All right, y'all, welcome to the Scott Horton Show.
I am the Director of the Libertarian Institute, Editorial Director of Antiwar.com, author of the book Fool's Errand, Time to End the War in Afghanistan, and I've recorded more than 5,000 interviews going back to 2003, all of which are available at scotthorton.org.
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The full archive is also available at youtube.com slash scotthorton show.
All right, you guys on the line, I've got Aaron Maté.
He is, of course, at the Grayzone Project, that's thegrayzone.com, and well, he writes there, and he's got a show called Pushback.
You can also find his articles at Real Clear Investigations, and wow, big news here.
It's a couple weeks old, but it's still really big.
Aaron actually testified before the United Nations Security Council on the question of the Organization for the Prevention of Chemical Weapons investigation of the third major alleged sarin attack in the Syria war from April of 2018, and it sure was something to see, and you can see it at thegrayzone.com.
Welcome back to the show.
How are you doing?
Scott, thanks for having me.
Really appreciate you joining us on the show here.
This was a really big deal, and of course, it was all by video and everything, but do I have it right that that was an official meeting of the UN Security Council that you were testifying there?
Yeah, it's under a thing called the ARIA formula, which is a mechanism by which Security Council members can hold special sessions of the Council, so this was one of those under the ARIA formula.
All right, and then so you were talking about the investigation of the alleged Douma attack of 2018 there, and this is a story that you've been covering at length, of course, the whistleblowers that have come forward and their different documentation and emails and memos and the rest, and so you made a pretty compelling presentation to the UN there, and so I guess, you know, first of all, can you start with just describing essentially the circumstances, as you understand it, of the investigation on the ground there, and then help us understand what it was that happened that made for such a controversial final report here?
So yeah, as you said, there have been a number of allegations against the Syrian government that it's committed chemical weapons attacks, and they've particularly amped up ever since Obama laid down the so-called red line, saying that if Assad uses chemical weapons, then that would be grounds for the U.S. to intervene militarily more than it already had in Syria to directly target the Syrian government with military intervention.
And as one former U.S. official told Charles Glass in an article that he wrote for Harper's magazine, the red line was essentially an invitation to a false flag by the militants who were fighting Assad, because if they could, you know, convince people that Assad had committed the chemical weapons attack, that that would then bring the U.S. even more directly on their side in the war against Assad.
So you've had a number of allegations since, you know, 2013, starting with the Ghouta attack, and Cy Hirsch has done a whole bunch of reporting on that, showing all the flaws with that allegation, including that U.S. intelligence had concluded that al-Qaeda in Syria had gotten a hold of Sarin, and also meanwhile Porter Down, the British military laboratory, had concluded that the Sarin that was used in the Ghouta attack was not the Sarin that is in the Syrian government's stockpile, amongst other damning findings that undermine the case that Assad did it.
So fast forward to April 2018, you have another allegation against Syria, and this time with Trump in office, Trump enforces the so-called red line, and he bombed Syria based on this allegation.
And shortly after that bombing, the OPCW sends a fact-finding mission into Douma, where this alleged attack occurs, and this is actually the first time that an OPCW team has gotten on the ground at the site of an alleged chemical weapons attack.
So their investigation is really significant, and it's actually historic.
So a year later, about a year later after the investigation, the OPCW puts out a final report that essentially justifies the U.S. narrative.
It says that there are reasonable grounds to believe that a chemical attack occurred in Douma, and that the weapon was likely molecular chlorine.
And the inference of the report, if you read it closely, is that the chlorine was delivered via cylinders that were dropped by aircraft, and you can deduce from that that they're basically blaming the Syrian government, because the Syrian government is the only warring party there with aircraft.
That's the inference of the report.
So it's taken as a validation of the allegation against the Syrian government.
But then we start getting a series of leaks showing that the actual OPCW inspectors who deployed to Douma reached a very different conclusion, in fact the opposite conclusion, but all of their evidence was censored.
It was kept from the public.
Their conclusions were rewritten to support an allegation against the Syrian government, when in fact these inspectors had found evidence that the most likely explanation is that this attack was staged on the ground by the militants who controlled Douma at the time, which by the way, even if you don't even look at the evidence, makes perfect logical sense, because the Syrian government was about to retake Douma from the militants, known as Jaysh al-Islam.
And so for them to use chemical weapons all of a sudden would have meant that they knowingly decided to do the one thing that they knew would invite a U.S. military intervention.
Because by the way, Trump had bombed Syria a year before over another alleged chemical attack in Khan Sheikhoun, which also is dubious.
So these inspectors found a whole bunch of evidence pointing to this being staged, that this was not an attack by the Syrian government, but their report, the one that they wrote, was censored.
It was kept from the public.
And the inspectors who went to Douma were actually taken off of the investigation.
They were sidelined.
And a new so-called core team was appointed to manage the investigation, and it excluded every single person who was on the ground in Douma except for a paramedic, which is, you know, a paramedic, to say the least, does not have the scientific expertise that a chemical engineer or a ballistics expert does, as the actual inspectors did.
So this was a cover-up.
And because the OPCW has refused to address it internally, and they've only actually attacked the inspectors who challenged the cover-up, this has not been addressed at the OPCW.
So now it's being litigated at the U.N. Security Council with Russia and China trying to hold meetings on it, and the countries that bombed Syria based on this allegation, obviously doing everything they can to avoid talking about it.
And by the way, one of the revelations from the leaks we got was that not only was the evidence censored, but that, in fact, this occurred under direct U.S. government pressure.
After the initial report by the inspectors was submitted, and after it got censored, there was some internal disarray.
There were some arguments.
So a U.S. government delegation was brought in, and they met face-to-face with the inspectors, and they basically told them what to say, or tried to tell them what to say, tried to convince them that this really was a chlorine attack, which went in the face of all the evidence that these inspectors had collected.
So not only do we have a censorship, we have it done under U.S. government pressure.
And now that continues at the U.N., where even though at this meeting, it wasn't just me speaking, it was actually one of the inspectors, Ian Henderson.
He spoke.
But these diplomats had no interest in what he had to say, and only dismissed everything that he had to say as being some sort of disinformation campaign and attack on the OPCW, when really what he was trying to do, and what I was trying to do as well in the way that I can, was defend the OPCW from being politically compromised and being used to lodge false allegations that justify war.
And this continued the following week, where Russia held another meeting of the U.N. Security Council, or Russia chaired another meeting of the U.N. Security Council, because this month they're in the presidency chair.
And they invited Jose Bustami, who was the OPCW's first director general, to testify.
Jose Bustami, who was kicked out from his job because he stood up to the Iraq war and was getting in the way of the Bush administration's plans to invade, because he was trying to facilitate Iraq's entry into the Chemical Weapons Convention, which made it a lot more hard for the U.S. to invade and justify its war.
So he was kicked out.
And he actually worked with these inspectors who challenged the cover-up, because these inspectors are so experienced with the organization that their tenure coincides with the OPCW's first director general back when it was founded in 1997.
So he came to testify, speak up in their defense, but the U.S. and their allies blocked him from testifying.
They voted against him being allowed to speak, which is just extraordinary to do that to a diplomat who headed the organization under discussion.
So you have this scandal beginning with a cover-up, and now it's continuing at the U.N. Security Council, at the highest level of the international community.
Yeah.
Well, and especially censoring Bustami in this fashion, I mean, how blatant can you be?
I mean, they might as well say out loud, we can't handle this truth.
So just leave us alone, as simple as that.
It's not like he was run out of there because he was discredited for doing anything wrong.
Of course he wasn't.
No, he was kicked out of there because John Bolton was telling him to resign, and he refused to do it because John Bolton didn't like the fact that Bustami was in serious negotiations with Iraq to bring it into the Chemical Weapons Convention.
And if Iraq was being subjected to inspections like that, that would have undermined the rationale for the Bush administration's invasion plans.
So they kicked him out, and they used bullying and intimidation.
A Bolton person would threaten Bustami with physical harm, and when that didn't work, he threatened the OPCW with the withdrawal of its funding, which would have made the OPCW just crippled.
It wouldn't have been able to function.
So enough states went along with the U.S. plans, even though actually more states either voted no or abstained than voted to remove Bustami, but the U.S. still won out because of the yes votes.
And now you have 18 years later, Bustami is now standing up once again to a U.S.-backed deception that justifies its warfare, and once again they're trying to silence him.
And amazingly, look at the media reaction.
Did anybody report on this?
Has anybody even acknowledged really the existence of these inspectors and their damning claims and the fact that their investigation was covered up?
No.
And that continues with even the U.S. and its allies blocking the OPCW's first director-general from speaking.
But there's been a complete media blackout.
It's pretty extraordinary.
Right.
Well, and as we all remember, because it was so blatant and ridiculous at the time, Brian Williams was the epitome, but they all did it essentially.
This was the only two times that the American national media approved of Donald Trump was in 2017 and 2018 when he bought these sarin hoaxes and dropped some bombs on Syria.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So they can't take that back.
Nope.
No, they can't.
What fun.
So tell us about Inspector A and Inspector B, and for that matter, the third one.
I don't know if he gets a C or has an official title, but there's a third one vouching for the first two.
But this seems really important.
These guys have obviously stuck their neck way out to bring us this truth here.
So you're asking about Inspector A?
Yeah.
You named him a second ago.
I forgot.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Oh, yeah.
Right.
Yes.
So there have been two inspectors who have been identified as the ones who challenged internally.
Henderson.
I was missing his name there.
Henderson is A, and then I don't know who B is.
I don't know if you know who B is.
So yeah.
So there's two inspectors who have been identified who challenged the suppression of the evidence, the ones who most forcefully pushed back internally.
So Inspector A, we know his name, it's Ian Henderson, because it was his name that was on the report that got leaked.
It was the first leak from the Duma investigation to show that there was some funny business going on, because he wrote this study of the gas cylinders that were found in Duma.
And his conclusion was that this gas cylinder, the most likely explanation, based on the fact that the hole in the roof was too small for the cylinders, that the trajectory of the cylinders made no sense.
One of them ended up on a bed, which means the cylinder would have had to drop through a roof, bounce off a floor and land on a bed, and a whole bunch of other engineering characteristics.
His conclusion was that the most likely explanation was that these cylinders were manually placed, basically, that's a way of saying that these cylinders were put there on the ground by someone who was staging this attack and trying to make it look like it was dropped from the sky.
And he also made a reference in his report to supposed experts, saying that the OPCW, to come up with a bogus conclusion, was relying on supposed experts who we don't know.
We don't know who they are, although we can make guesses, and by the way, whose work we've never been able to see, the engineering studies that were used for the final report, the one that came out, we've never been able to fully see them and see how the so-called experts who came to the conclusion that the cylinders likely came from the sky, we've never been able to see their work and judge it for ourselves.
And Henderson's study, which was suppressed, came to the exact opposite conclusion that the final report did.
So his was the first leak, so he's been identified and he's testified now twice to the UN Security Council, including at the session where I spoke.
He's never spoken to the media because he's been trying to speak only through official channels, whether through the OPCW or through the UN.
And then there's Inspector B, who actually is in fact an even more central figure here than Ian Henderson, because he wrote the initial report.
He wrote the team's initial report, which means that after they all got back from Syria, he was the one who got all the information, synthesized it, and was tasked with drafting the initial report.
And after he saw that his report had been radically altered and that his bosses were trying to rush it out to the public, he intervened and wrote an email that we later got when it was leaked to WikiLeaks, basically protesting all of these changes and saying that there was fraud being committed, that the report that they wanted to put out was totally bogus.
And the internal emails show that he very insistently fought the changes.
And both Ian Henderson and Inspector B have been slammed by the OPCW leadership, and they've been accused of being rogue, who didn't have all the information, when again, they were on the ground in Syria.
Inspector B wrote the initial report, and they are among the OPCW's top inspectors.
They've both been there since the start.
I've received leaks that show internal appraisals of their work that describe them as among the best inspectors the OPCW has.
So the efforts to try to impugn them, and meanwhile rely in the media on like fake experts from groups like Bellingcat, which are funded by the same governments that bombed Syria, is just a joke.
But yet amazingly, to try to get the media to cover this story has just been impossible.
It just doesn't get the attention, even though it's an extraordinary circumstance where you have ...
I mean, this isn't a case where we're using our best judgment of allegations to come to conclusions, based on logic and facts from media reports.
This is actually an internal investigation that has the facts, and the fact that they're being silenced and covered up, and the fact that they're being maligned, instead of any effort to weigh their evidence seriously, tells you about who is most likely right here.
Right.
Yeah, it sure does.
But now, could you elaborate a little bit about Henderson here?
Because I know that you have tangled at length with these Bellingcat people about him, among But I think they've really taken the lead in trying to diminish this guy, and reduce him down in rank to an unimportant figure who's talking out of turn here in these kinds of things.
Can you take us through a little bit of that?
Well, Bellingcat is a troll farm, basically.
They're funded by Western governments, including via the National Endowment for Democracy, which is a US government regime change arm.
That's its function, basically, to try to destabilize governments that the US doesn't like and wants to overthrow.
And yet, they've branded themselves as being somehow digital Sherlocks, that they can pinpoint blame for various allegations based on looking at Google Maps and other open source information.
And there's been this huge media campaign to take them seriously, to brand them as experts.
And whenever an official bad guy is accused of something, whether it's Russia or Syria, you often see Bellingcat being cited as some sort of authority on the issue.
And there's speculation that for the Douma investigation, after they realized that they couldn't rely on their own inspectors to cover up the facts and to blame Syria, that there's speculation that the OPCW might have consulted, as its so-called experts, a group like Bellingcat.
I can't prove it.
There was this curious incident where, for a long time, Bellingcat had this internal document where it claimed that it partners with a whole bunch of organizations.
And the OPCW was one of those partners.
And then all of a sudden, like five months later, as the Douma scandal was in full public view and all these damning things were coming up, all of a sudden, Bellingcat's founder Elliott Higgins came out and said, oh, hey, everyone, I made a mistake.
Bellingcat does not partner with the OPCW.
That was a copy and paste error from another document.
So I didn't mean to include the OPCW on the list of groups we partner with.
So then you look at the new corrected version, and the only organization that is no longer listed as a Bellingcat partner as a result of the so-called copy and paste error was the OPCW.
So what are the odds that there's a full list of all these groups that the Bellingcats partners with, but it's erroneously copy and paste, but the only group on that list that's really an error is just the OPCW?
You know, it's such a transparent lie.
And I think what happened was someone at the OPCW didn't want Bellingcat bragging anymore that they worked together, because it was getting embarrassing based on all the facts that were coming out about the Douma investigation.
And then there was a third whistleblower who, as far as I understand, did one thing, but one very important thing, which was say, hey, you should listen to Henderson and Inspector B here, because this is no joke, and these guys are serious, and they're just as expert as they say they are, and that kind of thing, right?
There are four known OPCWs.
Oh, there's four now?
Okay, I'm sorry.
There are four.
So the first one sent an email that we obtained.
First, I believe the email was first sent to a group called the Working Group.
It's a group of British academics who first raised questions about the Douma allegation even before any leaks came out, and their questions turned out to be very prescient, that they identified a lot of the, even from looking at the final report that was put out from the OPCW, they even saw there that it was contradictory and had some gaping holes, and the leaks that later came out confirmed that.
So I believe this third OPCW, who was a former OPCW official, sent them an email and raised questions about, or complained about political compromise at the OPCW, and a campaign of censorship and intimidation, and of being exploited by Western states to make accusations that are unsupported by facts.
So that came out, and then yes, earlier this year, I heard from a fourth person, an OPCW official, who was not involved in the Douma investigation at all, but is familiar with it, and who voiced serious concerns about how these inspectors were treated, and complained about a similar thing, of there being a climate of intimidation and censorship, and said that the OPCW's integrity has been totally undermined by the fact that it's been exploited to make these allegations, and to retaliate against inspectors who dare stand up for their own evidence.
So there is a lot of dissension within the ranks, and I can say that there's more to come.
And now even we have another eminent and really important voice speaking out, and that is the OPCW's first Director General, Jose Bustami, who worked with these inspectors, because again, they're so experienced that they were there at the start of the organization.
And the thing is, inspectors at the OPCW have a term limit.
So both these inspectors, Ian Henderson and Inspector B, they served, and then their tenure ran out, but they were brought back, because they were so experienced, and such experts.
So Jose Bustami has spoken out in their defense, and spoken to their level of integrity and their expertise.
And he also can tell us a bit about what happens at the OPCW when you try to stand up to the mafia don, to the people who run the place, which is the Western states, you get kicked out.
You know, even though this is, you know, even though, by the way, what's funny is the U.S. kicked him out a year after Bustami's contract was renewed for another mandate, including with the support of the U.S.
But as soon as the Iraq war comes into play, and the U.S. is trying to evade, that's when he became an obstacle.
So that's why he was kicked out.
Right.
And as you said, they threatened him, but you were being generous there.
They threatened his children.
John Bolton said, we know where your children live.
That's right.
That's right.
That's right.
Gangster John Bolton.
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Now let me ask you this about this whole big phony thing here.
And I know that in a way, this is a separate argument than a story really about the bureaucracy here, that about the investigation itself, because essentially the thing is broken in half, right?
On one hand, you have these people who run into the hospital and you have white helmet guys start spraying them down with hoses and screaming gas, gas, gas, and all of this stuff.
And that was pretty soundly refuted by Robert Fisk in the independent right away and by the doctors at that hospital.
And then you had the second part of this, where, you know, even Ted Postal got this wrong for a while.
And there was a piece at the intercept that said, well, the first part was fake, but the second part wasn't what happened at the apartment complex here.
And then it, and then Ted Postal changed his mind about that.
By the way, as soon as these whistleblowers started coming out, he said, Oh yeah, I was wrong about that.
Yeah, that's right.
You know, but, but I wonder, and by the way, everyone, all of us got to read mood of Alabama all the time.
Bernard is, you know, he was right about this from day one, of course, and in detail and, you know, on, on every development.
But anyways, so what I'm wondering is in the official version and then the new and improved and edited by the core team version and that kind of deal, did they give credibility to the first half of this attack or only to the second?
In the original censored report?
Either or both.
Yeah.
I mean, I'm curious.
Yeah.
Especially if they changed it.
I'm really interested in that.
In the original report.
No, they, they, they didn't even get much into the staged hospital scene.
They actually didn't, you know, that wasn't, that wasn't even a big part of the original report.
Although, you know, yeah.
James Harkin of Intercept, Robert Fisk, found evidence that the hospital scene was staged, but they didn't even really get into that.
They focused on the location of the cylinders and toxicology.
And they actually did a, they consulted with a...
And when you say cylinders, that means the apartment building, the second site, just to be clear there.
Well, there were cylinders found at two locations.
There's something called location two and location four.
And cylinders were found at both locations.
Okay.
And those are, but neither of those connected to the hospital though then.
So there's three sites.
That's right.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly.
Yeah.
Okay.
Yeah.
And at one of the locations...
By the way, how far apart?
They're both apartment buildings, right?
The balcony and the bed?
Yes.
Yes.
Yes.
And one of those locations is where all the bodies were found.
And you know, dozens of them.
And there was video of them.
But what was kept from the public was that the OPCW team consulted with a group of toxicologists from a, not just an OPCW member state, but a NATO member state.
So certainly one that would not be predisposed to bias against the NATO position.
And they concluded that the, they looked at the videos that were taken of the victims in the apartment building and they said that, you know, and they looked at, you know, all the evidence that was collected and they found that what was there was totally inconsistent with exposure to chlorine.
It just didn't make any sense.
And by the way, Ian Henderson later revealed that the, in fact, the stairwell where the bodies were found was actually disconnected from the roof where the cylinder was, which means that for the victims to have been killed by the, by chlorine, the chlorine would have had to have left the building from the top and then re-entered from the bottom to get up into the stairwell where the victims were.
So it just, you know, the more info you learn, the more just illogical it is.
And that's why the, it's one of the many reasons why these inspectors found that, that, that this was not a chemical attack by the Syrian government there.
And so, and it's just one more piece of evidence that was suppressed.
All right, well, great stuff there as always.
And now listen, I actually have a little bit of time before Dan Ellsberg here.
I don't know if you do, but I leave open to you the option if you'd like to address the recent releases of documents in the Russiagate case, some of which seem to have been of interest and have come out since we last spoke.
Yeah, there's been a lot.
It's hard to know where to start.
The start with Brennan briefing Obama about this Russian intel here.
Yes.
So now we know that Brennan took some notes that U.S. had picked up intelligence that Russian intelligence had gotten word or believed that the Clinton campaign was trying to concoct a false tie between Trump and Russia.
And that even that was referred to the FBI for possible investigation.
But interestingly, you know, Jim Comey said recently, he doesn't even recall that, even though he was reportedly alerted of this, which is interesting.
You know, I, it's significant, it's important, but it's also, it's not far fetched.
I mean, look, by that point, the Clinton campaign had hired Fusion GPS, which was producing the phony Steele dossier that was concocting a false Trump-Russia tie.
So it wasn't, it wouldn't have been difficult, I think, for Russia to know that.
So what I really care about is who, what is the evidence that the U.S. government has used to make its attribution of the Russian, of the Democratic Party email theft to Russia?
We haven't seen that evidence.
We should see it, because I bet that it's sketchy.
And I want to know to what extent they relied on CrowdStrike, which was the private firm that first made this allegation.
And that's very important because, you know, CrowdStrike, we've recently found out, admitted behind closed door, behind closed doors, that it had no evidence that any emails were actually taken from the server, which was another admission that was kept secret for, you know, over three years until we finally learned about it this year.
And by the way, I recently reported at RealClear that Nancy Pelosi and her husband have invested at least $500,000 in CrowdStrike.
I'd like to say unbelievable in response to that, but I can't.
It's just a funny irony that, you know, Democrats who have benefited so much from, or have, I shouldn't say benefited because I think it's actually backfired, but they've certainly exploited so much this Russian hacking allegation that CrowdStrike generated.
Now this is a new level of, you know, benefiting with Nancy Pelosi making a, you know, and her husband making a direct investment in the company that generated the allegation.
So I, it's no surprise to me the more we, the more that gets declassified, the more we learn how much fraud and deception was used to keep this investigation going.
But what I really care about is I want to have intelligence declassified on the core underlying allegation, which is, which is that Russia stole the emails because that's at the heart of this whole thing.
That's the basis for it all.
And what we've gotten so far publicly has a lot of holes and it's just not sufficient.
And I don't want to take the word of US intelligence agencies that Russia did it just because they say so.
We should be able to judge for ourselves.
Right.
And that is at the core of the allegation because every other thing has fallen apart.
The only reason this is still at issue at all is because it hasn't been completely disproven yet.
They've admitted that they don't have proof of it.
So that should have been the end of that when that testimony was finally released.
Yeah.
Exactly.
And you know, I went back and checked the archives and it's April Glaspy Day, July 25th of 2016.
I interviewed Jeffrey Carr, the computer security expert on the show who said, look, the only people who can tell you who hacked that server and took those emails is the NSA.
And there's no computer firm, security firm in the world who can examine a server and tell you who it was that broke into it because it's too easy for anyone to leave false tracks.
This is just as simple as that.
And the NSA, they're the only ones who could tell you and they could tell you with 100% certainty because they can trace every packet wherever they want back in time and anywhere in the world.
But no one else can do that.
So it's just as simple as that.
And then, as you've pointed out a million times, when in January they put out their fake little, you know, ridiculous intelligence report that has disclaimers, just because we say it in here doesn't mean we think it's true, written all over it and all this stuff, that the NSA gave it the weakest support out of the FBI and the CIA.
They were the ones who only gave it moderate confidence.
Yes, that was on the assessment that Putin intervened with the explicit aim of helping elect Donald Trump.
And FBI and CIA had high confidence, NSA had moderate confidence.
But in terms of the information that's come out, there's no indication that anything has actually come from the NSA, as you say, because NSA evidence is classified and there's been no declassification of it.
When I, I tried to, I asked the NSA and the U.S. government whether any of the evidence that was included in the indictments of the Russian intelligence officers when they got indicted in July 2018 for the for hacking the Democratic Party servers, whether any of the evidence contained evidence from the NSA.
And nobody would say yes.
And there's no indication that the answer is yes, because, again, for it to come out publicly, it would have to be declassified.
It was no indication that it was.
Yeah.
And although, you know, they could be brave and leak that, yes, we do have the proof, but we can't tell you.
But they're not even claiming that.
Right.
Well, they, if you talk to people in the U.S. government, they will say that the intelligence is strong.
And look, even, even congressional sources that I've spoken to who are skeptical of the collusion narrative and, but they say that the evidence that they were presented, that U.S. intelligence officials presented to Congress behind the scenes, they say that it was convincing that it was Russia.
You know, I've heard that from one source.
But the point is, I'd like to see it for myself and the public should be able to judge for ourselves rather than take the word of the U.S. government.
And everything we have so far has a lot of holes.
The case that Mueller made has a ton of holes, including that, well, first of all, they never interviewed Julian Assange, which is a very curious choice, given that Assange is at the heart of all this, because he released the emails that are at the core of Russiagate.
They never spoke to him.
They made a conscious decision not to.
He said the Russian government was not his source.
And the timeline that Mueller has makes no sense.
I mean, Julian Assange announced that he has the emails in early June.
And it's only after that, that according to Mueller's timeline, Assange first makes contact with Guccifer 2.0, who Mueller suggests gave the emails to Assange, although Mueller can't even say it definitively because he also admits that he doesn't even know how WikiLeaks got the emails.
So, and that's one of many holes in the whole thing.
So I just hope we get the chance to, to judge for ourselves.
And there's no reason why they can't release at least something, why they can't give us the CrowdStrike reports that were cited heavily.
And if you read the Senate Intelligence Report, there are multiple citations of the CrowdStrike report, these draft redacted reports done by a Democratic Party contractor.
So it's obvious that they played a role in the forensics here.
And given their partisan ties, the fact that they're hired by the Hillary Clinton campaign, who also hired Fusion GPS, and Fusion GPS who concocted the false collusion thing.
And meanwhile, by the way, one of the most intriguing aspects of this, and I hope we find out answers, is this story that Fusion GPS helped push about Alphabank, because that is actually more significant than I previously realized.
So Alphabank was this theory where it was alleged that there was, it was discovered that there was all these, you know, server interactions between a Trump, a Trump campaign server and this Russian server, Alphabank.
And there was so much unusual interaction that it became this theory that maybe Trump and Russia were using these servers to secretly interact.
Well now if you, now Alphabank is suing some people who generated this theory.
And they also sued Christopher Steele over it, and people tied to Christopher Steele.
And what has come out from that is that basically Alphabank alleges that some hackers used fraud to create the appearance of contact between a Trump server and an Alphabank server, in a deliberate bid to, you know, basically frame Alphabank and Trump as being in cahoots.
So if that's true, then that means that there was a deliberate criminal attempt to establish some kind of Trump-Russia contact, and which speaks to, you know, a setup.
And we know- I thought, now Aaron, didn't we, I'm sure you remember the source in Better Than Me on this, but the original story there was that it was just a Trump Hotel spam bot, and that Alphabank was receiving emails from them, or some kind of real weak link like that.
Am I wrong?
That is what one explanation was.
And that made sense to me, that it was just a spam thing.
But it looks like, I mean, Alphabank is alleging this, and apparently John Durham, who's conducting a review of the origins of Russiagate, is now actually convening the grand jury about this.
And the fact is- Oh, on that particular aspect.
Interesting.
On that particular aspect.
So the fact that there's a grand jury suggests that there is at least some reason to suspect criminal activity.
And by the way, we know from Christopher Steele's testimony that he said that the person who suggested to him this idea of a Trump-Alphabank connection was Michael Sussman, who is an attorney for Perkins Coie, the same firm that hired Fusion GPS and that also hired CrowdStrike.
So that could be evidence of a deliberate setup on the part of Perkins Coie working for the DNC to set up Trump and to make it appear as if there was a Trump-Russia connection, if that fares out.
So I really hope to learn more about that.
Yeah, absolutely.
That's an important new development.
And that's an important, I mean, the most important thing he just said out of all of that is that Durham is actually doing a thing.
Is that really right?
I mean, is there anything else that he's doing?
Well, in terms of, I mean, there's been a whole bunch of reports about, you know, like channels he's looking, you know, like angles that he's pursuing in his investigation.
You know, I don't know.
But what I do know is that the New Yorker recently reported that there's been a grand jury convened.
And the reason that the New Yorker reported it is because the New Yorker was used to try to launder this story a couple of years ago.
There's a big story by Dexter Filkins speaking to the people who made this allegation, who claimed to discover this unusual activity between Trump and Russia.
And now these same people are being interviewed by a grand jury.
And Dexter Filkins of the New Yorker, who wrote the initial story, he's trying to, you know, basically defend them and cast doubt on the notion that this was a, you know, setup.
But again, like, what is more plausible?
That Trump and Russia use some secret server to secretly communicate?
Okay, that's one choice.
Or that this was a setup.
And given how much of this has been a setup and has been a fraud, I'm going to go with the second option.
Yeah.
Well, especially when you find out that it was Glenn Simpson and Fusion were behind the Trump Tower meeting and that they were the one who told the lady to tell Trump Jr. that she had this dirt.
I mean, man, there's some pretty premeditated premeditation going on in this whole thing.
I don't, I mean, unless I'm wrong, I don't think Glenn Simpson, it's been proven that he told the Russian lawyer Veselnitskaya to say that.
But it has been proven that they met right before and after, which is just, it's either a crazy, you know, just a crazy.
I'm sorry.
I should not have embellished that point.
You're right to be more careful.
But yeah.
You all heard the man.
It's still weird that the that the same firm that is concocting these phony collusion allegations was working with and meeting with a lawyer who was later used to push the collusion allegations.
Could just be a coincidence or it could be a part of a setup.
And hopefully we'll find out some concrete answers when Durham is done, whatever that is.
Yeah.
Here's one more thing.
Let me ask you to parse for us.
It'd be nice if I could speak English.
Here's one more thing for you to parse for us, if you could, would be Trump saying on Twitter, I want everything declassified right now.
And I'm pretty mad at my attorney general for not declassifying everything right now.
No redactions, he says.
And then the other media says that at the agencies that their response to that is that, yeah, we're not doing that.
And in fact, I think there was a thing that said all that authority would go through the Department of Justice and then the Department of Justice is not ordering state defense, whoever else, to declassify anything other than in the, under the process that they've already been doing it, taking care to redact whatever they feel like, et cetera.
And at whatever timeframe they feel like.
But so I'm sorry to phrase that in the form of a question, is that real insubordination here or he's just blowing steam, pretending like he's doing what he should have done in the first place, declassify every single thing and let all the chips fall where they may right then back in 2017.
But anyway.
Yeah, I think it's both.
I think it's quite plausible and there have been reports that the CIA, especially under Gina Haspel, has been refusing efforts to, you know, to declassify documents.
I think that's totally plausible.
I mean, that's whatever CIA director does is refuse transparency.
And it's also probably Trump, you know, grandstanding a little bit and trying to give his base something.
He doesn't have much else right now.
He's, you know, he's, he's hurting in the polls, he's, you know, and so it makes sense that Trump would try to like, you know, blame the deep state on all of his failures.
And the problem is, you know, he does have some legitimate grievances.
The intelligence services were weaponized against him to try to bring him down.
At the same time, he also, I think, has been a terrible president.
So he'll look for excuses to try to justify his failures.
So I think it's, I would say it's a bit of everything here.
Yeah, probably right about that.
All right.
Well, listen, man, thanks for staying over time with us.
I'll let you go.
But I really appreciate you coming back on the show there, Aaron.
Great stuff as always.
Thanks, Scott.
All right, you guys.
That is Aaron Maté.
He is at the Gray Zone.
And man, I didn't get to ask him about, they're blaming Russia now for Hunter's emails coming out in the New York Post.
Yeah, sure.
I'm sure he would have just said, yeah, sure, to that.
Anyway, find him at the Gray Zone.
That's thegrayzone.com and at RealClearInvestigations.
And of course, he's a big famous guy on the Twitter there too, Aaron J. Maté, which is just spelled like mate for you there.
The Scott Horton Show, anti-war radio, can be heard on KPFK 90.7 FM in LA, APSradio.com, antiwar.com, scotthorton.org, and libertarianinstitute.org.
