All right, y'all, welcome to the Scott Horton Show.
I'm the Director of the Libertarian Institute, Editorial Director of Antiwar.com, author of the book Fool's Errand, Time to End the War in Afghanistan, and the brand new Enough Already, Time to End the War on Terrorism, and I've recorded more than 5,500 interviews since 2003, almost all on foreign policy, and all available for you at scotthorton.org.
You can sign up for the podcast feed there, and the full interview archive is also available at youtube.com slash scotthortonshow.
All right, you guys, introducing Aaron Maté.
Of course, he is the host of Push Back at the Gray Zone and writes at maté, spelled like mate, maté.substack.com.
This one's called Russiagate Has No Rock Bottom.
Welcome back to the show.
How are you doing?
I'm good, Scott.
How are you?
I'm doing good.
Listen, so the call goes out, I'm taking this opportunity to put the call out to everybody listening.
If anybody remembers where it was that I read that Hillary's people wanted to have the CIA not just brief the electoral college that the Russians had stolen the election from her, but that if that didn't work, and to give it to her, but that if that didn't work, then they should at least throw it to the House of Representatives, where then hopefully the House would give it to somebody trustworthy like Colin Powell or Paul Ryan.
And me and a bunch of friends helped me look yesterday, and I found a couple where they proposed John Kasich or in one case Mitt Romney, but for some reason my footnote is missing, but I couldn't possibly have hallucinated that one.
It's way too specific.
I know it's out there somewhere, and I'm 99% sure it's at the New York Times, but I can't find it there.
So God dang it.
I know that was part of it, and I am not wrong, and so I will not concede defeat, but I cannot brag that I can prove it at this moment.
So anyway, but it's really important, right?
Because there was nothing to this Russia thing at all.
And here Hillary Clinton was trying to do her January 6th insurrection and get the Electoral College overthrown based on a bunch of crap that her and her friends had made up.
Aaron?
Yeah, and then when that didn't work, the next best thing was to continue this ridiculous FBI investigation into whether or not the president is a Russian asset, even though the FBI knew all along that there was nothing to it and that the major parts of the investigation came from a Clinton campaign-funded private intelligence project, the Steele dossier.
But the public wasn't told what the FBI learned, and still we got this two-year Mueller investigation in which everyone who watched MSNBC and CNN was convinced that Robert Mueller any day was going to produce the evidence that the president of the United States was really a Russian agent.
And of course that didn't happen, and now we're getting the fallout where you have a special counsel, John Durham, investigating how all this craziness began.
And this latest indictment of a key Steele dossier source is just, it's just the latest development.
All right.
So let's talk about that.
Who's been indicted now?
So who was indicted is this guy named Igor Danchenko, and he is a Russian expat who's lived in the U.S. for a long time.
The Steele dossier claimed to have access to all these high-level Kremlin sources, but it turns out, as the FBI found out very early on, the Steele dossier's main source was this guy Igor Danchenko, who's known Steele for a long time and fed him a lot of the material that went into the Steele dossier.
And what Danchenko told the FBI in early 2017, and we already knew this before because we found this out in late 2019 with a inspector general's report from the Department of Justice, was that corroboration for all the claims in the dossier was, in Danchenko's words, zero, and that basically Danchenko had heard a bunch of random rumors over some drinks with friends, and he put a bunch of stuff together and gave it to Steele.
And Steele then passed it off in the dossier as this credible high-level intelligence.
And really, it was just, you know, chatter and made-up stuff.
But now we learn that Danchenko was actually not fully honest with the FBI about information that could embarrass him and Steele even more.
He lied to them about his interactions with some of the people he used as sub-sources for the dossier, and then he lied to the FBI about it.
One of them is this guy Sergei Milyan, who, you know, was said to be the key source for the claim that there was a high-level conspiracy between Trump and Russia.
I mean, that's what multiple media outlets were told, including by It Looks Like Steele.
But now it turns out that Danchenko didn't even speak to Sergei Milyan.
So he lied, and he lied to the FBI about that.
He's alleged to have lied to the FBI about that.
And another high-level, another source for the dossier is a guy named Charles Dolan, who it turns out is not Russian.
He's actually a longtime Clinton world figure.
He was a chair of Bill Clinton's presidential campaign in Virginia twice.
Bill Clinton appointed him to a State Department board.
And then he was a volunteer and an advisor for Hillary Clinton's presidential campaign runs.
And it turns out that he turns out to be a source for the claim that there was a P-tape of Trump in the Ritz-Carlton.
Now, It Looks Like Dolan didn't tell Danchenko that there was a P-tape, but what he told Danchenko was that there was a presidential suite in the Moscow Ritz-Carlton and that Trump once stayed there.
And Dolan learned this because he learned this during a trip to Russia in June 2016.
And the picture from the indictment, as Durham portrays it, is that basically Danchenko took that benign information that Trump was staying in the Moscow Ritz-Carlton and then embellished it by adding this thing about the P-tape there.
So the irony here is that not only did the Clinton campaign pay for the Steele dossier, but it looks as if a longtime Clinton world figure proved to be unwittingly a key source for one of its, you know, for its most salacious claim.
And then so I'm sorry, what was so unwitting about it?
Well, because he it looks it's it's unclear if Dolan knew that Danchenko was using this was was working on a on the Steele dossier.
It's unclear.
So Danchenko might have just told that.
So Dolan might have just told Danchenko about his visit to the Moscow Ritz-Carlton and relayed the fact that Trump stayed there.
He might not have known that Danchenko was then going to use that to make the P-tape plan to go into the Steele dossier.
But it's clear that it was Danchenko that added the P-tape part, not Dolan.
It's it's the way this document is written.
That's what it suggests.
Yes.
And so it's just funny that the Clinton campaign, while claiming that Steele got all this great intelligence, that actually one of the key claims came from someone who's in the Clinton world and whether it was winning or not, whether, you know, it just like instead of this coming from Kremlin high level people, it's coming from someone like a longtime Clinton associate.
And, you know, adding to the irony here, we also learned from the from this Dolan indictment that this guy Dolan, who turned out to be a key Steele dossier source, that he has far more extensive ties to Russia than anybody in the Trump world.
You know, that was the big thing is trying to find any kind of connection between Trump and Russia.
They came up empty.
Meanwhile, this guy Dolan, he worked for the Russian government as a PR executive.
I'm not saying there's anything wrong with that because I'm not a xenophobe.
But the whole premise of Russiagate was that, like, if there's any kind of possible contact between a Trump figure and someone with a Russian passport, then that is like inherently damning.
But here we have a key Clinton world figure and a key Steele dossier source being someone who literally worked for the Russian government.
It's just one more funny irony.
Yeah.
Amazing.
Danchenko, did he have any real sources inside the Kremlin or Russian networks of power at all?
No, no.
Unequivocally, no.
No.
I mean, there's no at least there's no evidence of it.
And so far, the only evidence of his sources are, again, a Clinton tied American public relations executive who worked for the Russian government, Dolan.
And this guy, Sergei Millian, who he never even spoke to.
So one of his two sources he lied about speaking to.
So that's the level of Danchenko and Steele's access to the Kremlin.
And, you know, funnily.
And I'm sorry.
You know, the latter guy there, Aaron, he has disproven the allegation that he spoke to this guy somehow.
Is that right?
He said he said he's never spoken to him in his life.
And it looks like from the indictment that.
So Millian was funny.
OK, so Danchenko claims he told the FBI.
This is really funny.
He told the FBI that that he received a call from someone by phone who he thinks was Sergei Millian.
He's not even sure that he's pretty sure that it's him.
Right.
And so that's why.
And then and then that was the basis for his for him naming Millian as a source.
But but the indictment shows evidence that basically Danchenko was trying to reach Millian and say, I'd love to speak to you, but that but that it never happened.
And so Millian just lied to say that.
So Danchenko lied to say that it was Millian who called him.
It's really, really comical.
And then there's I mean, Dolan, meanwhile, did have access to some Kremlin people.
But again, it all becomes totally benign.
So, for example, Dolan told Danchenko that someone he knew in the Russian embassy was going to be recalled back to Moscow.
And Dolan found out about this month in advance.
Well, what ended up in the Steele dossier is that this Russian embassy official in Washington was recalled by the Kremlin because they were afraid that he that his role in the Russian interference operation was going to be discovered.
And so but really what comes out from this indictment is that basically Danchenko got from Dolan that a guy he knew in the embassy was going to be recalled anyway.
And then that was spun into this thing that this embassy official was recalled because he was integrally involved in this supposed sweeping Russian interference operation.
Nice.
And that's why he went back to Moscow.
So, you know, to whatever extent there was a connection between Danchenko and people in the Kremlin, it was benign information that was used to spin just fantastical claims.
Yeah.
Now, I'm sure you're familiar with this, but, you know, on Twitter all the time, the Russian gate dead enders say.
But so much of the dossier was proved to be correct.
That's admitted.
You have to admit that.
So how can you just dismiss it all?
Well, the funny thing is, you know, people people like Rachel Maddow would often claim that so much of what Steele said would later prove to be true.
But they missed such an obvious pattern in the dossier.
If you read it chronologically.
Everything that Steele says happens happen only comes after some approximate predicate has been publicly reported.
And there's nothing that he says that proves to be true before it actually happened.
So, for example, when there's this like meaningless Ukraine platform change at the RNC, there was an article about it in The Washington Post in July or August 2016.
After that, Steele comes out with a claim in his dossier that the Trump campaign in Russia had a quid pro quo, where if Trump changed this meaningless, I'm saying meaningless clause in the RNC platform, which doesn't mean anything, then then that was the quid pro quo for Russia's interference on Trump's behalf.
And conversely, there's no mention of any of these key figures in Russiagate like George Papadopoulos or Joseph Massoud in the Steele dossier.
For good reason, because at the time that Steele wrote his dossier, none of these people had come out in the news.
So there was no way he could find out about them because his only so quote, unquote, intelligence was basically public news sources.
He would take publicly available news and then write some, him and Dan Shaker would write some fiction based on that.
It was so obvious from the pattern of the way of the chronology of the way that Steele dossier was written.
And that's why it doesn't mention, the dossier doesn't mention George Papadopoulos, because even Papadopoulos's role in the whole Trump Russia thing, which he was basically the supposed predicate for the FBI opening up an investigation, even though Papadopoulos's role had already happened by the time Steele was writing, it hadn't been publicly reported yet.
So accordingly, Steele wouldn't have known about it because his only real source was basically the news and his own imagination.
And so I wrote that a long time ago that basically it was obvious that Steele and sources were reading the news and then using their imagination.
And lo and behold, in this Durham indictment, it says that this guy, Dolan, that what happened was he fabricated a claim about Paul Manafort based on what he read in the news.
So it was obvious at the time what was happening is people who had a stake in promoting Steele's narrative, which is basically the entire media went along with it and failed to see the obvious pattern.
Yeah.
I love the one because this is the thing, I mean, I just objected out loud about it.
The day this thing came out, that this whole thing has got to be a giant bankrupt hoax.
When you look at this claim that, you know, as you and others have explained, now we see what happened.
The newspaper reported that the Russian kind of half owned quasi state oil company Rosneft was liquidating 20 percent of or 19 or 20 percent of their stock to reinvest in production or whatever it was.
I forgot exactly the deal.
And they just took that and said, oh, yeah, no, they're taking that 19 percent ownership of Rosneft oil company.
And they're giving that to Carter Page because Carter Page is going to be the new king of American sanctions policy and repeal all American sanctions on Russia as soon as total power is in his hands in the new Trump administration.
How completely ridiculous is that?
And then you can see where it came from.
Oh, it was right there in the news, something about 19 percent of their stock.
And that was enough to build a little story off of, even though it's completely ridiculous.
Yeah.
Something about the stock, like something about them being up for sale and something also about Carter Page visiting Moscow, because that was in the news, too.
That got some attention because all of a sudden this guy no one had heard of who's somewhat associated with Trump was in Moscow and that got some news.
So then, accordingly, Danchenko and or Steele wrote a piece of fiction off of that.
And again, people use that somehow as evidence of Steele's sleuthing powers.
And really, he was reading the newspaper and it got to the point where, look, Adam Schiff read that claim into the congressional record, literally.
He read that claim about Page and and and the stake in in Rosneft into the congressional record.
It's so ludicrous.
And not only, you know, as we're speaking, there's just been, I think, the first attempt at accountability of serious accountability that I've seen to date, which is The Washington Post just seriously corrected two old stories from 2017 and 2019, where they claimed that Sergei Millian was one of Steele's key sources.
They've just basically retracted those stories and they've added huge editor notes at the top and and they've and they've cut out parts of the story and they've changed.
And that's the first time I've ever seen that happen.
But I mean, it's there's there's only one one example of of the many egregious falsehoods that the media published.
So.
And now is that Eric Wemple on his little blog or that was the real newspaper did that?
That's the real newspaper.
So Wemple brought it up.
But now they've finally gone ahead and issued corrections.
OK, so that's a little bit of progress there.
And, you know, he really did when the Steele dossier came out, he he did some accountability for, I guess, everybody.
I don't know, including The Washington Post, but everybody else is reporting.
But as I think we talked about before, he wouldn't touch the server.
And the fact that exactly these same corrupt lawyers were the ones who hired CrowdStrike and were the ones who were behind all of this stuff working directly for the Clinton campaign.
Right.
The Steele dossier is low hanging fruit.
I mean, it's so ridiculous that it's impossible to defend.
But what they're going to do is throw it under the bus and they're even going to say that maybe Steele and whoever else were victims of a Russian disinformation campaign.
I'm sure they'll find some way to blame Russia.
They have said that before.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So they're going to.
But they're meanwhile going to try to portray the rest of the Russia investigation as credible.
And there's just there's no basis for that because, you know, there's so many other claims that are just as ridiculous.
And, you know, we've talked before about the attempts to save face by, you know, claiming that Konstantin Kalimnik is a Russian spy.
And that's not a claim made by Steele.
That's a claim made by other people, including the Senate Intelligence Committee.
But it's ridiculous.
It's it's just as ludicrous as I've reported on.
I mean, I've I've gotten evidence that undermines one of the key one of the Mueller reports key claims about Kalimnik, which is that he traveled to the U.S. on a diplomatic Russian diplomatic passport.
And that to Mueller suggests that Kalimnik as a spy was coming to the U.S. under diplomatic cover.
But actually, I got Kalimnik's real passport and he did not have a diplomatic passport.
It was a regular one.
He was given a regular U.S. visa.
And also, by the way, Mueller, in fact, never even called Kalimnik a spy because there's no evidence for that.
But the Senate Intelligence Committee did.
So things like that are, you know, are just as farcical as the Steele dossier.
But there will be an attempt now to portray those as, you know, as credible.
Right.
And the Steele dossier was really what underlined it all.
It wasn't just the FISA, you know, Warren against Carter Page, but the entire narrative of this ongoing conspiracy between Trump and all of his people and the Russians and all his where now that's the conspiracy kook framework.
You're supposed to look at all of this and that look, you know, this senator.
What's his name?
That idiot from down south who was the attorney general for a minute there.
His name is escaping me for a second there.
Trump's first attorney general.
Just sessions.
Sessions.
Sorry.
Oh, look, Sessions shook hands with the ambassador.
Oh, look, Mike Flynn was on the phone with the ambassador.
Oh, look, some Russians met at the Trump Tower with Junior or whatever it is, even though it's all just like the case against Iraq.
It's zero times 10.
It all amounts to nothing in the first place.
You have to believe in it first.
You know, like the standard conspiracy kookery.
You have to know it's true and then put all the pieces together and see how they all fit.
Aaron, come on.
Exactly.
It's it's that's why I call it blue and it's complete cult behavior.
And if you dissented from the cult, you were cast as a Russian asset.
You were a Trump supporter.
I mean, I was called all these names for so long as people just didn't want to engage with the evidence.
And it's like it wasn't hard to see all the all the contradictions, all the evidence undermining the conspiracy theories were there all along, but people just didn't want to see it.
Look here.
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This is so cool.
The great Mike Swanson's new book is finally out.
He's been working on this thing for years.
And I admit I haven't read it yet.
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And as he explains on the back here, all of our popular culture and our retellings and our history and our movies are all about the height of the American war there in, say, 1964 through 1974.
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Find out in Why the Vietnam War by the great Mike Swanson.
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Yeah.
Well, and so that's the thing of it, right, is it's sort of like discussing the war on pot.
It sounds like a trivial issue because pot is trivial, but it's not a trivial issue.
People go to prison over that stuff, man.
People's lives are ruined.
Illegal searches are predicated on this horrible, stupid war on pot.
It's really important.
It's the same kind of thing here where what a bunch of garbage.
It all amounts to kind of nothing.
But then the context is it's one party in alliance essentially with the secret police, with the FBI's counterintelligence division and the CIA to frame up and push this ridiculous case essentially of treason with the Kremlin, of all things.
It's really a big deal.
And I guess I get it that, well, people really hate Trump.
So what's the worst you could do to him that he doesn't deserve help?
He's the guy who insisted his predecessor was an illegitimate president all along because he was one of them black Muslims from Kenya, an alien to this society, had no business in that chair at all.
So screw him.
He did kind of deserve it.
But boy, I don't think the American people did.
And I don't think the Russians did either.
No, no.
And it's a pretty, it's amazing how both factions of our ruling system, just for all the talk of us being this great shining democracy, I mean, no one accepts the legitimacy of the other anymore.
I mean, you're right.
It's ironic that, you know, Trump came to office partly based on this xenophobic conspiracy theory that Obama was really born in Kenya.
And then what do Democrats do?
They, instead of responding with like a policy agenda that could win over voters, they respond with another xenophobic conspiracy that Trump is a Russian agent and it just goes on and on and on.
Yeah.
Whatever happened to they go low, we go high and all of that garbage makes a nice slogan.
And really framing it, see, here's the thing too.
And I really would have said this in defense of Bernie or Hillary or anybody on any side that you just cannot have the FBI and the CIA picking and choosing your president like this.
Or, you know, I remember there was the CNN report from the fall of 2017 where the FBI said, well, we want to rein him in.
But then I accidentally found when I was looking for my lost footnote, a blog entry that I wrote from December 2016 about the controversy about briefing the Electoral College, write a quote from, I think, a senator or something like that.
At the very least, we can hem him in.
That was the same language.
We're going to push this Russiagate agenda, even if we can't remove him.
Remember serious discussions about at the height of the Justice Department, maybe we can bring the cabinet together led by what Rex Tillerson and do a coup and call it the 25th Amendment and throw Trump out of power in the spring of 2017 over this.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Over this complete hoax where there is no basis to it at all.
Really?
Yeah.
Yeah.
And, you know, so obviously for the Democrats, their motive was that, you know, the Clinton wing did not want to take responsibility for losing to Trump.
They were humiliated.
And it's already documented in the book Shattered that within 24 hours they came up with this plan to basically blame Russia.
And they executed that plan to perfection.
But for the national security state, I think their motive was primarily primarily a few things.
One, they didn't see Trump as a suitable steward of the U.S. empire.
He's embarrassing.
He says the wrong things.
He's too honest sometimes.
And it's just, you know, he's not an effective operator when it comes to managing this global, you know, military empire around the world.
But also, and this is something that, I mean, you've written about in one of your books, you talk about a speech that Trump gave on the campaign trail where he basically called out the dirty war in Syria and he called out Libya, too.
And he also was embarrassing the Bush family.
He kind of killed the Bush dynasty when he brought up, you know, the fact that they are responsible for Iraq.
And I don't think there was ever really a real serious possibility that Trump was really going to do anything different on foreign policy.
I think he was, I think he's just a good salesman and he realized where the pulse of the electorate was.
People were tired of paying for war and tired of their kids dying in wars.
And I think he tapped into that.
And so I think for the national security state, you know, doing this to Trump, it was a good way to rein him in, but also was a good way to kind of stigmatize the appeal of his rhetoric, of the fact that they were seeing that on the campaign trail, him criticizing, you know, the wars in Syria and Libya, that was threatening to them.
And so to paint all of this as the work of Russia and to punish him basically for dissenting or for telling the truth sometimes about, you know, U.S. foreign policy, like when he said that the U.S. was arming terrorists in Syria, that was like, you're not supposed to say that.
So using this was a good way, I think, to get him under control and to stigmatize the appeal of his message and to suggest that really all that was just Russian propaganda.
Yeah.
Except who are they fooling?
Except themselves.
You know, like anyone who voted for Trump in 2016 believes that, yeah, the Russians fooled me.
All right.
Right.
That just didn't happen.
Or if it did, it was the dumbest of damn Democrats who had crossed the aisle for a minute and then went right back again over this nonsense.
But, you know, pick nine thousand nine hundred ninety nine thousand out of a million Trump voters.
Nobody's going to say, oh, yeah, no, I didn't have my own reasons for hating Hillary.
Clinton at all.
I was brainwashed by Vladimir Putin's military intelligence agency by some, you know, Facebook memes or something like that is finally what pushed me over the line.
The whole premise of the Russiagate narrative shows exhibits such contempt for average voters on the part of, you know, like, you know, liberal U.S. commentators and politicians who push Russiagate because it presupposes that people are so malleable and so unable to think for themselves that they were influenced somehow by these dumb Russian memes on social media that weren't even about the election.
I mean, literally, there's a whole industry of people who want trying to convince us that Russian social media ads swung the election for Trump.
And that's premised on such a profound level of contempt for voters, you know, especially for African-Americans, because there's been this extensive focus on whether, you know, ads, Russian ads aimed at African-Americans swung the vote against Hillary.
And it's so stupid because if you look at these ads, first of all, they're barely detectable.
There weren't that many of them.
Most of them aired after the election and the vast majority weren't even about the election.
They were just dumb memes.
So to believe that any of these dumb Russian social media ads swung a single vote, just one vote in this country requires just such a deluded way of thinking and such a level of contempt towards voters.
Yeah.
And now just to wrap up back on the main subject here, this narrower point here about this guy lying to the FBI.
You write that they knew good and well that he was lying by June of 2017 at the absolute latest.
Is that correct?
It looks very likely that they knew he was lying to them because they asked him about his interactions with Charles Dolan, this Clinton campaign figure.
And so which would make it appear that they'd already interviewed Dolan.
And if they'd already interviewed Dolan, if they knew that Denchenko had spoken to him, then they would have easily seen that Denchenko was lying to them when he when he obscured the nature of their conversations.
The fact that they didn't say anything publicly, the fact that they didn't indict him is ridiculous because meanwhile, Mueller was going ahead with this investigation, indicting people for lying to the FBI.
And the Mueller team did everything they could to suggest to the public that they were closing in on a conspiracy case.
They wrote their indictments in a way to make it appear as if they had something.
And really, if you read between the lines, they always sneakily kind of conceded with their language that they had nothing.
Pointing to a Trump Russia conspiracy was always potential or possible, there was never anything concrete.
And also anonymous intelligence officials told places like CNN and The New Yorker that the dossier was checking out.
So there was a concerted effort by someone in the intelligence community to make it look as if the dossier was credible, even when they knew that it was phony.
So this was an op and, you know, we've seen the damage.
Yeah, I want to see Durham indict Robert Mueller and Andrew Weissman, because they're part of this, too, pretending to investigate this thing for two years when they knew good and well that Donald Trump was no agent of the Russians and but perfectly happy to let what half the American population believe so.
Well, you know, the problem with Weissman is they're going to like say they wanted to investigate Weissman, which, of course, I don't think they ever would.
They're not going to indict one of their own.
But if they even wanted to investigate Weissman, unfortunately, he wiped his phones multiple times.
He erased the contents of all his phones, which you only can do by going through a really elaborate process.
And he claimed that actually it was because he forgot his password.
That's what he said.
But but I mean, of course, he was trying to just cover his tracks.
So to get Weissman, I think, would be difficult based on the steps he took to avoid detection.
I'll bring this back up because I never hear this mentioned anywhere else anyway, is which I don't watch TV, but I'm pretty sure they don't talk about this on TV.
And that is that in Bob Woodward's first book on Trump, which is, I think, fear.
He says that as soon as Trump came into power, his lawyer, Dowd, said to him, listen, is there anything to this whole Russia thing?
And Trump said no.
And he said, OK, well, then I want to turn over every scrap of paper from the campaign directly right over to the prosecutors right now in one big load and let them have it as a gesture of good faith that you can see.
And Trump said, do it.
I don't care.
Do it.
And then that's exactly what he did.
And he said to Weissman, now, listen, pal, I think we're being more than fair to you.
And all we request from you is that you treat us in a business like an above board fashion here, too.
And he said, yeah, thanks very much for this entire exculpatory twelve thousand page dossier on your WMD here.
We'll take it under advisement.
And then pretended to criminally investigate them for two years after that.
That's exactly right.
They fully cooperated and handed over everything.
And the Mueller team knew early on they had no conspiracy case, but they prolonged it with the obstruction thing that somehow Trump had obstructed an investigation into a alleged crime.
They knew he was that they knew he was innocent of.
So it's it was so cynical on their part.
And it just raises the question of what they were doing and why.
What they're basically doing is trying to cover up for the FBI's initial decision to open up a ridiculous case.
And I think that they were trying to actually cover up for the extensive reliance on Christopher Steele by trying to find other avenues that they could use to to make it look as if there was something to the Trump Russia thing.
And that's why I think they went so heavily in on Constantin Kalinic is because that was the one, you know, things things that hadn't already been.
But I was the one conspiracy theories that hadn't already been put out there.
Yeah.
Hey, listen, I think you're right, aren't you, about this kind of xenophobic angle here?
Like these Slavs, they're very white when you look at them, but they're kind of different in a way, aren't they?
And they have these weird sounding names with all these consonants in them and things like that.
And there is very much sort of a kind of aspect where the Russians are kind of European, but kind of Asiatic and all of that that does underlie this.
Kalinic, that sounds like a guy who's maybe up to no good, you know?
Oh, for sure.
They love to say these Russian names as if all of them were like these evildoers.
By the way, this guy worked for John McCain.
That sounds pretty bad, but I don't know if it in the same way that they mean.
Kalinic, I mean, that's another irony for all the talk of having ties to Russian intelligence, whatever that means.
I mean, that's the that's the FBI's vague way to describe him.
They say he has ties to Russian intelligence.
They don't explain what that was.
The Senate Intelligence Committee came out with a claim that he's a spy.
But their evidence for that was basically either completely thin what they showed or redacted.
And as I talked about, there's so much evidence to contradict it.
But yeah, he the irony of him is also he worked as a translator in Ukraine and he translated meetings with State Department officials.
He was a sensitive source for Paul for for the state, for the U.S. embassy in Ukraine.
You know, this polling data that is at the heart of his whole story, which he supposedly gave to Russia for its sweeping, sophisticated interference campaign, which, again, doesn't make sense on its face.
But that point that he also gave to a bunch of Americans, too, he was sending it around saying, look, I think Trump has a chance.
He was saying, like, look at this poll, you know, Trump 50, Clinton 48 in Wisconsin.
It was that kind of stuff.
And that was sent to Americans.
There's a footnote in the Mueller report that talks about that.
So the same polling data that Rachel Maddow believes and Adam Schiff believe was being sent to Russian intelligence was also being sent to American officials because, you know, it was just benign behavior.
But, you know, when you believe when you're a part of a cult, you believe in a conspiracy, you can turn benign stuff into anything.
And that's what they did.
Yeah.
Hey, one more thing.
Could you refresh my memory on something here real quick?
I seem to remember I didn't read the book, but it was reported at the time, I believe, that this book Shattered Glass that came out, not Shattered Glass, Shattered Something.
No, just Shattered.
Shattered Glass is about the guy, the New Republic, just Shattered, which is about Hillary Clinton's campaign that was written by some Newsweek type insiders, whoever, MSNBC types.
And in there, don't they say that there was a meeting of some insiders, I think the day after the election or a couple of days after, where they decided we're pinning this all on Comey and racists and Russia and whatever.
And they had this.
And wasn't Rachel Maddow there with them?
I don't think Maddow was there.
I mean, she was there in spirit.
She was definitely there in spirit.
A hundred percent.
She's there in spirit because, you know, she.
I'm only going from memory here.
I'm sorry, but I could have swore.
Yeah.
Yeah.
She took that narrative to the max.
And, you know, and that was her show every night for, you know, however many years.
It seemed like she had made a promise to somebody that like hell or high water, I'm going to hold this narrative down for you guys, you know, or something.
I mean, it looks like it.
Yeah, because she did.
But no, that meeting was just the Clinton campaign.
And yeah, I mean, they they executed.
I mean, they made that issue the dominant thing for more than two years.
Yeah.
That's a hilarious picture that you have of her at the top of your article where she's just so deadly serious about this.
Yeah.
Yeah.
That's from an that's from a special.
She did an hour long special about the dossier and tried to basically, you know, interviewing all these people like David Korn and Malcolm Nance to try to make it look credible.
I mean, this was it's it's it's QAnon level stuff.
It's but it was completely mainstreamed for many years.
It's still mainstream now.
Look, a lot of them are not backing down.
Yeah.
All right.
Well, so now here's really the all important question, right, is whether Durham is making any of these people who he's indicting testify against anybody else or he's just really going for the low hanging fruit here rather than trying to turn him up the chain.
I mean, if you read the indictments, the way it's written so far, it looks like Durham's trying to argue that, you know, these these Clinton tied people fooled the FBI, which I don't think I don't think I don't think that's plausible.
I think that's ridiculous.
The FBI knew exactly how thin this was, but that's the way he's doing it so far.
And we'll see.
I mean, there are many other people who have come up, you know, Fusion GPS.
They're the ones who hired Steele.
Can they be arrested for giving the FBI false information?
The people behind the Alfa Bank thing, that was the subject of the previous indictment of Michael Sussman, Clinton campaign lawyer.
And but, you know, look, what are the odds that they're going to go after high level FBI officials, CIA officials?
This doesn't happen too often.
I mean, look at look at torture with John Kiriakou, you know, the person who went to prison was not any of the torturers, but the person who blew the whistle on it, John Kiriakou.
Yeah.
So I I'd be surprised if high level FBI people get criminally prosecuted.
It's but at least hopefully we'll get a report that is honest and that is unredacted and that looks at everything, not just the low hanging stuff like Steele, but also the foundational claim about Russian hacking the DNC, which was generated, as we've talked about, by CrowdStrike, another Clinton campaign contractor like Fusion GPS.
And the public has never gotten to see the underlying evidence for that.
And there's so much that's come up, it's undermining.
So let's see the underlying evidence.
And hopefully Durham is not afraid to address that, because that's really the only thing left standing with Russiagate is the claim that Russia stole the emails.
Everything else now collusion.
That's that's done.
No one believes that anymore.
But the hacking allegation that that's still standing.
So let's see the evidence for it.
Yeah, absolutely.
Well, listen, I speak for a lot of people when I insist that you and Matt Taibbi work together to write a book, the definitive one about what the hell happened here.
What about that?
You know, I'm sure one of us will come up with something.
We'll see.
It's a you know, I've been trying to work on a book for a while, but to get the interest of a liberal publisher, which is what most publishers are, is not has not been easy.
I mean, like I'll never forget, I spoke to one big publisher a few years ago and they said to me, I like your work here, but if I publish this, my friends will be really mad at me.
So, you know, that's maybe things have changed now, but we'll see.
I mean, I'm definitely going to.
It's just like a Nazi book burning.
Right.
I won't be able to go to my friend's little cocktail party or something.
Exactly.
That's exactly what it is.
And that's what Russiagate was.
It's you know, it was a, you know, to to go against it would mean casting yourself out from a, you know, a club.
And a lot of people just didn't want to do that.
I know a libertarian publisher who will publish it if you guys are interested.
But it sounds good.
Sounds good.
You know, if I if I'm making the rounds now.
But maybe I'll hit you up.
Yeah.
Well, you got my number, man.
Thank you.
Thanks for having me, Scott.
All right, you guys.
That's the great Aaron Maté.
He's at The Gray Zone and at Maté.substack.com.
And of course, lots of great previous work in Real Clear Investigations and at The Nation.com as well.
The Scott Horton Show, anti-war radio can be heard on KPFK 90.7 FM in L.A.
APSradio.com, Antiwar.com, Scott Horton.org and Libertarian Institute.org.
