Sorry, I'm late.
I had to stop by the Wax Museum again and give the finger to FDR.
We know Al-Qaeda, Zawahiri, is supporting the opposition in Syria.
Are we supporting Al-Qaeda in Syria?
It's a proud day for America.
And by God, we've kicked Vietnam syndrome once and for all.
Thank you very, very much.
I say it, I say it again, you've been had.
You've been took.
You've been hoodwinked.
These witnesses are trying to simply deny things that just about everybody else accepts as fact.
He came, he saw, he died.
We ain't killin' they army, but we killin' them.
We be on CNN, like, say our name and say it, say it three times.
The meeting of the largest armies in the history of the world.
Then there's going to be an invasion.
Alright, you guys, on the line I got the great Gareth Porter.
He wrote the book Manufactured Crisis.
The truth about the Iran nuclear scare and he's good on pretty much everything.
And I think this is such a fun story where you have not just a Republican president, but this guy who's such a horrible caricature of the worst things about the right in so many ways.
And yet you still have all these great leftist reporters who are constantly writing about how the worst accusations against him just aren't true.
And that is this entire Russia story in its many parts and in its overall theme and in every little thing.
And now, Gareth, I think the real big news, just to get to introduce before we get to your story, is that the Senate, after interviewing hundreds of witnesses, the Senate committee investigation has determined they have no evidence that Trump was involved in any collusion, conspiracy of a quid pro quo with the Russians.
That you helped me win and I'll help you.
I'll lift some sanctions or whatever it was.
That was what they said they were looking for and that the Democrats agreed.
And according to Ken Delanian, who is the CIA asset at NBC News, was the one who he had heard this.
And then he went and tracked it down and asked all the Democrats and they conceded.
The Democrats on the committee can see that.
Yeah, well, oh, well, sorry.
Never did get to that whole giant thing we promised we were going to get to here.
And so I don't know how how flat that's fallen in, you know, the public media, but it seems like a pretty big, you know, step on this road before the Mueller report comes out anyway.
Yeah, I agree.
I agree that that story on the Delanian did is very damning to the whole Russiagate hypothesis or shall we call it hysteria is more like it.
Although, you know, he asks Senator Warner for his comment and he refuses to characterize the evidence rather than admitting that they don't have anything.
That was that was their little way of the Democrats way of dealing with it on the committee or Warner's way of dealing with it.
But anyway, I think you're right that that it's a fundamental indication that Miller really is not going to come up with anything either.
Yeah.
Well, that's going to be fun, you know, to hear a symbol crash.
But with such a dead note, you know, it's going to be a little interesting.
And I mean, hey, we already knew that this thing was a hoax in the first place.
Of course it is.
So and even, of course, the worst accusation about the Russians role in this is this nonsense about buying some Facebook ads.
You forget all of that.
And then the thing about hacking the emails that we all had the right to anyway, assuming that the GRU was behind it at all just for the sake of argument, which, of course, remains far from proven.
Oh, cool.
We got to read Hillary Clinton's communications.
Well, isn't it interesting how no one thought for a minute that these emails showed what a great leader she is and what a great leader she would be.
Instead, it was, oh, no.
What an obvious, nefarious sabotage for them to pull the curtain back and let us see the real Hillary Clinton and the real Hillary Clinton campaign.
And so that's really all they got.
Yeah.
Since you're inviting me to to comment on the on that larger picture.
Oh, I am.
Yeah, I mean, absolutely.
In my view, the fundamental premise of the whole Russiagate hysteria, which is that, you know, we should be terribly alarmed about Russia revealing the secrets from the Hillary Clinton or from the from the DNC emails that essentially show what happened during the during the Democratic primary phase of the 2016 election cycle.
You know, I absolutely disagree with that, because in my view, the American people need to have a press that is snooping around and getting secrets that have to do with misfeasance, malfeasance, cheating and lying on the part of the political elite.
And that is absolutely central.
That story that was revealed or that those stories, but particularly the mistreatment of Bernie Sanders during the Democratic primary cycle, is extremely important to American democracy.
So so I just think that that whole thesis couldn't be more wrong.
Right.
And, you know, what's funny is my old friend Jason Leopold, who recently got in trouble for blowing this story about Trump telling his lawyer to lie.
That was that the Mueller investigation reputed he actually other than whoever leaked the stuff to WikiLeaks, he was in second place for revealing the most Hillary Clinton emails that he sued under the Freedom of Information Act and got because many of her emails, of course, were to other people working at the State Department who they had their copy.
And so he was this was his new thing since he got busted relying on unreliable sources.
So many times he was starting to do documents only journalism here and he was getting all of this stuff about the war in Libya.
There's Sidney Blumenthal warning her that, hey, listen, the militias were backing or rounding up black men and massacring them and this kind of thing.
But anyway, and they kept going on.
There are a million things like that in there.
And so but we look at that and we go, well, that was the best journalism Jason Leopold ever done.
And no one would say that that's some kind of pro-Russian sabotage of Hillary Clinton.
He was doing his job in getting that stuff.
So it's sort of like the late phone call of Victoria Nuland and Jeffrey Piatt plotting the coup d'etat in Kiev in 2014 that was pretty obviously intercepted and leaked by the Russians.
Well, I don't care.
That's newsworthy audio, man.
Everyone should check that out.
And it's not because she says the F word.
It's because she's saying F the Europeans because they're taking too long to do this coup.
We should just go ahead without them is the context of the whole conversation.
And so what I'm supposed to be scandalized that it was the GRU that that intercepted that call and posted it on YouTube or it's a purely newsworthy item no matter where it came from.
Right.
It's like the ethic of a librarian.
Right.
We even keep books that say controversial things because, you know, books are books.
What are you going to do?
Burn them?
The truth is the truth.
Yeah.
And in a free press in a country with a free press, all these things would ultimately be worked out, clarified.
You know, the truth would emerge and this hysteria would disperse.
But of course, that's not what we have.
That's the real problem.
Yeah.
All right.
So now take us back in time to the beginning of the Trump administration here.
Spring 2017, he fires James Comey, the director of the FBI.
And so then we find out from recent reporting from last month, according to The New York Times, they opened.
And according to no reporting up until this time, I believe that they had an actual counterintelligence.
They had an actual counterintelligence investigation of the president himself at that time, the already sworn in president himself.
And so you're developing that story.
This is called the real motive behind the FBI plan to investigate Trump as a Russian agent.
And this was at ConsortiumNews.com and it's at Antiwar.com.
So what is can you describe the investigation such as it is and then get to this real motive here?
Right.
I mean, this is this is a very important story, not because of what has happened in the meantime, but because of its implications with regard to the nature of the FBI leadership, the senior officials of the FBI who were involved.
And the story that The New York Times and the CNN basically published in around January 11th to 14th of this year is that the that the senior group of FBI officials met almost immediately after Comey was fired and discussed a counterintelligence investigation of Trump based on the premise that he might be an agent of the Russian government, taking directions, as the CNN story put it, from the Russians.
And then then, you know, they they both develop the story in slightly different ways.
But both stories were based on leaked information from testimony by McCabe to the congressional committees that were investigating what happened.
And they both used that testimony in order to essentially legitimize the idea that the FBI people were talking about, which is that that it was reasonable for them to have investigated Trump as a suspect, a suspected Russian agent.
And in fact, what I show in my article is that the evidence from the testimony and from all the other evidence available about this whole matter shows that they absolutely had no evidence whatsoever to base such a investigation on.
That that the motives behind this had to do much more with the extremist views of some of the people like Peter Strzok, who was the main investigator on the on the investigation of the Trump campaign people.
And that it in fact, as I try to argue very forcefully at the end of my article, it legitimizes a completely illegitimate political idea that there is such a thing as an unwitting agent of a foreign country, as an unwitting collaborator with a foreign country.
And that idea, I argue very strongly, is traceable very easily back to the at the former CIA Director John O. Brennan, who was in fact the one who was pushing hardest for the investigation in 2016.
Morrell, too, right.
The acting CIA director, Michael Morrell, wrote a thing for, I think, The Post, but it could have been The Times saying using that exact same phrase as well, that Trump and this was before the election.
Morrell bought into it, but it was Brennan who was actually apparently not just using that after the fact when he testified in 2017, but but also believed in it and was using it as the as the reason for arguing that they needed to carry out an investigation of Carter Page.
And other members of the or other people associated with the Trump campaign.
And just to clarify what you're getting at here is you're saying that this is about as reasonable as when Jonah Goldberg says that if you're against invading Iraq, then you're objectively pro-Saddam or some kind of just rhetorical nonsense rather than any kind of legal standard.
Anything that should be taken seriously in terms of the role of the Department of Justice here.
It's not only not a legal standard.
It's not a legitimate political notion.
It's illegitimate.
It's a it's an idea that I show goes back to at least as far as far back as the House Un-American Activity Committee of the 1940s and 50s, which used that idea to go after people, not just people who were in the Communist Party, but anybody who took positions that were parallel to people in the Communist Party.
Or those that were parallel of the Communist Party.
In other words, if you were for racial justice in the 1950s or the 1940s, then and you palled around with people who had some, you know, contact with or involvement with the Communist Party, that was good enough to consider you to be an unwitting or witting collaborator or someone who was part of the communist conspiracy.
So that is the pedigree of this idea that is now being given legitimacy in the current iteration of this Russia hysteria business.
Sorry, hold on just one second.
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All right.
So now get into some details here about these bureaucrats and the different things that they did and said.
You have Baker here and you have Strzok and Page, the FBI agents and this and that.
So tell me a story about all that.
Oh, Andy McCabe, of course.
Yeah, McCabe is, of course, the key figure in this because he was the FBI director at that point.
And when when the firing of I'm sorry, it wasn't FBI director.
He was deputy director is what I meant to say.
And when Comey was fired, he then became acting FBI director.
And that was, of course, the opportunity that struck.
And Lisa Page, his girlfriend, who he was, of course, now very infamously involved in texting one another and thus giving us valuable insights into their thinking.
These these were this was the the the opportunity that those people saw to advance this idea that they had been talking about for some time.
We don't know exactly how long, but clearly, according to at least one text that was sent by Strzok to Page.
You know, he was saying as soon as the the firing of Comey took place, he was saying, we must now move on this investigation that we've been talking about for a while.
We must do it while we can make sure that McCabe, he said Andy, while Andy is still in position of of of acting director, because, of course, they were afraid that the Justice Department would would basically find somebody else to replace Comey, who would not be so eager to carry out this idea of an investigation of Trump.
And so so that is the first very interesting insight that we get about the discussions that are reported in The New York Times and in CNN.
And then another important insight that we we get from these stories and from other sources on which they're based is that McCabe, when he testified not publicly before the combined House committees in 2017, he gave his own personal account of what these discussions were about.
And it's clear, you know, if you stop and think about it, that what he did there was to to put a gloss to give a gloss on these discussions, which is not particularly reliable.
It's an effort to make it look as reasonable as possible.
And so what he did was to say, well, we began with the premise that that it was possible, it was theoretically possible that Trump might be a Russian agent.
And he did not explain that observation or that thought.
But, you know, The New York Times helpfully suggested that it had to be because these people were upset about Trump's policies or various aspects of Trump's policy toward Russia during his first months in office.
For example, very specifically, The Times reported that or recalled that Trump had intervened in the Republican convention to change the specific plank that had to do with Ukraine so that it did not support the United States arming the the rebels in Ukraine or arming Russia.
I should say arming the Ukrainian government, not the rebels, because that was reversed when the coup took place.
And so they were suggesting, of course, that Trump was taking the Soviet interest there.
He was supporting the Soviet interest by not wanting to arm the people who were fighting Russians or the Russian proxies there in Ukraine.
But, of course, what The Times and McCabe would have avoided giving away is the reality that all kinds of foreign policy experts were very much opposed to the United States arming the forces in Ukraine.
Because it would simply accelerate and worsen the process of escalation in that country.
And the Russians, as I think most experts on the Ukraine and that whole conflict have agreed, had the because of their geographical position could could outbid the United States in whatever the United States would do in that situation.
So this is just to underline the essentially unreasonable argument that was being made about that Trump policy decision or his move with regard to the Republican convention.
So that's just one example of the kinds of things that The Times was complaining about in its coverage and suggesting that this was what McCabe was referring to when he talked about the premise that Trump theoretically could be an agent of a foreign government.
And then McCabe turns around in his testimony and says, but on the other hand, we also considered the possibility that Trump is completely innocent and that there's absolutely no evidence that he did anything or had any ideas that would cause one to suspect that he is an agent of a foreign government.
So that's the way it was set up, according to these leaks of McCabe testimony.
And from my point of view, one can reach a very reasonable conclusion here that the sum total of that testimony indicates that they had no evidence, whatever, on which to base a decision to launch an investigation of Trump as a suspected agent of a foreign government.
That was simply not a legitimate decision, and it was therefore a political decision that reflected political interests in the part of that small group of five or six FBI officials.
And then now, Gareth, there's a quote in here.
I think it's in your piece, too.
I think that's where I got this, where they say that, listen, essentially, we're doing this because we need to rein him in.
This is the FBI knowing what's best for all of us by putting the, at this point, already sworn in, not just the president elect or presidential candidate, but the sworn in president of the United States.
We're going to rein him in by starting this investigation that, as you're showing, they virtually couldn't possibly have believed in and that they even admitted was virtually nothing but a hypothesis.
And that's when they're trying to spin it their way.
Right.
Now, so this is, in a way, sort of my punchline of this piece, the climactic line of the piece, if you will.
And you're right that this was, in fact, the idea that they were reining in Trump was reported by CNN, not contemporaneously with these two pieces, The New York Times and the CNN coverage of the secret testimony by McCabe.
But last December is when the CNN wrote a story that quoted, of course, an unnamed source as saying that there was a feeling at the time, attributing this to the group that was meeting in May of 2017, that this was a president who needed to be reined in.
Now, that's a very revealing quote, of course, and it was not explained, it was not elaborated on in the piece.
But again, one can make a very reasonable assessment here of the real meaning of that quote, that this group, particularly McCabe, who, by the way, your readers may be aware, just in the past, what, 24 hours or 36 hours, has given an interview with CBS News, if I remember correctly, in which he admits that he made this decision with the group of FBI people, with their support, to launch this investigation of Trump because he was afraid he was going to be fired.
And that, of course, is consistent with what I've been saying, that the group knew that he was acting, but it was probably not going to last very long.
They were probably going to name somebody else who would not necessarily be sympathetic to the idea of a national security investigation of a sitting president.
So you're saying, I mean, in essence, he's saying, well, I had to get this thing started.
But you're saying that really what he's saying is, even though I was short of a good reason to, a reasonable suspicion or whatever the exact threshold is, that's what he's really saying, you're saying, because he was in such a hurry, because he might be gone.
It does certainly shed additional light.
It basically reinforces the evidence from the New York Times and CNN pieces, based on his testimony, that they were hurrying to do this because they knew that somebody else who was likely to replace him would not be interested in doing this.
So they were taking advantage of an opportunity, in other words, is the real point.
But to come back to this punchline that this was a matter of reigning in a president, I suggest in my piece that these were people who, you know, they were a self-interested group of people who had a lot of power here over the president, or potentially would have a lot of power over the president, by launching an investigation.
And what does that do?
That means that they have leverage.
If they start a national security investigation of the president, that means that they have leverage over him.
That means that they can use this for a variety of purposes in bargaining with a sitting president of the United States.
That's real political power.
So that's my fundamental point about this whole episode.
Well, another part of this story, too, is that not just, you know, in the rhetoric of some dingbat Democrat in the House of Representatives or something, which there are plenty, but these guys say that they sat around talking about figuring out how to invoke the 25th Amendment to depose Donald Trump over this.
When the 25th Amendment doesn't say you can do a coup if you want or anything like that.
The 25th Amendment is about a president being incapacitated.
Something, I guess they should have been more specific, but at least the way they sold it was when Woodrow Wilson had a stroke and his wife took over, that that was illegitimate and outside the law and it shouldn't have been that way.
The power should have devolved then to someone else, something like that.
And here they're saying, oh, yeah, you know, and you hear this all the time now in a flippant way.
Yeah, we should just do the 25th Amendment, which just means cancel the election somehow, even though that's not what it says.
So but they were talking that way, too.
Well, you know, to be precise here and to recall a whole series of pieces that came out in 2018, there was a whole back and forth between McCabe and Rosenstein, who was then, of course, the deputy attorney general of the United States.
And, you know, McCabe was claiming that Rosenstein was the one who was pushing the idea of using the 25th Amendment.
Rosenstein has rejected that.
He's repeatedly said it's not true.
And they've been accusing one another essentially of lying.
So, I mean, that's that's another sub story of this larger picture of what was going on in the immediate aftermath of the firing of Comey.
This was a this was a period of enormous political intrigue and lots of activity rushing around with people scheming in various ways about what to do.
And we still don't know the truth.
And, you know, Lord knows if we'll ever know the truth about exactly what happened between Rosenstein and McCabe.
But let me ask you this.
Is it part of your position that they must have then agreed with you now about what a hoax this Steele dossier was?
OK, yeah.
Thank you for reminding me that that's that's another part of the story that that I wanted to talk about, because The Times actually claimed in their coverage that these this group of FBI agents or FBI officials, I should say, were aware of the fact that that Steele had all this damaging information about the Trump relationship with with the Russians, with the Russians having compromising material, kompromat on Trump and various other scandals that would be a very serious blow to the Trump administration if they were made public.
And, of course, I mean, in the first place, for The Times at this late date in January 2019 to suggest that the Steele dossier is like, you know, the gold standard of evidence against Trump and or or anybody associated with Trump is is absolutely scandalous in in in journalistic terms.
And it's simply not credible that this was, in fact, the case that that any of those people who were involved in those discussions were influenced by the by the Steele dossier, at least in terms of believing it.
Now, they may have been influenced by the notion that they could use it at that point for their purposes, but certainly not because they believed that it gave them the truth or some of the truth about the question of Trump's relationship with with the Russians.
And so so that is and what I do in my piece is to document the fact that the people in the FBI, McCabe, Strzok, Page, all three of them were well aware of the fact that there were serious questions about the credibility of the whole Steele dossier, because Bruce Orr, the senior Justice Department official who had been in touch with Steele, in fact, had had a meeting with him in September.
No, it was before September.
It was July or August of 2016, had passed on to the principals of this FBI group, had passed on to them his report about that meeting with Steele, in which he recalled to them that Steele had admitted that he was eager to make sure that Trump could not get elected, that he hated Trump.
And furthermore, that that he was what was the other thing he was he was saying?
Now it's slipped my mind.
There was one other revelation there.
But in any case, he he was admitting or not admitting he was he was reporting to them that they should not take the Steele dossier at face value.
That it was.
Oh, I'm sorry.
The other thing was that they should know that there was a connection, a direct connection there between what Steele was doing and the Democratic National Committee, because they were providing the funding for the for the company that was, in fact, carrying out the getting his his work done on a contract, getting Steele's work done on a contract.
So they were well aware of the serious questions surrounding Steele's dossier.
And I simply don't accept the idea that they were influenced by that in terms of their decision.
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Well, I mean, this whole story is just it's really reminds me of Iraq so much with, you know, the ratio, this huge ratio of a level of commitment to the narrative compared to the reality by the people who've bought into it.
It's just, well, it's really no different than Syria and Libya, too, where they just come up with these narratives about what must be done.
You know, I heard that Muammar Gaddafi is going to murder every last man, woman and child in the city of Benghazi if we don't get in there and stop him.
You're absolutely right, Scott, to to fundamentally question any report that credits the principals who are involved in creating this this scheme, if you will, of a justification for the scheme of carrying out a national security investigation of a sitting president to to question their bona fides, to question whether they really believe that.
And and with very, very rare exceptions, I think it is the case that every time you have an official justification, an official narrative, if you will, to justify a an action which is highly questionable, you can safely assume that the people behind that are using an argument which is instrumental rather than serious.
Right.
I think that's a general principle that it's safe to to use for virtually every case.
Well, and the level of ignorance and idiocy, too, you know, I got an anecdote from a friend who's a staffer for one of these congresspeople or something who told me about how after there was this very minor kind of a skirmish sort of a thing in the Kerch Strait there in the land between the Crimean Peninsula and the Russian mainland and that tiny little gulf there in these very shallow waters a few weeks back.
How there was, I think, an aide for a senator who had written up this language demanding a show of force that America, you know, sail its battleships in there and escalate this confrontation that how dare the Russians think they can get away with intimidating our Ukrainian ally like this and just way over the top with this.
And everyone in the room thought it was fine.
And I think he said, and this is no, I'm not trying to be ageist or sexist in any way or whatever.
Certainly the sex has nothing to do with it.
But this was like a 21 year old young staffer of a senator who thought that this was all great.
And then someone finally said, hey, do you know where the Kerch Strait is?
I mean, this is the kind of thing that, yeah, we're not doing this and we shouldn't, you know, but there's kind of that level of amateurishness goes into a lot of the thinking behind all this.
And we saw this certainly in Syria.
And, you know, it's just like in 1984 where George Orwell explains all this, where all that propaganda is for the party members, all the proles out there.
It doesn't matter if they believe it or not.
As long as they got beer and football, that's fine.
But it's the people who are members of the party who have to believe in it.
And so many of them do.
They just latch on to whatever the narrative is.
Like, for example, Assad is the most destructive force in Syria, not Abu Mohammed al-Jolani.
I'm an al-Zawahiri's loyal servant there, which is just crazy.
And in fact, treasonous, essentially, in the way that played out.
But go to Washington, D.C. and see if you can talk people out of that view.
Right.
I mean, they really commit themselves to this kind of crazy stuff.
Right.
It's because of the instrumental value of such arguments and such justifications for, in some cases, the inner circle of a government and in other cases, a much broader circle of political elites and their followers.
So, yeah, it always serves a political purpose.
And they vary from one case to another exactly how large the circle whose interest it serves.
I think you're right that the one in Syria serves a much broader constituency.
Well, and we don't have to rehearse the whole history here, but suffice it to say that it's America that's restarted the Cold War, expanding our military alliance far into Eastern Europe, right up to Russian borders and doing two coup d'etats in Ukraine in 10 years for one thing and a lot of these other aggressive policies.
That's not an apology for everything the Russians did, but it's to explain that the reality is everything, the worst things they've done, such as backing the Russian fighters in Eastern Ukraine or their air war in Syria, is only in response to the very worst American policies where we have no business whatsoever doing these things.
And so that really is the reality of it.
And by the way, I saw this Russian submarine movie that came out, Hunter Killer, where it's Tom Clancy type thing.
And it begins with the narration at the beginning, describes the Russians in the midst of the greatest military buildup in world history.
And this is what we must confront.
And I'm thinking, you know, that's the kind of thing that, you know, the introduction to a movie like that can have more sway with people's opinion about what's going on over there, especially for young people.
I mean, Garrett, to you, the fall of the wall was the other day.
No offense.
To me, it was still, I was old enough to understand it.
I was 14, 15 years old when all that stuff was going on.
But that's ancient history to a lot of people growing up, people in the military right now, who all they know is Russia, Russia, Russia, the dangerous enemy we must confront, we must defend from, with no, you know, no one to tell them this side of the story that, yeah, no, it was America that's really, you know, ramped this conflict up so much.
And then to talk them out of it now is almost impossible, you know?
You know, I agree that that the odds of making any headway against it are very, very great.
But I must say that the arguments, the arguments are all there.
The arguments are all there.
You know, the saying follow the money, which, of course, is very popular and very useful.
Well, when it comes to things like the new Cold War with Russia, my, my sort of watchword is follow the power, follow the balance of power.
And that's all you need to do to really understand this is look at the actual balance of military power between the United States and Russia.
Now, it's true that the Russians have new, you know, modern weapons.
But, you know, if you look at conventional, conventional military power, the Russians are a shadow of their former selves as the Soviets, right?
I mean, there's simply no comparison.
And that that has gone unnoticed in this whole brouhaha about the Russian threat.
And I'm going to I am going to write about this.
I will get around to it sometime soon.
But but this is really what we need to keep our eye on.
Two things about Andrew Coburn.
First of all, he wrote a book called The Threat in the early 80s about how even the Soviet Union was a paper tiger as far as their entire European force went.
They could have fought for about four or five days.
That would have been about it if there had been a real war.
They didn't have any gas or any real supply lines.
But he's also the same guy, a generation later, who had this great report about the day, I guess, or the day after whatever it was.
I think the day it came out, it broke in the news that the Russians had left their base at Sevastopol and had seized the Crimean Peninsula, that he had a source who told him about a party that he was at in Crystal City, where all these defense contractors have their offices and how they were just whooping it up.
This was the greatest day in their life since the fall of the wall, that finally, we can get this thing going and make it all Russia's fault.
And what fun.
And you can read all about that in Harper's Magazine.
That might be a footnote for your future research there, where they just outright were pouring the alcohol and let's have a ball.
Because now here's a way that we can pretend that we're on the defensive, essentially.
Yeah, that's the greatest story.
It's lovely.
Yeah, man.
So yeah, follow that balance of power and follow that money, too, for real.
Yeah.
So what do you think is going to happen when the Mueller report comes out?
And then it's just as flat as the Senate committee report.
I mean, I don't know what the Democrats are going to do, have some kind of nervous breakdown.
Here's what I think is going to happen.
I think that we can count on the Mueller report having, in more than one place, some new intelligence-based information about some GRU people doing something.
And that that will be somehow the centerpiece for the coverage in the New York Times of the Mueller report.
Now, you know, maybe I'm being exaggerating here.
Nah, that sounds about right.
You know, they'll indict somebody for some other non-crime.
But it's very difficult to believe that the New York Times and the Washington Post are not going to find something in the Mueller report that will merit their somehow avoiding having to admit the truth that it came up empty.
Well, and left-leaning comment sections everywhere.
I mean, it's just incredible to see the level of commitment to this narrative that Donald Trump is a traitor.
And you think of all of the horrible things about him and his policies that you and I could spend all day indicting him for.
In fact, we have, depending on specific issues, talking about the genocide in Yemen, for example, where this guy ought to be drawn up on crimes against humanity charges here, like Obama before him.
And just having Bolton on staff is enough right there.
OK, but we don't have to talk about that.
Yeah, I mean, but no, I mean, and the narrative, it's such a powerful kind of mind trick against liberals and leftists who, you know, essentially at least think they are, you know, born with this anti-establishment bent, right?
And promote change for the better for the most people and these kinds of liberal values.
And now they're rallying around the CIA and the central state, the FBI, to protect them from the elected president, who's not just from the conservative party, but who is a foreign alien traitor.
Sort of like he was born in Kenya and secretly works for Osama and has usurped John McCain's rightful throne, which you've got to admit, since Donald Trump was the leading promoter of that birther theory in this country, that nobody deserves this more than him, really, being called illegitimate in this way, in this false way.
But it's horribly ironic, but it's still not true.
And it implicates Russia in a way that Kenya was never threatened, you know?
And of course, you know, what you're saying precisely suggests that we've got to have a Democrat in the White House so we can get back to some sort of normal quote unquote politics where, you know, people who are supposed to be somehow, you know, for the underdog and dissent.
That won't work, right?
They'll just rally around all the crimes of the Democrat the way they did about Obama.
I'm joking, I'm joking.
Rallied in silence.
Yeah, you know, but it would be good to have somebody in the White House who would not be, you know, inviting Democrats to believe in the CIA and the NSA and the FBI.
It really is a funny turn of events to see it.
And yeah, I guess I'm anxious to see how this is going to play out, especially with the next election coming and all this stuff.
It's going to be fun.
I don't know if it's going to be fun.
It'll be interesting.
Let's put it that way.
All right.
Well, man, are you going to write about Afghanistan soon?
Please do.
There's so few people to interview about Afghanistan.
It's funny.
It's funny you should ask that because I decided that I must write something about negotiations on Afghanistan soon.
And so I have taken the first step toward that.
I don't know how long it's going to take me, though.
But I do.
I am thinking about that.
Absolutely.
Cool.
Because, yeah, there's some major doings afoot there.
I'm not exactly sure what's going on, but it seems like it could use the Porter treatment for sure.
Yeah.
I mean, I'm very concerned, as I'm sure you are, that there are now indications that once again, the national security state has managed to usurp the president's power and has essentially negated the decision that was announced earlier by Trump and his spokespeople that they will reduce the level of U.S. troops in Afghanistan by 50 percent.
Now they're saying, well, no, we're going to withdraw in conjunction with in collaboration with our NATO allies.
And that hasn't been the decision hasn't been made yet.
Well, you know.
Oh, I see.
You know, I saw that and I thought it just seemed so pointless that obviously the the European powers, they're not going to do a thing there without us.
They're leaving.
Even if we never consulted with them again, they would be leaving at the very least on the same day as the last of our forces withdrew from the country.
So what's to consult with?
That seemed like maybe just a fig leaf.
But you're saying, oh, no, it's a fig leaf for really staying for saying, well, no, this is a real process.
We have to go through and it's going to take longer to make an excuse.
It's a fig leaf for the power of the national security state, essentially for the for the Pentagon.
And in this case, I mean, it's the Pentagon and Central Command.
What I meant was like compared to faux respect for the Europeans.
It's not about that.
It's this is an excuse to stay.
Absolutely.
Yes.
Yes.
Man, I don't like that.
I don't like that either.
You know, it seems like this is the one and I don't know how credible this journalism is, but a few times it's been reported that Trump has really screamed at the generals and gotten so angry at them about this particular war.
You know, it's been a pet issue of his for years before he ever was the president that condemned Obama for for expanding it.
And then he supported Obama, who he hated against the generals when the generals tried to get Obama to extend the timeline of the surge.
And Obama stuck to it to our surprise.
Trump said, hey, the generals should back off the president's right to wind this thing up.
Now, that was back years and years ago.
And so apparently, for whatever reason, it's not that he cares about Afghans or, you know, Afghans or this.
I don't know why this particular war, other than it seems to him so particularly obviously hopeless to try to take the country over and pacify this population this way.
And also, actually, let me talk to you about this.
It seems like he must have told Khalilzad, we are leaving, pal.
And so you better work out something where we give up everything except one thing or something in order to find a way to shake hands with these guys and save the tiniest face on the way out because we're leaving anyway.
Otherwise, Khalilzad would be dragging his feet a hell of a lot worse than he is.
Instead, Khalilzad is essentially approving of the Taliban saying, yeah, they're going to leave.
There's like occasionally they go back and forth about whether to keep Bagram or not, which is a big deal.
But they've gone as far as saying that the Americans have agreed to leave altogether.
Well, I'm sure that you're right that Trump said something to Khalilzad indicating what he wanted.
I'm just making that up.
That's all my criminology type thing here, you know.
But I have to tell you that I think that there's absolutely a danger that the negotiations could be used as an adjunct to staying indefinitely.
You know, there's no doubt in my mind about that.
This is not a gimme by any means.
This is going to be very tough.
Well, you know, Mark Perry wrote an article about how you were right about Syria.
He didn't mention you, but he was saying the same thing as you only with much more direct sources saying that Trump told the generals in charge of Syria based in Iraq, they told him right to their faces that, OK, I want this thing done, that they told him we got ISIS down to the last couple villages here, boss.
And then he said to them, all right, and then we're out of here.
And they said, yes, sir, sir.
And that when you see an increase in troop numbers, not BS, that that only means, yeah, because those are the bureaucrats in the army in charge of packing things up and moving them out.
That's a different team than the guys who are already there and they need force protection and that kind of thing.
But that the schedule is on the withdrawal is on and that the generals weren't confused at all.
The president said a thing.
That's it.
They're done.
So that's pretty damn big.
Right.
Because again, a secretary Mattis resigned over this.
Right.
That's right.
This is a big deal.
He is facing him down on that one.
It's the one case where he has prevailed.
And the only question, again, just to remind people and you as well, that there is this question of all time, which as far as I know, has not been resolved yet.
This is the small base on a small on the Jordanian Iraqi Syrian border there.
Yeah, it's a it's a small base, but they've created this zone, a deconfliction zone, which they've treated as a zone where nobody can set foot unless the United States says you can.
And that's kind of a dangerous situation because it's used them to threaten to bomb pro state regime troops who moved into it.
Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
So it's a it's a potential serious problem, a hang up that needs to be resolved.
And I just don't know how that's how and when it's going to happen.
Yeah.
All right.
Well, man, it's too late.
I can't ask you about Iran.
But you think I don't think Trump wants to start a war with Iran, but man, he keeps doing things really bad on the Iran issue.
Garrett, are you just give me a short answer, optimistic, pessimistic on how bad this thing could get with them?
Well, I am optimistic on the United States not starting a normal sort of conventional war with Iran.
I'll tell you what I'm worried about.
And I'm going to write about this.
I'm worried about the U.S. sabotage of the Iranian missile program, which was covered in The New York Times the other day.
And I'm worried about the fact that Bolton has made a move as soon as he came into the White House on offensive use of cyber cyber technology by the United States, meaning planting malware in the Internet.
That's the infrastructure of a foreign country.
I'm afraid of the possibility that in this whole business of trying to sabotage the Iranian missile program, that we will get into offensive use of cyber against Iran and that the Iranians will retaliate.
That's what I'm afraid of.
And I'm going to write about that.
All right, cool.
Well, I'll let you go, man.
But thank you so much again for your time, Garrett.
You're great.
That's why we call you that.
Great.
Great to be on again, Scott.
Take care.
Appreciate it.
That's Garrett Porter the Great, everybody.
He's at Antiwar.com with this one.
It's reprinted from ConsortiumNews.com.
The real motive behind the FBI plan to investigate Trump as a Russian agent.
All right, y'all.
Thanks.
Find me at LibertarianInstitute.org, at ScottHorton.org, Antiwar.com, and Reddit.com slash Scott Horton Show.
Oh, yeah.
And read my book, Fool's Errand, Timed and the War in Afghanistan at FoolsErrand.us.
