's the last restraint, the moral restraint.
I think Putin is doing a good job of, by the way, preparing to not have that be a problem in eastern Ukraine by taking advantage of the pro-Russian people that are there, by chasing as many, quote, loyal Ukrainians out as possible.
It's not going to be a pretty place to live if you're a, you know, walking around with your yellow and blue T-shirts on.
I think Putin is going to ethnically cleanse, if you will, eastern Ukraine and try to draw a line.
Hopefully that line will be in the middle and not on the NATO border, which would be far more volatile going forward.
Yeah, man.
And you know, I'm reminded by this map how crooked that Dnieper River is too.
It really has a massive right turn there to the east.
And so, for example, if they want to go to Odessa, they've got to go quite a bit to the west of there and quite a bit to the west of, well, it's, well, anyway, it's very crooked, especially near the south coming back again toward the west.
So anyway, it'd be a very strangely shaped state with plenty of problems built into it.
The bottom line is to keep your attention on what the political goal is, because that's going to dictate the military strategy, not the other way around.
And not Putin is irrational.
What is Putin trying to accomplish?
And what that will tell you what he's going to do militarily.
And it will guide.
It's good.
It's what's guiding him.
What is my goal here?
Well, that's what Amir Sheimer was saying.
There's a new thing at antiwar.com slash blog where he did a thing with the committee for the republic.
And he talked about how, yeah, he's going to take the east.
This guy is stupid.
He takes the west.
He's got whole new problems.
I mean, as I think I'm still right that if he leaves the west, he's got whole new problems too.
But hopefully he's not going to double what he's already done here.
You know, I don't know.
But now I want to get back to your article here that you wrote at TAC about the new developments in the Russiagate case.
We all know that Charlie Savage has no dignity at all and simply writes what the CIA would have him write.
But I read him in the New York Times and he said, this is no big deal.
And you say that it is.
So help me understand the new develops some new filings by John Durham in the still quietly running origins of the Russiagate case.
Well, let me let me take everybody back into the misty days of 2016 to show you how far this this has this has all changed.
And I do remember you and I having a lot of fairly pointed discussions about how much of Russiagate was true.
And you had some some reservations.
You never bought the whole story, but you were a little behind me on this.
So I'm going to take a little bit of a victory lap.
Nothing.
Well, now, just to clarify here, I never I never believed in or stood by or vouch for one bit of this argument.
The only thing I did worse than you was I left open the possibility that still maybe we'll find something out here where you were way more certain than I was of the negative.
I kept a slightly more open mind, but there ain't one even so-called factoid of this thing that I said was right.
The whole damn time.
Well, we'll wait for the fact checkers to review the tapes.
But do you think I got one wrong when I say no, no, no, no, no.
I'm going to punch myself in the face right here if you actually got me on one.
No, no, no.
We're going to we're going to go forward with the you had the well, you know, we don't know the whole story yet.
Well, because I got to tell you, I mean, I know I debunked like the Russia server thing from the very beginning.
I never thought the the Trump Tower thing was anything or any of these things.
I debunked them all with you the whole time.
I guess I do remember saying I don't know about you, but I remember saying to Pete Canone is on his show.
He had me on like where I have you on as my expert.
He had me on as his expert kind of thing.
And I do remember saying to him, I mean, there's still we don't know what they're going to do with Roger Stone.
They claim there's something here that he was talking to somebody, but it sure doesn't look like nothing to me.
So in other words, I was still kind of not being 100 percent definitive in like the negative that I couldn't prove the negative of.
But I had an advantage.
I don't remember believing in a damn thing.
And I sure fought with a hell of a lot of people who I care about, about their stupid takes on the whole thing where they did believe.
I'm going to ease the blow here by saying that I had a very unfair advantage in that over the course of my time in the State Department, I was aware of I became very aware of how the CIA and other intelligence agencies do their work.
All right.
Wait a minute.
Wait, wait, wait.
I got it.
I got to interrupt you to say here, hey, Reddit room guys or somebody, would you go and look at some or listen to some interviews of me and Peter from back then and see if I was bad on Russian game at all?
I can't.
I don't think so.
All right.
I withdraw all my comments.
I'm going to the troops are retreating back across the river, even as we speak.
Scott Horton is the smartest, smartest and best looking guy ever.
No, I know that isn't true.
But I'm just thinking, man, I don't remember screwing this one up, you know, in the Internet against me.
I got enough problems already in my life.
They don't know your email address.
I'll just let you know what they found out later and I'm going to get swatted and doxed and all those terrible things.
So, no, Scott is the smartest and bestest.
Y'all do not swat Peter Van Buren, who lives on one of them major islands in Hawaii somewhere.
Go ahead.
Yeah, but there's eight of them.
So you don't know which one.
And there's a private secret island.
So there we go.
OK, look, here's the thing.
Whoever I was ahead of back in the day, I had the advantage of after being in the government and overseas of seeing how intelligence agencies do their work, both our own and foreign governments.
And part of that was some very extensive training in this so that I would recognize attempts by intelligence agencies to manipulate me or the United States and report these things.
So we had a fair amount of training in how this all works.
And in particular, what the U.S. calls information ops or psychological ops, where you're basically trying to use the tools of the foreign media to give credibility to your own lies for some reason.
And so when I started to see this whole thing unfold, and I've written extensively about this at American Conservative, it became apparent to me that I had seen this before.
Oh, that's this part of it.
That's this part of it.
It was kind of a textbook walking through the steps of here's how you run an info op 101, the stuff they teach them out at the farm when you become a new junior CIA officer.
And I was not working for the CIA.
I never worked for the CIA, just to make that clear.
But it was very obvious that what was being done was a classic textbook op.
Meanwhile, if I take you all back to 2016, or even better, this time of 2017, after Trump had been elected, basically we still believed that the so-called dossier had, quote, elements of truth in it, even if some of it wasn't true, but no one was really ready to say which part was which.
That it was the product of a concerned citizen named Christopher Steele, who coincidentally worked for the British MI6 in the past, that Donald Trump was possibly communicating with his handlers in Russia, either through the Alpha Bank server or directly when he met with Putin in Helsinki and other places.
We also believed that all of this was growing organically and the media was exposing it step-by-step-by-step through some very clever reporting and aggressive use of anonymous sources.
We now know, based on the Durham findings and a lot of other information, that absolutely none of what we believed in 2017 was true.
To begin with, we know now, and this is not open for discussion, I mean, there's people who won't believe it, but that's like not believing gravity really exists.
We now know that the so-called dossier was created at the behest of the Clinton campaign and paid for by the Clinton campaign through their lawyers, Perkins and Coy, passed to Fusion GPS, passed to Orbis, and Christopher Steele was hired to create the dossier from scratch.
The people that he interviewed for the, quote, raw information about the P-tape and everything else turned out to be sent to him by the Clinton campaign or its people.
One of his key sources was a Russian emigre who worked at the Brookings Institute who was introduced to Christopher Steele by Fiona Hill.
We know her name.
She's been involved in Ukraine hijinks up to her neck.
She claims that she warned Bush not to do the Bucharest Declaration to invite Ukraine and Georgia into NATO.
Sorry, go ahead.
Yeah.
So we see there that this was brought in by Fiona Hill from the Brookings Institution and told to Christopher Steele.
We also know that other Clinton activists or operatives, whatever you like to call them, were the other sources for Christopher Steele, particularly the so-called P-tape.
The whole dossier was paid for by Clinton, was created by people Clinton hired, and was full of information that Clinton supporters supplied to Christopher Steele.
That's no longer in question.
That's not something to debate anymore.
That's all simple reality.
We also know that Christopher Steele played the role of double agent, that he approached the FBI, John McCain, and a lot of media people with the information in the dossier and either told them that he had created the information on his own, not connected to the Clinton campaign, or in the case of the media, didn't tell them that he was the creator.
He showed up to verify the information in somebody else's created dossier.
That's running both sides, and it's called an information loop.
It's what the intelligence officers do.
They become their own confirming source.
So the FBI leaks out they've got the dossier, and then somebody at the New York Times is approached by Christopher Steele, who says, I'm Mr. Secret Agent Man from the former MI6.
Hey, you know, all that's really true.
And you confirm your own information.
None of that is open to discussion.
It actually happened.
Meanwhile, we know from the recent Durham finding that the Clinton campaign also paid people to collect information on what the White House was doing with Alpha Bank and to study what's known as DNS information in order to attempt to prove that there were other connections between Trump and Russia.
I'm not going to get into the technicalities of DNS information, but it's spying, pure and simple.
The NSA devotes enormous resources to collecting DNS information to find out who its targets are communicating with.
It's the so-called metadata that Edward Snowden warned us about.
And the Clinton campaign paid for that to be accumulated and collected against Donald Trump, including after he was in the White House.
It's in the Durham findings.
And the guy, the key indictee here, Michael Sussman, does not say that that's not true.
He admits to all of that as he admits to being a double agent who approached the FBI to peddle this information without saying it was paid for and created by the Clinton campaign.
The only thing Michael Sussman said in his defense that is not true is that he did not commit technical legal perjury in front of the FBI.
The basic facts of this all were made very, very, were confirmed by the people involved.
So you've got the Clinton campaign having created two mountains of false information that falsely linked Donald Trump to handlers in Russia, and then running a sophisticated intel agency-grade information op in order to get that data to the FBI and have them launch a full-on investigation, the so-called crossfire hurricane, as well as use the media to keep the story alive and drive the calls for impeachment.
But you're going to say to me, where's the smoking gun?
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Well, I'm going to say to you, but Charlie Savage says these guys were just doing good counterintelligence work protecting the Obama White House from these Yotta phones, these Russian smartphones, and other spying that they really believe may have been associated with Russians who may or may not be associated with the Trump people.
And that, therefore, you're taking this out of context to make it sound like they were framing up Donald Trump when maybe one guy was, but the other guy was just doing his job or something kind of like that.
Regardless of whatever else was being done, this happened.
And we can't ignore the fact that this happened, this DNS spying on Donald Trump happened, just because other things happened.
In addition, I'd like to point out that the company that went to, that did all this spying was deeply, deeply connected to the FBI.
Among other things, this company makes software that allows you to warrantlessly monitor someone's internet usage using false security certificates.
That's their core business.
So these guys were not just white hats out there trying to keep the world internet clean.
These were folks who were deeply involved with the FBI, with surveillance technology, who had a full understanding of what they were doing, number one.
Number two, the fact that they kept this going into the period of time where Trump took office, because the so-called spying was going on well into February, tells you what they were after.
And number three, now this gets a little bit off the reservation, so kind of put this with an asterisk next to it.
They may have in fact started the DNS monitoring under Obama as a cover operation.
That's what I would do if I was running the op.
And number three, they may have started it under Obama so that they could establish a baseline.
If you want to go back and say, well, Trump is communicating more than normal with the Russians, you have to know what normal is.
And there's obviously going to be communication between some Russian entities in the White House.
We have a lot of things to talk about all the time.
And so if you started under Obama, you create a baseline of normal.
And then if you can see spikes that jump when Trump takes office, you have yourself some juicy, juicy stuff.
Okay, now help me understand.
Is there a direct connection here to the story of the Alpha Bank connection to Trump's spam bot and all that?
Yes, because what happened is that the same people who were collecting the DNS information on Trump and his White House communications also used their connections to gain access to a massive amount, I'm talking billions of records of DNS information that had been amassed at the University of Georgia under a DARPA contract paid for by the Pentagon.
Now their supposed purpose in collecting these billions of records paid for by the Pentagon was legitimate counter-espionage stuff.
However, they off the record shared the information that they collected for what's arguably a legitimate purpose.
They shared that information with the same people who were monitoring the White House.
Kind of, you know, just friends sharing information with friends.
Their agreement with the Pentagon certainly did not include sharing this information with the Clinton campaign.
And the same guy that pitched the story about the fake Russian cell phones to the FBI, Michael Sussman, also pitched the story, the fake story about the Alpha Bank server to the FBI.
That's your connection.
Gotcha.
And...
But let's...
No.
No, go ahead.
Go ahead.
Well, let me just add, this is just a parenthesis.
It won't take away from where you're going.
You know who's tweeting all of this?
Hillary Clinton is the first one to tweet all of this stuff out.
It was one of the most transparent things about it at the very beginning.
Look everyone, there's something going on with this, you know, Alpha Bank server and all this stuff.
And I guess they even had Jake Sullivan.
She quoted this giant statement by Jake Sullivan, our current President's National Security Advisor about it and all of this stuff.
So that was something that was always very suspicious was that, boy, is she always the very first one to get out front making these claims.
It doesn't seem very smart from a public relations point of view, because as I'm saying, it kind of stuck out like a sore thumb at the time.
The thing about Hillary being out front is that she was also equally out front on lying.
She denied funding the Steele dossier for a long, long time before quietly admitting that it was her law firm that funded it.
And she claimed not to have known that at the time she disavowed the whole thing.
But when you're running an information op, you have to make some careful choices.
People like Hillary Clinton to the people they're communicating with have a lot of credibility.
And so having her spearhead these disclosures gives them incredible credibility with the audience they're trying to reach.
It also raises the whole profile of everything.
And so you kind of have to be careful about how far, how high a person you want to use as one of your mouthpieces, because it can give you that credibility, it can give you that exposure.
But at the same time, you run the risk of tying them to something that in the end of the day, they don't want to be tied to.
And that's what we're going to find out happened right here with Hillary Clinton.
Now, you're saying that.
Oh, go ahead.
Go ahead.
Please.
I was just saying your piece, you say about statute of limitations.
It's running out here.
So maybe we'll get kind of a Walsh report at the end.
I think that's what John Durham is aiming at.
He's got very little time left to actually charge and prosecute people for these so-called minor crimes like perjury, the process crimes.
He's never going to work his way up the chain.
It's taken him three years to get this far.
He's never going to get all the way to Jake Sullivan or Hillary Clinton in a format that is fully prosecutable.
I think you're going to see, just looking ahead, you're going to see Republicans take control of the House and the Senate in the midterms, and they're going to launch hearings into all this, and Durham is going to basically be given that platform to lay out everything that he has found.
And I think that's where this is headed.
But in the end of the day, I think what everyone wants is a smoking gun.
That seems to be the way this works.
So I've talked to you now, and we've established, without any reasonable doubt, we've established that the Clinton campaign paid for, managed, and manipulated the dossier and all the other stuff to come out of the DNS spying and the Alpha Bank.
It was all- We also know, don't we, that the same Perkins Coie law firm were the ones who had hired to claim, without evidence, that it was the Russians who had hacked the DNC and done the old Podesta hack as well, right?
And you know- Is that what you were about to say?
I'm sorry.
It was, because it's a small world.
Do you know the name of the lawyer that represented the DNC in that whole process?
You know what?
It's- Michael Sussman.
I won't say it on the tip of my tongue, but it's on there somewhere.
Go ahead.
It's Michael Sussman.
Right, right.
He was the guy that was sent undercover to the FBI to tell the FBI about the DNS spying and what it had found.
There you go.
So- And when he went to the FBI, he pretended, he didn't say he was working then for the Clinton campaign.
Yep.
He maintained that he was still an attorney and that, as a concerned citizen, he had somehow gained access to internet data from inside the White House.
You know how that stuff is always laying around somewhere.
But the question is, you know, what did Hillary know and when did she know it?
Well, here we go.
None other than John Brennan was holding the smoking gun all along.
On October- I mean, Beck, I've got to look at notes because, as you know, the memory goes first.
Man, I'm telling you what, I'm going from that was my greatest talent to what the hell am I going to do without it right now?
On July 28th, 2016, CIA Director John Brennan briefed President Obama that the Hillary Clinton campaign planned to tie Donald Trump to Russia as a means of distracting the public from her use of her private email server.
We know this because on October 6th, 2020, Trump's National Intelligence Director, John Radcliffe, released a highly redacted document that says, and I'm going to quote from that redacted document, �We're getting additional insight into Russian activities from redacted.
Cite,� meaning that person, �alleged approved by Hillary Clinton on July 26th, a proposal from one of her foreign policy advisors to vilify Donald Trump by stirring up a scandal claiming interference by the Russian security service.
That's John Brennan telling Barack Obama that his sources said that Hillary Clinton two days earlier had approved a proposal from one of her foreign policy advisors to vilify Donald Trump.
Okay, now, let me pretend to be a Democrat for a second and give you a couple of choices here.
So, one interpretation of that would be, �Hey, Barack Obama, Mr. President, I should tell you that I found out something, and the way that I found it out was that the Russians found it out, and then I found it out by spying on them, and what I found out was that Hillary Clinton is doing this.
� Another interpretation would be that, �Hey, Mr. President, I was spying on the Russians, and they think this.
� So, how come you're sure it's the more better one?
John Brennan was a big fan of Hillary Clinton.
He is not going to spread gossip about her.
However, John Brennan is a Washington politician, and rule number one is, you cover your ass, and you specially cover your boss's ass.
Brennan may or may not know what Barack already knows, and he's either telling Barack, �If you didn't know about this, you may want to figure out how you're going to protect yourself and insulate yourself from all this,� or he's saying, �If you did know about this, lots of other people know now, too, and you better act accordingly.
� The most important thing is that John Brennan felt a need to create a written record that he had said this, and he got the information two days after Clinton allegedly approved the plan.
That tells you a lot of things.
A, it tells you that the CIA was already deep in shit looking into American domestic politics, which it shouldn't be.
Number two, it tells you that somebody in Russia had eyes on the Hillary Clinton campaign, enough that it only took two days for this information to get from Hillary's decision to Russia to Brennan, and it tells you there's a lot more documentation that probably is there because you don't bring something like that up in front of the president and then never talk about it again.
This is in July of 16, right at the time they're coming up with the crap about the server and blaming Russia for Assange and the WikiLeaks and all of this stuff.
It's happening almost simultaneously with the opening of Crossfire Hurricane, with the DNC server.
All of these events are happening in the same span of about two weeks in July.
I'm sorry.
I was confused.
I thought Crossfire Hurricane wasn't until a little bit later on in the thing, but we'll check that.
But so, I mean, that's in fact, that's kind of the crux of my point here is that sounds like Obama and his people knew good and well how fake this is from the very get go, which means that he then spent, yeah, he just spent the next, you know, the last five, six months of his administration overseeing this plot, knowing good and well how fake it was from July on.
Let me give you some more.
Radcliffe in 2020 also unclassified a September 2016 document, which by the way, I'm not saying I'm astounded Obama would do something immoral.
I'm saying I didn't know that he was that written, or if I did, I guess it hadn't really clicked the date on that.
I mean, I knew that information.
Here's the thing.
You know, these documents that I'm reading to you from are on the internet.
I know I didn't, you know, I wasn't handed them by a deep throat in some garage.
They're on the internet and they've been on the internet for a couple of years.
But if you go back and look, when they first came out, what happened was the same old story.
The media jumped on them very quickly, announced that it was all unverified information, that it was released by Radcliffe just before one of the debates between Trump and Hillary to smear her, and there's no credibility to it, and we're never going to speak of this again.
And these documents essentially disappeared in plain sight for the last two years.
Okay, here's another one.
September 2016, Radcliffe shows, 2020 Radcliffe unveils another document from September 2016.
The CIA forwarded to the FBI an investigative referral on Hillary Clinton proving, quote, this is quoting from the CIA document, a plan concerning U.S. presidential candidate Donald Trump and Russian hackers hampering U.S. elections in order to distract the public from her email scandal.
Okay, let's break that down.
The CIA obtained information that Hillary had approved this plan.
They don't say where they got it from.
Because the investigation would have to take place largely in the United States, the CIA says hot potato and hands it to the FBI via what's called an investigative referral, basically saying, we came across some stuff that's your bailiwick, not ours.
We're handing it over to you.
That's in September of 2016.
That's a pretty good one too.
And guess who the memo, this investigative referral, it's addressed to two men.
First one is addressed to James Comey, then director of the FBI.
Comey tells Congress later that he has no memory of ever receiving this memo and basically backs himself all the way away from it.
The other person who's on the memo is a name you'll recall, Peter Strzok.
Peter Strzok was the FBI agent who originally was in charge of the DNC server break, who then became in charge of Crossfire Hurricane, who then was caught exchanging texts with his FBI girlfriend saying, no, Trump will never be president, we'll stop it.
And so Strzok and Comey get this message from the CIA saying, here's something to investigate.
Comey claims he's never seen it and Strzok takes no action on it that we can find.
He basically deep sixes it and it goes away forever.
And then he's the same guy that we know is covering his ass later saying, oh geez, this New York Times story saying that Trump's in bed with the Russians is way overblown.
We don't think that that's true.
So if you want a smoking gun, there it is.
You've got the Clinton campaign funding all of these, these information operations.
You've got the Clinton campaign using people it pays for to hide the fact that it's Clinton stuff.
You have the Clinton campaign using people essentially undercover to push this information into the hands of a very willing FBI.
You have the CIA director essentially holding a piece of paper in his hand saying Hillary is behind all this.
You have the president of the United States being briefed on it, likely as a cover your ass gesture or a heads up, the world is getting, this information is getting out there.
And I don't know much, what much more you need to say that the Hillary Clinton campaign attempted to use the tools of intelligence and manipulate the FBI very willingly, manipulate the FBI to try to overthrow the Trump administration once it was elected.
Because all of this fueled the Mueller investigation and the same customers, Fiona Hill et al show up in the Ukrainian impeachment attempt as well.
My goodness.
Brennan stayed in on it too.
And Brennan was there.
That's the guy who handpicked the guys who did the intelligence so-called document, whatever it was, the intelligence estimate, not a real kind, but just their made up thing in three days before the inauguration in January of 2017.
And if you wrote all this as a spy novel, I mean, the editor would probably send it back as saying, ah, too obvious, too contrived, try to make it a little more interesting.
And the fact that these documents exist in plain sight is a tribute to the American media who has been, you know, hand in glove in helping all of this, not only as stooges for Chris Steele and Mike Sussman passing the information, but also hiding Hillary's culpability in it very, very effectively because the majority of Americans will still claim, well, you know, her emails.
And that's the last point I want to make here is not under the American public being tricked into not understanding why but her emails are so important.
Leave aside the questions of what kind of judgment she showed by creating a private server.
Leave aside the question that private servers with classified material very obviously violate all sorts of national security laws.
But look at this, Hillary operated that private server during numerous overseas trips, including trips as Secretary of State to Russia and China.
They had access to her emails.
They were on an unsecured server.
Mike Peter Strozak at the FBI stated publicly, we know actors obtained access to some Clinton emails, including at least one secret message.
That's the FBI saying that.
And you're sitting there in July.
You're not, what you are worried about is all of Hillary Clinton's communications from her time as Secretary of State appearing on WikiLeaks tomorrow morning.
That's what this was all about.
You're not so worried, at least initially when this started, you're not so worried about Donald Trump becoming president.
What you are really worried about is did the Russians or the Chinese or some other third party actor get access to all of her emails through that server?
And is that information sitting somewhere in WikiLeaks hands?
Julian Assange, when he dies, whether he's formally executed or just allowed to wither away in a jail cell, is dying for Hillary Clinton's sins.
Yeah, boy, it's true.
What they're doing to him is just unreal.
And it is for this.
And by the way, you know, Russia, if you're listening, there are still 30,000 missing emails that the public never got their hands on, which she obviously lied and claimed were personal emails with Bill about going to yoga with Chelsea.
And Bill's on the record saying, I don't email, I don't know.
I sent one twice on somebody else's account and 30,000 of them.
So I mean, obviously those were all corruption.
That was her taking bribes for, you know, the Clinton Foundation for American foreign policies from various sultans and what have you.
And I'd like to see them still.
Well, let's think like intelligence officers.
Information is a weapon.
And the bigger the information, the bigger the weapon.
And so the idea of release, whatever actor has those emails, and it may be multiple actors, including our own intelligence agencies, you don't want to use them until you can get something in return big enough to justify going public with them.
And that's the real, real question here is, you know, was, was it, is it, it's not enough to embarrass, quote, embarrass Hillary or Bill at this point, because there already pretty much has been in everybody's department.
What those emails are, are ammunition against a whole lot of other people who are tangentially mentioned in those emails.
The people who were donating money, the people who were minor officials who are now in more senior positions, whoever has those emails is sitting on the mother of all blackmail loads and is going to be very, very careful.
This is another reason if you wanted to pretend that Julian Assange was a neutral actor, why everybody wanted Assange to go away, because if you were an intelligence agency holding those emails as blackmail to be used in the future, the last thing you want is your valuable property to be reduced to public information because Assange leaks it out on, sends it out to the world on WikiLeaks.
At that point, your, your cards are, your cards are worthless.
So whatever side you're on, you want Julian Assange and WikiLeaks to be neutered.
And that was a big part of all this.
If you're Hillary Clinton, you wake up at night sweating, somebody has all that and your role in the Trump campaign and the dossier and the impeachment and all of this stuff is one journalist who has the courage, who wants his Pulitzer prize, who's willing to write it up in an outlet bigger than the places you and I have access to.
Yeah.
You know, I like the side story here too, about how CIA was so damn worried about that vault seven leak and they were willing to give Assange immunity and let the bastard go free.
You just don't leak that vault seven stuff, man.
And he, and they were working on a deal and then, I'm sorry, his lawyer, somebody's lawyer.
I don't want to get that wrong, Peter.
Maybe you can help me.
Somebody leaked this to John Warner, the Senator, and he went and ran it to Comey and Comey ruined it.
I'm not sure who leaked it, but I can say that I truly believe that the CIA would have made such a deal.
The, um, there's been some more information about the vault seven information and it was a big deal to that vault seven.
I'm glad the, I'm glad he leaked it, but I'm so sorry he's in prison right now.
The way he's being treated is just horrifying.
He will never see daylight because my under my understanding is that in addition to sort of explaining the what he had, the how he had the source code for a lot of this stuff.
And if that, if you can get ahold of that source code, you can a immediately go through your own electronics and figure out where the CIA had penetrated you line by line.
And B of course reproduce the tools, um, and maybe even improve them and deploy them back against your, your, your enemies.
That stuff is the value of that is simply beyond the reality.
If you, Edward Snowden has, has hinted and, and I question Mark, why is Snowden stopped saying things?
I don't know.
Um, but you know, Snowden has hinted that the NSA had capabilities that we wouldn't even begin to imagine they had, um, in their ability to, to gather information, um, particularly against, uh, things like air gaps, you know, where you don't have a physical connection to the internet.
Um, you know, if you can figure, if you can bridge an air gap, if you can figure out how to activate a cell phone that's had its battery removed, I mean, you have unbelievable power and Snowden has hinted more than once that the NSA was working on that or had access to it, or maybe even had made it work.
Um, and if vault seven had that kind of level stuff in it, um, you would literally kill people to avoid it being released if you could.
Well, you know, and there were some flashy headlines, like they can spy on you through your TV, like Orwell telescreen and some of these things.
Um, but the real story, and I don't know all the details, I'm sure there's huge little story, you know, little details in there that are huge stories that totally escaped me.
But I know the overall story was that, let it not be denied that the CIA has their own NSA and they are spying on your ass just as bad as their colleagues are all day long.
Oh, sure.
We've, we've seen that now that they've been creating these, these files on American citizens.
The thing is, is that we only have ourselves really to blame.
I mean, not only have, if it's a conspiracy, it's the biggest conspiracy in human history.
The idea that private companies have created monitoring devices, which we pay a lot of money to own and willfully carry around with us at all times, and that the intelligence agencies have, have hand in hand figured out how to exploit those devices simultaneously as they're, as they're released.
If it turns out, I mean, I don't think you and I will, will live long enough to know, but for example, imagine if you were the smartest guy in the intelligence community back in 1980 and said, you know, these guys at Apple, they have a revolution they're about to unleash.
And if we get in on the ground level, our capabilities to monitor communications and locations will grow as Apple creates the technology to enable that.
And all we have to do is have a couple of guys from the beginning on the inside who were slipping in a few lines of code here and there.
And every time Apple upgrades its phones, we get a new spying technique, literally at no charge.
That'd be the story I'd love my grandchildren to one day pick up and, and, and, and read.
You know, now, now that it's all over, here's the truth.
Here's what really happened.
Because man, if I was an intelligence agent and you told me I could go back in time and do one sneaky thing, it would be something along those lines.
Yeah.
You know, I don't know if I ever told you this story, totally unprovable anecdote, but I like it.
Sure.
You know, on the Simpsons, there's that character, Rich Texan, who's like, oh yeah, he drinks whiskey and shoots his guns in the air and stuff.
He's rich and a businessman.
So I had that guy in the back of my cab.
I've known a lot of guys like that in my life.
There's a reason that's a stereotype.
So I had that guy in my cab and, uh, like probably complete with the whiskey and the cigar.
I don't remember.
But anyway, I was telling him some paranoid stuff about, you see all those towers that they're putting up, this would have been circa 1997 or eight, right?
As you see all those towers are putting up, they're going to be cameras on all of those towers to monitor all the cars everywhere we go and all this.
And he starts telling me, oh hell yeah, let me tell you.
And he was born rich as hell and him and his brother there had oil money and they opened a telecom.
His brother, he says, is an extremely talented, brilliant genius.
And they opened a telecom down there in Houston and they're doing all right and starting up their company.
And here come the NSA to them.
And he said they were the scariest people he ever dealt with in his life.
And they just said, listen, welcome to the telecom industry.
You are going to build your company with us from the ground up the whole time or we'll kill you.
Like, this isn't an offer.
This isn't a negotiation.
Welcome to the new world order, pal, you know, essentially.
And he said he was so scared of these guys.
He left the company to his brother and went and got out.
And now he's just drinking for a living or whatever it was.
And now no longer in this game because he didn't want to have anything to do with that.
And and it was rich Texan talking, which is what made it such a convincing and great story at the time, too.
It was like he didn't seem like he was making this up.
It seemed more like he was like, boy, you say you're intimidated by the NSA.
Well, I got a story for you.
You know what I mean?
He seemed to really, really mean it at the time.
Very believable.
And let me validate.
That was then.
Yes.
And look, I was good on this from 1994.
And I still have my high school paper probably somewhere in the garage, I think, where I could prove this, where I went all paranoid about.
And you can find these on YouTube now, except this one that I remember isn't on the the collection.
But it's the AT&T commercials that said the company that will bring it to you.
Oh, have you ever done this?
Well, you will.
And the company that will bring it to you is AT&T.
And one of them, I quote in my high school paper from 1994, was they said, have you ever sent a fax from the beach?
Well, you will.
And I said, you see what's going on there is, yeah, you have this new mobility, but now they're tracking you to the beach and it's on your permanent record that you took the day off and went somewhere that day, whereas before it was never anybody's business, whether you were at the beach or not.
And now you have like this permanent tracking device on you at all times.
So that was my paranoid take on that from the time that I was a kid.
But of course, the Internet is built to enslave you.
It's not built to set you free.
It would ruin the whole plot of Ferris Bueller's Day Off.
Yeah, well, I don't know about that.
That movie would be five minutes long if they had the right tech.
Look, let me validate your fears.
We know now.
Oh, wait, one more thing I was just going to say.
So in other words, what we're doing now, to me, has always been using their weapon against us against them back a little, the best we can.
But it always has, to me, the Internet from the get go has been the government's project against us all.
The ultimate surveillance tool for us all.
I think I think there's some truth.
Let me validate that.
We know now, without any shadow of a doubt, that during the 1950s and the 60s, the telecom companies, which at that time was basically just AT&T and the Bell system, became literal active partners with the American intelligence agencies.
We know that the Bell system had offices set aside for intelligence operatives to sit there and monitor foreign traffic overtly.
They didn't have to hack into anything.
They had full access to it.
We know that one of the Verizon buildings in New York City is essentially an NSA facility, which is where the big trunk lines all come in from from Europe and where they crisscross the United States.
There's no question about these things.
They're happening so that it validates your concern.
The CIA and the NSA built the Iraqi telecommunications system from the ground up.
Every piece of the Iraqi telecommunications system was wired from the start to be part of an intelligence network.
Every cell phone that connects, every computer that connects, and largely the same in Afghanistan.
Edward Snowden taught us that the American intelligence agencies played that role in Japan, that they worked hand-in-glove with the Japanese telecoms to basically use the entire system as a giant listening device.
The only thing I'll say about your rich Texan is the part about him being threatened, because in my very, very, very limited experience with this, I learned an awful lot from one person who said, no, we don't say blackmail, and we don't like to threaten people, because threatened people become desperate, they do crazy things, you can't trust them.
Money is just the easiest way to get everything done.
It's a whole lot easier to say, hey, we just paid for your oldest daughter's college, let us pay for your younger daughter's college.
No, no, really.
It's on us.
And by the way, could you just put this chip into one of your new machines for us, thanks.
Works so much better and is so much more efficient than overtly threatening people who could panic them or cause them to do things.
You know, a lot of this is written into the law anyway, right, that like, hey, you just have to obey the regulations, which say, here's the chip.
And it's a whole lot better when your cooperating sources don't commit suicide because they're terrified of you.
You know, you got to start over.
It's a lot better when you just roll up to your cooperating sources every once in a while with a bag of money and say, how's everything going?
You're getting a lot of time on that boat we bought for you.
Hope you get some time off.
Here's a new bag of money.
That works so much better.
Yeah, that makes sense.
Yeah.
Anyway, so that was his version, though, was he got, he told me he got out because he was so scared of them.
He didn't want to deal with them.
It wouldn't surprise me.
So, but you never know, like those guys might have just had a bad day and they are feds after all.
They carry a lot of weight around.
There's cowboys out there.
You know, it's hard for us when we're just regular people.
Somebody's an officer, an agent, this or that or whatever.
But I remember listening to G. Gordon Liddy talking about what it means that someone is an agent of the U.S. government, that they have the power of attorney of Uncle Sam himself, dude.
That is an eight trillion ton gorilla when they're coming at you.
You be careful.
I experienced it, you know, when the State Department threw me out, they turned the whole weight of the U.S. government against me.
It's a big thing.
It is not fun at all to have people in those positions threaten you, in my case, basically saying, we can tie this up in court till you run out of money.
And then at that point, you'll be bankrupt.
Your wife will probably have left you and we'll still be filing motions, you know, in case you had any change in the cushion behind the cushions in the couch.
And we'll get we'll have you spend all that on lawyers, too.
When someone says that to you, it gets your attention pretty, pretty quickly.
Yep.
And it's not like there's any question that they can just print the money and they can outlast you all they want.
You know, that's exactly correct.
Yeah.
All right.
Anything else I can clear up for you here?
Man, I think we're pretty straight here.
Thank you.
Thank you very much.
I won't stay on the line.
I just want to say thank you to you about something off off off line.
Oh, OK, cool.
Well, listen, everybody, go and read Peter Van Buren at WeMeantWell.com, which is coming up looking really weird for me right now.
Well, it's probably a glitch on my side.
Anyway, lots of great stuff there.
And at TAC, the American conservative.
More questions about Russiagate with ugly old Hillary Clinton right there on the front and get you all amped up to read that thing.
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