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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 a fact.
He came, he saw us, he died.
We ain't killing their army, but we killing them.
We be on CNN like say our name, bitch, 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.
All right, you guys, introducing William Arkin, he's the author of the book's Top Secret America, that one's co-authored with Dana Priest and also American Coup.
And so now he's writing for NBC News, doing reporting for NBC News, and he's got this one, Russians target Texas Democratic Convention.
Welcome back to the show.
How are you doing, William?
Very glad to be here.
What can I do for you?
Well, so I saw this, I saw this post that you put up on Twitter and I was just heckling.
I'm not buying any of this Russia BS, but and it looks like when I just Googled it, you have a few stories here going back.
So I guess just overall, broadly speaking, can you tell us what's your take on the Russia deal?
And we can get into the specifics of your recent story here in a minute.
Well, since early 2016, I've been tracking the Russian government's operations vis-a-vis the United States and the American political debate.
There's no doubt in my mind that it is a broad based covert operation undertaken at the behest of the Russian government.
And there's no doubt in my mind that it utilizes both Russian government operatives as well as private individuals who are working on contract for the Russians.
So I think that a combination of my own investigations, our sources within the intelligence community, our investigations in Russia and our investigations of both the victims and the parties involved have led to an undeniable conclusion that the Russians have been engaged in a broad ranging covert operation.
Now, there may be pieces of that that you disagree with, or there may be elements of Russian accusations against the Russians that might not be valid.
And certainly we have found ourselves in a situation in 2018 in which the Russians are being seen as behind many things, and some of them are clearly not Russian actors.
And so, in a way, you could say, well, we are suffering from some state of hysteria.
But on the other hand, you could also say, well, the Russians have exactly achieved their goal, which is that we see the Russians behind activities that even they are not responsible for.
But I really can't see how in March 2018 that anyone who's really knowledgeable in the field of national security could come to a conclusion that Russia has not mounted a broad, large scale, clandestine and covert operation to influence the American political debate.
All right.
Well, so I hope that you can at least understand my point of view when I say that it feels exactly to me just like it was 15 years ago.
A whole lot of consensus and a whole lot of everybody knows and a whole lot of everything changed and a whole lot of are you really saying that you don't think Saddam Hussein has at least some mustard gas still in a warehouse somewhere and that he could give it to the Russians?
He could give it to terrorists?
And how much time are we going to give these inspectors anyway?
And all of this crap and all of the very best people, and I'm not implicating you because I don't know at all what your position was then, but every other reporter worth his salt knew that all of this stuff was at least basically right, with only the very, you know, minor exceptions.
And when people like Scott Ritter said, I'm not asking you, I'm telling you, this is not true.
People said, oh, yeah, you're a freak.
You're a kook.
Don't listen to him.
And they lied us into war and they ruined everything.
And none of it was true.
And Iraq couldn't possibly have been a threat to the United States of America.
None of the stuff that they were saying in their narrative about the danger of Saddam Hussein was true.
You're interviewing yourself or you're interviewing me.
So let's talk about Russia.
I'm trying to take us back.
And then we can.
Okay, well, you know what?
So in 2002, I was one of the few journalists writing as a columnist for the Los Angeles Times who questioned whether or not there was physically WMD in Iraq.
So I have a fairly good track record on this subject.
Well, and then, you know, every other reporter was wrong.
And part of the reason that that countervailing information was so influential was not because people in the news media were lying or necessarily because people in the news media even got their stories wrong.
It was that the U.S. intelligence community didn't know what it claimed to know.
It's a good point, because here's how it really worked in Iraq.
It wasn't that there was some grand conspiracy other than the grand conspiracy from inside Baghdad.
So when Hosni Mubarak and King Hussein of Jordan and other Arab leaders said to U.S. intelligence at the highest levels, Saddam Hussein has WMD.
Well, how do you know this?
Well, because he told me himself.
He told me himself he has WMD.
And so then becomes the process of, well, how do we verify whether or not that's true?
Because here's the leader of Iraq telling these Arab leaders secretly that he has WMD.
And so the U.S. intelligence community, and I think we know quite well, didn't do a very good job of verifying that and operated with a lot of echo chambers and a lot of groupthink, came to the conclusion that all of these sort of anomalies in Iraqi behavior equaled WMD.
But in the end, it was provoked by something that was tangible, which was that, as we now know, Saddam Hussein was lying to everyone in order to what he thought would be to protect the country from attack, that if they think we have WMD, it's going to protect us from ultimately being attacked because there will be fear that we will use WMD.
Now, let's try to take that case, the actual case, not the political case about what the Bush administration did or didn't do, and update it for Russia.
What we know is that Vladimir Putin, as the president of Russia, has essentially had a very poor relationship with Hillary Clinton ever since his election in 2012 was condemned by the U.S. government when Clinton was the secretary of state.
The legitimacy of him as the president, the legitimacy of him as the leader.
And after the invasion of Crimea, there became a highly accelerated process and program on the part of the Russians to try to mess with, to influence, to undermine Hillary Clinton and her political ambitions and campaign.
Because that was really what Putin was about.
He was about making the legitimacy of her as a candidate and her legitimacy harmed in the same way that he felt that Clinton had harmed him.
And we get to 2016 and all of a sudden this actor appears out of nowhere.
And in the course of 2016, in this broad-based campaign to harm Hillary Clinton, it shifts to maybe we can help Donald Trump.
Now, I'm not saying for a minute that there's anything that the Russians did that actually materially helped Donald Trump.
Donald Trump got elected and it surprised everyone and it was the result of a massive failure on the part of the way in which the Democratic Party ran its campaign.
It was the result of the death of discourse in America that comes with social media, et cetera.
Now, you can't on the one hand argue that Donald Trump somehow became president illegitimately, that is with the assistance of Russia, and yet at the same time say that a Russian program doesn't exist.
So we have to take that off the table.
So then comes the question, well, what did the Russians actually do?
And now we know some facts.
We know that the Russians hacked the emails of the DNC and provided that material directly or indirectly to WikiLeaks.
How do we know that?
And DCLeaks.
We know it because the intelligence community has concluded and I would guess that within the next four to six months we'll see an indictment of the actual individuals who have done it.
That's what Mueller is working on right now.
Well, but when they released their intelligence report about that, the NSA said they had moderate confidence in that.
OK, so let's be truthful here.
Each element of that unclassified intelligence statement, which was all of three or four pages, broke down the confidence levels of different pieces of it.
So you're misstating things.
What they said was that they had moderate confidence that the Russian government was behind the hack of the DNC.
They knew that Russian actors had been behind it, but they had only moderate confidence of the Russian government.
By February 2018, however, all of the heads of the intelligence community have said that subsequent information, which was developed after October 2017, when that report was first prepared, said that they now had confidence that it was in fact the Russian government, that the Russian government had provided command and support for those actors.
It's not really something to be argued about.
One could be arguing about whether or not— You're still telling me that—you're telling me this is something that they have said.
You're not telling me what the evidence is.
You're not telling me this is how we know.
You're telling me this is who we believe.
Well, OK, so there's two aspects of the evidence, and you can go to the stories that I've done on NBC News and see them.
One is the sources of information that are both signals intelligence and human agents who have provided that verification to the U.S. government, and the other is the cyber forensics itself.
So the cyber forensics itself determined that the material which eventually was released by two entities called Guccifer 2.0 and another one called DCLeaks.com—entities, by the way, that don't exist anymore, and they don't exist anymore because they were Russian fronts.
They disappeared because prior to the election, the U.S. intelligence community in a covert operation took them down.
That evidence all cumulatively points to Russian government involvement in the movement of that data.
Now, you can take—let's just take what Julian Assange himself has said, OK?
What Julian Assange himself has said is we don't know where the material came from.
We have a blind submission system.
So it's not like WikiLeaks is saying it didn't come from the Russian actors.
What he says is we don't know where it came from because the very nature of the submission system for people to leak information to us is protecting the identity of that person who's doing the leaking.
Hasn't he at other times said that he knew it was not the Russians?
He has claimed that he knew it wasn't the Russians, but I'm telling you that the forensic evidence is that they couldn't know because the way their submission system works, it is built around anonymity.
That's how you get people to leak things.
Julian Assange may have his own reasons for saying it wasn't the Russians, but the facts don't back him up.
The fact of the matter is that if you submit something to WikiLeaks, your identity is protected.
Well, but I talked to Craig Murray on this show, and he says that he met with the person who was the leaker in Washington, D.C., and he didn't say he received the leak himself.
I'm happy for him to say it.
I'm telling you the facts.
So you think because—is it the Cyrillic letters and the Iron Felix reference in the metadata that cinches the case here?
No, I don't think anything like that cinches the case.
I don't think there's one smoking gun.
As you well know, having done many shows and many investigations, there's no smoking gun.
In fact, I can put all sorts of diversionary and or confirmatory data in any electronic document that I want to hand to you.
It would be a very weak way of proving the case.
Well, that was the basis of the CrowdStrike conclusion that this has all been based on ever since last summer, right?
You know what, if you're going to sit here and cherry pick what you like as a source and ignore everything else, then you are very much doing exactly what you're accusing the CIA of doing in the WMD case in Iraq, which is just taking the evidence that suits your conclusion.
I'm interested in asking the question of whether or not overall we can come to the conclusion that the Russian government is behind all of these operations.
The Facebook and the trolls and the bots on Twitter, all of the operations of Guccifer 2 and DC leaks, the blind submission to WikiLeaks, the use of RT and Sputnik and other entities of the Russian government to influence the American political debate.
Overall, you have to conclude that there is a methodical campaign.
Now, we could argue about whether or not the U.S. government has dealt with it properly.
We could argue about whether the U.S. intelligence community is competent.
We could argue about whether it had any actual impact.
Those are all interesting arguments, but we shouldn't be arguing anymore about whether or not the earth moves around the sun.
All right, you guys, here's who supports this show.
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It's on Amazon.com and TheWarState.com.
Also, he gives great investment advice, if you have any money to invest, at WallStreetWindow.com.
WallStreetWindow.com for all the financial news and the great advice from Mike Swanson.
When you follow his advice, I know he recommends that you keep at least some of your savings in metals.
What you'll want to do then is go to Roberts and Roberts, Brokerage Inc.
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LibertyStickers.com, we've got a brand new website.
In fact, just don't even go to the current website.
Wait 15 minutes and then go.
We've got a brand new website going up there for LibertyStickers.com.
It'll be up sometime next week.
I finally got Illustrator again, so we're going to be getting some new stickers up there.
Lots of good anti-government propaganda for you there at LibertyStickers.com.
Listen, if you want a new website, a 2018 model website, you've got to keep up with the times.
For your business or whatever it is you're doing, what you do is go to expanddesigns.com slash Scott, and you'll save $500.
Really, but what you're doing is a lot of dot connecting without any real proof.
The Twitter and the Facebook and this and that is directed by— I would guess talking to you right now, Scott, that there's nothing that I'm going to say that constitutes proof in your mind.
But what I don't want to hear from you again— What you are saying, though, is the intelligence agencies tell us this.
This is the overall conclusion.
I'm not just a mouthpiece for the intelligence agencies.
I've spent a year and a half working on this subject.
Let's talk about your recent piece.
Talk about the Democrats.
You either have to listen to what I say or not.
If you don't think that what I'm saying is true, then you can say to your listeners, I don't agree with him.
But don't accuse me of connecting dots to come to some tentative conclusion.
If I thought that it was only tentative, I would have the integrity to tell you that it's only tentative.
But you're saying if you zoom out, you see this kind of overall broad picture of this broad campaign, but it's based on a bunch of actual details that are themselves unproven, right?
That the WikiLeaks necessarily came from Russia.
That the trolls were necessarily working for the government.
No, I didn't say they were necessarily unproven.
I said that they accumulate together.
Look, we don't doubt for a minute that the Internet Research Agency is funded by the Russian government to conduct certain work.
Do you disagree with that?
You know what?
There are a lot of different things, a lot of different accusations about Saddam Hussein.
No, we're not talking about accusations now.
We're talking about facts.
He's threatening America with weapons of mass destruction.
If you take the data points about his relationship with Osama, and you take the data points about the VX gas he still has, and you take the data points about his unmanned drones.
So you don't want to talk about the Russians, basically, is what you're saying.
I'm sorry?
You want to go back to Iraq because that's the only way that you can say that the Russians is not accurate by saying that something that happened more than a decade and a half ago.
Wasn't accurate.
No, I just one sentence before that.
I cited the Internet trolls.
I cited that the giving of the documents to Wikileaks.
Do you believe that the Internet Research Agency is an arm of the Russian government funded by the Russian government?
Well, you just said they've worked for the Russian government before.
Yes, an arm of the Russian government funded by the Russian government.
I'm confident in that statement.
Do you agree with it or not?
You're leaping to the conclusion.
Do you agree with it or not?
Let's just put on the table what the facts are that we can agree on.
Okay.
Have they worked for the Russian government before?
Sure.
Their exact relationship with the Russian government?
I don't think you know better than I do.
Well, I think I do know better than you do because I've read the documents.
I've interviewed the people.
I've done the reporting.
You're using that to stand in for the argument.
No, it's not a stand in.
It's just one fact.
Let's move on to the next fact.
Do you believe that Guccifer 2.0 and DC Leaks were manufactured to represent private entities when, in fact, they were the Russian intelligence services?
Do you believe it or not?
That's my question still.
Listen, what you're doing is you're pretending that you know.
You're leaping to the conclusion.
I'm not pretending anything, Scott.
I'm just trying to figure out what facts you're going to accept.
How come you won't let me finish a sentence then?
How come you won't let me finish a sentence, Bill?
I'm the person who's being interviewed, Scott.
You get to talk to yourself all day.
Yeah, I know.
I could do that, but I'm trying to ask you a question, okay?
How come it is that you're trying to just filibuster me instead of just answer the question about how you conclude that a bunch of Facebook ads, half of which were posted after the election anyway, were the Russian government doing rather than making money or any other thing?
The question is, was it a Russian government plot to put a bunch of Facebook ads on Facebook?
And I'm asking how you know that it was, and you go, well, you have to zoom out and see the big picture.
Okay, so the answer is, how do I know?
I know because I've interviewed people in the U.S. intelligence community and the Russian government and the social media space at those companies themselves, and their overall consensus is that many of the ads, many of the bots originated with it from Russia.
So we can say that.
Yeah, but Russia's a big country.
Let's just do it one step at a time.
Okay.
Okay, go ahead.
Originated in Russia.
Okay.
So then we have to ask the question, well, what's the motivation?
What are they doing?
And so here's what Vladimir Putin said to Megyn Kelly just a week ago in an interview.
He said, well, maybe they're just patriotic people doing their own thing.
And he said, we had no involvement with it whatsoever.
It's just patriotic Russians perhaps doing something that they thought that they were having fun with.
So I guess you could come to that conclusion if you wanted to.
Intrinsically, Putin is not saying they're not Russians.
He's merely denying Russian government direction and control and funding of those entities.
So now we can at least agree that they're Russian.
That the Russians are trying to interfere in the American political discourse.
So now comes the interesting question.
Who are they?
What are they trying to do?
Where does it come from?
Where is it funded by?
Those are really interesting questions, Scott.
And I would be the first and have been critical of the U.S. government for not providing enough information in order to substantiate the claims that they make.
I'm the first to criticize the U.S. government, especially the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security.
Which is trying to rev up the states to be more involved in and more aware of cyber security against Russian intervention in the elections.
And yet they can't convince the states of anything because they won't provide them any hard information.
Now you conclude from that that's because there is no hard information.
And what I conclude from that is there is hard information.
I've seen some of it myself as a reporter.
The problem is that the way the U.S. government works and particularly the way the Department of Homeland Security works in being so way over their heads.
Is that they just don't have the culture to put that information into the hands of the states.
It's a power struggle if you will.
They don't want to reveal that classified information.
And some of it is highly sensitive as to where it came from.
So we're in this conundrum because I'm critical of the U.S. government for not doing a good job in convincing the American public of Russian involvement.
And yet on the other hand it's clear even from the statements that Vladimir Putin himself has made that oh yes well maybe Russians did this stuff but it wasn't the Russian government.
I am not more predisposed to believing Vladimir Putin than I am to believing the FBI or the Department of Homeland Security.
Hey y'all next Saturday I'm giving a speech to the Libertarian Party of New Jersey State Convention.
And this is at the University Inn on the campus of Rutgers University in New Brunswick.
And so I'm not exactly sure what time I go on but it's in the afternoon of next Saturday March the 24th in New Brunswick New Jersey there at Rutgers University.
So check it all out at njlp.org.
Well listen I mean it's certainly an understandable narrative that it's a problem that they're crying wolf and making false accusations and making therefore undermining real and real important ones if that's true.
But you know there was this whole phenomenon of fake news that was originally blamed on Russia but then the New York Times and others tracked it down and it was some teenagers in Macedonia and Colorado.
And basically they were putting out these stories like the Pope endorses Trump and this kind of thing.
And but so I wonder some Macedonian teenagers can do that.
Why is it that whenever there's a dot r u address that we must see this as part of this broader Russian government plot.
But that's not what we said in our but that's not what we said in our article.
We said that the dot r u address of people trying to register for a county meeting in Travis County Texas was certainly flagged and anomalous.
And when the county official went to the government to ask what he should do about it he was told go to the FBI and the DHS.
And what did the DHS and the FBI say.
We can't tell you any information.
And so then you get into this situation where you have a county official at the lowest level in Texas trying to himself decide and adjudicate what do I do with these mischief makers these Russian operatives.
I don't know what they are.
And that's what we said in our article.
We don't know what they are.
We can tell you what people think but we don't know what they are.
Well I'm going off of what your tweet said because your tweet said that looks pretty convincing.
Maybe you should have read the article before you interviewed me.
I did I did I did read the article and you know the version I'm looking at here is a local news reprint that I don't know if it's the entire thing or not.
Well it's a pretty convincing article.
It's pretty convincing.
This seems to be the first case of Russian involvement in the 2018 midterm elections.
Who is the Russian.
We don't know.
What are they trying to achieve.
That's not quite clear.
But it's certainly worth a news article to say that in Travis County Texas in the middle of the country in a county party convention registration that 48 people showed up as trying to register for that convention that had anomalous addresses that resolved back to Russia and that 25 of those 48 addresses were mailed.
Are you email addresses.
It's certainly worth putting into the news media.
Scott isn't it.
Well I mean I guess and you end with the quote that look this could just be a troll messing with us too.
Yeah.
So it seems to me though Bill that if you're going from it could be a troll to it could be Russians to then it's probably the Russian government if it's Russians at all.
Seems to me to be a stretch.
Well our our intelligence sources said it was the Russian government but are at the same time we wanted to cover the possibility that it was merely mischief.
So we include both sources in our article.
We're not making an advocacy point one way or the other.
The event occurred.
Some intelligence sources said it looks like and talks like and quacks like the Russians and other people said you know what it could be mischief.
But even if it's mischief we should have the tools at the hands of the local officials and the Department of Homeland Security which has taken upon itself to be responsible for this should be telling us what it is.
Well that's what our article said.
That's that's absolutely a fair point that whatever is going on here the local officials in charge of running these elections need to have confidence that the police agencies are telling them what they need to know so that they can run these elections fairly.
And they don't.
No question about that.
And so if we can come up and if we can come up with a common conclusion here it's that we do know now and we have many cases.
There's one in Alabama.
There's one in North Carolina.
There's one in Tennessee where local officials are being faced with the situation of having to determine whether or not anomalous activity is to be attributed to the Russians.
And they're telling us we don't have the tools to do that.
Where is the Department of Homeland Security that keeps telling us that they're going to protect the critical infrastructure to tell us oh don't worry about it or worry about it.
And here's the final point Scott.
We are in 2018 and a poor woman running for state Senate in North Carolina near Raleigh sees that her Web site has been hijacked and she comes to the conclusion that the Russians have hijacked her Web site.
And it's probably wrong but the fact that she believes it tells us that we have a lot of work to do to understand what's going on in the American political system right now.
That's the sad part is that we do see Russians under every bed.
We are back to some 1950s paradigm which makes me extremely uncomfortable and we should be trying as hard as we can to separate fact from fiction.
But the U.S. government has failed to convey to the American public what it knows and we now have a situation where the midterm elections are well underway and local government officials and local party officials are finding themselves out in the cold with absolutely no assistance and no information to help them to gauge what external threats exist to the election system.
I think you and I could absolutely agree this is an unacceptable state of affairs.
Yeah no I absolutely agree with you about all of that.
Every bit of it.
And I guess we better stop there because I'm late and we're not fighting anymore.
So good to talk to you again Bill.
Thank you.
Thank you Scott.
All right you guys.
That's William Arkin.
He wrote American Coup, a really important book about the rise of the homeland security state in the 21st century here and Top Secret America with Dana Priest before that based off their series in the Washington Post which I hope you all read.
All right this one is at NBC.
Russians Target Texas Democratic Convention.
And so ScottHorton.org, YouTube, Twitter, foolserend.us for my book.
The audio book is out.
Get it.
NIwar.com, LibertarianInstitute.org and yeah Twitter.
Okay bye.
Hey y'all check it out.
The audio book has finally been released.
Just go to foolserend.us.
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The audio book of Fools Errand, Time to End the War in Afghanistan and yes it's read by me and I'm sorry it took so long.
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