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All right, you guys, Scott Horton Show.
Check out the full archive, 4,000 and something interviews there at scotthorton.org, and check out the big new thing there, of course, at libertarianinstitute.org slash scotthortonshow.
All right, so on the line, we've got the great Ray McGovern.
He was a CIA analyst for 27 years, speciality on the Soviet Union back then.
He's the co-founder of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity, which has been pushing for peace since at least 2002, somewhere around there, and maybe 2001.
He's a regular writer at consortiumnews.com, and he gives speeches.
He tours around giving talks with an organization called Tell the Word in Washington, D.C.
Welcome back to the show.
How are you doing, Ray?
Thanks, Scott.
Doing well.
Very happy to have you back on the show here.
Interesting article, Obama admits gap in Russian hack case.
Ex-President Obama, that is now, he had one last statement about the CIA's big Russia conspiracy theory on the way out the door there.
Is that it?
That's correct, yeah.
And he admitted a gap, Ray?
Well, you know that we always considered it insufficient evidence to be nice about it and to quote what we used to say in the Bronx, it was a crock to begin with.
But now, Obama himself said something that curiously has been missed by the mainstream press.
The mainstream press, of course, beating the drums for tensions and perhaps even a little battle with Russia and accusing Russia of being responsible for us getting Donald Trump.
It could not have been Hillary Clinton's defective campaign and character.
It had to be somebody else, and the Russians were a good place to play the blame.
Now what Obama said, and this is just, you know, this is January 18th, so what's that, 10 days ago, right?
He says, quote, well, in effect what he says is the conclusions of the intelligence community were inconclusive.
Okay, here's the quote, the conclusions of the intelligence community with respect to Russian hacking were not conclusive as to whether Wookie Leaks was willing, was witting or not in being the conduit through which we heard about the D.C. and D.N.
C. emails that were hacked.
Now, now, stop, you befuddled old man.
You must be confusing that quote with something that Bill Clinton said in 1998 or something.
What?
It depends on what your definition of is, or in this case, what your definition of conclusive is.
Now Obama gave us all the impression before he went off to Hawaii that he had conclusive evidence, so much so that a few days later sanctions were imposed, 35 Russian diplomats were thrown out of the country.
And then he said, now let's do a comprehensive investigation to see what really happened.
Well, apparently they've done some investigation, and what comes up here is that there's a missing link.
Now, when I say missing link, I mean that the all important link between Wookie Leaks that put out this very damaging to Hillary Clinton email collection just two days before the Democratic National Convention, the link between Wookie Leaks and these quote Russian hackers, end quote.
So what we have is Russian hacking.
Now, you know, let me just go back a second here.
Does Russia hack?
Of course Russia hacks.
If I were head of the Russian intelligence service and I didn't allow my people to hack, I should be fired.
Everyone hacks.
We hack.
Everyone who can hacks.
So that's not an issue here.
The issue is whether the Wookie Leaks disclosures that showed that Hillary Clinton stole the nomination from Bernie Sanders, pure and simple, that's what the content showed, whether they had anything to do with Russian hacking.
And what Obama is saying here on his way out is, well, it's inconclusive.
We can't show any, any link between Wookie Leaks and the Russian hackers.
Now that's critical because if there's no link, then there's no proof and inconclusive is exactly the right word.
Now, last thing I'll say here is as William Binney, who is part of our group, has said time and time again, that were there to have been any, anything that went into Julian Assange or all those people that work with him over the, over the internet, you know, on the, on the network, they would ipso facto have been collected by NSA, the National Security Agency.
Now, when he told me that, you know, I had the normal reaction, most of us have, oh, that boggles the mind.
How can they collect everything?
Well, the answer is they do collect everything, partly because of the technology that Bill Binney devised as chief technical director of NSA before he retired.
Also, we know they do that.
We know how they do it by the slides that Ed Snowden revealed after he went out in 2013.
So they do do that.
Now, do they pay special attention to Julian Assange?
Well, hello.
The NSA people have a, have an expression or an adjective they use, cast iron.
That's the coverage that they give to people like Julian Assange, cast iron coverage.
Now, you can imagine what that is, telephones, emails, all kinds of listening devices on that embassy, the Ecuadorian embassy in London.
And it's well known, many of the people who helped Julian, and they would also receive this cast iron coverage.
So what's the bottom line here?
The bottom line here is that people have conflated the fact that Russia hacks, as everybody hacks, with the surfacing of these emails that Julian Assange said did not come from Russia or any other state entity.
And that one of his chief associates, a good friend of mine, Ambassador Craig Murray, says was not a hack.
It was a leak.
And he has been in touch personally with at least one of the people associated with that leak.
Now, what Murray says is we're talking about two leaks.
One leak from the Clinton or from the DNC and Clinton emails, and the other from John Podesta's emails.
What's the common thread here?
Well, Craig Murray suggests that when, you know, bright-eyed, bushy-tailed young people working for the Democratic National Committee, when they saw, when they saw what dirty tricks were played on Bernie Sanders, whom many of them supported initially, I guess, well, I guess, and Craig Murray guesses that, you know, the world needs to know this.
How are we going to do this?
Well, we're not going to send a message to Julian Assange, we're going to take a little thumb drive, right?
And we're going to put it in our computer, and we're going to download this stuff just the way Chelsea Manning did, just the way Ed Snowden did, and we'll get it to Julian one way or another.
That, I am 95% sure, is what happened.
And so if that's what happened, and, you know, Craig Murray and Julian Assange have a much better reputation for veracity than any of these clowns like John Brennan or James Clapper, I believe them.
And so, you know, if that's the case, then this whole charade, this whole charade that the Russians hacked into these emails in order to help give Donald Trump a special boost to become president, and Sotovoce, therefore, he's an illegitimate president, therefore, he's a Russian puppet, therefore, if he wants to calm tensions with Russia, beware, this fellow is dangerous.
You know, I've never seen anything quite like this, because the whole mainstream media is abhorred on this campaign.
It's even worse, and this is saying something, it's even worse than during 2002, when they all beat the drums for an unnecessary war against Iraq.
Even worse.
All right.
Well, so hang on, we're going to get to even worse in the Cold War and all this spin against Trump and the new Russia policy in a minute.
But I want to go back to just a couple of points of fact here.
First of all, I've talked with Murray and with Benny, and so if anybody wants to check the archives, those interviews are there.
And I will note that Murray, he more or less, you know, kind of confirmed that the Podesta leak came from the intelligence community, whereas the DNC leak came from the DNC, as you're saying there.
But I would say, and the Daily Mail is a variable here, it could be that they misreported it But the way he told it to me, the meeting in the Washington Park was not to receive the leak.
But the way the Daily Mail reported it, that was when he got the leak.
So there's a pretty good discrepancy there.
And I would also note that Giral, another former CIA officer, a friend of yours and mine, of course, said, hey, look, you know, yeah, the Russians can use a cutout so that even Assange wouldn't know it came from them.
I mean, that's good intelligence work, but there's no evidence of that.
So, you know, you can make suppositions all you want.
There's no real reason to believe that.
But I think, you know, it does seem to me that really, if anybody else said so, it doesn't mean as much as if William Binney says that, no, I'm telling you, if the dog didn't bark, then that means this did not happen.
You know, because, I mean, that can still fall in the realm of induction and speculation from others.
But then again, that's how the CIA is thinking on all this, obviously, too.
But from Binney, he seems to be the authoritative source on that, that, listen, if the NSA is not claiming that they can prove that this happened, then that's because they can't.
And if they can't, that's because it didn't happen.
Syllogism closed.
Well, you know, you're right about many of those things.
And you know, the bottom line here is that it's really, really hard to prove a negative.
We learned that from the Rumsfeldian dictum that the absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.
And so there must be weapons of mass destruction there in Iraq, even though all our imagery analysts under James Clapper couldn't find one.
Now, why didn't we know about that?
Because James Clapper, who just recently retired from being national intelligence director, kept the lid on all the imagery reporting that said, you know, Chalabi tells us that there's a suspected chemical weapons site at these coordinates.
But we looked at them, it's a chicken coop.
So, you know, please don't believe Chalabi anymore.
Now, Clapper's job as head of the imagery analysis during those days, put in there by Rumsfeld, by the way, put a lid on all that stuff.
And so Chalabi was believed.
Why?
Because the absence of evidence doesn't mean evidence of absence.
And besides, Clapper kept the lid on.
So getting back to other things here, now you talk about the Daily Mail.
I talked to Craig Murray after the Daily Mail came out.
It's about the same time you talked to him, I suppose.
Or maybe it was later because he said it was a few days later.
They got it wrong.
I said they misquoted me.
I never said that I got the evidence.
I have said that all that material was already in WikiLeaks possession well before I went in late September to Washington.
Hey, good.
Thank you for clarifying that, because, you know, I did say from the beginning I pointed out that discrepancy on the show as soon as I heard it.
But I believe also from the beginning I noted that we are talking about the Daily Mail here.
So it could be that they're the ones who messed it up.
So, you know, they sexed it up and like you.
Or they just misunderstood.
I mean, to be fair, they probably or whoever wrote this may not know anything about this kind of thing at all.
You know.
Yeah, but they're selling newspapers, Scott.
This was deliberate.
Craig was was really offended by it, but not surprised.
I mean, the BBC won't talk to him.
None of the establishment channels will talk to him.
So the Daily Mail calls, if they're the only one, he'll talk to them.
But he knows that they're going to get it screwed up on my show.
You can hear him in his own words.
So.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So the other thing is, you know, did the Russians get it and then give it to to WikiLeaks?
Well, I know that's that's possible.
I mean, who can who can rule that kind of thing out?
But in that case, it probably would also have had to go on over the Internet.
And Bill Binney is quite right, I think, that we would know about it.
So it's or even then FBI counterintelligence or NSA or CIA, whoever working together ought to be able to piece together who did it and and prove after the fact, even if they couldn't have intercepted it at the time, they ought to be able to show after the fact which Russian agent used this cut out, you know, right or no?
That's exactly right.
And, you know, when push came to shove and they had to put out this, well, it's an embarrassment to the intelligence professional, actually, this memo that Clapper and and the guy from Comey from FBI and in Brennan of recent memory, what they put out, you know, claiming that they had high confidence that Russia was behind all this stuff, NSA took the equivalent of a footnote.
Now, NSA is the one that would know these things.
CIA simply defers to NSA on all this technical intelligence having to do with communications and other intercepts.
So NSA only could muster, quote, moderate confidence.
OK, so what does that tell you?
That tells you that enough people within NSA were so appalled by this prostitution of the intelligence process that they wouldn't go along and they told their leader, look, you can sign up to high confidence if you like, but, you know, everybody can leak.
Everybody can leak.
And this is the news here, Scott, I want to point out to your listeners that leaks can be effective in a, well, I would call it a preemptive potential way.
And that's why, for example, James Comey, just a few days before the election, decided he had to tell the Congress they had new information from Huma Abedin's husband, their wiener from his thing, and that they had to look at it real quick.
Why did he do that?
That was crazy.
He did that because, in my view, his detectives, his FBI investigators told him, look, this is really important.
We need to get into this.
And if you don't do the right thing here, we're going to leak.
After all, you promised to reauthorize the investigation if new information came to light.
Here it is.
We got to look at it.
So he did that, in my view, because of the preemptive potential that comes from a threatened leak.
So leaks don't even have to occur anymore.
So this is a new force at work, relatively new, in Washington.
It's very salutary, in my view, because the people at the top need to realize that if they don't tell the truth, or in this case, with respect to NSA, if the head of NSA would have said, oh yeah, we have high confidence, and NSA has zero evidence, he wouldn't be afraid that some of his NSA people would have enough integrity to put another little thumb drive in their computer and send it to Julian Assange.
Well, I'll tell you what, too, I mean, I'm sure you're aware of this, but the audience should know there's a great kind of manifesto that Julian Assange wrote, I don't know what ten years ago or more now or whatever it was, where he says, this is the whole thing.
These giant nation-states are basically conspiracies, with all their secrecy and all their plans for violence against each other and this kind of thing, and their own people as well.
And so the deal is, is when you create another kind of regime, a regime of leaks around the world, a regime of transparency, and that means these conspiracies, these national governments, must completely clamp down on secrecy within their systems in such a way that it clogs up the system.
It makes them much less capable of carrying out the terrible conspiracies against us that they have been doing.
And I don't mean that in a skull-and-bones way, I just mean in terms of the Justice Department going to work in the morning kind of a way, and the CIA going to work in the morning.
The kinds of stuff that they get away with, we have to make it where they can't get away with it, and the way to do that is through things like WikiLeaks, from the get-go.
So what you're saying is, it's working.
Well, it's working to an extent, and we can only hope that there are enough honest people left around to act in a responsible way.
You know, the CIA is really in deep, deep kimchi, as we used to say in South Korea.
You know, they're missing their leaders, Brennan and his deputy.
Brennan had a certain hold over our president.
Now, you say, well, McGovern, you're exaggerating again.
But you know, I've looked back, and Brennan joined the Obama campaign in June of 2008, at a time when Obama was saying, I detest these violations of the Fourth Amendment, I detest snooping on Americans, and I will never vote to hold these giant telecoms and NSA harmless for what they've done.
Now, Brennan joins the campaign on the 1st of July, Obama says, you know, I think about that, I changed my mind.
I think, yeah, I think I won't vote against it.
I think it's a good idea to hold the telecoms harmless, and NSA's just trying to protect the country.
So I think I won't, I won't vote against that.
I said to myself, whoa, something's happened to this guy, or maybe, maybe he's a fraud from the beginning.
And I wrote about it at the time, and I said, count me out, Mr. President, as an intelligence veteran, for the following reasons, you could see it on the web.
So now that was, that was before he even became president.
And when he became president, he tried to get Brennan in as the CIA director.
He was too, he was too tarnished by torture and lying and other things that he would, couldn't be confirmed.
And so he made him his national security assistant for counterterrorism.
Fast forward.
This is when, of course, a lot of the, the torture was coming to light and where he was shown to have been involved.
He's on the emails and on the internal correspondence and CIA records as having been fully informed of these heinous, heinous techniques like, you know, rectal hydration and all this stuff that's not medically necessary or approved.
And yet he's, then, then when Brennan gets a chance to become CIA director, Obama lets him do that.
Now, what happens next?
Dianne Feinstein, head of the Senate Intelligence Committee, to her credit, issues, well, orders a investigation of CIA torture.
Now how was she able to get that through the Republicans?
It was right after the torture tapes had been destroyed.
The White House said, don't destroy those tapes.
There are about 97 tapes done mostly in Thailand.
They showed, you know, vividly the torture.
They were destroyed despite them being evidence.
So the Senate Intelligence Committee said, you know, this is really, really too much.
And so they approved this, this investigation.
Now Panetta, who was head of the CIA at one point, made a big mistake.
He thought that he could say, oh yeah, you come and look at the CIA cables.
You can look at our internal correspondence.
Yeah, we're nothing to hide.
They had plenty to hide.
And they gave those cables, and I'm talking original cables between headquarters and overseas stations and so forth, to these investigators, these young people who worked assiduously to piece them all together, even though they were heavily redacted.
OK.
Now, you come to 2014, right?
And these young investigators got their act together and they've got the report together.
And who is against issuing the report?
Well, obviously, John Brennan.
He has already redacted the hell out of it, and he says it can't possibly be released.
But who is his major protector here?
Well, the fellow's first name is Barack, and the last name is Obama.
And to his credit, Spencer Ackerman for The Guardian has written a four-part series that appeared nowhere else other than The Guardian.
And in part three, he shows, by talking to the lead investigator, his name is Jones, OK, that at various junctures, Obama sent his deputy or his satrap, McCullough, to do battle with the Senate and say, no, no, you can't release that.
You can't release that.
Long story short, there was a battle royale.
Now, number one, Dianne Feinstein became a little bit emotionally committed here, not only because these young people had slaved for four years, and not only because she had some of these grandmotherly instincts, but because the CIA hacked into Senate Intelligence Committee computers, which they swore they would never do.
Brennan was asked about it when it happened, and he said, oh, it's all pretty ridiculous.
We would never do that.
Three weeks later, he said, oh, yeah, we did do that.
Well, not only that, but the CIA lawyer, who's named about 170 times in this torture report, does a crimes report on Jones, the lead investigator.
Now, crimes report is a referral to the Department of Justice that we believe a crime has been committed.
I have to look at this fellow because he stole stuff from the CIA.
Well, he didn't steal the Panetta stuff.
The Panetta stuff was given to them.
So anyhow, long story short, coming down to the end, because Dianne Feinstein has lost her position on the Senate Intelligence Committee because the election went the way it did in 2014.
And so what is she going to do?
Well, she talks with Harry Reid, Senate Majority Leader.
Harry calls the president and he says, hey, Barack, you know, Dianne Feinstein's people don't bring up job here, and we need to release that thing.
So I'm asking you personally to release it.
Obama gives him this song and dance about, oh, no, we have to protect the CIA.
And Reid says to him, Mr. President, I wish that you could just hear what you just told me.
So Reid became a very, very strong supporter of Dianne Feinstein.
It comes down to the crunch.
OK.
November.
One of the main progressive members of the Senate Intelligence Committee, Mark Udall of California, of Colorado, loses.
OK.
Well, why is that important?
Well, because he had nothing to lose literally.
He could read the executive summary of the whole report into the record and escape any kind of prosecution because of congressional immunity.
Oh, OK.
So the issue is joined here.
Dianne Feinstein goes to the president and she says, look, you know, by all rights, you should you should release this report, at least the executive summary of it, which has already been redacted, but reveals enough of what happened.
You should do that on its merits.
But I have to tell you, Mr. President, that there's this senator on my committee.
His name is Mark Udall.
And he feels really strongly about this.
And he tells me he's going to read it into the record if you don't do the right thing.
So Obama says, oh, damn.
And he must have called John Brennan and says, oh, John, the jig is up.
The report's going to go out.
That report is the most heinous report I've ever read out of any congressional committee.
And it's based on authentic, genuine documents from the CIA.
Everyone should have access not only to the executive summary, but to the whole report.
Last thing I'll say is that when the Senate did change hands and this guy, Aaron Burr.
No, it's not Aaron's name.
Name is Burr, anyway, from North Carolina.
He takes over the chairmanship of the Senate Intelligence Committee.
First thing he does is call in, call in all copies of the Senate Intelligence Committee report on CIA torture.
Wow.
Why would he want to do that?
All belongs to us.
He says it belongs to us.
You mean he called them in from the Department of Justice and whatever the State Department, whatever other agencies had copies in their safe?
Yeah, probably about five, maybe a handful of places where it would have been.
Now, the announcement at the time was that the CIA Inspector General kept its own copy.
But then there was a report, and I'm not up on this, it's about a year ago, that the Inspector General of the CIA lost this copy.
So the investigators know what was in there.
The investigators did a really courageous job in facing into incredible opposition from some real high rollers, namely Brennan and James Clapper and a fellow named Barack Obama, who for whatever reason, whom for whatever reason, John Brennan had a hold on.
He, why would the, I can understand a cowardly president not wanting to prosecute the torturers.
I mean, I can understand, I don't condone it, but why would he continue to want to cover up these things and hold John Brennan harmless, just like he did with the, with the bill that was going to hold the telecoms harmless.
So this is a major story, because why did Brennan lash out in every kind of way against Trump and try to actually do a little soft coup, and I can prove that, and this dossier, which is really a crock, why did he do all those things?
Because Obama's gone.
Brennan knew he would be gone.
Brennan was afraid that he'd be thrown under the bus because he's guilty of all manner of prosecutor, prosecutable things.
And you know, he's really put Trump's nose on the joint now.
So he wanted to get his licks in, delegitimize this president if he could.
And with Barack Obama away and not really concerned, Brennan could be thrown under the bus.
That's why we see him.
And he was behind all this.
I don't know, Ray.
I mean, you're the professional Kremlinologist here, but it seems to me like, well, all these guys have a license to kill.
No CIA director is going to be prosecuted for torturing somebody.
Even the low level guys who tortured people to death were cleared by the Department of Justice.
And that was under the Obama government.
And there's no way in the world that Trump is going to actually try to enforce the law against somebody like that.
And in fact, that was going to be one of my next questions was, did you see what Trump did on his first day in office on a Sunday?
He wouldn't crawl on his knees to Langley to go worship at their church and let me make up.
You know, now Brennan wants to go on vacation or he wants to go to see his relatives in Ireland.
He can't do that.
Oh, so you're saying that he, he wants to, well, so how does this help him in that situation though?
Well, he had hoped to sabotage the access of the accession to power of Trump.
You know, if he were able to persuade Obama and Obama was not about to go this far to get permission to brief every single member of the electoral college, which they could still have done three days before they voted, uh, that could have conceivably, or at least Brennan might've thought it could have turned those 37 vital people into voting against Trump.
Well, we do know that the Clinton campaign was cooperating with that instead of saying, no, no, no, stop.
They were saying, yeah, go ahead.
Stay in contact.
Let us know what you find out.
Do a dossier, you know, it's just a classic stuff.
So he did all this stuff and it was mostly out of fear because he'd lose his, his, his rabbi, his, his protector.
And now he is in jeopardy because, you know, he can, he can, uh, hope that our system will remain as corrupt as it has been for the last 12 years.
Well, there's always a chance that some, some judge with, uh, with integrity will look at the evidence.
The evidence is there.
Uh, Brennan blessed all manner of things, including, uh, drone killings of us citizens.
Uh, you know, Obama did too, but you know, this thing was an unholy alliance.
So universal jurisdiction is why, uh, Donald Rumsfeld seven years ago when he was in Paris, he had to escape from the back door of the embassy, uh, get a special limousine to the Charlotte de Gaulle airport and fly right home.
They were about to arrest them.
Okay.
It's the same reason why George W. Bush couldn't go to Geneva to give a big speech and get an award.
Okay.
But if Hillary was the president, what you're saying, she would just keep him on and he would have a license to travel around under diplomatic immunity for another few years before he's in the same situation.
I mean, I thought all this was about Russia policy, that this was about undermining, hemming in Donald Trump, if not stopping him, at least making him look as illegitimate as possible.
And especially on the issue of getting along with Russia, which I actually don't think is going to work because they tried it for months before the election and he won anyway.
And the American people aren't scared of the Russians because, well, give me a break.
All that was a long time ago, right?
They all collectively shrug.
Well, you, you, you grasp at straws in this situation.
Now, uh, the, the reason Russia became the real, real, uh, bit moire here is because it was very convenient to blame Trump's win on Russia.
And that's exactly what the New York Times and the Washington Post did.
Uh, they, they said if it weren't for Trump meddling or interfering or however they said it in our election process, uh, we would have Hillary Clinton as president.
So it's very muddled, but there, it's hard to distinguish between the need of the, uh, military industrial congressional, uh, security state complex to have a, a degree of tension with Russia.
Uh, that's a reality here.
The other thing is, uh, the people who are leaving, uh, you know, maybe Brennan will get a nice soft spot, uh, on the Council of Foreign Relations or he'll get a, an honorary position as a lecturer at Fordham University, his alma mater and mine.
Uh, there's no, there's nothing that, uh, these institutions won't do for, for a little more prestige and a little more money, uh, but he's still liable and he didn't want to go out, uh, without, uh, making a last gasp effort, uh, to derail Trump.
Now the Wall Street Journal complained bitterly.
They said all these reports coming from anonymous CIA source, this is all Brennan and Brennan won't talk to us.
He only talks to the New York Times and tearfully said this, the Wall Street Journal.
And this has happened before.
Bill Colby, who is director under whom I served personally in the seventies, said we control 90% of the important people in the media.
Bill Casey, when he came in in 1981, and I know somebody who was there when he said this, When we have succeeded in deceiving all the American people into thinking what we want them to think, then we will have achieved our mission.
Oh, that's a famous quote.
You know someone who was there firsthand for that, huh?
Do.
Yeah.
It's a woman who is a good friend of mine.
So, you know, this is all very true.
And it came out, I was up in New York, uh, at a forum in which David, uh, Sanger, one of the chief offenders here, chief rooters for weapons of mass destruction with the New York Times back in 2002, uh, he was pronouncing on the Russian hack that gave Trump the election.
Okay.
And everybody was sort of taking the Russian hack as flat fact.
Right.
So I, I spoke up.
I had done a little research and I said, now, David, tell me on the 29th of July, 2002, when the, the, the drums are being beat for the war against Iraq, you wrote a piece for the New York Times, which said seven times that there were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq as flat fact.
Now that was nine days after George Tenet, the head of the CIA had told his British counterpart, what was the mass destruction?
That's a crock.
We're fixing the intelligence around the policy.
So what did George Tenet tell you?
Something different from what he told the head of British intelligence, apparently so because you believed him or believe someone like him and, and asserted as flat fact as your colleague Judy Miller did as everyone else in the New York Times did for the months preceding the unnecessary attack on Iraq.
So now you're doing it again.
Where do you get these flat facts about Russia interfering with the election?
That's the link that, that exists between Russia hacking and WikiLeaks.
Well, he didn't like that and neither did everybody else.
I was just going to get the picnic again, but I had a chance to expose this guy for the kind of guy he is.
Is there a video of that?
Is there a video of that?
There probably is.
So you go to Fordham Law School and you can get that.
Yeah, let's find that, write it down for later here.
I didn't think of that, it was sort of my typical shell shock after I challenged Rumsfeld.
It was, it was as though...
Well, listen, I mean, people don't really realize what a villain David Sanger is, but for one complaint, and I think the most severe thing that he ever did wrong was at least dozens and dozens of times in the New York Times, he simply flatly asserted that Iran had an illicit nuclear weapons program, just over and over and over again as the basis for all of his reporting about Iran's very safeguarded civilian nuclear program that was not a weapons program at all, was not illicit at all.
And he just got away with that for years on end.
And that could have led to a war for real, as we covered at the time, in fact.
You know, that was the main topic at this panel meeting.
Alex Gibney was there and everyone was crowing about this wonderful film on Stuxnet, okay?
It's called Zero Something, I forget the title.
Zero Days.
Yeah, right.
The film was shown after.
Now, what does the film show?
Picking up on your point, Scott, it shows that David Sanger and others were hell-bent on destroying whatever these Iranians were working on, centrifuges or whatever, okay?
Now we're talking 2009.
In 2007, maybe the last one, but it was an honest national intelligence estimate which concluded that Iran has stopped working on a nuclear weapon at the end of 2003, okay, do the math, and had not reinstituted their program for a nuclear weapon.
Now that judgment was reinstated every year since then, since 2007, by the head of the National Intelligence Committee, okay?
Now, so that's 2007.
Now we're talking 2009, and the film and David Sanger made it quite obvious that the reason they developed this new mode of warfare, Stuxnet, putting computer bugs into things like centrifuges and blowing them up, it's not like, you know, it's not like derailing your email or something, but blowing up physically, and in the process, blowing up at least five Iranian nuclear scientists.
Well, Sanger was, you know, just glowing about that.
And why?
Here's the reason.
Here's the payoff.
Because Israel said, we don't believe your intelligence.
We think the Iranians are just on the verge of a nuclear weapon, and so we're going to have at it.
We're going to attack them.
And what did Obama do?
Instead of saying, the hell you are, if you do that, you're on your own, he said, what are we going to do?
What are we going to do?
And all those advisors, well, let's find some way to buy off the Israelis here so they don't attack Iran.
That'd be awful.
Oh, I know what we'll do.
We got lots of money, and we got computer people.
We'll develop a virus together with the Israelis, and we'll stick it in Iranian centrifuge mechanisms, and we'll blow them up.
And we'll blow up some of the scientists, too.
That's what they did.
Now, bad enough on its own merits, but in so doing, they unleashed a whole new category of warfare.
And as you probably know, the Stuxnet went a little bit farther than anybody wanted it to, and it's caused all manner of problems getting its stuff back in the bottle.
Well, it's out of the bottle now.
And if anyone complains in future years about starting a whole new theater, a whole kind of genre of warfare techniques, it was first done in conjunction with the Israelis and the United States.
And the reason was, the reason that Obama went along with it, with the help of people like David Sanger, is because he was told, oh, if you don't do this, if we don't find some other way to show the Israelis that we're behind them, they're going to attack, and then it will be worse for us.
So that's how bad it is.
And I'm glad you mentioned that, because David Sanger is notable not only for his meretricious reporting on Iraq, but on Iran as well.
And now he's out in front with this Russians gave the election to Trump by hacking Canard.
And I was able to expose that before this audience.
Maybe you can get the tape.
They're pretty, I've done this before, I haven't been able to get the tape, but maybe you can.
It would be worth watching.
Yeah, we'll see.
I mean, I'll at least give it a shot.
Maybe on their website or something, who knows by now.
But so listen, how much of this is really about the Cold War?
Because well, so he went there on Sunday to give a speech.
You know, he didn't just, you know, have a couple of them over to his house.
He went to Langley, which is, you know, pretty obsequious, I would think, for the new president.
Went over there and said, what?
I never had a beef with CIA.
The media made that up, which, of course, it was the CIA that made that up and put it in the media because it was true.
Right.
And anyway, who knows what he really understands about the world he lives in or not.
I don't know.
But it seemed like he was going there to make up with them.
But now they're leaking to the CBS News that, which this is probably true and hilarious, but I'm not sure what it means that they're leaking it and complaining about it, that he brought cheerleaders with them to lead the crowd in hurraying for him as he gave his little talk there.
But so they still, in other words, they still hate him.
And and they think that they're the boss.
Yeah.
Scott, in my view, you can't say they, OK.
My insight into the rank and file is that they hated John Brennan just as much as a lot of other people did.
So when you look at what happened.
With the campaign against Trump, that was John Brennan and his very top lieutenants.
Some of whom are already gone, most of them who will be trashed.
The rank and file.
Well, there's still some honest people around there.
They're dwindling in numbers.
But there are people who who can do and would like to be able to do the same thing that those analysts did in 2007 when they had an honest supervisor who said, look, tell it like it is.
And they came up with that judgment that Iran had stopped working on a nuclear weapon with high confidence.
They expressed that all 16 agencies, unanimous, stopped in 2003 and had not resumed work on a nuclear weapon.
So there are still guys around.
And it's, I think, a mistake to say, well, they all hate him.
They'll hate him if he starts to do the kinds of things to analysis that George Bush and Dick Cheney did and that Obama let Petraeus and all those people do, you know, suit the intelligence to meet the policy.
I think you'll see people leaving.
And I'm afraid that they'll be the good people unless unless they can get get Trump aside and say, look, you know, before 12 years ago, it was our tradition to tell tell you the truth.
You still want to know the truth because Truman thought that was really anything to have somebody reporting directly to him and telling him the truth and to have career protection.
Well, I mean, the thing is, I know that's your career experience and everything.
But to most of the world, CIA means the president's private army that has no law and goes around doing whatever the hell they want for the American empire, including, you know, cut people's ears off or whatever.
Well, you know, take care of business.
And that's more of the truth here than.
So that's why I've always predicted he would have good relations with him, actually, that he would say, all right, guys, whatever you want to do, just keep me in the loop and then you'll do the things that I want you to do sometimes, too.
I mean, that's basically the agreement between CIA and the president's right.
Well, it is.
But there are a couple of things that should be pointed out here.
General Flynn.
Now, he's going to be the national security assistant, of course, or he is now.
And he is the guy that CIA really reports to.
OK.
They don't usually report directly to the president unless Trump decides to reinstitute the morning briefings of the president's daily brief, which I used to deliver in person.
Now, Flynn knows which end is up.
I'll give you an example.
Flynn was head of the Defense Intelligence Agency when there were those sarin chemical attacks outside of Damascus in August of 2013.
And when John Kerry and John Brennan and everybody else wanted to blame that on Bashar al-Assad, Flynn would not go along because he knew that it was a false flag attack meant to trap Obama into enforcing the red line against chemical weapons use in Syria that he had been mousetrapped into putting down a year before.
OK.
So how did this play out?
Well, Flynn won.
OK.
So Flynn told the president and he told his boss, General, I'll remember his name in a second, the chief chairman, General Dempsey, he said, look, this is a crock, OK?
It's going to be blamed on Bashar al-Assad, it is already.
But we know that those precursors came down through Turkey.
They came from Europe.
They were assembled by rebels supported by, guess who?
Some of them were moderate rebels supported by, guess who?
Not only Saudi Arabia, not only Turkey, but, you know, our old friends there in the CIA.
OK.
So look, Mr. President, you should know this.
And besides, as General Dempsey told him, my opposite number in Great Britain has just told me that they have a sample of the sarin gas that was used outside Damascus on the 21st of August 2013.
And it is homemade sarin.
It is not the same sarin that we know to be in Syrian army stock.
So Mr. President, you might want to think about taking your finger off the button.
They want you to start an overt war because Bashar al-Assad is starting to win.
OK.
That's why they want to mousetrap you.
You might want to stop that.
Now, Flynn was in on all that.
What happened to Flynn?
He got fired.
Now, everything else I know about Flynn is not good.
OK.
But I do know that about Flynn and nobody else knows that about Flynn except the people who told me and they were in a position to know.
So what I'm saying here is that Flynn will be able to exert, if he wants to, a moderating influence on what the CIA proposes.
And this this is one.
I got I got kind of a skewed view of that same thing there.
You know, he co-authored his book with Ledeen and he has all this ridiculous stuff that, you know, he thought Iran must be behind the Benghazi attack in Libya, this kind of thing.
And once you believe in radical Islam, then now you can't differentiate between the two major sides of the sectarian war there anymore.
And you know, you have people like Pamela Geller and Frank Gaffney who are horrible neocons, horrible right wingers who just hate and fear all Muslims and more to the point, they hate and fear any organization with the word Islam in it.
And so even though you have some neocons want to go ahead and overthrow Qaddafi and overthrow Assad, to these guys, they hate Muslims so much they keep their eye on the ball.
And they say, no, no, no, rightly, that the alternative to Assad in this case is a bunch of bin Ladenites.
You must be crazy.
And so they're they're too far to the right of the party line to go ahead and smash Syria because they're looking ahead at the consequences in a sense the same way that you and I do.
So in other words, broken clock right twice a day, but otherwise completely nuts and believes that the Ayatollah Khamenei is behind every damn thing in the world.
Well, you've paraphrased what I said at the end there, that everything else I know about Flynn is beyond the pale.
Yeah.
I'm just saying him even being good on this is part of him being horrible overall in that sense.
You know what I mean?
I don't know what you mean there.
But I will say this.
Ladeen.
Yeah.
I wrote this book.
Flynn didn't write the book.
Flynn wanted to have a verisimilitude of some some intellectual capacity.
And so he said to the book, that's not to excuse it.
The book is crazy.
The question is whether Flynn will be as crazy as everybody thinks he will be.
Now the other side of this, and this is the worst side, is what Trump told the CIA on Sunday.
It was, look, people haven't had your back or I'm going to have your back.
I'm going to have your back to the degree where you won't even want me to have your back to the degree.
I'm going to have it.
So, you know.
So who's he talking to there?
He's talking to the paramilitary types who run little wars here and they're not the CIA function that Truman had in mind.
And it reminded me of George Tenet when he wrote his book after being CIA director for seven years.
He wrote a book about the after 9-11 and what he said, and this is a virtual quote, you know, after 9-11 we CIA people were given so many authorities that my worst dream was that we would have to face congressional investigations later on to hold us accountable for the kinds of things we were asked to do.
Whoa.
And they went on to say, I don't know if the CIA should be running drones and shooting people up.
You know, that's usually the Air Force.
I understand that the Air Force can't do that over Pakistan because we're not in war with them.
I still have some misgivings about whether we should.
So Tenet himself in his own memoir is saying, my God, they give us so many authorities.
Well, let's come back to bite us when they find out what we've done.
Why do I mention that now?
Well, it seems to me that Trump is pretty explicitly saying to the people he thinks are the people that dominate CIA, and I have to admit that they have been for the last several years.
He's saying, I'm going to give you authorities that you won't believe.
So don't worry about it.
I got your back.
Now, if that translates into action and Flynn and others can't restrain Trump, we've got more problems than we even, well, not more than Brennan, because Brennan had a hold on the president.
In this case, we'll see what Pompeo will do.
The jury is out as to what will happen there.
But I would hold out some hope, number one, that there are enough integrity people there to put a brake on these things, and number two, that Flynn is not 100 percent wrong that in this case of Syria, he acted courageously and lost his job because of it.
Yeah.
Well, you know, certainly, you know, thwarting the attempted war there in 2013 is absolutely a huge thing.
So you're right about that, for sure.
Now, so Trump has said that he wants to knock the hell out of ISIS quick.
He wants a 30-day plan from Mattis to go in there and get rid of them.
And I wonder what you think that means.
Well, I think if Trump is smart, he'll talk to the Russians.
And he'll say, look, we know that there was a ceasefire agreement agreed upon on the 9th of September.
We know that it went into effect on the 12th of September and that it was sabotaged by our own air force on the 17th when they deliberately attacked known Syrian army positions on hilltops that had been there for months.
OK, we're sorry about that.
We know it was deliberate.
Now, let's get back to not square one.
Let's get back to September 9th.
We were able to cooperate.
There was an agreement we would share intelligence.
The Air Force general said we don't want to do that.
And this was after Putin and Obama had agreed to the agreement.
So let's let's restrain our generals.
Let's get together and figure out how we do this ISIS thing together, or at least without bumping into each other.
That's the most sensible way.
And that would open the door for a more reasonable approach in Russian eyes of a president who says, you know, there's not really a lot of reason why we can't talk with the Russians.
You know, it reminds me of Scott.
It reminds me of when Obama was running and he said, you know, I want to talk to the Iranians.
And McCain's, oh, no, you can't talk to Iranians, even Hillary, no, you can't talk to Iranians.
Well, he did talk to Iranians.
Now, it took him a while.
Right.
But he made a deal.
And the deal has ensured, in my view, that Iran can't possibly get a nuclear weapon without us discovering it pronto for the next 10, 12 years.
So you can do deals and you can monitor these deals.
And that's where CIA monitoring comes in.
They can make sure that the Iranians in this case or the Russians live up to these deals.
And that was one of our major functions that nobody knows about.
So there is kind of some some hope here.
And I think if Trump is serious about talking to Vladimir Putin, that he will have a willing partner in trying to work some of these things out.
All right.
Now, in Afghanistan, I'm sure you noticed they announced they're sent 300 Marines to the Helmand province down there to try to keep the Taliban from taking over Lashkar Gah, which apparently they're right up against the wall there.
And they announced this, what, three days, I think, four days before Trump was sworn in.
And I had to wonder when I saw that whether Obama was even informed or whether he just went ahead and did this, because, you know, you talk about how they pressured Obama back then.
Well, we we certainly saw how they pressured him on Afghanistan.
And basically, as he put it later, whining to Jeffrey Goldberg, they jammed him into the escalation in Afghanistan.
Yet the war is no more won now than it was in 2008 and 2009 when he was coming into power.
So and we got Mike Flynn, who was McChrystal's right hand man, and we got James Mattis, who also is, you know, implicated in the failure there.
He was part of the original invasion force, at least.
And so anyway, I wonder whether you think that we're just going to see an entire replay of Coyne and the Afghan surge again, or is Trump going to call it quits?
Even a chance of that?
We have to realize that whoever becomes Secretary of State is going to be important.
But Mad Dog Mattis is head of defense now.
Ashton Carter is gone.
Mattis spent his entire life as a Marine since the age of 19, except for the last three years when he made billions of dollars on boards for Lockheed and places like that.
Mattis only knows to take orders.
So if Trump orders Mattis to do this kind of thing, Mattis is going to say, you know, 3,000 Marines.
Hey, Mr. President, are you serious?
You really want to win this thing?
Or are you going to withdraw 3,000 Marines six months from now?
I'm not going to commit my men to a fool's errand.
We're going to move.
We're going to win this thing or not.
And then I hope some people who know something about Afghanistan will tell the president, look, this is a fool's errand.
I mean, Alexander the Great couldn't get through Afghanistan, for God's sake.
So you're not going to do it either.
Get out of Afghanistan.
I think coming in new, Trump will have that option and be able to say, well, Obama called this the good war.
It's just as feckless as Iraq.
We've lost 3,000 men.
Let's get the hell out.
Yeah.
Well, that's interesting.
You know, it seems like if Trump had the vision to say that he's kind of right wing enough that he can do, you know, Nixon goes to China and shake hands with Mao only over and over again.
Let's go ahead and do not an apology tour, but just a let's make a deal tour, put a right wing spin on it and just go to Tehran, go to Pyongyang, go to Moscow, go to Beijing, work out a thing.could call him and just say and and have Mad Dog Mattis standing on his right flank to, you know, keep all the pressure off and just say, don't worry, Mr. McCain, I've vetted the policy and we're doing this and and, you know, protect him in that sense.
He could do it right without.
I mean, a Democrat could never do that, even if Obama had really wanted to do that.
He couldn't have done that.
It's just too much.
Yeah.
And I think that's not only wishful thinking.
We have to be careful about that.
But I think that there's a lot of truth in what you say.
And if you look at what worries the Russians most is the abrogation of the anti-ballistic missile treaty in 2001, as soon as George W. Bush came into office.
This was the guarantee of a nuclear balance, a guarantee that no side would think they could get a leg up against the other side by anti-ballistic missile systems.
Now, when Obama was running for his second term, he was in Seoul, South Korea, at one of these summits.
And Medvedev, who was president at the time, Russian president, and he were talking and their conversation was picked up by an ABC microphone.
This is the way it went.
Medvedev.
Vladimir Putin is very, very worried about your insistence on putting ABM systems all around the periphery of our country.
And he wants to talk about this, Obama.
Look, I know that's a concern.
Just I'm focused on the election.
Let me deal with the election and then we'll talk and we can talk, OK?
And please tell Vladimir that.
And Medvedev says, OK, now the election came.
Did Obama so much as lift a finger to discuss this very neuralgic issue with Putin or Medvedev?
No, he didn't.
Now, what are the what are the Russians thinking about this?
Well, at Valdai, this big conference that they have with academics, the press and everyone else down in near Sochi, Putin was on the dais, was on the, you know, on the panel with our former ambassador, Jack Matlock.
Now, Jack is a terrific guy.
He was the ambassador when the Soviet Union fell and he went into the new regime there.
He knows an awful lot about Russia.
He knows something about America, too, because when Putin said, how do you feel about the abrogation of the ABM treaty?
You know, Mr. Matlock, you worked so hard on that.
And parenthetically, so did I, Scott.
We were the verification thing, OK?
We were the ones that worked out whether if Nixon signed this thing in 1972, whether we could verify that the Russians weren't cheating.
Did they cheat?
Yes, they cheated.
Did we catch them?
Yes, we caught them.
Did they destroy what they said?
Yeah, they did.
OK.
I happened to be in Moscow at the time.
And that was one of the thrills of my life, to see that abrogated.
But we'll go ahead here.
So we're at Valdai.
And Putin says, Mr. Matlock, how do you feel about the abrogation of the ABM treaty?
And Matlock says, well, I was against it.
I didn't think that would work.
So Putin says, well, why do you do this?
Why is this?
Why do you threaten us this way?
And Matlock says, I'm sure he regrets it.
And Putin says, well, Mr. President, look, this system is really not, is not really designed or aimed at Russia.
It's basically a jobs program.
And Putin looks at me and says, oh, Mr. Matlock, have you no other needs in your country for infrastructure, for anything else where you couldn't put these billions of dollars into something else that is not a, it could be a jobs program.
And of course, Matlock was embarrassed to hell.
But it, you know, when you look at the billions of dollars that have been invested in Star Wars and other concepts like this, it's deservedly called the biggest corporate welfare system ever devised by mankind.
One footnote on ABM systems, and this is sort of important, they don't work.
They don't work.
Even the missiles would have shot up there to be intercepted, they're missed, okay.
So the Russians, they know pretty much, their engineers and scientists know that any quasi sophisticated ABM system can be penetrated by a million decoys or whatever.
So that's the reality.
But it's a really good lucrative program.
So here's, put yourself in Putin's place.
We're sitting around the table, he's got all his generals around, you know.
And they say, well, Mr. Putin, they're building ABM system in Romania, now in Poland, and they have the Black Sea and the Baltic Sea, what are we going to do?
Now, I would suggest that it isn't an option for Mr. Putin to say, don't worry about it.
They'll never work.
Right.
Although, yeah.
So now the truth of this, well, we'll get back to this in a second, the jobs program.
But so I have an anecdote for you here, Ray, that seems worth bringing up.
It's something that you may well know, but then again, it's a somewhat obscured, you know, source material, and it's about 11 years old.
And that is Andrew Coburn's book, Rumsfeld, His Rise, Fall, and Catastrophic Legacy.
In there, Coburn explains that Dan Coats was the original pick to be Secretary of Defense.
But the reason Donald Rumsfeld got it instead was because in Coats' job interview, he said, oh, come on, you know, all this missile defense is a bunch of crap.
No, we shouldn't scrap the ABM treaty just for a bogus missile defense system.
That'll never work.
And then they said, okay, Dan Coats.
Well, thanks a lot, but don't call us, we'll call you, kind of thing, bye.
And then they got Rumsfeld instead, and there was another anecdote there that Cheney said, but you know, your father hates him.
And Bush said, oh, really, yeah, call him.
And that's how Rumsfeld got the job.
But anyway, Dan Coats is the new pick to be the Director of National Intelligence.
And I don't know whether that's meaningful or not, and I don't know whether his opposition to withdrawing from the treaty was based on any firm conviction or just on common sense, whether that's, you know, really a position of his or not.
But it seems fitting, because I hadn't heard his name since then, really.
Either way, it's a hopeful sign.
I'm glad you pointed that out.
I had missed that in Coburn's book.
Yeah, there's lots of little strings of hope out there.
And the trick is to try to get to Trump and his people.
We veteran intelligence professionals for sanity have made ourselves available to anyone.
And we're hoping that people will notice that we're around and that we can give some straight advice the way Truman actually envisaged the whole CIA analytic division to tell them the truth without fear or favor.
So we're hopeful that somebody will put us on the radar and we can at least share what we know, whether it be accepted or not is another issue.
But flying blind like Obama has with people who knew nothing about Russia, even the Russians in the last week of Obama have criticized really, really strongly in a way that they'd never had before Obama for, as Medvedev himself said two days ago, quote, destroying relations between Russia and the US.
That's important.
And that's why when the Russians look at this new opportunity, they say, well, we didn't expect this.
I mean, those who claim that Vladimir Putin looked into his crystal ball and said, you know, despite the polls, I have a hunch, I have a hunch that Trump's going to win.
And so I'm going to hack into Hillary's emails and I'm going to give them to Wikileaks.
I'm going to raise all kinds of hell because, because I think Trump's going to win.
Now all the evidence, and I just wrote a piece about this, the, the, the big pundits in Russian television, which pretty much state control still, and much in that all, everybody who is among the cognoscenti there and in Russia, fully, fully expected Hillary to win.
They even had prepared programs to show how her win was illegitimate.
Okay.
We know that now.
So the notion that Putin would, would know something special, everybody else didn't know is ridiculous.
Now, if that's ridiculous and Putin, like everyone else on this planet expected Hillary to win, what percentage would it have been for him to do the kinds of things that he's accused of to hacking into Hillary's stuff and all that stuff?
You know, it doesn't make sense to a common sense person if he thinks this person's going to win and there's all already a lot of antipathy between him and her, she having called him Hitler.
Okay.
It doesn't make much sense to instruct your intelligence people to hack the hell out of the DNC and Hillary's emails and give them to Wikileaks.
I'm not saying that's impossible, but I would give the chances of that 1%.
Yeah.
Well, you know, I read a thing that said, Hey, you know, if I'm a game theorist and I'm Vladimir Putin, I would rather deal with Hillary Clinton because yeah, she's a hawk, but also she's pretty predictable.
She ain't going to do nothing.
Tough guy, Hillary, you know, uh, whereas Donald Trump, he's kind of a mess and you know what?
He might wake up on the wrong side of the bed one day.
And for that matter, if he was going to intervene in such a ham handed way to implicate himself like this, you know, one pretty obvious interpretation was that he's trying to provoke a reaction against Donald Trump and make Hillary Clinton look like she was the, the American Patriot standing up to the foreign intervention in our election.
Why would he think?
Cause this went on for months, these accusations.
Why would it be the Russian position that, Oh yeah, no, the American people won't mind when the media tells them that the Russians have been trying to elect the Republican over the Democrat this time, you know, that certainly doesn't sound like a safe bet to me.
Yeah, that's, that's true.
And one really has to go back to the beginning, uh, when Assange had all these emails from the DNC, he took the time to go over them, to order them in a way that would be searchable and picked what he thought would be the best time to release them two days before the Democratic National Convention.
Now all hell broke loose.
People don't realize or don't remember that Debbie, Debbie Wasserman Schultz and all her four of her top people, they all quit.
Now what does that tell you?
Okay.
Now, number two, they will be fuddled.
What are you going to do to two days before the Democratic National Convention when the content, and I say again, the content of these emails show that they performed every trick in the book to deprive Bernie Sanders of the nomination.
So what are they going to do?
I can see him sitting around the table, you know, in this little war room.
I know what we'll do, blame the Russians.
And some would say, well, yeah, but it wasn't the Russians, it was, it was Julian Assange.
Oh, that's okay.
We'll say Julian Assange was working with the Russians.
And okay, but what's the rationale?
And here's getting, getting to your point, Scott, Oh, clearly the Russians wanted Trump to win.
You know?
Well, I agree with you.
If I were Vladimir Putin and I was looking at a guy who brags about being unpredictable, you know, a guy who takes extreme action in reaction to any, any offense, real or just perceived, you know, like you said, if you get up on the wrong side of the, of the bed and had the button near his bed table, you know, if I were Vladimir Putin, I would have serious reservations of trying to help this guy win as much as I might have reservations about Hillary.
So I think that Putin had the same attitude.
I was in Germany at the time of the election.
My friends were saying, well, it's eine Wahl zwischen Pest und Cholera, which means, hey, these two candidates, it's a choice between plague and cholera.
Which is what all 7 billion people in the world thought, including all the people who voted for Hillary and voted for Trump or, you know, probably super majorities of both of those groups anyway, that the other person's worse got to stop her, got to stop him.
Well, I was, I was very pleased to have someone I could enthusiastically support and vote for.
And that was Jill Stein.
And when she asked me to actually officially endorse her, I was in Berlin, but I did it on Skype.
And I said, look, to me, it has to do with my nine grandchildren.
Either they don't die a slow death through climate change and not having clean water or clean air, or they could have a maybe slightly less pain, painful death by immediately destruction just being destroyed in a nuclear exchange, which I think Hillary is much closer to provoking than Trump.
So you're taking you take a choice.
I vote for Jill Stein.
She's really good on the environment.
She's good on foreign policy.
And I'm proud to have voted for her.
And I still support her efforts to look into how elections are done and the results of what she's been able to accomplish.
Yes.
Well, when I interviewed her, she was solid on pretty much everything.
I just took her on a tour around the world.
We think about American intervention here, there and the other place.
And she didn't just say, oh, yeah, no, I'm against it.
She had, you know, solid answers and explanations and all of this stuff for all this stuff.
So I certainly admire her on her foreign policy, although I guess I saw her tweeting some nonsense about Syria.
But anyway, let me just add a little thing.
I was with her on Saturday.
She was down for the Women's March.
And I did a little interview.
And she was telling me, she was thinking we had given, V.I.P.S. had given her substantive support whenever she asked us, which we would have given to any candidate.
She said, you know, when I was interviewed by The New York Times and they were saying, what about Russia?
What about the invasion of Crimea?
What about the invasion of Ukraine?
I told him, I said, well, you know, you're not talking about the coup in Kyiv on the 22nd of February, 2014, which George Friedman, the head of Stratfor, called the most blatant coup in history.
Why don't you mention that?
This is what the Russians did was mostly in reaction to that.
And you know what they said to me, Ray?
I said, oh, what coup?
We don't know about any coup, a coup in Kyiv.
This is the editorial board of The New York Times.disingenuous.
But if they didn't know about this coup or weren't at least prepared to engage Jill Stein in discussion about the aftermath of that coup, you know, Jill is very good and she has repeated many times that there is not one scintilla of evidence that Vladimir Putin or any of his advisors had it in their mind to do anything with respect to Crimea before the coup on the 22nd of February, 2014.
Probably the right answer of all the different things to say about it.
Sure seemed happy with the status quo ever since he's been in power in the year 2000.
Sure never sees Crimea before.
Yes.
You know?
Yeah.
That's what I'm saying.
We were I was with a little citizens delegation in Crimea.
Gosh, when was it, June?
And the Crimean people, we were the first American delegation, unofficial though we were to visit Crimea.
And we were just greeted with such enthusiasm.
And we try to find somebody who voted who voted against the plebiscite.
And you know, we were sure we could find some.
I mean, they say 90 percent or more voted to rejoin Russia.
We said, come on, dig us up somebody who voted against.
You know what they say, Ray, is that, well, the ethnic Russians, sure.
But what about the poor Tatars?
Well, there's a point there.
Yeah.
We talked with some of those Tatars and yeah, they had mixed emotions.
They've been a point of history forever.
But the vast majority of the Crimeans, of course, were delighted that they didn't have to submit to this coup regime led by, well, some of the key cabinet posts were led by proto-fascists and they're still in power.
But you're saying the Tatars, they would have rather not gone to Russia or they actually were still for joining Russia anyway.
Well, you know, they've had such a bad history with Russia.
They did.
They didn't know exactly what they thought.
It's sort of another vals zwischen pest und cholera, you know, choice between plague and cholera for them, unfortunately, is they're like the Kurds, the eternal pawn of history where great powers just play with them.
And yeah.
And like, doesn't Ukraine in the translation stuck between a rock and a hard place in the original Slavic or something like that?
Yeah.
Yeah.
That's pretty much.
You know, Trump can, you know, what most people don't know is that the ball is in Trump's court.
OK.
Now, what I mean by that, and this was not widely reported, surprise, surprise.
About a month ago, Putin sent his spokesman Dmitry Peskov to attend a chess match in New York for the ostensible reason.
As soon as Peskov gets off the plane, he goes to AP and he says, you know, there's no reason for this increased tension in Central Europe.
What we suggest is that NATO, instead of building up troops on the Polish-Russian border, withdraw these, withdraw these plans to fortify a border that is not threatened by us.
So AP reported that in one little dispatch.
Now, the Washington Post, New York Times usually picks up pretty much what AP says.
They forgot to do it this time.
So but the ball is in in Trump's court.
And there's nothing that would prevent Trump from going, well, to going to Reykjavik or going somewhere, meeting with Putin and deciding or even before saying, you know, we don't agree that it makes a lot of sense to stoke tensions in Central Europe.
The Russians and we are going to have a mutual emphasis, mutual withdrawal of the units that we have near the border with NATO.
And we think that's a sensible solution.
We don't really see any indication that Russia is going to invade the Baltic states.
Now I know that the Baltic people have lots of reason to distrust the Russians, but they also have no intelligence that Russia would want to invade the Baltic states.
So let's put this red herring, literally red herring back in the box.
Let's talk to each other.
Let's have a mutual withdrawal.
And I think that's where it could easily start.
Then we could talk about ABMs.
Then we could talk about Syria.
There are lots of things where our interests coincide.
And that is all been obscured by the people that that Obama had hired to make them hate the Russians.
Yeah.
Well, you know, when it comes to Donald Trump, I do not expect great things on the Asia pivot, the special forces in Africa or the perpetual war in Al-Qaeda and ISIS and all that.
I expect all that to go on for eight years.
But at least he's good on Russia.
And I think he seems to, at least so far, to believe in it enough that he's going to have his way.
As you said, he's going to figure out.
Mattis must have already decided he's either going to click his heels and obey or he's just going to be insubordinate on this issue, you know, all along.
Seems like probably more likely the former.
Right.
So at least there's that, you know.
Yeah.
And the important thing, in my view, is not to prejudice the outcome.
In other words, Bob Perry, for whom I have great respect, has an article up in Consortium News yesterday which goes into some detail with respect to how the Democrats, the progressives and everybody else are, are so viscerally against Trump that they can't even see this one little silver lining, which is not a little silver lining, it's big.
If he's willing to deal with Russia in a mutually acceptable way, that is big and that's lost in all this stuff.
And that has to do with this campaign about the hacking and all this other stuff.
And the continuing effort to show, in quotes, that Trump owes his presidency to the bette noire Vladimir Putin.
All right.
Well, we better wrap this up, but I sure appreciate you coming on the show, Ray.
Always great work at ConsortiumNews.com and always great talking with you on the show.
Well, Scott, I had to turn down CBS, ABC and NBC to be with you right now.
They're all really, really interested and I wish so.
That's a sick joke.
Well, I'm glad I was here for you to settle for.
Thanks Scott.
All right.
Appreciate it.
All right.
So that's the great and hilarious Ray McGovern, ConsortiumNews.com, ConsortiumNews.com and RayMcGovern.com as well for all his TV appearances and all that, which he does do RT and other things like that.
This one is called Obama Admits Gap in Russian Hack Case.
There's a lawyerly language there.
And that's the Scott Horton Show.
Thanks very much for listening to me.
I'm over at ScottHorton.org.
About 4,000 something interviews now going back to 2003 for you there.
And I'm also on LibertarianInstitute.org.
I'm at there.
And Twitter, Twitter.com slash Scott Horton Show.
Thanks.
Hey y'all.
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