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 us, he died.
We ain't killing they army, but we killing them.
We be on CNN like Say Our Name been saying, 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 the great Peter Van Buren, a former State Department employee turned whistleblower, author of We Meant Well and Hooper's War.
And wementwell.com is his website and he writes regularly for the American Conservative Magazine and we run them at antiwar.com, where today, in fact, his article Russiagate, It Was All a Lie, is the top news story and the spotlight.
Welcome back to the show.
How are you doing?
I'm doing very well.
And thank you for featuring me at antiwar.com.
Over the last three years, you guys have been a consistent voice of skepticism, of asking questions and that kind of thing stands out.
When democracy dies in the darkness, one of the things that needs to be remembered is the value of asking questions, of giving skeptics a chance to raise their points and to say, here are a set of facts, refute them.
Don't just shout me down or kick me off Twitter or tell me I'm a white supremacist and therefore not listenable to.
Instead, put my information in front of other smart people and tell them to agree or disagree and pick it apart if they can.
So congratulations to antiwar.com and you and the radio station for keeping a little, little bit of light on this Russiagate subject over years of darkness.
Well, I mean, our job is featuring you.
So that's how we do it.
And I'll go ahead and I did this on the last interview with Ray McGovern, but I want to make sure and do this as much as I can.
I'm sure there are people who I'm leaving out.
Anyone I'm leaving out, it's only because of holes in my brain.
It has nothing to do with any personal disrespect.
It's just me forgetting.
But the late great Robert Perry, the current editor of consortiumnews.com, Joe Lauria, Aaron Maté at The Nation, Glenn Greenwald at The Intercept, Max Blumenthal at the Grayzone Project, yourself, and of course, the great Gareth Porter writing for Truth Digged, Truth Out, Truth Everything, the American Conservative Magazine, antiwar.com.
And those are mostly focusing on the left wing critics or kind of left leaning critics, at least liberals and progressives and so forth, because it's obviously against interest.
Here are people who are just absolutely born to loathe everything about Donald Trump.
And as far as I can tell, I don't mean to speak for you, but certainly for the rest of these guys, absolutely can't stand him.
Ray McGovern was just telling me a minute ago that he thinks that bar none, Donald Trump is absolutely the worst president of his lifetime.
And yet, of course, Ray spent the last three years defending him from this lie, because in his way of looking at it, this is the unelected national security state attempting to first prevent Donald Trump from becoming president and then cover their own rears and also hem him in with this set of lies that they knew were lies, as you put it in your headline here.
And that has put all of these people on the side of the truth against those who were Trump's worst enemies, which is confusing to a lot of people, but the truth is the truth.
And I'm sure there are a lot of people on the right who I'm not giving credit to, but I just haven't read very much of them.
I know Andrew McCarthy at National Review was pretty good.
I'm happy to give you space here if you want to do some honorable mentions for those who have just absolutely refused to go along with this.
I think one that I'll call out, and again, if I'm leaving anybody off my list, again, it's just aging on my part.
But someone that I've paid a lot of attention to is Chuck Ross at Daily Caller.
And Chuck has been writing about the Hillary Clinton emails and national security long before the election was concluded.
And he has written all along some good stuff about Russiagate, has written some pieces on the Chris Steele dossier, which I know we're going to talk about here a little bit later.
So I'm from the right of center there.
Red State, they have good and bad days over there, and a lot of their writers appear to use pseudonyms.
But like I said, they have good and bad days, but I take a look at them often on this particular topic to just make sure that I'm not missing something that somebody else caught.
And so there's good stuff out there.
I think what underlies this list of names is that with maybe the exception of Glenn Greenwald, none of them have major platforms.
And it's so important to take advantage of the little corners of the internet where alternate thought is still allowed to publish so that you do read broadly and try to read if you can outside of your political beliefs.
Like I said, there's stuff at Red State that I don't agree with absolutely or don't support or even find intellectually solid.
But on, for example, the topic here of all things Russiagate, they've done some good stuff.
So don't be afraid to look around.
And if you see something that seems wrong, ask yourself, well, what's wrong here?
Why am I reacting to this this way?
Is it an emotional reaction?
That's bad.
Is it an intellectual reaction?
If so, which are the facts I'm looking at?
Which are the conclusions that are being presented?
Don't have facts behind them, for example.
And test yourself, push yourself, and things will be better for all of us under those circumstances.
Hey, here's a book for you high-tech businessmen out there, No Dev, No Ops, No IT by Hussain Badakh Chani.
And it's a great book.
It's essentially how a libertarian would run his tech company.
And I've read the whole thing.
It's really engaging, and I'm not much of a businessman.
But I sure liked it.
I think you really will, too.
No Dev, No Ops, No IT by Hussain Badakh Chani.
Check it out at Amazon.com.
Of course, and you know, the thing is, too, is it's about perspective and experience.
You know, you might be young and just not kind of know how these things work, but there are some very simple lessons of life.
Like the CIA.
These are the same guys who do the color-coded revolutions around the world.
And how it works is, when there's an election in a democracy, and they don't like the result, they just pay these people to refuse to accept the results of the election, and do everything they can to just push and push and protest and stay outside, and come up with whatever excuse they can to overthrow the elected leader.
If that doesn't work, at least they try to hem him in.
And so, you talk about meddling in your election.
The CIA is a foreign country.
The CIA is the enemy of the American people and the people of the world.
So, why would we accept their meddling in our election any more than from the Russians or anyone else?
At least the Russians were trying to keep Hillary out for us.
Let me move that into a larger context, because, you know, you can get into, oh, the CIA is good, the CIA is bad, all those kind of things.
Look, the CIA and any intelligence organization, whether it's the CIA, the FBI, the KGB, or whatever, you know, the Bolivians call their secret service, whatever, they lie.
That is part of what they do.
It's how they do their job.
It's a core skill for what they do.
And I say that neutrally.
I don't say it's good or bad.
I say it's what they do.
And so, those people, particularly on the left, shame on you, you knew better.
When John Brennan or Clapper or Comey or any of the deep state actors who have been such made into folk heroes over Russiagate by the left, their job is to manipulate information to lie in furtherance of their gains.
It's one of the most effective weapons and tools that they have.
And these men, particularly, I mean, Clapper was the one who said that all the satellite data backed up the idea that there were weapons of mass destruction all over Iraq, which was not true.
And he knew it was not true.
And then he's the same one who used the excuse that, oh, yeah, that's because Putin helped Saddam move it all to Syria at the time.
It's in the New York Times.
That's the same guy.
Everybody says he lied about NSA spying, which is true.
And it was perjury, a felony at the time when he did it in front of Congress.
But he also lied us into Iraq, too.
And John Brennan, well, he's the commander of the Jabhat al-Nusra front there in Syria under, you know, the Obama years from 2011 through 15, 16 there.
So why would we listen?
Oh, and Comey, he's the Comey and Mueller both, actually, were the guys who entrapped like 200 useful idiots into saying they loved Osama into the microphone so they could parade him on TV and pretend America was riddled with terrorist cells.
Well, they're trying to lie us and scare everybody's mom into supporting the next war in the Bush years.
I mean, these guys are real war criminals.
And this is why I say shame on the left for elevating them to folk hero status.
We knew better.
We absolutely knew better.
Recent history is full of examples like you've just cited of how these people have, in fact, done their job as intelligence operatives.
They skillfully lied to achieve their objectives.
We can agree or disagree on the objectives being, you know, the right things, the wrong things policy.
That's that's legitimate political thought.
But the point is, their job is to lie and to get a human piece of feces like Clapper or Comey or Hayden, luckily, has has withered away.
Good.
But, you know, put them on CNN to give them the statue of Javert on the march protecting democracy.
Shame, shame, shame on anyone who did any of that.
Someone who dislikes me sent me a link to the Saturday Night Live cast singing All I Want for Christmas is Mueller a couple of months ago.
Shame on all of us and shame on our media as well.
They did exactly the thing they said they were never going to do again after the Iraq war, which was not only fully accept the government's line on this and by government here, I'm talking about what we'll call it the deep state in that sense, you know, accepting fully what they've been spoonfed, not only that, but also amplifying it by by giving it credibility.
They did it again and they said they never were going to do it again.
And we should not trust them.
Yeah, seriously.
And especially when they're pointing at a foreign government.
It's so transparent.
America is the world empire.
The thing about the Russiagate is that, you know, Putin was just you know, they needed a villain, a foreign villain.
They need somebody, you know, who looked good on TV as a bad guy.
But this was, you know, 100 percent all American this time.
This was a coup, an attempted coup, I should say, against the elected president of the United States eventually, but against Trump as a candidate.
What's going to what should be done now in the United States is a form of reckoning.
I doubt it's going to happen in any realistic form, but we're optimists every once in a while.
Every other day we are optimists.
So there should be a reckoning because we talk about Russiagate as if it's something that always was.
And it's an actual thing.
You know, you can go out and look at it there.
It's in an office somewhere or something like a statue.
But in fact, the entire idea that the Trump campaign was deeply connected into the Russians, it was made up.
It was created out of nothingness by a guy named Christopher Steele.
And it was readily allowed to snowball by a collusion among our intelligence community, the media and the Democratic Party.
Didn't you mean to say a foreign intelligence officer named Christopher Steele?
Sorry, go ahead.
Yeah, I mean, we can we can have fun with the foreign side of it.
I mean, Christopher Steele was a retired MI6 operative, and he is a foreigner per se because he's from Britain.
But I think they just kind of picked him because he was he was able to operate outside of the edges of the American intelligence community.
It could have easily been one of our own ex-spooks, though, you know, they don't have the accent that is so compelling in these situations.
But the idea is, is that if you look at the genesis of all this, you go back to spring of 2016, Christopher Steele was hired by the Democrats to go to Russia and look for dirt on Donald Trump.
An appending question is whether the Democrats, how many other countries did the Democrats hire someone to go dig for dirt?
My guess is if the truthful truth would be known, they sent somebody, they hired someone in most of the places around the world where Trump does business to go dig for dirt.
He had a hotel in Panama.
Great.
Let's send somebody down there.
He must have paid somebody off to do that.
He had this operation here or there.
So my guess is there's a lot of Christopher Steele's out there digging for dirt.
But Steele is a professional.
He is an intelligence operative.
And one of the things that those guys are good at is what's known as an information operation, an info op.
And this is where you attempt to infiltrate information into your adversary's politics and media to further your goals.
And Christopher Steele went and he slapped together the so-called dossier.
And the media, of course, was just lovely in their willingness to cooperate.
They didn't call it a report.
They called it a dossier right from the beginning.
You got to love these guys.
And he slapped together a bunch of gossip and third-hand news.
And he threw in some salacious details like the pee tape that he knew were going to tickle everybody.
I remember the very first conversation I ever had about the Steele dossier.
And it was with a retired American ambassador who had read a library full of American CIA reporting over the course of his career.
And he was just giggling and laughing with me, pointing out the amateurness of what Steele had written and saying that it read almost like a parody of a proper CIA report, that someone had gone out of their way to say, here's what the Onion would do if they worked inside Langley or something.
And he was giggling us, giggling me all the way through it.
And I didn't really focus too much on it at the moment, but I've since gone back to that conversation and remembered many, many times.
So Christopher Steele goes out, he throws together this thing.
Now, I don't know if anybody out there in your listening audience has ever done any freelance work for someone, created something for a client.
And what do you do?
You please the client.
That's what you're there to do.
You're not there to alter the marketing strategy of brand X. You're there to make the client happy because they're the ones paying you.
And that's what Christopher Steele did.
He went out and pasted together internet chum and third-hand sources and stuff that he probably just made up one day when he was drunk.
And he threw in some sex with the pee tape and everything.
And he confirmed many people's cliches and biases about Donald Trump, that he was a crude guy.
He ran a criminal operation, yada, yada, yada.
And because Chris Steele's area of expertise was Russia, it was all set in Russia.
If Chris Steele had been a Hungarian expert, trust me, it would have been Hungary gate we would be talking about.
But nonetheless, he puts this all together.
And that's the first half of the job.
He gets the money for putting it together.
But that was just the beginning.
Because again, his job was not opposition research.
It was an information operation.
And so he comes back to the United States and he tries to infiltrate his made-up garbage into the American body politic through two routes.
One is the media and the other is the intel community.
He doesn't do very well in the media.
In the summer of 2016, he meets with 15 different journalists from all the big names, tries to get them to run these stories.
And he only gets one nibble from Michael Isikoff.
And I think it shows up first on like Yahoo News or something.
He gets a little nibble there.
It turns out to be kind of a useful one, but that's not the point.
The bigger point is he goes after the intelligence community through three routes.
One is a guy named Weiner in the State Department who was close to Victoria Nuland, who I know is a personal favorite of yours.
Aside to the audience, Scott has picked a poster of Victoria Nuland on his bedroom wall.
And Robert Kagan, too, for a Neo-Reaganite foreign policy is right here saved on my desktop.
That's right.
That's right.
Three-way to democracy, it says on there.
How to overthrow Ukraine and put Nazis in power by Victoria Nuland.
The truth finally comes out here.
But Steele infiltrates the document to the FBI through the State Department is one path.
The second path is through St. John McCain's office.
Steele sends his colleague, and this is all in my article, the details and links and everything.
So you don't need to wait for the fact check.
You can fact check it yourself because I provide links to all these things in the article at the American Conservative at antiwar.com.
He then sends Andrew Wood, a former UK ambassador, to bump into John McCain at an international conference and hand him the dossier and explain that this is explosive material.
McCain dutifully passes it through his office to the FBI.
And last but not least, the company that Steele is actually working for called Fusion GPS has hired two months before the dossier comes out, it hires Bruce Orr's wife.
Now, Bruce Orr is a Department of Justice official.
His wife had been a contractor for the CIA, a report writer kind of person.
They hire her two months before the dossier is being shopped around.
And she gives a copy to her husband, who takes it, who hand carries it to Andrew McCabe at the FBI.
You can't do better than that.
So all of a sudden, from three different, quote, reliable sources, this dossier hits the FBI.
And it doesn't just go to the mailroom, it goes to Andrew McCabe, Peter Straszek, and Lisa Page, three people inside the FBI who we know from their text messages to one another, are violently opposed to Donald Trump and are strong Hillary Clinton supporters.
They look at this document, and I'm sure they're smart enough people that, like my ex-ambassador friend, they giggled their way through it, like what an amateur effort.
But they didn't need it, anything but good enough for government work.
And two days after receiving the report, they open the investigation Crossfire Hurricane, which was the official investigation into Donald Trump being an intelligence asset of the Russian government.
They immediately dispatch FBI agents to London, who by accident run into the Australian ambassador, Ambassador Downer.
He, by chance, had run into George Papandopoulos, the low-level Trump guy.
And this, again, is wholly transparent.
The meeting between Downer and Papandopoulos was actually set up by an alleged Australian intelligence operative who was twigged to this thing by her boyfriend, who worked at the Israeli embassy as a political officer.
So you've got the Israeli secret service, the Australian secret service, arranging a meeting between Papandopoulos and Downer.
Downer himself is quite a guy.
One of his signature accomplishments was arranging a $25 million donation to the Clinton Foundation as a way of just making friends.
Nonetheless, the FBI now, quote, has corroboration because they've got the Australian ambassador reporting, they've got Steele's dossier, and that is enough to go for, to start shopping around for FISA warrants.
And that's what they really wanted.
They wanted enough of a cover, a very shadow of an accusation that they could take to the FISA court because they knew once they could put full eyes and ears on all these people, they'd find something.
And that's where it all started.
The FISA application on Carter Page.
Remember Carter Page?
Nobody does.
Yeah.
Well, it said in the dossier that he helped broker an oil deal.
And as a reward, he was going to get 19% ownership in the oil company.
Which is a really sweet deal, Peter, it sounds like.
James Risen, who God bless him, is a Pulitzer Prize award winner and was one of the few reporters at the New York Times who left, who came out of the war on terror with his honor intact, flushed it down the pooper, claiming that Carter Page was Exhibit A in proof of collusion about a year ago on The Intercept.
Sorry, Jim.
Love you, man.
But no, you're in the Colin Powell rehab school.
Nonetheless, they go to the FISA court for Carter Page.
They present the Steele dossier.
And then in a stroke of brilliance, they use Michael Eisenkopf's article as corroboration to the FISA judge of the dossier.
Now, Eisenkopf's article is based on the dossier, though we don't know, though the judge doesn't know that, because Eisenkopf wouldn't name his source.
So in fact, the FBI is getting the warrant based on the Steele dossier, which is essentially a work of fiction, corroborated by this news article, which is based on that work of fiction.
There you go.
They call that the one-two chain here.
Some kind of, I should make up something good to splice in right there.
It's a technical term for that, Scott.
If we were to rehabilitate you and send you down to the farm in Virginia to learn how to be an intelligence operative, this is a bad thing.
It's called cross-contamination.
And if you were in the CIA and you're being operated against by, say, the Russian FSB, and the Russians are trying to push disinformation to you, one of the tricks they're going to try to do is feed you the same information from what appear to be two sources.
So you think you're getting corroboration, when in fact, it's the same.
They're pushing you the same disinformation, but they're tricking you into thinking you've corroborated.
It's called cross-contamination.
It's one of the things that they teach, the CIA teaches its operatives.
The most famous example in our time, right, is Dick Cheney leaking a story, having Scooter Libby, his chief of staff, leak a story to Judith Miller in the New York Times about Saddam is seeking parts for atom bombs, her and Michael Gordon.
And then, but she doesn't cite Cheney's chief of staff.
She cites a former congressional staffer, which was true, but a lie.
And then Cheney goes on Meet the Press and says, well, it's right here in the New York Times.
And when I'm talking about these things, as you've quite pointed out this, I'm not like breaking news here.
This isn't like you, but you know, this is, this is one-on-one stuff.
This is stuff that they hope you knew before you got to class on the first day.
And it's a beginner's mistake, but the FBI, who I think are smarter than beginners, you know, I don't, I think they understood that the judge was easily fooled.
And like I said, all they needed was good enough for government work.
They just needed the judge to approve the FISA warrant and they take it from there.
And that's what happened.
We know that the Trump campaign was under electronic surveillance.
I do remember the media making fun of Donnie saying his wires were tapped.
He just didn't know the lingo.
His wires weren't tapped because you don't tap wires anymore.
You pull it out of the air.
They made fun of him for that.
But we know Michael Flynn was under electronic surveillance.
Jeff Sessions was under surveillance.
Carter Page, George Papandopoulos were all under electronic surveillance.
Trump himself was picked up quote, inadvertently in some of those, those taps.
And the next thing we now know is that the FBI, probably maybe the CIA, I think it was the FBI borrowed a CIA asset named Helper, Professor Helper at Cambridge University to infiltrate, to try to infiltrate the Trump campaign.
He, this guy has a history of intelligence work going back into the 1980s.
If you remember way, way back in the 1980s, some democratic foreign policy campaign documents were leaked to the GOP.
And Ronald Reagan in a moment of honor rejected those leaked documents and said, this isn't right.
He wasn't going to go into his debate with Jimmy Carter with inside information.
And he exposed it.
Well, it was Professor Helper who was behind that caper back in the 1980s.
And he's got a long history of, of connections there.
He's married into CIA royalty.
One of the, you know, the, the special families that have had CIA people for decades.
His source of funding is through a Pentagon think tank office that never publishes stuff.
Nonetheless, this is a guy who then went out and tried to, what a spy would call recruit Carter Page, George Papandopoulos, and Sam Clovis, who worked on the Trump campaign.
Clovis blew him off and laughed at him.
Page and, or Page and Papandopoulos, they're young guys.
They're not very smart.
They're not very experienced.
I think they enjoyed the flirtation.
For those who don't know how recruitment works, it's not like you see in the movies and it's almost never blackmail.
It is a seduction.
What do you want that I can give you in return for what I have?
And so, for example, with Papandopoulos, who imagined himself a man of the world, this guy Helper offered him $3,000 and an all expenses paid trip to London to write a so-called white paper on some bullshit topic.
It was just money and favors.
And he tried real hard and he pushed real hard on both of those guys to give him something about Hillary's email, something about the Russians.
And they couldn't give it to him because they didn't have it.
It didn't exist.
Nonetheless, if you go back, the media made quite a production out of all this.
And of course, every person with a Russian surname that any of these people bumped into became an associate of Putin, had ties to Russian intelligence.
And if they had more than 50 bucks in the bank, they were an oligarch as far as our media was concerned.
And so the FBI basically, going back to this Steele dossier, opened a full-on global intelligence op against the Trump campaign.
They ran an op against them.
And I don't want to pat myself on the back because it was not hard for anyone who has had any bumping into the way the intelligence community works.
And trust me, the way the intelligence community works was established roughly 5,000 years ago.
I'm sure the Greek spies operating against the Macedonians use the same techniques.
This was obvious.
It was like textbook stuff.
This is how they work.
This is what they do.
It's a professor.
It's a friend.
They even tried sending a woman out there, the so-called honeypot dangle.
After Page and Papadopoulos blew this professor off, they ran into his quote-unquote assistant in a bar in London, who spent a lot of time with them and bought them drinks and tried to get them to re-engage with the professor.
So it's textbook stuff.
It's not hard to figure out.
Anyone who's read a bunch of books can see it.
And if you've ever had any exposure to how this operate works in real life, it was pretty damn obvious what was going on.
The FBI was trying to entrap someone in the Trump campaign.
And they failed to do that.
The one question dangling from the Mueller report, and among the things that I would be very interested in, the thing I'm going to look for first if and when I ever get to see the full Mueller report, is how early in the two-plus years of investigating did Mueller basically understand there was no collusion?
That's the whole thing of it, right?
People are saying, oh, now you say he's honorable, now that he's found not guilty, but all this time you were saying how unfair the whole thing was.
But wasn't it just the fact that it lasted two years?
As you constantly were saying, hey, the people need to know if the president is a traitor or not.
Hurry the hell up, one way or the other, right now.
We would like to know that.
Because, I mean, obviously Mueller didn't come to that conclusion last week.
And so did he finally decide three weeks ago?
No, no, no.
It was a long time ago.
And you know what?
This is, Andrew McCarthy at the National Review has a piece here where he talks about how when you're prosecuting people who are part of a conspiracy, and you go after the lower-down guys first to flip them and all that, you prosecute them for that conspiracy.
And you make them name names and turn over and do this and that and whatever.
And instead, we had the exact opposite M.O. on each and every one of these prosecutions, which was to prosecute them not at all for any conspiracy because there wasn't one.
So instead, it was all, oh, you cheated on your taxes, and oh, you laundered some money, or oh, you passed something to a guy with a Russian-sounding name who turns out worked for John McCain's National Republican Institute all this time.
But anyway, it's probably a link to he was near the GRU one time when he was a kid or something I heard.
This is it.
I mean, he's an oligarch.
But what I would love to see is whenever we see this whole report is really if we grant Mueller the benefit of the doubt that he was an honest operator on this question, at what point did he come to the conclusion that there was no collusion?
I'd really like to parse that out.
And I especially love someday in a magical world to know how quickly that evolved in his mind.
In other words, three months in, did he have a pretty good idea there was no collusion?
Was there a turning point where he made up his mind?
You know, those kind of things.
Garantee it was early on like that.
You know, we learned from the Woodward book, and I don't think anybody ever talked about this before the Woodward book, where his lawyer, Dowd, who's no longer there but was at one point Trump's lawyer here, how at the very beginning, very, very beginning of the appointment of Mueller and the special investigation, he said to Trump, hey man, did you do this?
And Trump said, hell no, I didn't.
And he said, okay, then you don't mind if I turn over every scrap of paper from the campaign and everything we got to these guys right up front just to set it straight that we're cooperating in every way because we have nothing to hide.
And Trump said, you do that.
And he did.
He gave everything to Mueller.
And he struck a deal with Mueller's assistant that said, listen, man, between you and me, this is everything and you know it.
And we're working with you as long as you guys are honest with us and deal with us.
And that was, I mean, that's it.
The whole thing was blown right there.
And the Mueller team had to have known that from the beginning, that they weren't even trying to hide anything because they had nothing to hide.
And that's another piece of speculative evidence that supports that is the electronic surveillance.
We know that a number of Trump people were under full on surveillance from at least the summer of 2016.
That's what we know publicly.
It may have been earlier, but at least from summer 16 forward, we know.
We also know that the NSA has an extraordinary collection capability and extraordinary storage capability, which means that once they, and again, we're assuming good intentions all around here, once they get permission in summer 16 to start surveilling, say Carter Page, they have the ability to go backwards.
They have the ability to go through their storage and say, well, what was he saying before this?
What did he say then?
And I think early on, it was obvious that there just wasn't anything there.
And that Mueller did not incrementally tell us that I think is also very shameful.
You know, he decided to wait to issue his report and say one thing, and that's that.
And you know what?
I mean, that is the strongest indication that first of all, you're right about the origins of this thing was the CIA and their overseas associates and FBI associates, you know, coming up with this as a push.
But also that, I'm sorry?
I might just, just supposition is that it was FBI, that the CIA loaned these assets over.
That's just kind of pulling it out of my butt, but I'm pretty sure I'm right.
Go ahead and stipulate, especially if you want to be more specific rather than overly broad, that's fine with me.
But the point is, is that what you're just talking about there is, I think the biggest indication that Mueller was in on it too.
This whole thing was a sham, that they knew that they couldn't really overthrow him because they had nothing.
But the whole game was just keeping it going as long as they could and hurt him as much as they could.
As they said to CNN, to hem him in, to prevent even the possibility that he would go ahead and become friends with Putin and get along with Putin.
And in a productive way, say for example, in Syria or Ukraine or NATO expansion or anything like that.
Yeah.
And as long as we're having a little speculative fun here, I want to talk, Mueller is an interesting guy.
He is because, and again, I'm just crawling into Mueller's head with absolutely nothing but a couple of Red Bulls to justify this.
But Mueller's an interesting guy.
He owes his allegiance in a lot of different directions.
He certainly owes his allegiance to the broader deep state.
And that is the part of him that dragged this thing out.
That's the part of him that threw in some ambiguous language.
And I'm sure when we get the full report, there's going to be some more fuzzy wordings here and there that people will jump all, conspiracy theorists will be chewing on until Oliver Stone's grandson makes the movie.
And Mueller had his obligation to the deep state and he was probably under a lot of pressure from his old buddies on this report.
And that's that.
But Mueller also loved the FBI.
This was his thing.
This was his whole life.
And I think that one of the reasons, we all know the old joke, right?
A good prosecutor can indict a ham sandwich.
There's always enough to make more smoke than is necessary.
You can always make, not really make something up, but blow something up.
And Mueller did not do that.
He could have.
And I think, I'm just guessing here, but I think when he went through this and he realized how slimy the FBI's role in this was and how shameful the FBI's role was and how, what this is going to do to the FBI's reputation.
I think that loyalty caused him to back away from his loyalties to the deep state.
He easily could have said the hell with it.
I recommend obstruction.
You guys work it out.
Mueller out and walked away from it, but he didn't.
And I think that was because he was, I don't know, embarrassed, ashamed, whatever word you want to pick, about the conduct of the FBI in this.
He was wary that more of the FBI's sliminess is going to emerge over the next year or so.
We'll see if everyone, this could easily be a thing where the so-called deep state Republican and Democrat gets together and says, nah, we don't want to do that.
So we'll see.
But I think Mueller was probably shocked by how bad the FBI came off in this.
And he probably pulled back a little bit.
Again, just guessing, guessing, guessing.
But I do, if you have a moment, I just want to quickly deal with obstruction because the media in attempting to salvage its so-called reputation is jumping all over the idea of obstruction, that Trump is guilty of obstruction and that this is going to be the new battlefront.
Obstruction means you tried to stop an investigation from happening.
And one of the critical elements in it, and you only have to try, by the way, you don't have to succeed.
But one of the critical elements is obstruction requires intent.
What you did can't be by accident or in the belief that you weren't messing with the investigation or anything else like that.
You have to have intended to stop the investigation.
And you've got to prove intent to prove obstruction.
And Trump, who knew from the beginning what he didn't do, how can you claim he wanted to willfully stop an investigation that ultimately was going to show he did not work with the Russians?
Which was, I mean, that's the whole thing about this.
It was an investigation into him, not into a crime because there was no crime.
But Trump knew the truth.
Right.
Why would he, how can you show intent to stop a process that was going to prove you right?
There's no logic to it.
No jury could ever be convinced.
Lastly, there's also this theme that, well, Mueller had- Wait, wait, wait.
One more thing on the obstruction thing, or I'm not sure if you're still talking about the obstruction thing, but they're saying firing Comey is an obstruction, as though the president doesn't have the right to fire the director of the FBI.
And they pretend that when Trump says, oh, well, yeah, I fired him over the Russia thing, that that clearly meant his complete sellout and treason to Putin, when instead he was obviously talking about the way Mueller had tried to blackmail him with the bogus dossier, is what he meant by that.
That's what's going to come out, maybe not in the near term, maybe in the history, when the history of this is written years from now, is that Trump fired Comey because Comey was basically blackmailing Trump with the dossier.
And the same thing for Andrew McCabe and those other guys.
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I mean, to try to call that obstruction of justice is just as stupid as the rest of this.
It has no footing whatsoever.
It's just the media and the Democrats trying to keep the ball in the air a little bit longer.
The other thing that's coming up on the media side and the left is that, well, you can't indict a sitting president, so Mueller had to back off.
Well, the argument about indicting a sitting president has never been resolved, but Mueller didn't indict anybody.
He didn't indict any of the Trump kids.
He didn't indict Jared.
He didn't indict any of the secondary players.
Nobody got charged with collusion or conspiracy or perjury or anything connected with the big ones, the Moscow Hotel Project, the emails, the WikiLeaks, the secret meetings in Trump Tower with shady Russians.
No one got charged with that.
The hell with the idea that the president can't be indicted.
Don Jr. can be indicted.
Sam Clovis could be indicted.
People whose names we don't know who have played lower level roles in all these things were not indicted.
Michael Cohen wasn't indicted.
The Barr document, and I forget if this part is a direct quote of the Mueller document or not, it very well may be, says that that was not part of the consideration, that they decided that he and his assistant, Rosen Rosen, what's his name?
Rosenstein.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Rosenstein.
Sorry.
I always think of Fletch, where he's all Dr. Rosenbaum.
Him and Rosenstein, they decided that there was no obstruction and they specifically say the entire argument about whether an indictment could apply against a sitting president was not a consideration because they didn't even get that far.
There was nothing to indict on whoever it was, and that's very important.
The other thing is to keep in mind what Barr and Rosenstein actually did.
Mueller had the option in his report of recommending indictment.
He didn't.
He said there's insufficient evidence to indict, and then he said, I don't have, essentially what he said is I don't have the authority or the evidence to go any further, but there is insufficient evidence to indict.
And so when Barr and Rosenstein acted in their constitutional roles to take the next step, they were essentially confirming Mueller's decision not to indict.
What happened here was not Mueller saying we should indict him and then Barr overruling that.
Mueller didn't say indict.
He could have, but he didn't.
He said there's not enough evidence to indict.
In the American jurisprudence system, we don't issue certificates of exoneration.
That isn't how it works.
That was a pretty backhanded thing for him to do, really, was to add that, well, I'm also not exonerating him.
Well, you're not charging him with anything.
Yes, you are too exonerating him.
Or as you say, you know, essentially in the way our law works, as close as it gets to that, other than like a judge dismissing charges with prejudice or something like that.
Mueller had conflicting loyalties, as we said.
He probably was pissed off at Trump for some of the things Trump did.
He certainly wasn't pleased by it.
And so, you know, he took a little shot on the way out the door just to kind of stir the pot.
Those reports are, you know, are obviously written by more than one person.
Mueller himself didn't sit down and type it.
I'm going to guess there was a discussion around that and it was a compromise phrasing, throw a little meat to the other side.
But the bottom line is, if we accuse you, Scott, of stealing a car, you go to court and at the end of the process, if the prosecutor says, you know, we've looked at this again, we don't have enough evidence to prosecute Scott, we withdraw the case.
That happens.
They don't issue you a little gold star.
You just go home.
If the case goes all the way through, through a jury, they say, yes, innocent or guilty.
But if the case never goes that far, the government, the courts, the prosecutors don't issue certificates of exoneration.
And so- And even not guilty isn't innocent.
And they make sure everybody knows that too.
Exactly.
So the idea is, is that again, the media has created this false flag by saying, well, he's not exonerated.
And that proves that, you know, that that's important.
Well, I don't know.
I don't think so.
The other thing is this magic Southern District of New York thing that, you know, all this is going to be blasted at Trump the day he leaves office.
And there's, you know, a warehouse of sealed indictments somewhere here in New York City that's just sitting there waiting for Trump to finish his term.
And again, that never happens.
If Trump gets his second term, he wins in 2020, the statute of limitations blows most of this stuff away.
Anyway, if Trump loses in 2020, trust me, the first thing, the second thing, or the last thing the new Democratic president does is not prosecute his or her predecessor.
Okay.
It's all going to be about moving on, looking forward.
What did Obama say about torture?
We're going to have to look forward, not backward.
That's right.
So if Obama, if Obama let the entire Bush administration off for torturing human beings, trust me, President Elizabeth Warren is not going to prosecute Trump over Stormy Daniels.
Hey, let me ask you something, Peter.
Do you think that the Russians hacked the DNC and the Podesta stuff and gave that to WikiLeaks?
I have no way to intelligently answer that question.
How about, do you think there was a Russia influence up here at all?
Or the whole damn thing is just silly.
Okay.
So somebody hacked DNC.
And if it turned out to be someone with a Russian surname, you know, one of the things those guys do, our NSA, as well as everyone else, is you hide your tracks and you hide them really, really well.
And so if it was a Russian surnamed person, that doesn't necessarily mean they were hired by the FSB.
That's one part of this.
Second, I understand about the legalities and all, but at the end of the day, the fact that it was hacked is the fact that it was hacked.
That the information became public, regardless of who typed the code in, the fact that the information became public is what matters.
Go back to Chelsea Manning and WikiLeaks.
I mean, whether the Russians hacked the State Department cable database or Chelsea Manning handed it over at some point other than for Chelsea, you know, becomes irrelevant.
Shout out to Chelsea in solitary confinement today, by the way, for being in contempt of court for refusing to testify before a grand jury going after Assange and WikiLeaks right now.
That's a hell of a parentheses, but I'm sorry, please continue, sir.
And I don't want to make, not see that as significant.
But I mean, the idea would be that at some point, who did the hacking starts to become less and less relevant than the fact that the information became public.
And the fact that it originated, possibly originated with a foreign government.
Let me ask you this question.
So let's pretend that the British, who clearly favored Hillary Clinton in this election, let's pretend that GCHQ acquired information through hacking that Donald Trump did something wrong.
And they handed that to the Hillary campaign.
Are you telling me that we all would say that the Hillary campaign should not have used that information because it came from a foreign government?
Nah, I mean, I got a better example from the real world, where Victoria Nuland and Greg, was it Pyatt?
Anyway, the American, essentially ambassador to the EU and the ambassador to Ukraine, were caught on the phone plotting a coup in Ukraine in 2014.
And no one, I guess, knows for sure, but no one has ever disputed the obvious conclusion that it was the Russians who posted their intercepted conversation on YouTube for everybody to hear.
This is the famous F the EU thing.
And yet, I don't give a damn about that.
I want Robert Kagan's wife exposed for plotting a coup.
And I'm grateful to Vladimir Putin and his evil, murderous, autocratic, right wing Slavic spies of his for exposing the truth of that horrible coup d'etat that resulted in a massive war and the empowering of literal Hitler-loving Nazis and the rest of the catastrophe.
You know, the media are such, such babies about this.
You know, they use leaked information all the time, and they don't know the source of it.
I mean, we officially don't know who hacked the Panama Papers, for example.
But the media didn't bother to wait to see if it was a foreign government.
That's all just noise.
So, like I said, whether it was the FSB Dream Team, or a bunch of teenagers somewhere, or someone inside the DNC who got those emails out, at some point, it becomes largely irrelevant because the information is out.
And that's where we now begin our new version of reality.
And that's that.
So I don't I can't imagine in our lifetimes any source will emerge that the mass of us will consider reliable enough to actually answer that question conclusively.
And especially, especially given the incredible technical abilities of state-level actors to hide their identities and to plant false flags in their hacking operations to try to make it look like somebody else did it.
Given all that, plus the lack of credibility around this subject, I don't expect in my lifetime to ever have a real answer to that.
But I don't really think it matters.
Yeah, I mean, if 99% of the whole story was all just trumped up BS, you know, besides that, and of course, in the whole Steele dossier and all that, that's what matters anyway.
But so, and, and you know what, I want to throw this into that, that Jason Leopold, who really got busted for recently.
I'm sorry.
I'm so ashamed of Jason Leopold.
I know.
Cause I mean, he's a personal friend of mine.
I haven't talked to him in a little while, but I liked the guy and we were friends when I lived out in LA and he's an old friend of my wife's and stuff.
And he'd gotten in trouble before for some sloppy journalism.
And here, he said that Trump had told Cohen to lie and obstruct justice and all of this stuff.
And then that story fell apart.
But then here's the funny thing is that in the years 2015 and 16, his major occupation before smearing Trump with nonsense was suing the state department, forcing them to release Hillary Clinton's emails, as much of them as were available from the state department side of so many of those conversations and including Sidney Blumenthal warning her that the war that he encouraged her to start was on behalf of Libyan jihadists who were rounding up and executing blacks and that she needed to be aware of that and went on to, of course, support the war for many more months until the regime change was complete anyway, and leading to the entire ethnic cleansing of Tawerga and all of the rest of the nightmare of the Libyan war and all of that stuff.
And so, well, wait a minute, was he serving the American people in journalism or that's treason to the American people to tell us the truth about what's in Hillary Clinton's emails?
And how come whenever he did that and whenever Vladimir Putin or whoever else leaked these emails, Julian Assange and whoever gave them to him, whoever, Craig Murray met in the woods in D.C., who was the leaker, he says, and all of that, how come this didn't help Hillary Clinton win the election?
How come this didn't expose what a wonderful secretary of state she was and all the honor that she carried around in that pocketbook of hers next to her hot sauce and all of the rest of this?
How come it's just, it goes without saying, of course, that this would have been an operation to destroy her by telling us what she really thinks about things?
Jason Leopold would be one of my nominees for patient zero of the so-called Trump derangement syndrome, a good guy, a smart person who probably understood FOIA as well as any working journalist who just lost his mind over Trump and became a muckraker in the worst sense of that word and ended up peddling gossip.
And his reputation, like I said, he too will be in the Colin Powell rehab clinic along with a lot of other people who should have known better.
You sent me, I think, something from the New York Post.
It was a Mueller madness bracket that looks like a March madness bracket that showed all of the media people and deep state actors who have claimed Trump was colluding with Putin and trying to figure out which ones of them deserve the most shame at this point in time.
It's a long list of shameful actions.
If some of these people would come forward now and say, I did it because it was worth a lot of money to me, I would at least give them half a pass because, okay, greedy old dude.
So yeah, we all like money.
But I think a lot of these people, in fact, couldn't care what happened to the nation and did it for their own political gain and their own power gain.
And certainly Clapper and Comey et al fall into that.
And they really just knew they were telling untruths and they did it because they were going to get something more than money out of it, they felt.
And they truly deserve to suck in hell over that.
Hey, man, you know, I got a prediction for your future, bud, and mine too.
And Max Blumenthal's and Glenn Greenwald's.
In one month, six months, six years, and from now on for the rest of our lives, whenever we say anything about anything, people are going to say to us, yeah, right, you guys were the liars in the media who pushed this Russiagate stuff.
And we are going to have this hanging around our necks as an albatross for being anti-government, anti-Republican, anti-Trump, anti-right-wing on any particular thing.
And all the people who actually are guilty are all going to get away with it scot-free.
Well, here's my response.
I take your bet.
When you and I are in the labor camp together, if it turns out you were right, you get my bowl of gruel on Mondays.
Deal?
It's so clear.
Yeah, I have vision, see.
I already can hear him.
I can already hear him go, oh yeah, you were the Russiagate.
That's going to hang around all of our necks, even especially those of us, especially those of us who were best on it.
Nope.
When we're in the Marcy Wheeler labor camp, I'm betting you Monday's gruel that you're wrong.
Wouldn't it be funny if they made her a senator or something?
Yeah, I think she's probably going to become Elizabeth Warren's manicurist or something.
Oh God.
All right.
Yeah, speaking of friends of the family, I should not be too harsh.
Anyway, listen, man, I'll tell you the same thing that I told Ray McGovern.
Thanks for coming on the show, but also thanks for really being good on this this whole time.
It's really important that some people know better and say it very loudly and don't give an inch.
And you're certainly one of them and you deserve a lot of credit for it.
So thanks.
Sounds good.
Carry on, my friend.
There's still going to be a lot to talk about going forward, and I look forward to talking about it with you.
Take care, please.
Hell yeah.
All right, you guys, that is the great Peter Van Buren.
He's at the American Conservative Magazine and at the very top of the news and the spotlight today at antiwar.com, Russiagate.
It was all a lie.
And also check out his great blog, WeMeantWell.com, and his most recent book is Hooper's War, a novel of World War II Japan, post-World War II Japan, I guess.
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.
