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.
We can also sign up for the podcast feed.
The full archive is also available at youtube.com slash scotthorton show.
All right, you guys, introducing David Stockman.
He's a former Reagan official, a budget director and a congressman and a successful businessman.
We find him on the financial channels on TV sometimes, driving his hosts crazy.
And he keeps David Stockman's Contra Corner at davidstockmanscontracorner.com, and you can find him regularly at antiwar.com, where he's been writing a lot about Ukrainegate and impeachment here.
Welcome back to the show, David.
How are you doing?
Happy to be with you.
Very happy to have you here.
So I got to admit to you, I watched the first day of the impeachment hearings and then I went back to work.
Who's got time for this stuff?
But you've been really looking and watching the testimony from, I guess, the fourth branch of government here, the bureaucrats, talking about their disapproval of Donald Trump's Ukraine policy and the, you know, what it has to do with him requesting investigations into Burisma, the Hunter Biden connected gas firm in Ukraine and all this kind of stuff.
So I guess I'll start with how impressed are you by the Democrats' case against the president, David?
Well, you know, the case they're making is not the case that is being articulated.
All of these witnesses that they've drug out of the balls of the State Department and the NSC, you know, Lieutenant Colonel Vindman and Ambassador Taylor and this George Kent guy from the State Department, Tim Morrison, in the last day, they've got a totally different agenda.
Their concern about Trump's legitimate desire to have the 2016 events and the Biden, you know, involvement in the Ukraine investigated was entirely based on a fear that it would undermine the bipartisan consensus in favor of, you know, using the Ukraine as a battering ram to carry out their vendetta against Russia and Putin and this whole exaggerated, inflated demonization of the Russian threat.
So that's what it was about.
It wasn't about the rule of law or whether the president abused his power or whether somehow there was a dereliction of constitutional duties on the part of Donald Trump.
It was a fear that if they dug into the cesspool that has emerged as a result of U.S. intervention in Ukraine, that the consensus for this confrontation and the military and economic aid that fuels the conflict in Ukraine would be totally undermined.
And of course, the Democrats are so beside themselves with anger about losing the 2016 election that they are happy to find any excuse or reason to try another run at discrediting or impeaching Trump.
And so all these witnesses have come forth.
But if you listen to what they're saying, you know, the whole burden of it, the whole thrust of it is that we're doing God's work in the Ukraine and Trump's inconvenient questions about what happened there is undermining the, let's call it the deep state's foreign policy and national security campaign against Russia.
So that's really what's going on.
Yeah, well, like I said, I haven't watched all week, but I sure saw on the first day that in their opening statements, they made it absolutely clear that this is all about America's policy toward Ukraine and therefore Russia, and that essentially the president has no right to contradict him on this.
Who the hell does he think he is for trying for thinking for a moment that there is a better way or that he could decide to change?
And especially not over something that seems, you know, about a political, you know, a favor for political damage of an opponent in the upcoming election here.
And such a crass reason is that how dare he was built into the whole thing.
In fact, they even started with the militia men who went to go and fight the separatists in the east of Ukraine after the coup of 2014 were like the minute men who served George Washington in the American Revolution.
Yeah.
Well, you know, first of all, that's outrageous.
And second, then it continued day after day.
It wasn't just one guy.
I believe that was George Kent who came up with that malarkey.
But then you had this Tim Morrison kid who's actually just some functionary that Bolton brought to the National Security Council.
So you can understand where he's coming from, you know, telling the Congress, the United States in the year 2019, that if we don't aid the Ukrainians, you know, resisting Russian aggression there, we're going to be fighting them, you know, on the banks of the East River or the Potomac here.
I mean, that is just crazy nonsense, complete malarkey.
And yet that was, if I recall correctly, was about in the second sentence of what the guy had to tell Congress.
So that told you, you know, all you needed to know about where he's coming from.
This is really neocon, you know, moronic neocon nonsense.
And yet here you have all these liberal Democrats sitting there laughing it up, giving a forum to the most extreme neocon, you know, warmongering, because they think it's serving the end of this phony, you know, Ukrainegate and impeachment tribunal that they have underway.
But, you know, there's an important lesson in this.
How in the world are we going to ever get foreign policy changed if we have the Republican Party infested with neocons and the Democrats now stepping up to the plate and abandoning their traditional role of being the party of resistance and opposition to the CIA and the warfare state and, you know, interventionist foreign policy as they occasionally were in the past?
Right now, it's a, you know, bipartisan consensus, a duopoly in favor of empire.
And there's Trump kind of all by his lonesome in the Oval Office talking about America first, which is kind of a metaphor for backing off from all these interventions and regime change wars and so forth being undermined from both sides of the aisle.
Yeah.
You know, it is really too bad, too, because the Republicans are the last people in the world who you want arguing the case against the CIA for you because they're just not going to do it.
Right.
They love this president.
But like Sean Hannity complaining about the deep state while wearing a CIA pin on his lapel.
Yeah, well, but you know, the thing is, the only glimmer of hope I see in this kind of a silver lining is that maybe it's waking up the Republicans and the hardcore conservatives to the threat that the whole warfare state apparatus clearly poses to constitutional government, fiscal solvency and, you know, foreign policy rationality.
They're at least happy as we get into the next phase of this, too, and that is all of the stuff that's going to come out from the investigations of the 2016 Brennan FBI Russiagate effort.
Maybe this will start to wake up the Republican Party a little bit.
That's the only good thing I can see coming out of this.
Well, speaking of John Brennan, I think in the case of Russiagate, it's almost perfectly clear.
It's not, you know, the ironclad case hasn't been finished being proven yet, but it sure looks like Brennan launched this op to frame Donald Trump on Russiagate in the first place.
And the whole thing was really came out of that.
Now we find out that the alleged so-called whistleblower, Eric Cherimella, worked for John Brennan, worked for Biden, too, to me, more importantly, worked for John Brennan.
But I wonder if you think that's just, well, it goes to show where his loyalties lie overall.
And, you know, best guess about that?
Or do you think that that really implies that Brennan sent him to the White House to find something else, anything that you can once you find something, do what you can with it?
Yeah, well, you know, I don't have any detailed facts that aren't public, but detailed facts that aren't public, but it sure seems a strange coincidence that this guy comes forth after playing the roles that he played.
He's a young guy over the last two or three years.
So I don't want to put on a tinfoil hat and outline some conspiracy here.
But it doesn't surprise me that when they now have pretty well established that, you know, Brennan was working with a small handpicked group of analysts.
They constantly portrayed this as a consensus of the 17 intelligence agencies and all that.
We know that's absolutely not true.
It was Brennan, a handpicked group of analysts, a few people at the FBI that were at the heart of this whole Russiagate, Steele dossier investigation.
And it looks to me like this Ciaramella guy was an integral component of that little group that basically, you know, attempted to undermine the election process in the United States.
So now he shows up conveniently as a whistleblower and nobody could say his name.
I mean, what kind of complete malarkey do we have going on in this country?
And it shows you where the mainstream media is, even to this day, unless I've missed something.
You can't find a name mentioned on CNN, the War Channel or MSNBC or any of the mainstream daily newspapers.
This is this is just reached the point of absurdity, in my view.
Yeah.
Well, it's been, what, four or five weeks since his name was first published.
And even then, before it was published, it was said and published that it was an open secret and that everybody in D.C. knew who it was and that they were keeping it from us.
Then finally, a good journalist goes ahead and puts it out there and it got picked up.
And if you look, you can find it.
Eric Ciaramella, nobody seems to dispute that he's obviously the guy.
But then, like you're saying, the idea is in the media, there's this consensus.
We must protect the whistleblower by refusing to say his name.
And then that works.
Yeah.
Yeah.
You know, this isn't obviously some run of the mill case where a, you know, someone down in the bureaucracy sees some wrongdoing or abuse or even, you know, illegality and then, you know, stands up and blows the whistle.
You know, that's one thing.
But this is an impeachment process.
This is an attempt to remove an elected president of the United States.
And if the case hangs heavily, among other things, on what the whistleblower put in that long memo, which was clearly he had a lot of help from lawyers drafting, then you need to know who he is.
He needs to come forth.
He needs to be questioned by the committee and both sides of the aisle and let the public hear the case.
Yeah.
Here we are.
You can't even pronounce his name.
Yeah.
And by the way, about the, you know, the presumption about whether he was working for Biden or not, I hope that, you know, you didn't feel like I was trying to put you on the spot to necessarily, you know, conclude anything like you say, you know, tinfoil hat or whatever.
But I'm just saying speculation wise, it seems like a fair assumption that the fact that this guy worked for Brennan is a huge red flag that, as you're saying, you can't just take this at face value that this is just another whistleblower like the ones that they imprison and persecute and destroy all the time.
Right.
Yeah.
And, you know, the facts are known that he was detailed then to the National Security Council in the last days, months of the Obama administration.
He was still there in the early days of Trump.
They finally figured out he was one of the big leakers at the NSC.
They had him removed and sent him back to the CIA.
So, I mean, his his pathway to the September memo is pretty clear.
I think there's another issue here.
And despite his good intentions and, you know, the fact that he wasn't brainwashed by 30 years in the imperial city, as I call it, I'm talking about Trump now, he constantly undermines himself by appointing people who then populate his government and top positions with people who are absolutely opposed to his policy.
And in this case, we can see it in spades.
He brought in Bolton.
Bolton brought in a lot of these other people or kept the holdovers from the Obama administration.
Fiona Hill, you know, Lieutenant Colonel Vindman.
How did they possibly put Bill Taylor in as ambassador when they got rid of the other woman when you could have easily seen what his track record and viewpoint was?
So, you know, it's it's actually fairly discouraging to realize that either Trump is truly alone all by himself in the White House, you know, with maybe Jared Kushner and Ivanka or this government, the deep state is even more persuasive and all powerful than we think because he constantly populates all of these policy positions with people who turn around and undermine what he's trying to do.
You see this in Syria.
He still can't get out of Syria.
You see this in the Korean situation.
He had tremendous good intentions there and engaged in some pretty powerful personal diplomacy that brought this to a new stage that offered some hope.
And now, you know, the whole thing is just slid back into the status quo and the same old deep state policy.
So I guess it's kind of a warning of what we're up against.
Yeah, well, and there's no one to blame except Donald Trump.
He's so lazy.
He only watches TV and he does not read.
He clearly does not read the fact that he's never heard of any good anti-war right wingers in this society that he could have hired for anything.
Yeah.
And there's not a lot of guys who have the credentials who really could work for Trump on his cabinet or in his White House.
But there is at least one solid bench worth, you know, easily.
There's a good bench worth, you know, and he could start with Pat Buchanan, for instance.
I mean, that guy's got a pedigree, a Republican pedigree as deep and good as it comes.
And certainly he would help Trump figure out what I mean, I don't agree with Pat Buchanan's trade ideas, but he would help Trump figure out what America first means in terms of day to day policy and implementation and the initiatives that should be taken.
But he doesn't draft Pat Buchanan, who I assume would have been happy to do the job, but comes up with John Bolton.
You explain that to me.
I, you know, I I think it's pretty pathetic, actually.
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Well, now, so let me ask you this.
It's 2019, and that means that there are kiddos who were born in the year 2000 who are 19 years old right now listening to this show, David, and they don't know the first thing about Russia other than they heard lately that that Vladimir Putin, who, by the way, when you look at him, seems like kind of a psycho type that he's out to get us, man, real bad.
And maybe we do need to fight them over there so we don't have to fight them over here.
And after all, when I look at the shape of Russia on a map of the world, it's really big.
And so, like, maybe there's a real problem here.
And what do you know about that?
Yeah, well, you know, I always say I live in New York City.
I actually right on the East River.
We have an apartment on the 19th floor.
When I look out from my balcony, I can see Russia from there.
And what I mean, not like Sarah Palin, when she saw the Siberian landmass from Alaska, I can see GDP for the metro New York area of one point seven trillion, one point eight trillion, roughly.
That's bigger than the entire GDP of Russia, which is one point six trillion.
And you're excluding upstate.
Yeah, no, I'm just looking at Detroit.
I'm looking at the New York metro area.
And of course, our national GDP is twenty one point five trillion, you know, massively larger than Russia.
If you look at our defense budget at seven and fifty billion only for defense.
And then you got to put all the other dollars in there that are hidden in the DOE budget and security assistance and the rest.
It's easily nine hundred billion.
And the Russian budget is sixty billion.
OK, they have no capacity to project power anywhere outside their borders.
Seriously.
And so how are they a threat to us?
And as I say in some articles I've written recently, they're not a threat to Europe either, because if they were, countries like Germany would not be spending a mere forty billion or one percent of GDP on defense if they thought Putin really was this wannabe Hitler or Stalin or aggressor that threatened, you know, to breach the Brandenburg Gates or occupy the Rhineland or something like that.
The Europeans, by their own fiscal posture and decisions, unequivocally are saying that, you know, we don't believe that Russia is an existential threat to Western Europe.
And if it's not a threat to Western Europe, how is it a threat to the New Jersey shoreline?
Yet all of this information somehow gets lost by people caught up in the narrative down in Washington.
Number one, the deep staters who need that narrative, because how do you justify these horrendously unnecessary and wasteful giant budgets and all the military apparatus that we're still purchasing?
And the Democrat politicians who, you know, are looking for a way to reverse the huge setback they had in 2016.
So it's a coalition of convenience.
They have actually, the Democrats, and you can put Adam Schiff right up in the lead, have become the useful idiots for the deep state.
The deep state has a much, as I say, a much bigger agenda, and that is to keep Russia demonized and to work on demonizing China and continue to exacerbate tensions in the Middle East with the Iranians and so forth, because that's where their bread and butter comes from.
And they have found now, what used to be a off and on adversary and source of resistance, the mainstream Democrats and progressives have now become essentially handmaids of the warfare state.
Could you do a little bit of a comparison contrast between the power of the Soviet Union circa 1987 versus right now in terms of, you know, military strength?
You talk about the Navy in your recent piece there, but you also have so many, you know, great measures of, you know, countries they controlled and troops they had deployed and all of these kinds of things.
Yeah, well, I mean, Russia today is just the rump state of what was left of the old Soviet Union, to say nothing of the Warsaw Pact countries, Poland, East Germany, Czechoslovakia and so forth.
But if you look at Russia today, it's been shorn of about more than a third of its population from Belarus, the Ukraine to all the Kazakhstans, Uzbekistan and all the rest of them.
Its GDP is now, you know, relatively speaking, a fraction of what it was in the full Soviet Warsaw Pact empire.
And back then, and this is the key thing, when finally the whole, you know, Soviet system collapsed under the weight of communism, centralization, militarism and so forth.
But then they were spending 40 percent of GDP on defense.
Today, this rump state of shrunken Russia spends 4 percent.
They had 50,000 tanks on the Central Front.
They could have actually, I don't think they ever had the intention or capability, but they had at least the wherewithal to invade Western Europe.
Well, what happened to those 50,000 tanks?
They've all been, you know, melted down for scrap, disappeared.
The Russian Navy is a shell of its former self.
They've got one aircraft carrier left that was built in the early 80s, and it's just a smoke belcher that is a joke compared to what is in, you know, the 11 carrier battle group arsenal of the United States.
So no matter how you look at it, you know, we have something like 12,000 helicopters and six wing aircraft.
They have a couple of thousand.
We have massive capacity for airlift and transport, refueling and so forth so that we can strike anywhere around the globe.
They couldn't get a few hundred miles into the Atlantic Ocean heading our way before, you know, we would know exactly what they're up to.
So, I mean, the point is the military capacity wherewithal isn't there.
Their policy is one of defensiveness, and this whole idea that somehow Putin wants to secretly recreate the old Soviet Union is so much damn nonsense that it's hard to believe that adult people in Washington repeat it, and yet I hear it all the time.
This guy, Morrison, was talking, you know, yesterday or Tuesday about the revanchist policy under the covers, so to speak, of what Russia and Putin are doing.
Well, that's just nonsense.
I mean, they're smart people.
They don't want to have to tangle with the Poles.
They don't want to have to occupy Slovakia.
I mean, this is just crazy nonsense, and yet it's kind of embedded in the whole, you know, Washington discussion that's underway today.
Well, I think this is really the key of the problem, right, is that this, and as you talk about in your recent pieces, too, with beginning with Bill Clinton's NATO expansion, that's only accelerated this whole time and with America's interventions in Ukraine especially, but all the other color-coded revolutions and all these things, essentially the story is this is all USA's fault.
We picked this whole fight, and yet the people in Washington, D.C. can never admit that.
And you know what it is?
You hit it a nail on the head, but it's like groupthink that sets in and becomes institutionalized through relentless repetition.
And now you have people who may have stumbled onto the scene, got elected to Congress in 2005 or 2010 or whenever, who take things, who can't understand the historic context and flow of events in which they're caught up.
If you look at it, it's clear when the Cold War officially ended in 1991, it was time to dismantle NATO.
There was no purpose in NATO.
In fact, George Kennan, the architect of containment and really the father of NATO in the late 40s, warned that to keep it alive and to expand it to the old Warsaw Pact would be the ultimate folly.
And we also know that George Bush, the elder, promised Gorbachev verbally at the time that Germany was reunited that NATO wouldn't expand a single inch to the east.
Well, you know, here we are and there's 13 former Warsaw Pact countries that have been added to NATO that encroach right up on the borders of Russia, including these ridiculous efforts that are behind what we're talking about today to get the Ukraine and Georgia to join NATO.
You know, that'd be like having the northern Mexico joining Russia.
I mean, it's crazy.
And yet that's where we are.
Well, you know, it's notable when you talk about how it's just crazy that all these accusations that Putin's trying to take over Europe and all this stuff, that even when the Donbass region, which is the predominantly Russian region in the far east of Ukraine, held their own plebiscite and begged to be absorbed into the Russian Federation, he told them no.
Yeah, he didn't want to.
Yeah.
And you know, the thing about Crimea that frosts me, I was at a dinner the other night with a bunch of these New York mainstream liberals who were yakking away about the occupation of Crimea.
And, you know, it's so ironic that people don't even know that for 170 years, Crimea was an integral part of Russia.
They bought it from Catherine or Catherine the Great bought it from the Turks in 1783.
They home based, home ported the great Black Sea fleet there at Sevastopol.
And the only reason and it's populated about 85 percent with Russian and Tatar people.
The only reason it's part of the Ukraine is that in 1954, when Khrushchev won the power struggle after Stalin's death, he rewarded his compatriots in Kiev by transferring Crimea from the Russian Socialist Republic to the Ukrainian Socialist Republic.
And so here they are today, mainstream Washington, these idiots who've come before the Schiff committee talking about, you know, the occupation of Crimea, which is to say their desire to enforce the dead hand of the Soviet Presidium from 1954.
This is really a lot of damn nonsense.
Yeah.
You know, have you seen this documentary?
I think it was produced, you can tell it's a couple of years old because Robert Perry's in it and there's no recognition of the fact that he's dead in it.
So I think it took a couple of years for Oliver Stone to put this out.
Ukraine on fire.
Have you seen it?
No, but I've heard about it.
And he's done a great job on a lot of things, including those interviews, those extended interviews he did with Putin.
So it sounds to me like it would be very worthwhile.
Yeah.
So Dan McAdams recommended it to me and it's on Amazon Prime right now.
And you just click play.
It's right there if you have Prime.
And there's one thing in there where he interviews Putin and Putin says, essentially, you know, is what this is really all about is seems sure.
It sure seems to me that the Americans, they just need to have a big enemy to try to build up against.
And despite all the hype, Iran doesn't really fit the bill, do they?
Yeah.
Well, he's right.
You know, the GDP of Iran is about 300 billion dollars.
It's got a defense budget of 15 billion, which the Pentagon waste in a week and a half.
So you need a more substantial enemy.
Russia was handy and, you know, it became demonized.
But especially with this coup in 2014, they have this so upside down.
It is absolutely clear that in February 2014, Putin was minding his own business at Sochi, basking in the glory of the Winter Olympics and world attention when the State Department and the National Endowment for Democracy and CIA operatives and a lot of other U.S. personnel were on the ground in Kiev fomenting and instigating and financing the coup that basically threw out a legitimately elected government president on the grounds that he had made a deal with Moscow rather than marched to the West and joined up with NATO, as he was supposed to do.
That's the heart of this thing.
OK.
And somehow all of that is lost in the in the idea of the lie, the big lie being promulgated here that the Ukraine is a victim of blatant Soviet aggression when it's actually, you know, a consequence of Washington meddling and aggression.
All right, you guys, that is David Stockman, former congressman, former Reagan official in the on the economic side, not the foreign policy side.
And he keeps David Stockman's Contra Corner online and you can find him regularly at Antiwar.com.
We ran one, I think yesterday, Democrats in power, a pack of paranoid neocon morons.
And and before that, the Ukraine influence peddling rings all about the Atlantic Council, which is great.
And we got another one coming up that's, you know, in the chamber ready to be fired tonight.
So everybody keep your eye on Antiwar.com for that.
Thank you very much again, David.
OK, thank you.
All right, y'all.
Thanks.
Find me at Libertarian Institute dot org at Scott Horton dot org, Antiwar dot com and Reddit dot com slash Scott Horton Show.
Oh, yeah.
And read my book, Fool's Errand, Timed and the War in Afghanistan at Fool's Errand dot U.S.
