Sorry, I'm late.
I had to stop by the Whites Museum again and give the finger to FDR.
We know Al-Qaeda, Zawahiri, is supporting the opposition in Syria.
Are we supporting Al-Qaeda in Syria?
It's a proud day for America.
And by God, we've kicked Vietnam syndrome once and for all.
Thank you very, very much.
I say it, I say it again, you've been had.
You've been took.
You've been hoodwinked.
These witnesses are trying to simply deny things that just about everybody else accepts as fact.
He came, he saw, he died.
We ain't killing they army, but we killing them.
We be on CNN like, say our name, bitch, say it, say it three times.
The meeting of the largest armies in the history of the world.
Then there's going to be an invasion.
All right, you guys, on the line, I've got Matt Taibbi from The Rolling Stone and author of the new book, Hate, Inc.
About how the media is making us all hate each other.
Welcome back to the show, Matt.
How are you doing?
All right.
Good, Scott.
Thanks a lot.
How are you doing?
I'm doing real good.
I appreciate you joining us here today.
And you wrote this interesting thing here at Rolling Stone.
The Ukraine gate whistleblower isn't real.
Oh, isn't a real whistleblower is the way you put it.
So, well, what do you mean by that?
I mean, I think what I was trying to say is, you know, the intelligence community strategically leaks things all the time.
You know, you think about after the Snowden disclosures came out.
If you remember, they actually gave us a piece of information about intercepting the phone calls of Al-Zawahiri.
And this was all a secret.
And they betrayed some intelligence capability just to sort of steal the news cycle a little bit.
And these are really more like press releases than they are like leaks or somebody blowing the whistle and giving us something unauthorized.
So I'm just drawing the distinction between an approved leak and an unapproved leak.
You know, real whistleblowers like Snowden and Chelsea Manning and Thomas Drake and Jeffrey Sterling and, you know, William Binney, when they blow the whistle, they basically expect to lose everything, you know, face charges, be ruined financially.
That's not going to be the situation here.
This is a person who's got very powerful institutional interests behind him or her.
It doesn't mean the information is necessarily wrong.
It's just that you have to frame the story differently.
It's something that's coming out with a lot of people behind it and not just one person against the state.
I guess the confusing part for people is that it's the president himself who's the target of all of this.
Just like with Russiagate, it was, as you put it, analogous to the weapons of mass destruction hoax about Saddam Hussein.
Only in this case, Saddam Hussein was the president of the United States.
He was the guy that they were going after.
And so that kind of confuses the issue where, and after all, well, I don't know, what do you make of the transcript of the call and the implication that aid was being withheld over the re-instigation of this investigation into Biden and all of that?
Well, this is like almost every one of these stories that's come out really since Russiagate.
And the huge Russiagate leaks have really begun.
They began before Trump even took office.
I mean, the big one was when we first heard that they had presented Trump and Obama with the Steele report before Trump's inauguration.
With all these stories, when you look closely at them, they're really kind of a Rorschach test.
I mean, if you absolutely can't stand Donald Trump, there's certainly an element of the story that's improper.
The president should not be using his office in any way for personal gain.
And there's no way around the fact that Joe Biden is a potential political rival to Trump.
On the other hand, there isn't a direct quid pro quo in the conversation.
It's been frequently misreported that when he asked for a favor, he's talking about Biden.
That's also not the case when you look at the transcript.
You also have to weigh in the fact of whether or not there actually is corruption involving the Bidens, in which case it becomes a little bit more appropriate to ask the Ukrainians to look into it.
So it's a tough story.
I mean, I just don't like the way it's been divided along partisan lines and people aren't reporting both sides of it.
All right.
Well, now, is it crazy conspiracy theory land to wonder about the fact that this so-called whistleblower in this case is a CIA officer?
No, it's not.
It's not crazy at all.
And that's that's been part of my point.
It's abundantly clear that since again, since the beginning of Trump's presidency, the you know, the different thing about his presidency is that there's an open schism between the intelligence community and the White House.
And we just we haven't seen that ever in modern times.
Maybe going back to the Hoover days, you might have seen something like that.
But remember, before Trump became president, the heads of the NSA, CIA, FBI, and then the DIA presented Trump with that news about the Steele report and then instantly leaked it to the media, which was basically an open declaration of war against the White House.
I mean, that is that's not in the national security interest to make other countries think that the president is a foreign agent.
So I think you have to view this in the in the in that context.
There's been a steady stream of leaks coming from the intelligence community.
Some of them are true.
Some of them have proven not to be true over time.
And this is, to me, just the latest skirmish in that kind of ongoing conflict.
Yeah.
Well, you know, it seems like it's relevant that there's a group.
Well, I don't want to say a group.
There are lots of different people who are on the progressive left, like yourself and Aaron Maté and Glenn Greenwald and others who've been very skeptical about and quite a few others.
I don't want to.
As you know, I showed you that list of all the people who are good on Russia, hundreds of them.
But, you know, there's there's a group of leftists who obviously are progressives, who obviously have every reason in the world to despise Trump.
I know you wrote a book about him, The Insane Clown President, you called him.
And yet, essentially, the deal is right.
If you stand for something, you won't fall for everything.
And so as long as you are a little bit outside of just partisan politics, then you can look at the CIA as, hey, maybe as bad as this president that you also hate.
And maybe they don't deserve the benefit of the doubt when you consider their history and this kind of thing.
Absolutely.
I mean, politically, I'm probably almost a complete opposite from Donald Trump.
I don't really believe in much of anything that he says.
But part of it is because I spent a huge portion of my adult life in second and third world countries like Russia and Mongolia and Uzbekistan.
And you have to look at these things sometimes structurally.
What's going on?
It's not just Democrats versus Republicans.
This is the this is the office of the presidency versus the intelligence community.
And when there's a schism like that, you have to take the 30,000 foot view of it.
Donald Trump, you know, for all of what I would consider his flaws, he's still he was still elected.
And the the threat from the other side where you have, you know, the CIA, FBI, NSA and and some other agencies have been steadily leaking information, some true, some false.
That's been taken from programs like the fight, the FISA program, the 702 program of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.
They've used human informants.
You know, all this stuff is incredibly dangerous.
It's more dangerous than having simply a bad president.
I mean, if they win this this battle and you have essentially the intelligence agencies and corporate media, you know, with the precedent of being able to oust an elected president, then that's way more dangerous than than, you know, anything that Donald Trump could do.
Hey, guys, Scott here for Liberty Under Attack Publications.
Looking for a Liberty Focus publisher?
Liberty Under Attack publishes books and strategy guides for individuals looking to increase their personal freedom.
They assist authors through the entire publishing process, proofreading, editing, cover designs, paperback and Kindle formatting and full audio book narration and post production.
Tell them Scott sent you and get 20 percent off a full service deal to get some one of a kind books or for more information, visit LibertyUnderAttack.com.
Hey, guys, check out Listen and Think audiobooks.
They're at ListenAndThink.com and, of course, on Audible.com.
And they feature my book, Fool's Errand, Time to End the War in Afghanistan, as well as Brand New Out Inside Syria by our friend Reese Ehrlich and a lot of other great books, mostly by libertarians there.
Reese might be one exception, but essentially they're all libertarian audiobooks.
And here's how you can get a lifetime subscription to Listen and Think audiobooks.
Just donate $100 to the Scott Horton Show at ScottHorton.org slash donate.
All right.
And then so is there one overriding thing, do you think, that's the cause of the permanent state's enmity toward this president?
You know, I covered Trump's campaign, and there's a couple of things going on here.
First, unlike every other president in recent history, he doesn't owe his election to a small cadre of donors.
So he's not really representing any interests in the White House.
His campaign, you know, I watched it.
It was basically him and three other people.
He didn't travel with anybody.
He was making it up as he went along.
So there's that, but there's no political hold over him.
And then I think also Donald Trump just offends the people in Washington on a class level.
He's not their kind of person.
He's crude.
He represents people who aren't their people.
He doesn't have a connection with the kind of elite Washington consensus that they consider to be the appropriate pool of applicants for the presidency.
And so there's that figures into it, too.
So, yeah, I don't know.
I mean, it's difficult to say.
But they didn't, again, they didn't even wait until he got into office before they started trying to oust the guy, which is troubling.
Well, and it's not really a coincidence that they framed him for high treason with Russia, because that was really the thing that bothered the most of all, wasn't it?
I mean, haven't they even said, boy, when we heard him talking about getting along with Russia, that's when we knew we had to do something and all of this.
Sure.
And there were things that that Trump said along the campaign that were deeply upsetting, because, among other things, a Trump presidency was going to mean, you know, not embracing, for instance, NATO.
Right.
So NATO, you know, even though I think Trump is actually one of the few things I agree with him about in the campaign is that NATO's mission is outdated.
There is no Soviet Union anymore.
This idea of, you know, a gazillion dollar defense program internationally that we need to arm ourselves to the teeth against the Russian threat.
You know, having lived in Russia, I just I think that that's no longer really a thing.
Trump agreed.
He thought that was on the campaign trail.
He said that was something we could save money on.
We wouldn't have to pursue that anymore.
He also didn't agree with the intelligence community about issues like Syria, where they take very seriously the idea that they have to be in there.
And so I think they viewed him as an apostate to the national security interests and a threat.
And, you know, he also represents the same kind of movement that we saw in Brexit in England, where it's sort of isolationist nationalist politics.
And I don't know whether I agree with it or don't agree with it, but it's what it's what won the election.
You know, my problem is that these people don't respect that decision.
Yeah.
You know, I saw a clip of Tucker Carlson saying and talking to his guests.
Jesus.
Oh, is a Fox News reporter, I think.
And they were saying, you know, these are unelected bureaucrats essentially deciding to overturn the foreign policy that this guy ran on was elected on this foreign policy.
I want to get along with Russia.
The people liked the sound of that, apparently, or at least enough of them.
And the only correction I have for that or, you know, thing I would add to that is it's not just bureaucrats.
I mean, when you look at John Brennan and James Comey, the intelligence branch of the FBI, counterintelligence branch of the FBI and and under McCabe and all these guys and and the CIA, these are the secret police.
This isn't just bureaucrats.
These are people who essentially at the CIA, especially they had the right under the law to break the law.
Right.
This is what they do in overthrowing other governments in other countries.
Absolutely.
Absolutely.
And it's it's been kind of astonishing to me watching people on my side of the aisle politically not be concerned that all of a sudden CNN and MSNBC have become essentially a patronage system for people from the secret police world or from or from the intelligence services.
I mean, look at the people who are now paid network contributors.
Brennan, James Clapper, The Washington Post just has one former CIA chief after another writing op eds, whether it's Michael Hayden, you know, or Michael Morell, the former station chief in Moscow, Stephen Hall.
You know, it's people are not realizing how dangerous is this like a it's a characteristic of third world states that to not be sure whether you're listening to the media or to the secret police.
And that's that's where we're heading in this country.
You know, you'd like to see a bright line there and there isn't one anymore.
And as you said, yes, you're absolutely right.
Donald Trump on the campaign trail openly campaigned on.
Yeah, I think we should get along better with Russia.
And whether you think that's legitimate or not.
And as someone who lived in Putin's Russia and was very much against him, I had some serious issues with it.
But it's what he said openly and people voted for it.
So it's not like you can't call it a treasonous reaction, you know, that he's in the White House.
You know, that's that's it's a policy that people want.
And I bet that's a problem.
Well, and speaking of Putin on a scale of worst communist, fascist Nazi tyrant from the pit of hell to Satan himself, where do you put him on the scale there?
He's pretty bad.
I mean, you know, I'm not gonna lie.
I have a close friend who knew him long before he was famous.
He used to be the deputy mayor of St. Petersburg.
And when the mayor who was this guy named Anatoly Sobchak, who was Americans loved, he was one of the first sort of Western friendly politicians in Russia.
When he used to miss his press conferences, they would put Putin on the podium and he would answer the questions and all the reporters would be like, oh, not this guy again, because he was like this boring, nebishy little dude who little did we know he was actually kind of a bag man for, you know, various gangland interests in Moscow.
But then when he he was essentially brought into the Yeltsin government to safeguard Yeltsin's way out of the Kremlin, he was afraid of being prosecuted for the gazillions of dollars that he stole while in office.
And so it was a trade.
We're going to put you in the presidency and you're going to make sure I don't get in trouble on the way out.
That happened.
And then he instantly started cracking down.
And the really the big difference between Yeltsin and Putin is that Putin is not friendly to the United States and Yeltsin was.
But, you know, I have very good friends, Russian journalists, some of whom are not with us today because they wrote about the Putin regime.
People like Anna Politkovskaya, Yuri Shekachikin, you know, these people were assassinated in the early years of Putin.
So he's he's no joke.
He's he's a formidable, genuine authoritarian character.
The only thing I would say is that Russians, though they fear him, there is a significant segment of the population that is happier than it was in the 90s because the economy has improved somewhat.
Well, so, I mean, just say he's the same as Yeltsin only without including the Americans in on the corruption.
And that sounds right.
People I know have said, too, that, oh, yeah, he got rid of all those other oligarchs in favor of his oligarchs.
And he runs an absolutely corrupt regime.
Just the same.
Yeah, but then so there are other categories, though.
Like, I mean, in other words, Yeltsin was really bad in terms of corruption, but he was no threat.
So are you saying that Putin really is no threat either?
He's just corrupt for different interests than our old ones.
Well, I think in terms of how big of a threat he is to the Russian people, it's, you know, it's probably kind of a jump ball question, right?
He's probably a little bit more repressive.
But, you know, the situation under Yeltsin was like a disaster in terms of taking care of the country.
I mean, their services were collapsed in terms of the threat to the United States.
Russia certainly is a much smaller and less formidable country than people in America think.
You know, the entire economy of Russia could fit into New York State, for instance.
Even though it's a big country geographically, it has a gigantic army.
It has a very, very advanced and skilled intelligence service.
But economically, it's nowhere near on the same page as the United States.
I mean, China is much more of a real geopolitical rival to us than Russia is.
That said, you know, Russia is a serious military power.
And, you know, we couldn't just walk over them in a day if we had to go to war with them.
They also still have a massive nuclear arsenal.
And again, they do have a very, very skilled intelligence, series of intelligence services.
And probably some of the stories we heard about what they're doing in terms of trying to, you know, engage in propaganda in the West, some of that's probably true.
But it's just, it's nowhere near the level that it's been advertised.
Yeah, I mean, I think most of that is overt in just RT more than anything, where, hey, anything that makes USA look bad overall, therefore, which I don't mind.
I've been on there before.
And I don't hold against anyone who goes on there.
Because it's, hey, they won't let us on other TV.
So what the hell are we gonna do?
You know, but...
Sure.
Yeah, no.
And I know people hate this comparison.
But, you know, I lived in Russia and the Soviet Union back when Radio Free Europe, Radio Liberty, Voice of America were a very big deal over there.
And it's not like we were publishing nice things about, you know, the Soviet Union or the communist regime or anything like that.
I mean, we definitely took sides politically in Russian affairs.
And, you know, that's kind of the purpose of state media, right?
I mean, you're not, you're there to kind of advance your own agenda.
And the thing about RT is they don't have to do a whole lot of lying.
They can just, you know, say, look, look at Occupy Wall Street, look at the inequality, look at police brutality.
These are all real things.
You know, so it's just as you say, yeah.
All right.
So now back to the Trump case here, this impeachment and all of this.
It's sort of unreal to see how it's unfolding here.
But I thought it was important.
And actually, thank you for highlighting because I would have missed this.
Bob Bear on CNN, the former CIA officer and full disclosure, he's a friend of my wife's, but I don't really like the guy.
But anyway, he he said something important on CNN.
Can you talk about that?
Like the context and everything?
What was going on there?
Yes.
So they were trying to CNN.
I forget who the anchor was, but they were asking him basically, what's your assessment of the whistleblower complaint?
And he said, yeah, you know, it sounds like it's maybe not one person.
It's probably a couple of people.
I think that was one of his quotes.
It's a couple of people.
And then he says, you know, it feels kind of like a palace coup.
And but he didn't say that in a derogatory way.
I mean, he's he's very against Trump.
I think what he was trying to say is that there's a significant portion of the people of people who work in high places in both the intelligence community and in the White House, maybe who, you know, who have negative feelings about Trump and about maybe even this particular issue with Ukraine and the Biden situation.
He says, but imagine what what else they know.
Right.
That must be why.
In other words, this phone call doesn't really seem to be good enough to warrant this.
There must be secret information that they can't tell us about yet.
You know, again, just like with Russiagate in Iraq and the rest of this.
Oh, I know.
I mean, that reporting technique drove me crazy during the Russiagate phenomenon where they kept saying, yeah, well, maybe this isn't terribly convincing, but, you know, Mueller must know more.
Right.
Mueller knows, you know, that that was a constant leitmotif of the Russiagate story.
And there's a little bit of an implication of that here, right, that they're that this is only the tip of the iceberg.
There's more coming.
There are going to be more whistleblowers coming out of the woodwork.
There's now two of them.
Right.
And we're going to hear, you know, when I when I read the complaint, the first thing I noticed was the whistleblower himself is sourcing all the information to multiple people and discussions with colleagues.
So it's not like, you know, an Edward Snowden situation where he's making a decision alone to plot an escape and make a leak.
This is something that was done.
You know, they're having discussions with colleagues about how to how to release this and how to put this out there.
That doesn't make it illegitimate necessarily, but it's a different kind of story.
Right.
I mean, it's a faction of something that's that's going public.
Yeah.
And again, it's, you know, a fair question of whether these CIA officers or this one was sent there to find something on Trump, which obviously isn't going to be too hard to wait around long enough.
But, you know, that's a very possible scenario here, I think.
Certainly one not worth dismissing that, you know, this is essentially the son of Russiagate, not just in the sense of that's where this begins with the Manafort questions and all this stuff.
Also in, you know, taking the implication and drawing it out.
You conduct electronic surveillance of people in his orbit.
You get at you access conversations that the president has with other people in the White House or maybe foreign leaders.
And, you know, the Mueller report ended up essentially being a story about the reaction to an investigation, which to me calls into question the entire enterprise.
Right.
Or is was this all designed to to produce evidence that was that was going to get Trump out of office, in which case the origin story of all this is more important than the result to me.
I mean, like, if that was the aim from the beginning, then then I really question the whole thing.
By the way, are you still working on that as your next book?
I'm trying, you know, it's it hasn't been really easy going.
But yeah, I'm definitely trying.
Yeah.
Good deal.
I mean, one real problem is, I mean, maybe this is just me, but Durham, the lawyer in charge of investigating officially the origins of Russiagate, he's the same guy that led the cover up for Obama and Holder in letting the CIA and everyone else off the hook for the torture and murder during George W. Bush.
So, yeah, I presume that means he's just a reliable bag man for power rather than anything else.
Yeah.
I mean, it's it's hard to know exactly what the appetite is for any of these people for shaking things up.
I think, you know, Robert Mueller's history was was also that he was very much a protector of institutions more than he was an investigator.
He was an insider on all of the various war on terror machinations.
And but, you know, the Horowitz investigation, we you know, I've already heard that it's going to be a little bit disappointing.
It's going to it's going to come up with a conclusion that sounds like it's very, very harsh and aggressive, but actually doesn't go terribly far.
I think that's what what's going to come out of that.
The Durham thing, though, I have heard that, you know, again, that there was the news that that he was staffing up, that he's adding new investigators, new lawyers.
There's also some news that he's maybe trying to accelerate the timeline.
And if he's really traveling personally to a lot of these countries overseas, it's very possible that they actually are going after at least some individuals responsible for cooking up parts of the Russiagate caper.
You know, I don't know, but but you're right.
I wouldn't be surprised if it turned out to be something less than an aggressive investigation.
All right.
Well, so then we're all relying on you.
Yeah, well, that doesn't seem like much hope, but I hope I hope we do get to the bottom of it just because Russia gets just such a maddening.
I mean, hasn't it been maddening to this one?
Absolutely.
Yeah.
I mean, and here's a guy and I'll say it every time because it deserves to be said.
Donald Trump, like his predecessor, Barack Obama, is guilty of genocide in Yemen.
He should be removed and convicted and prosecuted in federal court and put in prison for war crimes.
And that's just the worst thing he ever did was continue Obama's war in Yemen.
But there's a lot worse than that.
Trying to get along with Russia ain't on the list.
And, you know, asking the government of Ukraine to look into Joe Biden and look into the origins of Ukraine gate.
And it's part of the origin of Russiagate there with the Manafort leak and all of that stuff.
That is nothing.
Yeah.
I mean, if anything, that's all to the positive as far as I can tell.
Right.
If that that's what drives me crazy about all this, if that if that's your impeachable offense, one where, you know, because he's he's upped the drone bombing significantly, even from from Obama's levels, which were extraordinarily high and they were totally inexcusable.
I mean, yeah, you could talk about Trump's expansion of security state.
There's a million things you could you could talk about, but they don't.
They pick this picayune partisan political issue that doesn't really have any meaning.
And that's what they want to go to the mattresses over.
And it's it's crazy.
And then, you know, the counter to that is that I'd still like to know, you know, what started this entire mess.
You know, what's at the what's at the origin of all this Russiagate craziness.
And, you know, so let's hope that comes out.
Well, we have another five or so, five and a half years of Donald Trump's administration to find out.
So.
All right.
Thanks very much for your time again, Matt.
Appreciate it.
All right.
Thanks a lot, Scott.
Take care.
All right, you guys, that's Matt Taibbi.
He was writing over there at Rollingstone dot com.
The whistleblower probably isn't in his latest book.
It's really great.
You heard me interview him about it.
It's called Hate Inc. about the media there.
All right, y'all.
Thanks.
Find me at Libertarian Institute dot org at Scott Horton dot org.
Antiwar dot com and Reddit dot com slash Scott Horton show.
Oh, yeah.
And read my book, Fool's Errand, Timed and the War in Afghanistan at Fool's Errand dot US.
