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Okay.
So really the reason I do the show is so that I can interview Gareth Porter about the articles that he writes.
And the reason why is because, well, he's interested in all the same stuff as me.
And yet he's got the patience.
The brains to really go through and meticulously deconstruct the lies of the war party in this country as he so often does.
He wrote the book on the Iranian nuclear program, Manufactured Crisis, about how they never had a nuclear weapons program every time anyone ever said they did.
It was a lie.
Okay, good.
That's the book, Manufactured Crisis.
And here he is on Russia issues, how new cold warriors cornered Trump.
And really, it's not so much about Russia as it is about Washington, D.C.
Welcome back to the show, Gareth Porter.
How are you, sir?
Thank you very much, Scott.
I'm great.
Thanks for having me on.
Good.
Good.
Very happy to have you here.
And, you know, kind of sorry for always bugging you and taking up so much of your time.
But I really feel like people need to hear you explain the things that you write in a way.
And I like asking you follow up questions.
Well, you like to get into the details of my stories more than anyone else in the world.
So I appreciate it.
Thanks.
There you go.
Good.
So and yeah, on this story, it's all the details is the point here, not just to drive home the point that, yeah, they're lying.
Guess what, everybody?
They're lying.
But you really deconstruct, you know, basically a year's worth of narrative about you can elect Donald Trump.
He's a sock puppet of the Russkies.
Yeah, that's that is the storyline that we are being subjected to, definitely.
And it's quite an extraordinary campaign, which which I felt compelled, absolutely compelled to, as you put it, deconstruct in my piece for for Consortium News.
Well, the punch line, not from your article, but just overall, of course, is that this isn't working because even though the Soviet Union is gone, it's still, you know, Kremlin baiting is still more or less red baiting in effect.
And yet Donald Trump is a right wing nationalist, Mr. You know, wrap himself in the flag.
And he's literally a capitalist skyscraper tycoon from Manhattan.
How in the hell could he be a communist?
How in the hell could he be anything but loyal to the United States of America?
Now, obviously, his judgment is completely cracked.
No one's arguing that.
But the idea that he would be an agent of some foreign power, you know, manipulating the American people or any such thing along those lines, it's just not plausible, I don't think, to a regular American human.
They're just not buying.
I don't think people are buying.
I haven't seen all the latest polls or anything, but I just think it's so stupid.
They tried it all summer and then he won anyway.
What you're pointing to, again, is just the disconnect between the political elite viewpoint in this country, you know, both Republican and Democratic political party elites and media elites and the national security elite on one hand, and the rest of America, which is, you know, basically, I mean, we're talking about the Midwest and Far West, the part of America in between the coasts, which does, I believe, as you say, tend very strongly not to clue into that whole way of looking at things.
So I think you're right.
It's not going to work with the people who voted for Trump.
Of course, it works with the partisan opponents of Trump.
That's a no-brainer, but I think it will be a hard sell, and it's going to be interesting to see how this develops.
Yeah.
Well, I mean, the professional liberals and left have really disgraced themselves falling all over to accept and propagate this narrative, but I have to kind of give the benefit of the doubt to the average Democratic voter out there that they're not very impressed by this either.
They know that the Soviet Union is gone.
They don't want to be enemies with Russia.
If you tell them that Russia's doing really bad things and you should be scared, you could probably scare them a little bit, but do they want to live in a world where America stands up to the Russian bear like Ronald Reagan or whatever?
No, they didn't vote for Ronald Reagan, and they don't feel like that now.
They especially don't feel like that now, that we should have a cold war.
I think you may be underestimating the degree to which partisanship warps judgments on something like the threat from Russia.
I certainly see the Democrats falling in line all the way over to people who would be anti-war in the past and so forth, so I think that they're very successful in that regard, absolutely.
Well, yeah, certainly all the ones whose careers depend on it, but yeah, I guess.
I'm just kind of being hopeful about sort of the gut feeling of the average liberal is sort of not so instinctually warmongery, you know?
I mean, they'll love it when Obama does it, right?
But we are talking about sort of like Republicans don't really trust Obama to wage war on Syria.
Republican voters don't.
You know, liberals don't really trust Trump to do anything, right?
Even if he was like a Russia hawk, they wouldn't be like, yeah, Trump, stick it to Russia.
They'd be like, oh, wait a minute, and now I'm scared, you know?
Right.
But see, this gets also to this great divide within what was the Democratic Party between the Clinton wing of the party and the, what do they call themselves, the Sandor-Anistas?
Which are really, you know, I think there's a great exit from the party right now, so whether they're still in the party is very doubtful at this moment.
But I think that's the fault line on that side of the United States.
In any case, you know, this is a major issue which is going to play out for weeks and months to come.
And, you know, I'm just going to be very eager to see how this plays out.
All right.
Now, so, I mean, it already has played out over months and months, as we were saying at the beginning here.
And you know, part of the story was, and I don't want to go through necessarily, you know, bit by bit or anything like that, but just to kind of illustrate how complicated it was with, especially before the election in the summer, before the election, where CIA is really saying all this is true and FBI is saying it's not.
New York Times ran an article saying that, you know, the FBI really looked into this and they found nothing.
And well, and FBI was dissenting really on more than one of these episodes or, you know, the partial episodes of the entire string of leaks.
One is on the Trump contacts.
The other one is on Flynn and his contact specifically with the Russian ambassador.
So I think that that's really significant.
It appears very clear that the FBI is not really, you know, on the inside in pushing this line as CIA, NSA and DHS, along with Clapper, were seemingly eager to push this ahead.
Well, you know, I talked with William Binney.
I'm sure you're familiar with his line on this, and he's the architect of a great part of the National Security Agency's infrastructure to, you know, attack the world.
I mean, he's the guy.
And he basically said the fact that the NSA was only willing to sort of half ass sign off on this about, well, about the hack of the Democrats, of Podesta's emails and the DNC, and the fact that they were willing to say, well, you know, we think that it could be or whatever, is the exact same thing as really proving the negative.
If it was true, the NSA would know that it was true, and they would be on the forefront of this saying, you can rely on us.
We know it's true.
We're ones and zeros here.
We cracked the code.
And the fact that they're not signing off means that they have no evidence at all other than, geez, they don't want to make their CIA friends look bad.
And so, OK, exactly, exactly.
They went along as a matter of courtesy, it looks like, or something like that, with the January statement.
You're talking about January particularly, where, you know, this was really the key move here, the first major move in this kind of public campaign to put out the view, supposedly on behalf of the intelligence community, but not really, that the Russians not only hacked the DNC, not only turned the emails over to the WikiLeaks, but they intended to do so, or as they put it, aspired to do so in order to elect Trump.
And that's what the NSA really, in effect, dissented from, although it was, you know, in a very funny way saying, well, it's plausible, but nothing more than that.
Right.
Well, and I'll add, too, and there was a bit of a discrepancy, but now it's been solved.
And that is that Craig Murray, the whistleblowing former British ambassador to Uzbekistan, claimed on this show that he had met somebody at a park in D.C., not to get the information handed off directly to him then, but that this was the same person that the information had come from and that he has met this person, he knows who it is, and that it was not a hack, it was a leak from the inside.
And then the Daily Mail published a story, but they published it and said he received the leak himself in the park there that day.
So that's wrong.
Of course.
Yeah.
So I mentioned to Ray McGovern about that, and Ray said that Ray had talked to him since then and he and that Murray had denounced the Daily Mail story and stuck to the story, the version that he had told me and said that the Daily Mail had gotten it wrong.
He never said that he received it personally, but he knew who leaked it.
And you know, Giraldi said, hey, if you were the Russians, you'd use a cutout.
So Craig Murray might not know that this person was actually working for the Russians.
But then again, that's still just within the realm of possibility.
He seemed to really think that this was a Democrat who was pissed off.
I mean, he didn't say that exactly, but yeah.
Oh, and in fact, he implied very strongly in my interview of him that the Podesta leak came from the national security establishment, whereas the DNC leak came from within the DNC, but that both were leaks and neither were hacks.
Well, I have a little footnote to add to Craig Murray's story, and that is that when he was in Washington, D.C. last September, I met him for the first time.
And this was at Ray McGovern's Veterans Professionals for Veterans Intelligence Professionals for Sanity annual awards ceremony.
And so I chatted with him and invited him to have dinner with with me and some other friends afterwards.
And he said, no, no, I got to go meet somebody.
And of course, it was that it was that evening that he had that meeting.
So, you know, I believe I believe what Craig Murray is saying.
Absolutely.
Small world.
There you go.
Yes.
So, yeah, me too.
And, you know, the fact is, it's it's pretty clear.
And you know what?
I'm not Marcy Wheeler and I'm not able to track down every last fact and categorize it the way that she can.
So I just don't know everything in the world about this.
But it does seem to me that the the Russians, the Chinese, the Australians and, you know, the Chadians and anyone else are probably trying to hack the DNC and probably do hack the DNC.
And there's probably, you know, Hillary Clinton's 30,000 missing emails that Trump talked about are probably on the hard drives of intelligence agencies all over this planet.
No problem.
That doesn't necessarily show the causation in terms of who gave it to Julian Assange.
Right.
Right.
Absolutely.
Of course.
It could have come from a hundred different places.
It's it's absolutely unknown at this point, certainly unproven and essentially unknown.
And, you know, I think that has to be that that has to be considered as part of the way in which the the intelligence leadership under Obama has really taken us for a ride on this by by trying to force this narrative on on the public as though, you know, there cannot be any doubt.
And you must believe us.
Well, but you know what?
John Brennan's gone now.
So what's going on over there is Pompeo unable to control the CIA or this is all really true in the CIA is bravely leaking the truth over Pompeo's dead body.
Or what is going on here?
No, no.
I think these leaks, these leaks have been by by people who were in the Obama administration or who were holdovers, i.e.
Yates, Sally Yates.
But but who are now gone.
She's in the D.O.
J.
Right.
She was the acting attorney.
Right.
That's right.
Yeah.
Yeah.
But but I think basically, you know, the way it was worded in like for CNN, CNN stories specifically, you know, worded in such a way as to make it clear that it was official former officials and former and present officials.
But this was at a time when the the D.O.
J. people were still were still there.
I see.
I think I think these this were these were high level leaks, you know, either either personally by Brennan or somebody that he chose to have do it.
But, you know, I mean, I finger Brennan as the guy who started the whole thing and who had the biggest clearly had the biggest stake in keeping it moving and joined joined by others.
But but that that he was the one who was really pushing it the hardest.
Well, let's go back a minute to the 25 page assessment there.
Right.
Did you want to remark any more about, you know, just what was or wasn't in there?
I mean, because I think even The New York Times editorial board said, well, geez, kind of thin girl.
Well, I mean, it's certainly it's notable that they they didn't have proof, they didn't have evidence to cite there.
And even The New York Times, as you, I think, just suggested, took note of that.
They were surprised that there was so little or nothing, basically, by way of we kind of all were right.
I was expecting a little more in there, you know, not that I expected to be convinced by it necessarily.
But, geez, I didn't really have any expectations one way or another on that.
But look, I think that the most important piece on that, that whole episode of the 25 page memo is what they attach to it.
It's not so much the memo itself.
It's what they attach to it, which was this scabrous private intelligence company, 35 page memo, which, you know, is unvetted.
I mean, everyone agrees.
Nobody claims that there's anything but unvetted stories that he picked up from his contacts.
And these are stories that were gathered by somebody who's a former MI6 intelligence operative in the UK.
CIA people knew him.
And so some of them sort of suggested that, well, he must be OK.
But, you know, it's a very big difference.
Well, OK, there's some difference between working for an intelligence agency, you know, coming up with raw data, raw intelligence that then is sifted and, you know, at least in theory, subjected to, you know, some checking, fact checking, vetting and so forth.
And a guy who's working for the Hillary Clinton campaign to get dirt on Trump.
I mean, you know, this is such an obvious case of somebody who's got incentives to come up with dirt and is going to do so inevitably and therefore is going to have a set of stories that simply cannot be regarded as reliable.
And you know, the veterans, veteran intelligence operatives and analysts that I talk to, people with decades of experience in the intelligence community, were aghast that a clapper would allow that 35-page memo to be attached to the official, quote unquote, not intelligence community document, but a document representing the specific officials who we've been talking about.
I mean, this was unprofessional.
It was an abuse of power and clearly reflected a political agenda.
You just don't do that in the line of duty as the director of national intelligence without having a political motive for doing it.
That's my view.
And I think it's shared by people who are professionals in the intelligence business who don't have an axe to grind.
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Yeah.
Well, what was John McCain's role in that dossier?
He went and got it.
He was a courier or something, huh?
Well, I think that, you know, because of the nature of the dossier itself, being a private company, I mean, it was all over the city.
It was all over the world.
I mean, a lot of people had it, you know.
It was just it was like something that was passed around, like, you know, a dirty magazine from one hand to another.
And so, I mean, it's not surprising that McCain got a hold of it.
But he didn't play a key role.
I mean, I guess they say he marched it down to the FBI or whatever, but you're saying it was the CIA that was passing it around in the first place.
Well, no, I'm not saying it was only the CIA.
I think a number of a number of people had it and were passing it around.
So obviously the CIA got it, but they were not the only ones in town, by any means.
FBI, CIA.
Well, I mean, but that was the thing of it, right, was they told they were they did, as you were saying, they appended it to this other report, right?
Right.
They appended it, and it was passed then to all the senior officials of the Obama administration, plus what is it, the top 12 members of Congress, you know, all the leading committees of the members of Congress.
And they told CNN that, oh, yeah, no, well, we can't really vouch for what's in there, but we sure can vouch for the guy who wrote it.
He's a great spy.
Well, that was that was on unnamed sources, of course, saying that.
And what, you know, CIA, according to them.
But what Clapper said was we are making no statement about the reliability of this memo of anything in this memo.
And we did not make any decision based on any of the information in this memo.
But then but then he justifies attaching it on the basis that, well, we have an obligation, something to this effect.
We have an obligation to to give the White House the maximum amount of information available so that they can understand the situation or something to that effect.
I mean, that is that's just way beyond anything that that should be regarded as legitimate.
Mm hmm.
All right.
Now, so you mentioned this lady Yates at the Department of Justice here, and that goes to the story of, I guess, is it Lieutenant General Michael Flynn, who was the first national security adviser in the Trump administration and is already now gone, because, well, what was her role in all that?
Well, I mean, there are two two episodes, two sort of phases of the Michael Flynn part of this of this storyline.
The first part before we get to Sally Yates was when the first leak was was February.
Well, there was a there was a semi leak in January to David Ignatius, who very coyly, you know, asked the question.
He was told by a senior official and, you know, I believe that it was undoubtedly John Brennan that that, you know, Flynn did meet on December 29th with the Russian ambassador Sergei Kislyak.
I don't know if I'm pronouncing it right.
And the question is, did they discuss that or spoke on the phone?
This is on the phone, on the phone.
And and he did not say specifically that this was an intercepted conversation, but all you had to do is read between the lines and you could you know that that's exactly what happened.
And so he ends his his column with, you know, did he discuss sanctions and did he did he violate the spirit of the Logan Act?
So that created a minor press sensation and all kinds of stories were written, you know, saying there are these questions surrounding Michael Flynn's conversation.
So that that was going on throughout January and into February and then February 9th, the Washington Post comes out with a story saying that Flynn did indeed discuss sanctions with Kislyak and cited all these present and past sources, past officials.
And of course, that was when Sally Yates was still in the Justice Department.
At least she had been until the end of January.
So obviously, the Post had been working on the story for for many days.
So this was the key turning point, basically convicting Flynn of of violating the Logan Act, quote unquote, and illicit contact or illicit conversation with the Russians, suggesting that he had to have somehow conveyed a promise that the Trump administration would roll back the sanctions.
And so that that was the big storyline for it for the next few days.
Now, the truth is, as we learn from the details of of the stories then and later, that what actually happened was he did not discuss sanctions per se.
He discussed, at least in passing, the fact that the Obama administration had just expelled 35 Russian diplomats from the United States to punish them.
Now, you know, as far as I know, the expelling diplomats has never been considered to be sanctioned.
It's it's just a gesture of disapproval.
It's been done repeatedly, of course, both during the Cold War and since then, the George W. Bush administration did it.
Almost every administration has done it at one time or another.
And and in fact, what we learn from, again, the details of some of these stories, but but never, never headlined or anything like that, is that the FBI questioned Flynn and regarded him as having told the truth that he didn't discuss sanctions.
And the prosecutors and the Justice Department had no intention of trying to charge him with anything because they knew that he would have a case that he didn't discuss sanctions.
He just had made some comment about the the expulsion of the diplomats.
And basically, it turns out that what what Flynn said was, yeah, we know all about this.
Look, we're going to we'll be looking at everything.
We'll be reviewing everything when we get into what it was just a blanket statement of the obvious.
I mean, it's a matter of fact that they're going to review Russia policy.
And the claim to at least in the retelling on TV and that kind of thing is, oh, see, and Flynn's secret illegal Logan Act violating parallel negotiations with the Russians is the reason why Putin played it cool and invited the American ambassadors and their families to a Christmas party instead of kicking them out in response as though Putin couldn't couldn't have just made that PR stunt decision himself without this secret negotiation going on.
Yeah, that was that was a very amusing side part of the story.
And, you know, I'm sorry, I forget who I'm paraphrasing here, but I read a thing where clearly Trump did tell Flynn to do this.
It was some kind of long write up about this since he was fired.
I forgot the conversation where the conversation with the ambassador was clearly authorized by by Trump.
I mean, in a broad sense, I read they talked about how he has a long history of dealing with Russians when he was the head of the DIA.
He worked with them and had, you know, Russian bilateral relations, this and that.
So it made absolute sense that when Obama kicked these guys out, that Trump or Bannon or whoever told him, hey, why don't you call your Russian buddies and try to smooth this thing over a little bit?
There's nothing improper going on here.
After all, it is absolute like not just lame duck, but the very tail end of the lame duck bit of Obama's presidency here.
And and Trump was the elected the president elect at this point is all after the election, not before.
He's the president elect.
Flynn is his designated national security adviser.
I mean, I don't I don't know what the historical mores and taboos and crap are, but this doesn't seem like a big deal at all to me.
In fact, it does.
People cited Obama was making overtures to the Israelis and the Russians and whoever else.
I don't know the Russians, but all kinds of foreign countries before he was inaugurated.
Yeah, Scott, I totally agree.
I mean, this doesn't even come close to being improper in any sense, let alone illicit, you know, in terms of the contact between the future NSA and and the Russians.
And so it's really just an incredible blowing up of a nothing incident.
And OK, but so here's what I don't understand then.
Why didn't Flynn say I didn't lie to Pence?
You know what?
Bring up the transcript, dude.
Pence, I told you the truth.
You know, they want to say this.
They're just framing me, man.
And so don't fire me.
Why didn't he say that?
And why didn't Trump say, hey, man, you can't punk me.
You know, John Brennan, you're not going to tell me what to do.
Pompeo says this is just John Brennan trying to cause problems.
Well, it ain't going to work on me.
And yet he gave in and he fired Mike Flynn.
Why?
Well, I think this is more complicated.
A couple of things going on here.
One is that Mike Pence is not an insider the way Flynn is, the way the way, you know, Bannon and those people in the White House are.
He was chosen precisely because he was an orthodox, quote unquote, Republican.
He, you know, was acceptable to people in the Republican Party.
And he's not part of the inner circle.
And there was apparently some degree of differentiation between what was discussed in the White House, between Trump and his advisers and Flynn and what was told to to Pence.
Now, you know, I mean, we can't go beyond sort of the general statement there, but that appears to be at least one aspect of it.
Now, the other side of it was that, you know, it looks very much like Trump was saying to Flynn, look, you know, we're going to we're going to fight this thing.
And, you know, Flynn actually gave that interview to the Daily Caller the day he was fired.
And he said he was doing so at the encouragement of Trump.
But but they the Trump and his advisers made a last minute decision to give in to the pressure and sacrifice.
And, you know, I think part of this is that, you know, there's probably some tension between Flynn and some of the other people in the White House, some people who didn't like his style, didn't like him personally.
And in the end, some of that may have played into it.
And also, you know, it appears that for whatever reason of calculation, Trump felt that maybe he could cause this this uproar to subside if he let go of Flynn.
Of course, that was a mistake because they were really after him, not after Flynn.
Yeah.
Well, and, you know, for the record, I've read you.
So I know that Mike Flynn is a war criminal and this isn't about sticking up for him at all.
It's only about just what's going on out there in the Kremlin, I mean, the American Moscow.
We can both repeat the point that we've got we've got nothing good to say about Michael Flynn, you know, except that he was not guilty of what they accused him of in this case.
Right.
It's just like defendant Saddam or whoever they're targeting.
It's it's only a defense of the truth, not necessarily the target of the smear.
But anyway.
Precisely.
All right.
So now then we come back to Sally Yates and how she got to it, because the next leak in the string was February, February 12th.
And this is when this is the day before the Flynn Flynn's let go and really precipitated it when, you know, it was leaked that Sally Yates and after, you know, talking with Brennan and that whole crew decided that they really needed to let the White House know that Flynn had lied to Pence and that that really Pence really deserved to know the truth.
And more spectacularly, of course, the storyline was that they were concerned that Flynn had opened himself to blackmail by the Russians because he had not told the full story to Pence.
Now, that, of course, is a ludicrous story.
It should have been just made fun of by the media, but they lapped it up as though it were totally could not be questioned.
It's just a review real quick.
They're saying he would be blackmailed because the Russians would be able to reveal that.
No, he did say that.
Yeah.
We'll look at the sanctions when we get inaugurated in a few weeks.
Yeah.
And so then they would say to him, listen, you have to give us the nuclear codes, dude, because we could reveal the fact that you had mentioned to us that, yeah, we'll review the sanctions when we're inaugurated in a couple of weeks.
Right, right.
And then he would say, yes, master.
Unfortunately for that story, the FBI had already leaked the fact that after they interviewed Flynn, they decided that he was telling the truth about all this.
So, you know, I mean, it's just a non it was a non story.
It was it was a non starter from the beginning.
But it was the FBI's accusation.
Right.
It was this political appointee at the Department of Justice.
Right.
Right.
Exactly.
So so that was that was the most really the most laughable part of the whole the whole series of leaks.
But but it did, as I say, you know, up the ante and it became a political crisis for the Trump White House.
No question about that, because, I mean, he was just he couldn't do anything else except answer questions that were being raised by everybody in the news media about Flynn.
And so that whole day of February 13th was spent essentially going over what to do about it in the White House.
All right.
So then the next section here is the phony constant contacts story.
Right, right.
And this is the one that, of course, is is is the big one.
This is the one that has legs, which which is which means that it's a story that that everybody in the Democratic Party picks up and says, oh, well, we've got to have an investigation.
We have to have a special prosecutor.
We have to have a congressional investigation.
And so this makes makes sure that the story will go on for months and months into the future.
And that that is the big game that we now have.
In front of us.
But, you know, this this is a story that goes back to the period of when the the hack was supposedly going on, which was last spring, spring and early summer.
And the the sources of the leak to The New York Times, as well as to CNN, they both put out stories the same day on the 14th of February.
If I remember correctly, if I remember my dates correctly.
And so so they both reported that their sources, the usual sources, if you will, were telling them that the intelligence community had been going back over the evidence or going back over communications at the time of the hack to just see if, in fact, Trump associates or campaign staff were having illicit contacts with the Russians.
Now, the interesting thing, of course, about that is that they were openly saying that that and this is reported in the stories that the the intelligence community, the Obama administration suspected that the Trump campaign was, in fact, having illicit contacts with the Russians.
In other words, this whole thing was inspired by the Obama administration itself.
They apparently, according to that story, suggested to the intelligence community that they might want to check this out.
And they did that.
So so that gives another twist to the to the whole thing, which should have been the should have been part of the lead to the story that that, you know, that this was something that was done at the behest of an administration that, you know, obviously had a partisan interest in the in having this be done by the intelligence community.
So to make the long story short, I mean, those stories, if you read them carefully, what they should have said in the headline and in the lead was that intelligence community tried to find evidence that Trump had Trump associates had illicit contact with the Russians and found nothing.
Now, you know, they were doing they started doing this, obviously, months ago, and they've had plenty of time to check into the contacts that they checked on or that they they went back and and looked at the transcripts.
And if they didn't find it, if they hadn't found it by now, they're not going to find it.
I mean, that seems very clear.
So, again, it's a non story blown up, twisted into a different story, because if the if the press were honest and trying to, you know, to reflect the truth, as I say, it would have been a story about how a politically motivated investigation was launched and found nothing.
Instead, the story was, oh, there are questions surrounding these contacts.
And so we've got to keep investigating.
Right.
It's amazing.
It's just, you know, the thing is, too, is it's really destructive, even from the point of view of these Trump hating liberal media types, because the day is going to come, I mean, very soon when Trump is doing something really horrible and nobody just is going to take them seriously anymore.
You know, they're going to complain about Trump slaughtering little babies somewhere and people are going to be like, you know what, you media people do nothing but make up and gripe about a bunch of crap all the time and just completely tune it out.
He's going to round up all the alternative journalists in America and the rest of the American people be like, well, it must be a good thing then, you know.
Right.
I mean, again, you come back to the two Americas and the America that is inclined to believe that there's there's fire behind the smoke will continue to believe that regardless of what, you know, what happens in the future and the rest of America will turn off and won't believe any of it.
And so, in effect, I mean, nothing will change.
I mean, in terms of political attitudes.
Yeah, that's completely ridiculous.
All right.
So now I'm trying to think back.
Are there any claims?
Well, so instead of, you know, Trump is the mentoring candidate and all this crap.
I don't know if you saw where yesterday that you had a hot mic moment where he was overheard.
Raw story somehow thought this implicated him.
I'm not sure.
They blared the headline as though it helped to their case.
He was caught on a hot mic saying, oh, it's Russia crap.
I haven't called Russia in 10 years.
Right.
He was caught saying as somebody.
So the whole thing is a hoax here as far as, you know, him being even compromised by them.
It doesn't seem like to me.
On the other hand, though, Putin loves Trump and Putin has done everything in the whole wide world in his power to help Trump and to tear down Hillary and to let's see, I guess you already debunked the whole WikiLeaks thing there, Gareth.
But this was the part when they said big headline, huge headline, part of the Trump dossier confirmed.
Not the disgusting parts and not the corrupt parts, but the part about how one Russian was overheard on the phone telling another Russian that, yeah, I like Trump.
All right.
Or something like that.
Well, it wasn't even about the content.
God, God, it wasn't about the content of the call at all.
It wasn't even that.
Yeah, it was.
It was about the fact that two of the Russian people who were mentioned in the dossier did talk to one another.
That was it.
Did talk to one another.
That's it.
OK.
It wasn't even.
I'm sorry for embellishing the story the way I remembered it.
So.
But now, look, look, the reason Trump won is because everybody hates Hillary Clinton.
Bill hates Hillary Clinton.
He calls her the warden.
I got to check in with the warden.
We all hate Hillary Clinton.
And if you were Vladimir Putin, you would extra double super hate Hillary Clinton.
So why wouldn't you do everything to help Donald Trump there, Gareth Porter, disprove a negative right now?
Well, I can't disprove the negative, no.
I mean, there's no way to disprove the negative, obviously.
You know, the intelligence community people who put out that the 25 pager, which was really like a five pager in January, made the statement quite explicitly that that this was the key thing to their argument was that the the hack and the helping Trump were consistent with motive.
And what was the other thing?
Motive and a method of of the Russians, the motives and the methods of the rush that that was as much as they had.
That was the most telling point for me that they used that language because that meant that it was essentially an assumption.
That's all they had.
Right.
Yeah, that was the official DHS report from.
I'm sorry.
Help me out.
Which month that was.
That was no, no.
No, that was the January DHS thing.
Yeah, I mean, I'm talking about the January 5th combined CIA, DHS, NSA thing.
I'm confused then because wasn't there another statement that they had released previously that used that exact same language?
That was just the DHS report that was separate from the big one that had all the art crap in it.
Oh, yeah.
Yeah.
No, there was.
That was.
That was previous.
There was the stuff that DHS and NSA, wasn't it?
I think that's right.
Yeah.
DHS and NSA put out this long paper that had all of those details about how the grizzly step operated, the grizzly step paper.
I think that may be what you're thinking of.
Yeah.
But I think it had that same language at the beginning, though, that, well, it's consistent with Russian aspirations and motivations.
I'm sure you're right.
Motives and methods, or motives and methods.
Yeah, and consistent with, too.
I like that.
Right.
Consistent with.
Yeah, yeah.
It surprises me sometimes the degree to which they're honest about what liars they are.
Why not just outright lie and go, look, we have some evidence.
We just can't tell you what it is.
Instead, they concede that, actually, we're just kind of BSing you here and hoping you buy it.
Right.
Well, I mean, this is an interesting case study of this theme that we go back to over and over again.
You know, what do they really know?
What do they really understand?
Do they understand that they're lying?
And, you know, one has to believe that at some level, this series of leaks involves conscious, you know, sort of conscious lying.
Okay.
I mean, it's very difficult for me not to believe that because of the nature of the things that they put forward.
I mean, you know, just ludicrous things that they got away with.
It's true.
But, you know, I mean, the idea that they believed the story that they put forward about, you know, that Flynn would be liable or vulnerable to having the Russians do a blackmail job on him, that doesn't pass the laugh test.
So, you know, that's just an example of what we're talking about.
All right.
Now, one more thing here, as long as I'm keeping you away over time.
Did you see this thing in Politico from the 25th, the generals guarding American democracy?
And it's about how James Mattis.
Okay, so there's the three Marine Corps generals are the Secretary of Defense Mattis, who used to be the superior officer to the current chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Dunford and the Secretary of Homeland Security Kelly.
And right.
And how these guys and I guess probably now, including with McMaster, too.
But these three already, I guess they're saying Mattis and Kelly had a secret agreement that one of them would always remain in the country at all times.
And make sure because they were so concerned that Trump had kicked Dunford off the National Security Council and replaced him with Bannon, which I have to say, you know, I don't know if Dunford had just rubbed Trump the wrong way or if he even made that decision or what happened there.
But I have no idea.
I have no idea what that was about.
Well, it's really amazing to see, though, that just the entire take that thank God for the standing army to cool the passions of our civilian leadership.
Right.
Yeah, that is that's a nice trope by the by the media elite in this situation.
I agree.
Yeah.
The CIA and the military, both there, you know, are are wonderful Praetorians here to protect us from Caesar.
Right, right.
And this, this, of course, brings back memories of when the military actually did do that with Fox Fallon and and his friends in the in the joint staff and joint chiefs of staff in 2006, 2007.
Well, I'm with Trump.
It's half plausible, right?
I mean, if the issue is Russia, then we know that the problem is he wants to get along with Russia and they can't stand that.
And so we have a problem with that.
Right.
But on the other hand, as far as the terror war goes, he's as bad as could be.
I mean, I think he's already I mean, Mattis has a review on Afghanistan that's due here real soon.
And we're going to hear a call for who knows how many tens of thousands.
Well, Trump's going to give it to him.
I think we're going to have a hard time distinguishing between Obama and Trump on the terrorist terror war.
You know, I just think that they're both political, highly political presidents who are doing stuff on terrorism, which reflects the politics of the issue rather than the the reality of the issue.
And that means that they basically play into the hands of the war bureaucracies selling their products to the White House all the time.
And that's been a huge problem that will continue to be a problem.
I think that's why that's why we had that horrible raid in Yemen.
I don't think that Trump said, oh, I want you to do a raid in Yemen.
I think that the S.O.S. people went to him and said, we've got this great idea.
Why don't you let us do it?
Right.
Well, I I believe I could be wrong, but I'm pretty sure it was not some kind of scoop.
It was Mattis.
I think it was Mattis's people that let it be known that he had.
I don't think this was like Trump blaming it on them.
I think it was their side who told the media that, yeah, what we did was we told Trump that Obama wasn't bold enough to do something like this.
That sounds right to me.
That was how they made him do it.
Yeah.
So they're like, yeah, the Bay of Pigs blame it on us, not Jack Kennedy.
You know, they're like they're they're happy to brag about it.
And see, this is the mechanism that I want to write stories about every time I get a chance to tweet about and so forth, because this is the way the United States edges more and more towards war in each part of the world.
It's selling your selling your services to the White House and getting more and more work, more and more missions and creating more and more trouble and sort of a never ending cycle.
Yeah.
All right.
One last question, I guess.
Does it make sense to wait until Mattis makes his recommendation or wait another few days till Trump rolls over for him?
And then go ahead, write that into the book and publish or go ahead and publish the book now in anticipation of these horrible recommendations and decisions that are coming anyway.
I guess I got to wait till Trump orders the first increase, right?
At this point, I would wait.
Sure.
Yeah.
It's only a few weeks away now.
No, the other 300 million Americans have no idea the Afghan war is still going on or that we're about to see it quadrupled again.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So but it's about this is about to drop because what are they going to do?
Let the Taliban take over the entire south of the country?
No, we can't have that.
Of course.
Absolutely not.
Anyway, always great talking with you, Gareth.
You're the best, man.
Thanks so much, Scott.
Appreciate it.
I do, too.
All right.
So that's the great Gareth Porter.
He wrote the book on the Iranian nuclear program, the book.
It's called Manufactured Crisis, the truth behind the Iran nuclear scare.
And he writes a ton of great stuff deconstructing all of their lies about everything.
Ten years.
It's the 10 year anniversary of me interviewing Gareth about what they're lying about here on anti-war radio here on the Scott Horton show.
This one is called How New Cold Warriors Cornered Trump.
It's at Antiwar dot com.
It's at Libertarian Institute dot com.
And that makes me forget where it originally ran.
Ah, Consortium News dot com.
How New Cold Warriors Cornered Trump.
Thanks, guys.
I'm Scott Horton.
This is my show.
Scott Horton dot org.
Libertarian Institute dot org slash Scott Horton show and Twitter dot com slash Scott Horton show.
Thank you.
All right, y'all.
Scott Horton here.
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