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.
You can also sign up for the podcast feed.
The full archive is also available at youtube.com slash scotthorton show.
All right, you guys, I got Ray McGovern on the line.
He was a CIA analyst for 27 years, was the chief of their Soviet Union division back in the bad old days, used to brief Reagan and Bush in the 1980s, and has spent the entire century so far opposing imperialism and America's aggressive wars.
Welcome back to the show.
How are you doing?
Thank you.
Okay, Scott.
How are you?
I am doing okay.
I think I flubbed a little bit on the word opposing there.
I'm not sure why I can't speak English, but anyway, that's the word.
And so one of the things you've been really good on is Russiagate, and it's especially interesting, I think, should be to people that you are, because you are so heavily biased against Trump.
So just like with Aaron Maté and Glenn Greenwald and Matt Taibbi and a few other reporters on the more liberal left side, it is quote unquote against interest for you to argue the innocence of the president on the very worst accusation against him, a president that you oppose, and yet you do.
And you have this new piece that you sent us last night.
We're running on antiwar.com about John Brennan, and oh, here it is right here.
It's at consortiumnews.com, first of all.
We're going to poach it and run it at antiwar.com.
It's called, What Is John Brennan So Worried About?
And then of course the answer is that we will learn the truth about Russiagate, right?
That's right.
And, you know, by way of caveat or introduction, I have to say that the intelligence business has become so politicized, and by extension journalism has become so politicized, that it's very difficult for the ordinary American, even my closest friends, to believe that there are people out there that are just after the truth, that believe that the truth has to be exposed and that it will keep us free, actually, and that people should not avoid exposing the truth out of political concerns.
One of our major efforts, that is ours as veteran intelligence professionals for sanity, one of our major efforts where we collectively told President Trump that we had technical evidence that there was no Russian hack of the Democratic National Committee emails that were later published by WikiLeaks.
Now, we, as we went into that, it became clear that we had to do two paragraphs of a caveat.
I don't have them in front of me, but they read something like this, please understand that we look at this evidence in a dispassionate way just to get at the truth.
We hold no brief for either political party, and anything we say that helps or hinders some political party is purely accidental.
Okay, now, my God, that we had to say that in an intelligence memorandum speaks volumes, but we did, and that's the case here, and I'll just finish this little spiel by saying it really became a crisis of confidence when Hunter Biden's emails became divulged.
Now, just to show you how bad it has become, 50 or so former CIA and other intelligence officials immediately said, you know, we smell the Russians behind this.
We don't have any evidence, but it is, you know, it's typical of the Russian modus operandi.
You know, it must be the Russians that are doing this late in the game in this election period.
Well, my God, who wrote that thing?
John Brennan.
Who circulated it?
John Brennan's PR person, Politico, published it, puts that in the article itself.
John Brennan's personnel, or PR person, okay?
Now, what does that mean?
Well, look at the history of John Brennan's PR people, and you'll see what kind of credence you should give to it.
The others that signed on- Is that a reference to the white helmets?
Top of the list was Jim Clapper.
Now, Jim Clapper knows about the Russians.
As you know, he saw fit to say on TV that the Russians, you know, we know the history of the Russians.
They are almost genetically driven to co-opt, to penetrate, to do all kinds of bad, bad, bad things, bad Russians.
This is Clapper, the director of national intelligence.
So here's the kind of situation we were up against.
Most American people believe that stuff, okay?
And when you say, wait a second now, let's get rid of all the political stuff.
Let's look at the forensics.
Let's look at what happened with that DNC computer or server from which emails were copied and given to WikiLeaks.
Okay.
I guess this is worth mentioning again, although, well, most people don't know it.
Jim Comey, head of the FBI at the time, in his wisdom decided that even though the likes of John McCain were claiming that this was an act of war by Russia, act of war, act of war interference, you know, hacking into DNC emails, Jim Comey decided, well, let's let this firm called CrowdStrike look into this.
We don't know what we'd find if we send our own, our own investigators in.
Let's do, let's CrowdStrike do it.
CrowdStrike headed up by an old person who worked for James, for Bob, Bob Mueller at the FBI.
So CrowdStrike was the one that's the source of all this stuff that Russia hacked.
Now what happened?
Why is this important?
Well, most Americans, and I dare say most of your listeners will not know this, but the CrowdStrike head, Sean Henry, was testifying before the House Intelligence Committee on the 5th of December, got a pencil, 2017, 5 December, 2017.
What did he say?
He said, we don't have any concrete evidence that the DNC emails that WikiLeaks published were hacked, were exfiltrated, and not by the Russians, not by anyone.
No evidence.
Wow.
Well, now that was the 5th of December, 2017.
Can I just interject right there, that in the transcript, lawyer leans over, whispers in ear, and then he says that.
Yeah, right.
Okay, sorry, go ahead.
Oh yeah, we can prove that.
And then the lawyer grabbed him by the shirt and said, wait a second, you better, you better say it this way.
And Sean Henry says, yes, counsel advises me to say that we don't have any evidence of exfiltration.
Well, hello.
So the point here is this, 5 December, 2017, Adam Schiff was able to keep that secret from that time.
And I dare say all the members of his committee, including the Republicans, were afraid to say anything about it from that time until finally they had a new director of national intelligence come in and say, okay, Schiff, you released that transcript or I'm going to.
And so Schiff, on the 7th of May, 2020, so what's that?
That's a half year ago, Scott, he released it.
And Aaron Maté and I and everybody who was after the truth said, my God, look at this.
The current strike admits that there's no evidence of a Russian or that anybody else hacked at the DNC for those emails.
Wow, what a story.
Now that was the 7th of May.
Has the Washington Post, the New York Times said anything about it?
No.
So here's the situation here.
We are really struggling uphill to get the truth out.
And rather than being discouraged about this, we're encouraged that, you know, there are a couple of people around like Greenwald and Matt Taibbi and others that, you know, really feel strongly about this to the point of, Greenwald's case, quitting, quitting the enterprise that he himself helped found because they wouldn't let him tell the story about the 100-biter emails.
So here's the story.
Here's the last thing here.
When the 100-biter emails came out, about two and a half weeks before the election, as I recall, you know, I was tempted to write on them, but my God, there they were.
They spoke for themselves.
And everybody else in, you know, my coterie of friends was writing about them.
And I said, you know, why should I alienate my closest friends, my wife, my brothers and sisters, all my friends in New York, why should I alienate them by repeating this stuff and being called, oh, trying to help Trump?
So I decided, no, I wouldn't.
Now that was against my better nature.
It was okay, I think, because everybody else did play it up.
But nobody, nobody in the mainstream media mentioned it.
So we're in a situation where, as you know better than most people, the mainstream media is flagrantly dismissive of the truth.
And that's what's in play now with respect to what John Brennan, the head of CIA, former, is really, really concerned about.
And he let it all hang out on Monday night.
It was really quite amazing.
He couldn't get his MSNBC folks to do it, but he begged Chris Cuomo for four minutes.
And what he said was, oh, I'm terribly afraid, I'm terribly afraid that this president is crazy.
He's, it's very, very worrisome, Brennan's words, that he's going to do a, quote, wholesale declassification of intelligence for his own political purposes.
Wow.
Now, what could that be?
Whoa.
Could it be emails?
Could it be intercepted telephone conversation?
Could it be all the things that NSA already has showing who is responsible for this Russiagate and showing that Brennan and Comey and Clapper and people in the FBI and DOJ were all participating in this, well, you know, this cabal, number one, to prevent Trump from becoming elected president.
Number two, for, well, to emasculate him so he couldn't get anything done.
Russia, Russia, Russia, Russia, Russia, Russia.
Now, that's important.
And I'll say again, because it's necessary for people to understand, you know, when people say to me, come on, Ray, for God's sake, you're talking about the top intelligence, the top judicial, the top law enforcement people in our country, all committing, participating in this cabal.
How could that be?
And I tell him, look, it's very simple.
Listen, everyone expected Hillary Clinton to win.
And seriously, what's more plausible that Donald Trump actually was a secret agent of the Kremlin?
For Christ's sake, come on.
Well, it doesn't have to be plausible, or it has to be said over and over and over again.
OK.
But the point is, they all expected Hillary to win.
And Trump was something of a threat.
You know, if, if he did deal with Russia, what would happen to the military industrial complex?
For God's sake, they need an enemy.
I don't make money.
Big deal.
So they all combined, these guys, and they said, well, she's going to win anyway.
And here's another big deal.
They didn't hide their tracks.
OK.
I mean, she was going to win anyway.
So these very high officials didn't take the rudimentary security procedures to hide their tracks.
So, oops, wait a second.
She loses.
What do they do?
They've got to hide their tracks.
What's the first target?
General Flynn.
Why?
Because he knows the tracks.
He knows where the bodies are buried.
And that, that's what happens to, we know what happened to General Flynn.
So the whole four years here has been spent hiding tracks and Russia, Russia, Russia.
And it doesn't matter to these people that they're, you know, toying with a major, major nuclear power.
And if I were Putin and seeing, seeing Trump and under such pressure and taking pills and so forth, I would, I dare say I would have my strategic forces on alert because God knows what's going to happen to this guy on steroids or to, to what he might feel he has to do to show himself, you know, standing up to Russia.
So it's kind of a long kind of story here.
But this recent thing that I hope we can talk about now with John Brennan saying, oh no, my God, he's going to release these things and national security.
He's trying to make it sound like, oh yeah, he's just going to release the names of all our spies in Iran and Russia.
So they get brought up, I guess, probably not Russia, but right.
He's going to like, he's like, he means to declassify American secrets in a broad fashion rather than secrets about John Brennan, which we all know are the ones that issue here.
Yeah, I can, in the names, James Clapper, John Brennan, Jim McCabe, you know, the whole coterie of people, including Gina Haspel.
Yeah.
Gina Haspel was a major player.
She was stationed chief in Britain at the time of all this.
That's exactly right.
So what Brennan was a little afraid to do in the United States, because the CIA's charter does not extend to the United States, and the FBI is very jealous about that prerogative, he caused to happen through Gina Haspel in London.
And that's where you get all this stuff with Papadopoulos and other stuff starting.
So the whole thing is a really good murder mystery.
We've been kind of grappling at the answers to it, which have been pretty transparent.
But to have the emails, the last thing I'll say on this is that, how are you going to get the emails, McGovern?
Well, here's the deal.
Here's the deal, as Joe Biden would say.
NSA, our national security agency, captures and stores everything that goes into the ether.
Now, when I said to Bill Binney, former technical director of NSA, come on, Bill, for God's sake, billions and billions, trust me, everything, okay?
What does that mean?
No, I know.
Hey, listen, anybody who's read Bamford's books knows that, first of all, at least in the United States of America, every bit of our telecommunications infrastructure since World War II was all built with the NSA all along, essentially, with military intelligence and then the NSA since 52, from the ground up.
I mean, all of it is within their rules and regulations of how it has to work.
So they have access to everything on our networks.
And then plus, when it comes to scooping up the rest of the world, no law applies.
They can do anything they want, splice any cable they want, mirror image, whatever they want, and they do.
Well, that's right, and they have the capability.
And if there were any doubt about that, when Ed Snowden came out in June of 2013, he came out with the documents.
He listened to what Dan Ellsberg has been telling every whistleblower since, well, since 1971, bring the documents.
Well, Chelsea Manning and Ed Snowden did him proud.
They brought the documents.
So what's one result of that?
Well, Bill Binney, technical director of NSA until he quit after 9-11, he devised some of these collection mechanisms, but he could never talk about them.
Now he's got the slides, the top secret slides that Ed Snowden brought out with him.
And he can trace the roots and he can say, look, you know, for you people who can't understand this, here are the trace points in this, in these routes.
These emails have to be kind of broken down into little packets.
And when you have these little trace lines here, then you get the end, well, they have to be reassembled so that people can read them.
And you know what?
I mean, here's the thing too, though, Ray, is never even mind that, frankly.
Like if you just read the Mueller report, he refuses to even attempt to establish a chain of custody of this leak to WikiLeaks at all.
He doesn't even try it.
He says, well, we don't really have a chain of custody.
All right.
What's that then?
I don't need Bill Binney to tell me other than, here's what I need Bill Binney to tell me, which I already knew, but it's especially great coming from him.
That if this happened, the NSA would be able to prove it a hundred percent.
That's the point.
And the fact that they're not saying that they can is the dog that didn't bark in this whole thing.
It's all you need to know about the whole thing, really.
And then on top of that, you got the Mueller report where he doesn't even try because he can't prove it because it's not true.
It's obviously a hoax.
Well, let me pick up on that because that's really interesting.
So NSA has not been very cooperative.
In other words, if Trump knew and acted on the reality that NSA could show that this whole thing was a hoax, that this whole thing was perpetrated by these same players, why doesn't he order NSA to come up with that information?
Well, the answer is simple.
He's afraid.
He's afraid.
Well, no.
I mean, he tried, but they won't do it.
I mean, I was just going to say, who's this guy, David Ignatius, at the Washington Post?
You know?
And let's get into that because they're openly talking about how they're just insubordinate.
They're just going to wait out the clock.
Yeah.
Well, you know, he's tried.
In October, he said, release everything, everything, unredacted, all caps, three exclamation points.
Now, then he complained.
Complained?
Where?
To Fox News.
He says, you know, I asked them to be redacted.
I asked them to be released without redactions and, you know, I just kept asking them and nothing happens.
Well, you know, as I put it in my article here, what Brennan and Clapper and Comey are all afraid of is that somebody's going to steal into Trump's bedroom some night and on his mirror etch in, you know, in one of these pens, hey, I thought you, all caps, were the president.
No, he sees this first thing in the morning, he says, my God, I am the president.
Maybe.
Maybe I'll make it possible for myself to get all those NSA messages out.
Now, how does he do that?
Well, who does the head of NSA report to?
The secretary of defense.
Ooh, we're getting a little interesting here.
Who is the secretary of defense on Sunday, Mark Esper?
Was he fired?
Yeah, he was fired on Monday.
Is there a new guy?
Yeah, a non-entity, Christopher Miller, you know, he's acting.
So who does the head of NSA report to now?
Oh, a new acting secretary of defense.
General Nakasone, head of NSA, is a military man.
If he is ordered by the new secretary of defense to release those, those very incriminating documents and intercepts, he's either got to quit or he's got to do it.
Wow.
What else?
Well, there's a new, there's a new general counsel at NSA.
And who is he?
Well, he's a guy who worked with Congressman Nunes, who used to be head of the House Intelligence Committee, and who knows chapter and verse as to how this all went down for the last four years.
Ooh, that's interesting.
And what's happened at, at defense?
Well, the new chief of staff to the acting secretary of defense is another fellow who worked with Nunes very closely.
And he's supposed to be very tight with this fellow named Christopher Miller.
So, you know, if, if I were an analyst, which I suppose I still am, I would try to get these little pieces and put them all together and say, hmm, I think I know why John Brennan's so, so concerned.
I think maybe he's seeing that the president is making it possible for him to order somebody to do something that they will actually do.
And what could that be?
And after all, I mean, look, he's the president.
He can carve out the spot in his schedule to call the car, take me to Langley, and then get to Langley and say, all right, take me to the back room where you keep the Russiagate files.
I want them right now.
Hand them over to me.
I hereby declassify them or I'll declassify them later today.
Hand them the hell over or you're all fired.
I'll have the janitor give them to me.
Yeah.
You know, it doesn't work that way.
That's what I would do.
I would just send the Marine Corps to wipe Langley off the face of the earth is what I would do.
But that's just I save humanity from their satanic evil once and for all.
He's supposed to be in charge, but he's not.
I mean, let's face it.
What I call the Mickey Matt, if people have a pencil, the military, industrial, congressional, intelligence, media, academia, think tank complex.
They're in charge and they need Russia.
They need Russia to be an enemy.
So they make lots of dough making weapons and selling them and they need to have their own interests protected.
So let's say today Trump calls over to Langley and says, Gina Haspel, I want all those things brought down to the White House by the end of business five o'clock today.
What's she going to do?
Well, there's precedent for what she will do.
She ordered the destruction of the videotapes from that secret base, the dark site, the black site in Thailand, where three people were subjected to very harsh interrogations, two of them waterboarding, one of them waterboarded for 147 times, if memory serves.
Okay, what'd she do?
She said, destroy all those things.
They were destroyed.
So what's she going to do today?
I mean, let's face it, she's implicated in all this stuff.
And so are her major cronies.
She's going to flush that stuff right down the women's room toilet so nobody will get in there.
And, you know, that's how bad it is.
So what I'm saying here is that Trump is going the defense route.
He thinks that defense people do salute still.
And there is a chance.
Now, I don't hold more than a 40 percent chance of this, but there's a chance that he's setting things up so that the new secretary of defense can order his subordinate, General Nakasone, the director of NSA, to produce the goods on all this stuff.
Nakasone will probably quit.
Who's the next guy?
Oh, he's a civilian.
He should do it.
So now, if he does that, my God, the cat's out of the, or the horse is out of the barn.
And what's John Brennan going to do?
Oh my God.
Well, he'll find a syndicate in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, or maybe Tel Aviv.
And he'll just, you know, just have to disappear into the woodwork because he and his co-conspirators will be, will have been found to be guilty of this whole thing.
And the American people will gradually awaken, maybe after a year or two, to the notion that they've been had.
Russia, Russia, Russia, they've been had.
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You know what I got to say, man?
I mean, I'm like you, while I'm not on the liberal side, but I certainly have never been a Trump guy, but I've been so opposed to this thing this whole time.
And I'd have felt the same way if they'd done it against Bernie Sanders or even against Hillary Clinton, although they wouldn't have done it against Hillary Clinton.
But for them to go after a major party candidate in this way for, you know, the Democrats, they come up with some opposition research BS, fine.
But then the FBI counterintelligence division and CIA get in on this plot and then keep it going and carry it through.
And then not just against a major party candidate, but then the president elect.
And then they even try to stop the electoral college.
People forget this, all the controversy about Trump now in the electoral college.
Back then they wanted to get Mike Morrell to brief the electoral college about why the Russians stole it from Hillary and they ought to give it to her or at least throw it to the house of representatives so that the house can give it to Paul Ryan or Colin Powell.
And you would think that that is the craziest conspiracy crap you ever heard except I read it in the New York Times where Hillary Clinton's campaign is saying, yes, this is exactly what we want to do on the record with the newspaper record.
Then they tried the whole thing, as you talked about, the fake intelligence assessment.
And then a month, a couple months later, right after he fires Comey, a special counsel investigation after we now know from all the classified documents they had already concluded there is nothing tying these guys to the Russians.
After they concluded that, they put the story in the Times.
There are a lot of connections to the Russians.
We got to start this investigation now in the spring against a sitting president.
This absolute frame up hoax kind of deal.
And I'm not exactly sure what to compare it to because usually, of course, the whole government is subordinate to the president.
George Bush didn't have this problem.
Barack Obama didn't have this problem.
And I'm not sure how many degrees different this is than just going ahead and shooting him in the face in Dallas.
And it made me think.
And honestly, you know what?
Check the archive of 5,400 interviews here.
I've never done a single show on JFK.
It's never been my interest since I was a kid, really.
But I got to wonder whether you think, well, and I mean, you were in the CIA in the 60s.
So I don't know what the hell you're going to tell me.
But I wonder if you think that maybe they did just shoot the president in the face because they didn't like his Russia policy and they couldn't figure out how to frame him for a WikiLeaks hoax here.
And so they just shot him.
Well, Scott, you're almost right.
The only only problem is it wasn't in the face.
It was in the back of the head.
No, I'm serious.
I'm dead serious here.
This was the most significant event since World War Two.
Clear.
There is an excellent book that I recommend to you, written by James Douglas, an eminent historian.
It's called JFK and the Unspeakable.
It was released about 15 years ago, completely suppressed in the press.
The CIA did have a role in that.
It's very clear.
And now tell me, when you were at the CIA, did you guys all know that then?
Or you're telling me you read this in a book in the 90s or early, early 2000s?
It's the latter.
Now, I entered on active duty with the CIA in April of 63.
OK, so they just had a couple of months left.
But so then when you read this book and you think back on it, you don't say, nah, you go, yeah, wow, they really did, huh?
And there I was working for him right after that, right before and right after that and after that.
Yeah.
Scott, as I try to remind people, and you know, this is this is the reality.
There were and there are two CIAs.
One that did this kind of stuff, mostly abroad, thank goodness.
And one that Truman really intended to be a CIA, a place where analysis would be done without fear or favor, without, as he as he called it, trimming or adulteration.
And he could go to one place subordinate strictly to him and ask for a straight answer.
How tall are the Russians?
Well, the Pentagon says 15 feet tall.
What do you guys think?
Well, maybe five foot six and shrinking is what we would tell them.
It was it was really great duty because we could tell the truth.
And you know, my my little niche of the world was the Soviet Union.
So that went in spades.
And we were able to do a lot of good stuff.
The other guys were separated from us in headquarters building by turnstiles.
We couldn't go to the operators.
The operators couldn't go to us.
They never wanted to go to us.
They had their own, quote, intelligence, end quote.
That's how separate things were.
That's why they really were physically two CIAs.
Now, which was the one that that did the well, you know, that's not only JFK.
Well, but I'm sorry to interrupt, but like when it's 1965, are you sitting at your desk and you at least think and believe that the guys across the turnstile were the ones that killed the president?
Or you really didn't think that until you read this book?
I didn't think that then, you know, it'd be on my can.
My God, there was one.
I mean, it was the obvious question, right?
Well, like if anybody in the U.S. government did it, it was like right wing special ops teams from the military and the CIA kind of thing, like in the movie JFK, right?
Scott, I was focused laser-like on Soviet foreign policy.
My portfolio was Russia's relations with China and the international communist movement in Vietnam.
I was making a career and I didn't take the trouble to look into all this stuff.
It just gradually became clear, mostly over the last 10 years or so, who ran the Warren Commission?
Alan Dulles.
Look, I went and saw JFK when I was 14 and I didn't know who Dulles was then by name and all that kind of thing.
But it was pretty obvious to me that that was more or less, and in fact, I was a real conspiracy nut, you know, New World Order kid in the 1990s, but I never really read about JFK and tried to solve that one because there were like 50 books about it.
And I just figured I'm never going to get to the bottom of it anymore than the rest of these guys did.
But I'll just go ahead and believe that it was, you know, the Rockefeller's lawyers, the Dulles brothers that ordered the hit probably.
Well, Jim Garrison and Oliver Stone, Oliver Stone has a movie about, of course, when the book I just mentioned, JFK and the Unspeakable, came out, written by James Douglas, Oliver Stone was so taken with it, so impressed, now Oliver is no slouch, okay, he's so taken with it that next time he went on Bill Maher, he brought a copy of it.
And as Bill introduced him, he said, now, Bill, I got to take just a minute to advertise it, blah, blah, blah.
He took the first minute of the half of the show to advertise it.
And of course, this obscure publisher named Orbis, I got hundreds of thousands of requests for it.
It's in paperback now.
It is, in my view, the Bible, JFK and the Unspeakable.
Now there's a companion book, which is equally compelling.
It's called Mary's Mosaic.
It was written by the son of one of the cover-up plotters in the CIA, a fellow that I worked for in my first job.
I see how it's all coming home here.
Mary's Mosaic, written by Janney, J-A-N-N-E-Y.
His father was my supervisor in 1963, 1964, 65.
Now, it's an amazing detective story, and it focuses on one of JFK's lovers, more than a lover, a real intellectual support, partly responsible for his famous speech at American University.
Her name was Mary Meyer, she that was killed on the Chesapeake and Potomac Towpath just about six or seven months after JFK was killed, because nobody wanted her diary to get out.
Who was it that got hold of her diary?
A fellow named James Angleton, who was working for Dulles ultimately, but Dulles had been cashiered by then.
These guys were up to no good, and the cream or the top of the pudding here is simply that Donald Trump, here comes Donald Trump.
He doesn't know anything.
He's coming from the real estate program.
He comes in, oh, there's a law, a law passed by Congress 30 years ago that says I have to release all the remaining documents on JFK assassination, and it's today.
He gets up in the morning and says, all right, I'm going to release later all the remaining documents on JFK assassination.
Five hours later, he gets up at four o'clock and says, actually, I'm not going to release documents.
He says this.
The FBI and the CIA have objected to this, and so we're going to revisit it in six months.
Now, McGovern writes a little note in his calendar, you know, six months, nobody, nobody but McGovern asks about this in six months.
Man, I'll tell you what.
You know what?
Just like you've always said, too, about Comey comes to him with the P-tape stuff.
He should have gone to war right then.
You know what?
The FBI and the CIA, they're badass.
And in fact, they're most of what makes a president powerful.
But on the other hand, he's still the president, and they're not.
And he should have just said, you know what?
You guys want to really do this.
Let's do it.
And that would have been a huge blow right there is the more you want me to not declassify it, the more I'm going to accuse me of treason with the Russians, will you?
I accuse you of treason for shooting the president in the back of the head.
I like in the face because it's funnier.
But you got me.
You know, that's, you know, if Trump were really as vindictive as he's capable of being, he would include those documents in what is released.
I mean, all these people are dead now anyway, for God's sake.
Why not release them?
You know, he said to Mike Rogers at NSA, Mike Rogers, would you please tell the people that I'm not a guilty traitor with the Russia thing?
And they spun that like, oh, my God.
See, Trump's trying to obstruct justice and trying to get the NSA to lie for him.
It was like, no, you're just begging the question of his guilt.
Take it at face value.
He knows he's innocent.
And he presumes that the NSA knows he's innocent because they know everything.
So he's saying, hey, Mike Rogers, if the FBI and the CIA were out to get me, would you like put it in the Wall Street Journal that I didn't do it?
And then Rogers says, well, geez, you know, there's a criminal investigation now.
So that would be obstruction.
My hands are tied.
I can't do anything, you know, but Trump could have forced the issue.
I think he could have said, you know what?
I demand that you do a massive internal investigation for your eyes only.
That is not for obstructing anything with.
And then we'll see if that gets leaked, you know, something like that.
He should have kept fighting it.
He should have kept pushing.
But I love the way they spun that, like he was trying to suborn this guy, Rogers, to help cover up his treason that, of course, he never committed in the first place.
You know, Scott, it would be worthwhile, I think, just paying a little bit attention to the existential threat here, and that is war with Russia.
Now, things have never been quite so bad since the Cuban missile crisis.
To his credit, Putin seems to have ice cold blood in his veins, and he's not going to be provoked.
And he's just kind of watching things.
And you can quote me on this.
He's acted like a statesman through all this.
But what does he watch?
Well, you know, the Russians have a tradition going back, well, their whole history goes back just 11 centuries now.
But the tradition is, in Russian, it's yedina chalia, ruled by one person.
Yedin.
Yedin is one.
There's one chief that calls the shots, whether he's a tsar, whether he's Stalin, Khrushchev, or now Putin.
Now, when they look at the US and they look at Trump, and if they look at Obama, now take a look at Obama.
He says to Kerry, look, we need to do some work out something with the Russians on Syria.
Work on it real hard.
I know you got real problems with all these, quote, moderate rebels and all that stuff, but work on it.
He and Sergei Lavrov, his counterpart, Foreign Minister of Russia, work on it for 11 months, and they get a ceasefire.
And everybody is sort of, a ceasefire.
It took the US Air Force nine days to put the kibosh on that ceasefire.
Now, what does Lavrov say?
He says, you know, I think John Kerry really wanted this, but he's not really in control.
I feel sorry for my friend John Kerry.
And John Kerry, a month later, says, well, we weren't all agreed in Washington on this.
The Defense Department had other ideas.
And here's Obama.
Now, Obama had personally assured Putin that this was his working, that his instructions being followed out, and he stood behind the ceasefire accord.
And Putin says two weeks later, how am I to look at this?
The president gives me his word.
He signs off on these things.
And when he gets back to Washington, it doesn't happen.
How am I going to interpret that?
So what does he have?
Putin has a more realistic view of what's possible for a US president.
And that's why he's been not so acerbic with respect to Trump.
Although he has said, my God, Trump is supposed to try to be improving relations with me?
My God, why does he put sanction after sanction after sanction on me?
This is no way to do business.
Now, I think Putin will be relieved not to have Trump around, mercurial and unpredictable as he is.
Whether he'll be able to work with Biden, I think the omens are much better.
Biden says maybe he'll rejoin the Iran deal, the nuclear deal.
Maybe he'll restart the negotiations for an armistice control treaty.
So there's hope there.
But my point simply is that the president knows that even Biden, especially Biden, will not be fully in charge.
It's the Mickey Man.
To repeat, the military-industrial-congressional-intelligence-media-academia-think-tank-complex.
Don't forget Silicon Valley.
Well, yeah, that's part of military-industrial.
But the reason I say media, all caps, is because they're the pivot.
They're the cornerstone.
If you don't have full control of the media, which the military-industrial-complex does have, then you can't make this work.
Because then you can't fool all the American people out of spending 60 percent of their tax money on unnecessary military expenditures lining the pockets of the congresspeople who appropriate this money.
The people who make the weapons, the people who sell the weapons.
And of course, Ray, I mean, it was Russiagate was the excuse for all the whole new generation of controls on Google searches and Facebook and Twitter algorithms and all these things, banning people and shadow banning them and ghosting them and this, that and all of this stuff.
It was all in the name of Russia was the excuse that they needed.
The fake news that helped the Putinists rig the election for Trump.
Again, the whole thing that never happened in the first place.
That's largely true, Scott.
And I dare say, we've been trying to get in the mainstream media ever since we founded Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity just before the Iraq war.
We had limited success at the beginning, no success lately.
And what I see happening now with Glenn Greenwald, of all people, unable to produce his own stuff without censorship and his own intercept that he's created.
My God, that's really serious.
Not to mention what Facebook and Twitter and all those guys are doing.
So, you know, the Russians had a way to get around this.
They called the summies that and that was sort of pretty primitive.
You needed a mimeograph machine, explain to your grandson what that means.
And, you know, you published it all by yourself, but it did get around.
Now, I think we can make the Internet still work for ourselves.
There are lots of clever people that can do that.
It's just that we have to pay attention to the fact that the regular pap you get is incomplete.
And we don't even know about Hunter Biden because everybody said, well, that was a Russian plot.
We don't have any evidence of that.
But, you know, this bears all the classic earmarks of how the Russians, my God.
So we have a very gullible, very impressionable people.
And we have to have to find some way to get around that and give them an even chance to be educated.
Yeah, well, that's what we're doing.
And the good news is we still have 15 minutes.
We could talk about, you know, other horrible lies and deceptions of these guys.
Well, I know.
How about let's talk about this, since we're talking about Brennan and Greenwald in the same stroke.
You were also mentioning Edward Snowden and Julian Assange in previous conversation here.
Glenn Greenwald, I'm sure you must have seen this, did a spot on the Tucker Carlson show where this is two weeks ago, I guess, two and a half, three or something, where at some point Greenwald essentially stops speaking to Tucker and starts speaking directly to the president in the hopes that he's watching and just says, look, if you were to pardon Assange and Snowden, you know who would that who that would make the maddest?
It'd be nice if I could speak English.
You know who that would really anger would be your worst persecutor enemies, John Brennan, James Clapper, James Comey.
These guys, more than anyone else, are the ones who want to see Snowden banished to Russia for the rest of his life and want to see Julian Assange buried under the supermax in Florence.
It ain't right.
And you got a way of getting back at your enemies by doing the right thing and pardoning these heroes, which, of course, after all, was the right thing to do anyway.
And he he did it well.
If there's anybody who could have got through to him, it was Glenn right then.
And it's a hell of a long shot.
But well, I don't know.
Why don't you tell people why you think that Assange and Snowden are so important and whether or not you think they belong buried under the supermax like the government is trying to do to them?
Well, I think you bring up a really interesting complex of issues here.
I dare say that even if I were even if Julian Assange weren't a good friend of mine, which he is, I would say that the worst thing that happened to journalism in my lifetime, the unadulterated persecution of this fellow, the fact that he was set up by, I think, by those people on the other side of those turnstiles that I talked about before, by the operations people who have their claws into the people in Sweden.
Hey, get this guy on what always works, what always works, sexual indiscretions.
Get him on that.
And then we can get him.
Well, that's how it all worked.
And you don't have to believe me on that.
You can believe the UN rapporteur for torture, Nils Meltzer, who speaks fluent Swedish and who went to Sweden and looked at the documents and saw that they were fraudulent.
The case against Julian Assange, which, of course, was never actually no indictment, no accusation, really.
It was all doctored and fraudulent.
OK, so that's where it started.
And why?
Well, because Julian published real, real accurate documents, documents.
Now, you know, when Dan Ellsberg and I, I remember distinctly 2004, we said we have to get whistleblowers.
My God, we have to tell them, go ahead, it's your duty.
We have to give them some hope that they can be protected.
But most of all, we have to tell them, and this, of course, is Dan's shtick, documents.
Nobody's going to believe you without documents.
You got to bring out documents.
Now, little did we know that Chelsea Manning had the guts to do precisely that and Julian Assange had the mechanism to get them out into the public consciousness in spades.
OK, no more Xerox machine for God's sake.
You can do it like by pushing a button.
And that's what happened 2009, 2010, 2011.
That's why they had to get Julian.
You can't have that happen.
Now, Ed Snowden, he watched all this, what happened.
He watched people who objected to the persecution of Assange.
And he realized that the only way that he could get this information out to protect the American people and specifically the Fourth Amendment was to go not to South America or anywhere from Hawaii toward us, but he had to go to the Orient, to Hong Kong.
He might be safe there for as long as it would take for him to give this documents over.
And that's what he did.
Now, was he prepared to risk his life?
Yeah, he said so.
He says, I know the CIA station is right down five blocks from here, and I don't expect to be around very long.
Who saved him?
Do you know?
Julian Assange saved him.
He called all his chips in from people he knew in the Far East.
He sent one of his first lieutenants, I'll remember her name in a second, to be with him.
And she, by some great trick, they hit him in a slum where nobody would think to look for him.
And then they whisked him onto an airplane and got him safely to Russia.
He was en route to Cuba, but as we all know, his passport was revoked.
Now, that's one of the reasons- Now, wait a minute.
We don't all know that.
Explain that, because they make it sound like, yeah, look at what a traitor he is.
What do you think he's doing living in Moscow, Ray?
What more do you need to know than that?
OK, you know, here it is.
He was rescued because of people that Julian and Sarah Harrison, his lieutenant, knew in Hong Kong.
He was put on an airfield plane headed toward, I think, well, for Cuba, but he had to go through Moscow.
Now, halfway to Moscow, John Kerry, in his wisdom, revoked Julian Assange's passport, making him, what's the word, stateless.
OK, so with Sarah Harrison helping him, Ed Snowden had to stay at Sheremetyevo Airport in Moscow for, I think it was about seven weeks, before Putin said, OK, you're a political prisoner.
The international law requires that we give you asylum.
You have asylum.
Whoa.
OK, there's a little side note here.
Putin, KGB guy, right?
Knows what secrets, how important it is to protect them.
He's faced with this decision.
This guy has released the family jewels, my God.
Am I going to let him in the country and give him safe harbor and thereby encourage all my old friends in the KGB and its successor organizations to go ahead and release the family jewels?
The U.S. or somebody else would give you safe harbor?
It was a tough decision.
What did he make it on?
He made it on international law.
Now, you could say McGovern is crazy, but that's what he said he did, and that's what he did do.
And when he was later asked, do you think Julian Assange did the right thing, what do you think, do you think Ed Snowden did the right thing?
And Putin said, the right thing.
No, of course he didn't do the right thing.
But nevertheless, he came through and gave them.
Now, Ed has just become a Russian citizen.
He has a child.
That child is a Russian citizen.
He's prepared to hang in there as long as it takes, and he's doing great work supporting those people who are against violations of the Fourth Amendment.
One little anecdote I'll add here, and it's important for Americans to know.
When Ed Snowden released all this information that made NSA and other U.S. intelligence agencies look like the old East German Stasi, the old intelligence service of the East Germans, we knew some of those old Stasi people.
And we went to Colonel Wolfgang Schmidt.
He was an old friend of ours.
We had recruited him.
So he said, Wolfgang, now tell us.
Americans are all saying, well, you know, we have to have the surveillance.
You know, you never know.
It's keeping us safe.
And I didn't do anything wrong, so I don't care about the surveillance.
What do you say to that, Wolfgang?
And Wolfgang says, this is terribly naive.
The reason they collect this information is to use it against you.
You don't get to decide whether it's used against you.
The only way to prevent it from being used against it is to prevent it from being collected in the first place.
Now, there you go.
I mean, there it is right in a nutshell.
You have to prevent it from being collected in the first place.
Now, what is being collected on us?
Well, everything, everything, everything.
Yeah, they have this.
And when they do apply for a warrant to go through the motions, they have this two hop procedure.
Take Carter Page, for example.
One hop, Carter Page to one of his associates.
OK, that's one hop.
Two hops.
Well, let's say his associate goes to Google.
Oh, my goodness.
Well, that means that those watching Carter Page and his associate also have access to Google.
And Bill Binney tells me that means like 100, well, 1.7 billion people in the world who have computers, you know.
So it is saturated.
And, you know, it is the Fourth Amendment that the Congress is too afraid to to revoke those those laws.
And so that's what we're up against.
And people who want to leak now to The New York Times or anything, well, number one, The New York Times probably wouldn't wouldn't publish it.
But and leak leaks, well, they're still in business, but they're preoccupied with their leader.
So we're in quite a fix.
And it's up to you, Scott, and me to figure out some way out of it.
Got it?
Yeah.
Oh, who me?
I, geez, I don't know what to tell you other than, again, nuke Langley from orbit.
It's the only way to be sure.
And then we can start humanity over again without the CIA.
Yeah, that's the only real solution.
Only kidding aside, this I'm not kidding.
No, I'm a little bit kidding.
I guess you could get the women and children out.
Well, I think that that we have to be cognizant of the fact that there are some pretty bright people around.
I don't include you and me, but maybe we should be included.
And with all this technology, there has to be a way there has to be a way better than zombies that that I mentioned before, for us to make sure that American people have access to the truth.
And, you know, not easy.
No, not easy, but it's possible.
And I think we have to enlist people who have a conscience as well as technical ability to figure out how to do that.
And, you know, that that way we shouldn't give up hope here, even though the media and the Silicon Valley and everybody else seems to be very much impinging on on us and and collecting stuff that that we don't want, shouldn't want collected and censoring stuff that everyone has a right to know.
Yeah, well, I'll tell you what, it is completely out of control.
And, you know, it is just the irony of ironies that, you know, will live forever in history to that the one person in American society from outside of the real establishment to be able to come in and to really thwart the establishment, to stop a Bush and a Clinton in one year and get in there and cause so much disruption in some ways, essentially didn't touch any of all of the worst stuff and never really had an intention to.
And, you know, maybe here in the last couple of months, we're going to see he did appoint a couple of good people to apparently try to get us out of Afghanistan.
I guess we'll believe it when we're done seeing it happen.
But this whole time, you know, we've had I'm repeating myself from some other thing, but it's like he's bizarro world or, you know, funhouse mirror Ron Paul, like where he doesn't really believe in a lot of the same things that Ron Paul is really against.
You know what I mean?
But he never really had a philosophy, certainly not one that, you know, he was mad at the CIA for being mean to him.
But otherwise, you know, he didn't really think, wow, our republic is in jeopardy because of our national security state is out of control.
You know, he didn't he never really thought or cared enough, certainly not enough to do anything about it, even when he was at the center of, you know, really, I mean, their worst conspiracy since the war in Syria was the war to frame him.
And he's still they came at the swing and missed and he still didn't really do anything about it.
You know?
Yeah, I think he he reconciled himself to the conventional wisdom that he can't do anything about it, that Obama couldn't face down the security state, nor could nor could he.
And Brennan's right in the center of all this, you know, Brennan was head of CIA for Obama's second term and pretty much ruled the roost on, you know, drone warfare, for God's sake, targeting American civilians for God's sake.
You know, it was the whole schmear.
And why Obama was so subservient to Trump, to to Brennan, why he pulled out all the stops, all the stops to prevent the the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence from publishing that that that review of Brennan and other people activities having to do with torture.
Well, you know, Obama tried his best.
He sent his chief of staff to all those redacting meetings and hoped against hope that Dianne Feinstein would cave.
And she didn't for once.
She didn't.
The thing is published.
It shows in bas-relief what happens to an agency like the CIA if you have corrupt performers who have no conscience.
Yeah, boy, did they get away with bloody murder.
And speaking of which, the guy that Obama and his attorney general, Eric Holder, appointed to investigate the CIA torture was John Durham.
And what Durham did was he launched a preliminary investigation to see if they ought to have an investigation into whether these guys committed crimes.
And immediately he decided all torture, including torture that took place before a single memo was issued, was all even still retroactively justified.
And after memo, after the memo came out, forget about it.
Anything the CIA did to anybody was fine.
Cutting Binya Mohammed's genitals with razor blades in Morocco.
We got a memo.
Totally cool.
Forget all of that.
Now we're reducing the question.
Should we have an investigation into the murder of two guys?
Jamal Abadi, I'm pretty sure was his name.
The guy that they hung with his arms behind his back in the shower in Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq till he suffocated to death that way.
And then Gul Rahman, a guy that they froze to death in the salt pit dungeon north of Kabul in Afghanistan.
And John Durham decided that, yeah, now whatever, you can murder people, too, if you want.
And that's it.
And Lord knows those aren't the only two guys the CIA murdered during that whole black site business.
But those are the ones that they admitted to, I guess.
And he decided that nothing should be done.
And they dropped it at a preliminary investigation.
And now this is the guy that William Barr brought in to get to the bottom of Russiagate for us, Ray.
And what's he done so far?
He imprisoned a guy for a short amount of time for something that was really egregious, which was censoring the fact that Carter Page was an American patriot and a CIA asset when they were falsely accusing him of being a connection to Russian intelligence.
Yes, he was talking to Russian intelligence.
Then he was going straight to the CIA and telling them everything.
That's not the same thing as he's been talking to Russian intelligence, is it?
But that was apparently it.
Am I wrong about that?
No, you're right about that.
You're right about what you're talking about when you said the evidence against these torturers was abundantly clear.
The only thing that you're not accurate about is that this is not Durham.
This was Holder.
This was Obama.
This was out-and-out fear.
The deep state rules the roost here.
And so what's the effect?
You're right about that.
Get out of jail free.
You can do pretty much anything you want.
The evidence will be destroyed or you'll get off even if a guy like John Durham goes through the motions.
On this case, of course, you have John Durham looking into the origins of Russiagate.
I think that Bill Barr, as tough as he talks, chickened out.
I think he saw that Trump was going to lose.
No one wants to be on the losing side of this thing.
Why go through with this thing?
And he said, okay, a cease and desist, John.
Wait, let's see what the election brings and maybe you can fold your tent like an Arab, silently steal away, and the rest of us can still go to dinner parties in Georgetown.
But it's looking up.
It's going to be interesting now to see whether, you know, you and I, I think, have been seeing eye to eye on all this stuff, including Durham.
I think we always agreed that the chances were less than even Durham would do anything constructive.
And the clock sure is ticking now.
But now we have just, what, 10 weeks?
And, you know, Trump has the wherewithal to try to do this.
Whether he can bring it off or whether he'll have enough people that will do his bidding is up for grabs.
But one guy that is really sweating blood is John Brennan and those people who are deathly afraid that these classified documents, which need not be classified, will show what they did, because what they did were crimes.
There is a law against classifying information dealing with crimes.
In other words, you can't classify it if it's a criminal act.
And so, you know, the law is on the side of the people who want to bring the truth out.
There's an outside chance, I think you'll agree, that this might happen now with the personnel replacements that Trump has instituted just within the last five days.
And we'll have to wait and see.
Yeah.
All right.
Well, with that, I'll let you have a great rest of your afternoon, Ray.
But I sure do appreciate you stopping by here with us.
Oh, it was a lot of fun.
Thank you very much, Scott.
All right, you guys.
That's the great Ray McGovern, co-founder of the Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity, which is asking a hell of a lot.
But they continue to.
And he writes regularly at ConsortiumNews.com and at RayMcGovern.com, of course, his own website.
The latest at ConsortiumNews.com, which we will poach and run at Antiwar.com.
It's called What Is John Brennan So Worried About?
In fact, it's in our top headlines at Antiwar.com today.
And I already talked to Eric.
We're going to run it in the viewpoints on Monday and make sure everybody takes a look at this because we all hate John Brennan so much, don't we?
All right.
The Scott Horton Show, Antiwar Radio, can be heard on KPFK 90.7 FM in LA, APSradio.com, Antiwar.com, ScottHorton.org, and LibertarianInstitute.org.
