For Pacifica Radio, March 31st, 2019.
I'm Scott Horton.
This is Anti-War Radio.
All right, y'all, it is Anti-War Radio.
I'm your host, Scott Horton.
I'm the author of the book, Fool's Errand, Time to End the War in Afghanistan.
And I'm the editorial director of antiwar.com.
You can find my full interview archive, almost 5,000 interviews now, going back to 2003, at scotthorton.org.
All right, you guys, and introducing Aaron Maté from The Nation magazine and the Gray Zone Project.
Welcome back to the show.
How are you doing?
Hey, Scott.
How are you doing?
I'm doing real good and happy to have you on and to take a little bit of a victory lap today for myself, but mostly for you.
You've done such great work on the Russiagate scandal.
Of course, I've been debunking this since the summer of 2016, had Jeffrey Carr on to debunk even the claim that the Russians hacked the DNC server in the first place, way back when they debuted this lie, and have been debunking it ever since.
But so have you.
And I want to highlight, might as well start with this, I'd like to highlight a few leftists and progressives and liberals who have been good on Russiagate.
Of course, many, many right-wingers deserve credit, too, for getting this right.
But it's the liberals, the leftists, the progressives who've gotten it right, who have been arguing essentially, quote, against interest.
As a president, you have every reason to despise, and yet you debunk the Russiagate thing because it's not true, not because of any defense of him.
And I want to make sure to get some honorable mentions here before we begin.
Norman Solomon, Joe Lauria, Gareth Porter, Peter Van Buren, Max Blumenthal, the late great Robert Perry, Ray McGovern and the veteran intelligence professionals for Sanity, Michael Tracy of course, Glenn Greenwald, and quite a few others, on and off Twitter and in the media, have refused to go along with this Russiagate story.
And you're the best of them, I think, Aaron, over there at The Nation, an entire article worth of archives of you not buying this.
And I know, as you've told me before, you're a self-described progressive writing about this issue.
So let me ask you, at what point did you decide that you were a little bit extra skeptical about this story and wanted to pursue it?
So back in 2016 still?
So when I first became skeptical was, yeah, I mean, back in the summer of 2016, we started hearing rumblings about Trump's ties to Russia and how that was, you know, a possible threat to the country.
And Hillary Clinton picked it up.
I believe the first article in the mainstream was an article in The Atlantic by Franklin Fowler called Putin's Puppet.
And that became sort of a talking point for the Democratic Party.
And, you know, that coinciding with the charges against Russia or the public claims that Russia had hacked the Democratic Party emails, it all just seemed sketchy.
And when I would look for, like, what evidence would be adduced to substantiate these claims or the suspicion that Trump and Russia were in cahoots, I just didn't see anything there.
There was, like, vague claims about Russian money laundering, which, even if that's all true, I mean, I don't think any of that's been, like, disproven nor fully proven yet.
So even if it's true, I don't see how you then get to, you know, that being the grounds for a grand conspiracy between the Trump campaign and Russia.
I mean, when we first and then when we first heard, and I believe in, like, October of 2016, The New York Times reported that the FBI had been looking into contacts between Trump and Russia.
And it's just the idea on its face to seem ridiculous that, like, both the Trump campaign and Russia are going to risk some, like, you know, international scandal that could really hurt them both for the sake of what of doing what exactly, like coordinating the timing of some stolen emails that, you know, weren't actually, I think, even that damaging to the Democratic Party.
I mean, they were damaging, but they weren't like this wasn't like, you know, like the Pentagon Papers.
You know what I mean?
Like, these were these were some.
They were embarrassing.
They were embarrassing.
But they didn't describe felonies or anything.
No, exactly.
Yeah, exactly.
Like, they were embarrassing.
But, you know, plenty of things come up that are embarrassing.
And they're like, it's just these emails didn't seem to just be worth some kind of grand conspiracy and nor like, well, what exactly was the theory of the case?
How did the Trump camp and Russia go about their purported scheme?
It was never presented to us, and it just seemed sketchy.
And when you looked at the interests of who was fueling it, you know, you had that was a time also when a sort of bipartisan foreign policy consensus had formed around opposing Trump's campaign promises because he was talking about having better ties with Russia and talking about pulling out of Syria and not engaging in foreign interventions.
I don't think Trump really believed in any of that.
I don't think I think he's a very competent con man, but I think he had his finger on the pulse in terms of that, you know, parts of the country that he needed to reach to win election were sick of war and sick of their own communities being sent to war and, you know, losing lives there.
So it just none of it seemed like the theory of the case didn't make sense.
And there seemed to be already sort of a convergence of of interest that had a motive in pushing this idea of Trump and Russia being in cahoots and Trump possibly being compromised by Russia.
Sorry, hang on just one second.
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So I remember in 2016 thinking, well, this is never going to stick.
I mean, obviously the Soviet Union is gone, but essentially they're still red baiting him saying that he's controlled by the Kremlin.
But it just seemed to me not just implausible that he would make such a corrupt deal, but it seemed to me implausible that the American people were ever going to buy this.
I mean, this guy is a real estate tycoon from New York City.
How is he supposed to be some kind of communist agent like Alger Hiss or something?
But I guess what really made it was, it wasn't just the smears.
They opened up a criminal investigation of this thing.
And that's what perpetuated it this whole time.
So I wonder, can you take us back to that?
There's so much dispute about how this got started in the first place.
And maybe if you could just give us a little bit on the dossier and Papadopoulos and Sessions' recusal and how this even became a thing here, Aaron?
Yeah, I mean, look, one thing is very clear that both in terms of their investigative decisions, in terms of opening up a counterintelligence investigation, and then the steps they took as a result of that during that investigation.
And then also, you know, I think equally as significantly, when you look at what kind of leaks were making their way into the media very, very early on, and what they were suggesting or saying about Trump, and then of course, how many of those leaks turned out to be either false or, you know, never proven.
And we can talk about some of those in a second.
But yeah, the, you know, the official story in terms of how a counterintelligence investigation was opened up to begin with, was that in July of 2016, the FBI got a tip that a low level Trump campaign volunteer, George Papadopoulos, had heard that the Russians might have compromising information about Hillary Clinton.
Later on, we were told that Papadopoulos was told that the Russians have Hillary Clinton's stolen emails.
But according to the person who Papadopoulos told this to, Alexander Downer, who's an Australian diplomat, Downer even says that what Papadopoulos told him was very vague.
Downer says that Papadopoulos didn't even mention stolen emails, and he said that Papadopoulos didn't even mention what the Russians exactly had.
But anyway, what Papadopoulos told Downer, Downer then relayed that to other officials in the Australian government, and their tip made its way to the FBI.
And it's sketchy there exactly how that happened, because it didn't make its way through proper channels.
And so there's some theories about what that might mean.
But putting that aside, the FBI then opened up this investigation, looking into the Trump campaign's contacts with Russia.
This investigation is called Crossfire Hurricane, July 31st, 2016.
Let me ask you here, is there any reason to think that this Australian who met with Papadopoulos was actually sent there as, you know, part of a setup in the first place?
I don't want to be too truthery and conspiratorial about this myself, but it is kind of a curiosity to me.
Well, look, I mean, you know, like, I have no idea.
I certainly, unfortunately, because this whole story is so crazy, I just can't rule that out.
I think it's a legitimate line of inquiry, because there's so many weird circumstances.
First of all, the guy, the mysterious professor who told Papadopoulos about the Russians compromising email is this sketchy professor named Joseph Massoud, who has now vanished.
He's since disappeared.
We do know that he has, you know, like he was presented to the media when Papadopoulos was indicted, Massoud was presented to the media as being a possible Russian agent, because Mueller in his indictment of Papadopoulos for lying to the FBI says that Papadopoulos understood Massoud to have connections with the Russian government.
So Mueller is not saying that Massoud actually is a Russian agent, and Mueller has never said that Massoud was a Russian agent, but his language, I think, deliberately so helped, you know, propagate this notion that Papadopoulos had spoken to a Russian agent.
Certainly if you look at how the media coverage has gone and how, you know, Adam Schiff talks, it's taken to be as fact that Massoud is a Russian agent, when in fact he actually has connections to the State Department and other, you know, Western intelligence agencies.
And, you know, and one of the reasons we know that is because actually after Papadopoulos was indicted for lying to the FBI, a few weeks later, Massoud was in the United States.
This is now in February 2017.
Massoud came to the U.S. at the invitation of the State Department to speak at a State Department conference.
And Massoud was, according to the official story, Massoud was interviewed by the FBI, who then let him go.
And they never indicted him and never accused him of anything.
And now Massoud is missing.
So this, and Massoud is the guy whose claim to Papadopoulos is the basis for the entire Trump-Russia investigation, at least according to the official story.
So no matter what is going on there, it's clear that Papadopoulos did not speak to a Russian agent, because again, Massoud was even interviewed by the FBI and never, never detained or charged.
And now he's gone.
So, but the only issue here, though, is whether the Papadopoulos thing is a cover story for how the investigation really started, which might very well be the Steele dossier.
Because before the FBI initially opened up that investigation on July 31st, its agents had already, you know, FBI officials and Justice Department officials had already been discussing the Steele dossier.
There were meetings between the oars, Bruce Annelli and Glenn Simpson.
Christopher Steele was in contact with them.
And it had already been circulated.
And it's quite hard to believe that the Steele dossier did not play a major role in getting that investigation going, at least as much as the Papadopoulos tip.
And I suspect the Papadopoulos thing might be a cover for the fact that really the Steele dossier was actually used as the predicate.
But we don't know that yet.
And hopefully we'll find out more.
It certainly looks that way based on the fact that, for example, when the FBI then tries to apply for a surveillance warrant on Carter Page, another low-level Trump volunteer, what do they cite?
They cite the Steele dossier.
And they say that based on the Steele dossier, they believe that Carter Page might be coordinating contacts between the Trump campaign and the Kremlin.
So the Steele dossier played a huge role in this, whether or not it triggered the investigation or not.
So there are some serious questions about how this investigation began.
And it's funny, I mean, we've been like this whole scandal, this whole saga for two years.
We've talked so much about what happened in 2016, but we haven't even gotten to what's interesting about 2016, which is that how did this baseless investigation really begin?
And hopefully now we'll find out more now that Mueller's report is in, and maybe the report itself will give us some, a window into it.
And if not that, then, you know, Senate Republicans and Trump, I mean, they're going to exploit this for their own partisan advantage.
And they're going to use their investigative powers to get information out that I think will make the FBI look bad.
Well, you know, I noticed conspiracy thinking in ways like in Iraq War II.
And what they were both doing was just cherry picking out the stuff that makes them feel right and seem right, and ignoring all the countervailing information.
Conclusion first, data second.
And that was the most obvious thing of what was taking place here.
The New York Times over and over says 100 links, right?
This is just like the links between Saddam and Osama.
Well, 100 times zero is zero, not 100.
And that was what happened here, was you're just supposed to take it, first of all, that well, the CIA and FBI seem to think that Donald Trump is a Russian agent.
Therefore, every contact between anyone associated with him and anyone associated with Russia in any way, all are dots to be connected on that same conspiracy board, which is OK if it's a hypothesis.
It's not if you really mean it and get stuck to it, you know.
It's a conspiracy theory mainstreamed by a mainstream that adopts a like a propaganda mindset where you do exactly what you just said.
You ignore all the countervailing evidence.
You just don't report it.
So, you know, people like me who are looking at the available evidence, because that's what journalism is, right?
You, you know, you you assess claims based on the available facts.
It's very simple.
And so, you know, a few of us were doing that.
And it's just the evidence was not there for the Trump-Russia conspiracy.
All the evidence, in fact, undermined it.
But that's not, you know, we didn't see that reflected at all in the mainstream narrative.
It was all this effort to prove this conspiracy theory correct.
You know, adopting such propagandistic tactics as, for example, the one you cited there about the New York Times and these 100 contacts between Trump and Russians.
So basically, if you look at what they were doing there, someone had a Russian passport that counted as like a questionable contact between Trump and Russia.
And on top of that, not even all those 100 contacts were Russian.
So for example, if you look at that, if you look at that New York Times piece about 100 contacts, WikiLeaks is included in that.
No one thinks that Julian Assange is a Russian.
Whatever you think about Julian Assange, he's not Russian.
So they used both like, that's like beyond Russophobic.
Because it's not just like Russophobic in the sense that if you talk to a Russian person, it's sketchy.
They're even going to accuse people who aren't even Russian of being Russian somehow just by virtue of having some tangential relationship to Russia.
So it's like.
Lynx.
Lynx.
This guy used to know a guy who was close to the GRU.
Now, since then, he's worked for John McCain at the National Republican Institute.
You know, the NED regime changers for the right wing in Ukraine.
But anyway, Lynx.
You're talking about.
To the GRU.
Yeah.
You're talking about Konstantin Kilimnik, who was Manafort's fixer.
And you know, Kilimnik was working for Manafort for years.
He was in constant contact with the U.S. embassy in Ukraine.
He worked, as you said, for the International Republican Institute.
And all you know, there was never an issue with him before.
But all of a sudden, after this conspiracy theory gets propagated, he becomes Manafort's Russian intelligence contact.
And he's a Russian.
Because Manafort asked for some printing data to be printed out, for some polling data to be printed out ahead of a meeting with Kilimnik, that becomes Manafort gave Kilimnik complex polling data to give to the Russian government to assist in their attack on the election.
And whatever claims he made about that, Mueller has since kind of abandoned it.
But still, people are still clinging to that, because they've totally bought into a conspiracy theory for complex reasons, not just because there's partisan interest, but also because for many people, it was psychologically comforting to believe that Donald Trump was put here by Russia and that Robert Mueller was going to save us.
And you know, there's like a psychological aspect there that I'm not equipped to fully analyze.
But it's worth looking at one day.
And you know, I want to say, Scott, when you talk about partisan interest, look, it's true.
I've tried to just follow the facts.
But I'm not going to lie and hide the fact that I don't want Donald Trump to be reelected.
And you know, part of the argument that I've made to other progressives for the last two years, I mean, I warned in my very first piece on the topic that progressives and liberals were setting themselves up to hand Trump a massive gift, because for two years, they're going to focus on this narrative, distract attention from his actual policies, channel liberal energy into this conspiracy theory mindset, and this belief in Robert Mueller and proving it.
And if all that fails, which, you know, the available evidence tells us that it would, they'll be handing Trump a massive reelection gift.
So even from the point of view of partisan interest, I thought it was a huge mistake.
But of course, not only that, I mean, just an ignoring and I know you have a whole laundry list of domestic and foreign policies, but just think especially on the wars after eight years of Barack Obama, and not real leftist journalists and stuff, but the broad swaths of the American left remaining silent on all of his horrible foreign policies for partisan reasons.
Now is the time for them to find a way to come slinking back to the anti-war movement and say, okay, if Donald Trump is involved in six or eight wars, regardless of who he inherited them from, let's get to work becoming, you know, pro-Sheehan again, and stuff like that.
And they didn't.
And instead it was like treason summit.
How dare Donald Trump meet with the, you know, on a peaceful basis with the head of a foreign nation.
He's selling us out.
And they all became not just not the anti-war movement again, but they became right wing national security state lunatics.
Whether it was conscious or not, or just a, a natural outgrowth of a political system that, that is driven by, you know, neoliberal elites on the democratic side that, you know, one consequence was to, of Russiak, was to totally undermine the actual progressive left, you know, the Bernie Sanders wing, the people who were, you know, as you say, going out to protest, you know, war and, you know, organizing around actual issues.
Instead it became about this like national security state reverence, you know, absolving Hillary Clinton and her, her faction of their terrible policies that many Trump voters rebelled against and their failures during the campaign.
So Hillary Clinton blaming Russian social media ads for her loss in Wisconsin and Michigan, two states where she couldn't even campaign in because her aides told her that the more she went there, the worse she would do because her economic message was so unpopular.
So the- So Aaron, wait now, and tell me what's the footnote for that again, because you've told me that before.
And I think that's such a unique point because the conventional wisdom, of course, is that, yeah, she was too lazy to even go to the Midwest or something like that.
And you say, no, no, no, she was warned that she better not go to the Midwest.
She'd only make it worse.
Right.
So this comes from the book Shattered, the definitive account we have so far of the Clinton campaign.
It's by two veteran Capitol Hill reporters, Jonathan Allen and Amy Parnes.
And they report this, they say, one of the lessons Mook and his allies took from Michigan was that Hillary was better off not getting into an all out war with her opponent in states where non-college educated whites could be the decisive demographic.
In Michigan they believed Hillary's hard campaigning had called attention to an election that many would-be voters weren't paying attention to, and given Bernie Sanders a chance to show that his economic message was more in line with their views.
So Mook's clique, so Robby Mook, the campaign manager's clique, looked at the elevation of the Michigan primary, poking the sleeping bear of the white working class as a mistake that shouldn't be repeated.
And then it says, quote, that was a takeaway we tried to use in the general, said one higher ranking campaign official.
And the book goes on to say that aides said that they only sent Clinton to Michigan once during the final months of the campaign because they believed, quote, to make the election a bigger deal was not good for our prospects, unquote.
So there you have it right there.
That is the aides from the Clinton campaign admitting that basically they tried to avoid giving Hillary any attention in the final stretch of the general, because the more attention Hillary got there, the worse that they would do.
And you know, I think you've solved the riddle of how Donald Trump got elected.
The Democrats ran Hillary Clinton.
Imagine that.
And you know, it's, it's, you know, look at these states.
Michigan- And you know what?
I can understand how, from the point of view of real power mongers inside the Democratic Party, that they would think to themselves, oh, geez, I don't know.
This kind of quirky, bald, old Jewish guy from Brooklyn, like, he doesn't cut a very presidential figure.
But that's such a surface analysis.
They could have said the same thing about Barack Hussein Obama.
That was the reason people liked him, was because he wasn't Hillary Clinton, for God's sake.
None of this is about electability and them being actually seriously concerned with helping the country or even winning.
This is about protecting their own positions of privilege.
And you know, Dave, the Clinton-Obama camp has overseen a neoliberal economic agenda that has been great for people, for them and their friends, for coastal liberals.
It's been wonderful.
People can go to Hamilton, have a great time.
But in places of the country like Wisconsin and Michigan, it's brought, you know, a devastation.
And Trump, by conning people into believing he was going to be a working class champion, because he at least acknowledged their pain.
I mean, he acknowledged that the pain was out there.
I don't think he actually meant to do anything about it.
And of course, his policies show that, that to be correct.
Has fully only enriched, you know, the, the upper class even more.
But at least- And she wasn't just Joe Biden or something.
She was actually Bill Clinton's wife, the guy that passed NAFTA in the first place back in the 90s.
Exactly right.
And exactly right.
And she was basically spinning this fantasy that all that was great for the country and the country just rebelled.
And that's why Bernie Sanders won the primaries in states like Wisconsin and Michigan.
And that's why the Clinton campaign had to avoid those states, because, you know, their message was unpopular.
And so when, of course, predictably, they, they lose those states, then of course, now we have to blame the Russians.
So blaming Russia has been, in short, blaming Russia has been a way for failed neoliberal democratic elites to blame Russia for the consequences of their own actions.
Right.
By the way, I saw this great clip on the Jimmy Dore show.
And now I forget if it was the one.
I think it was the one where you were the guest, actually.
I forget now.
But it was a clip of NBC investigative reporter Richard Engel of Kidnapping in Syria fame.
Ha ha.
But he was explaining to Rachel Maddow in December of 2017, when, when Trump was president elect, not sworn in yet.
And he said, I tried to track down everything, all these rumors, all the stuff that's claimed about Trump.
And he's clearly talking about the so-called tape, the pee tape and all of that stuff and the dossier stuff.
And he's saying, Rachel, I can't nail any of this down at all.
None of it is proving to be true.
But what I am hearing from my intelligence sources is that they are doing this to Trump essentially to put him in check and to let him know.
And because remember, he had been rude to the CIA and the FBI for meddling in the election already.
And Charles Schumer, the leading Democrat in the Senate had told Rachel Maddow, oh, you don't want to do that.
You don't want to cross the intelligence agencies.
They'll get at you six ways to Sunday for that.
And then it was just a couple of weeks later that Richard Engel was explained to Maddow that that's really what's going on here is this is the intelligence agency trying to figure out a way to control Donald Trump.
They couldn't stop him from getting elected.
And so now they're the ones compromising him.
They're the ones meddling.
And Maddow says, OK, thank you very much for your time, Richard Engel, and then spent the next two years pushing this Russia conspiracy stuff for the CIA and the FBI.
It's like she was warned what was going on in the first place.
Yeah.
So that was actually in January 2017.
Oh, OK.
This is right before or after he was sworn in, though.
Do you know?
This was right before Trump was sworn in.
This was like about just over a week out from when Trump was sworn in.
And yeah, Engel talked about not being able to confirm any aspect of the Steele dossier.
And Engel said, I have that quote here.
He says, I was told by a senior intelligence source that the reason they did it is the intelligence community is angry.
The intelligence community effectively wants to put Trump on notice, saying, look, you are saying all these things about Russia.
Be careful.
These are the there are the there are all these allegations out there.
So I mean, it's you know, that is an aspect of this.
And this is part of why this whole thing has confused people into thinking that Russiagate was a legitimate way of resisting Trump.
Is because it is obviously true.
And this gets to what I referenced before.
It is true that there are members of the intelligence community that do have it out for Trump.
I mean, that's obvious, given there's been so many leaks about him and things said about him.
But just because some intelligence officials don't like Trump doesn't mean that they're doing it out of a you know, in the interest of the of the common good.
They have their own cynical interests.
And those cynical interests, I think, include trying to undermine his call for better relations with Russia and also trying to undermine.
I think we have to.
I think it's fair to speculate whether they wanted to undermine his what he was talking about with Syria, because, you know, we know that people like John Brennan played a key role in the CIA program that fueled a proxy war in Syria.
And Trump on the campaign trail was talking about, you know, undoing that and also criticizing the intervention in Libya.
And that's why there were members of the national security state that that turned on that were adamantly against them.
That really is the supreme irony of this whole thing, that everything that they hated about him were the few things he was good on.
He wants out of Afghanistan.
He wants to stop back in Al-Qaeda in Syria.
He wants to get along with Russia.
We've got to stop him.
He think of the laundry list of bad things about Trump.
And none of those were on the list of their motive to launch this putsch against him this way.
Yeah.
Now, the only qualifiers is I'm not sure if Trump many meant any of this sincerely or whether you're just a really effective salesperson and he had his finger on the pulse of what the country wanted and that they were sick of foreign interventions and he just used that to his advantage.
Right.
In fact, he says this morning there's a brand new one by Taibbi where he talks about being at the Trump rallies and seeing how he was like testing out his material and that he was getting really good reactions from his antiwar stuff.
So his antiwar stuff got better and better and better because the people demanded it.
Yeah.
So basically, Trump had one advantage over Clinton and the Democrats, which is that he actually looked at the people he was trying to reach and trying to convince to vote for him.
And he and he tried to gauge what they thought and what their concerns were.
And in his own crude way, he spoke to it, speaking about, you know, making America great again and and helping out the working class, whereas Clinton painted this picture of America is already great and things are already awesome and she didn't acknowledge people's pain.
And, you know, we I think her loss was was was a reflection of that fact.
But so just to illustrate what then elements of the national security state did, they gave us stuff like this.
So in February 2017, as Russiagate is really picking up, you had articles like this start to appear.
So we already had the Steele dossier come out.
The Steele dossier was leaked, probably, I think, by James Clapper to CNN.
And and the Steele and also you had Comey.
And this is really interesting.
You had Comey briefing Trump on the Steele dossier and especially briefing him on the most salacious claim in it.
This is right as Trump was about to take office.
They briefed Trump on it.
And and and it's come especially briefing Trump about the PTIP.
He made sure to mention that to him of all the things in the Steele dossier.
And that briefing gave Clapper and other intelligence officials, whoever actually leaked it in a news hook that they could use to then leak it to to the media, which they did, because basically, you know, otherwise it's just like this, like it's just like a it's just like this dossier of uncorroborated wild material.
But now the fact that the president has been briefed on it, that is now news that that gives them a news hook.
And so a few days after that briefing, it gets leaked.
BuzzFeed publishes the full thing.
So it's like, you know, the intelligence officials gave themselves their own news hook to leak this hugely sort of embarrassing thing for Trump.
And I think that helps explain what fuels at least some of Trump's initial paranoia.
And then not long after that, in February 2017, you have stories like this appearing in The New York Times that to this day, by the way, have not been corrected.
It's called this.
It says Trump campaign aides had repeated contacts with Russian intelligence.
It starts with this.
Phone records and intercepted calls show that members of Donald Trump's 2016 presidential campaign and other Trump associates had repeated contacts with senior Russian intelligence officials in the year before the election, according to four current and former American officials.
OK, think about what an extraordinary claim that is.
The the winning presidential campaign had repeated contacts with senior Russian intelligence officials.
So what kind of picture does that paint?
And this coming in the nation's top newspaper now.
What happened with this story?
A few months later, James Comey testified to the Senate.
He was asked about it.
This was in June.
So from June to February, that's four months later.
Comey said it.
Comey responds in the main.
That was not true.
OK, so basically, Comey is denying that story.
The New York Times never corrected it, never retracted it.
And even if they had retracted or corrected it, the point is that leaks like this, selective leaks and transparently false leaks, created this overall impression, painted this picture for everybody that Trump had some sketchy dealings with Russia.
And they were willing to go so far as to invent claims like this, that senior Russian intelligence officials were talking to Trump.
So something shady was going on here.
And this is a, you know, perhaps as investigations now pick up under the Republican-controlled Senate, we'll find some answers.
Right.
Well, and they wanted to pretend then, too.
And to this day, I guess they're trying to pretend to believe that it's obstruction of justice for Trump to then fire Comey.
He should have told him right there on the spot that the moment I'm sworn in, I want you to pack your stuff and get out.
But even then, a couple of months later, he does.
And he explains on TV, well, yeah, it was because of the Russia thing, which all the question beggars took to mean, yeah, all that high treason I was committing with Russia, when clearly what he meant was the fact that Comey had come to him and tried to pull a J. Edgar Hoover and blackmail him with this bogus dossier, that they were launching this fake witch hunt against him.
That's why he fired him.
And so then also, if you don't get the question, then it's all, it's perfectly clear.
Yeah.
And then also, not only that, Scott, so there's the Steele dossier briefing, right, right before he gets elected.
And then you have Comey saying, testifying in Congress in March that the Trump campaign was under investigation for its ties to Russia, you know, which is like announcing that publicly to Congress.
So that's what Trump was referring to when he talked about Russia.
He also says in that same interview that he wants the investigation to continue.
He was basically saying that he just thought Comey had played him and he didn't want Comey there anymore.
He also even makes clear that he wants the investigation to continue because he wants to shoot to come out.
But because it's just amazing that, like, it's actually striking that, like, based on what someone says in a TV interview, that that can be even considered as as as ground as serious evidence for an obstruction case, like like you don't go to trial with what somebody says in a television interview, especially if their comments are taken totally out of context, which is if you read the full transcript of the interview, you'll see that that's the case.
Sorry.
Hang on just one second.
Hey, everybody.
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Now, so there's so much here.
I want to go back to the original hack.
You know, Ray McGovern has been a regular on this show this whole time from veteran intelligence professionals for sanity.
He's been right on, obviously, Iraq and Iran and every other thing so far this century anyway.
And he has Bill Binney, the guy that wrote the Thin Thread program, the guy that designed the architecture of the National Security Agency's global eavesdropping network.
And he says, and has some other backing at veteran intelligence professionals for sanity, that you can forget the idea that the Russians even did this hack at all, never mind the giant begged question about how that amounts to an attack on our election if they leaked some Hillary emails or any of the rest of this.
But he says that that's not what happened at all.
But the evidence says that the data was copied to a thumb drive locally, and that much more likely implicates a local Democratic Party staffer rather than a GRU spear phishing expedition and this kind of thing.
And I wonder, are you settled on who you think did the hack or not?
Or what?
Listen, my my thing is, I don't think we've seen enough evidence either way.
And I also have to say, just as a caveat, I don't personally think I have the, you know, computer hacking literacy to be able to fully to be able to understand the information.
I, you know, I read the problem, too.
I don't really get it.
I read the VIP stuff and I, you know, obviously Mueller's indictment of the Russian GRU officers.
I've read that, too.
And I just like like my eyes glaze over.
I just don't fully get it.
It just might, you know.
So the thing to be said about that indictment is they offer no evidence whatsoever.
For all we know, it's based on a conclusion of the intelligence community that would never hold up in court.
You know, well, they they offer a very detailed picture.
So they've obviously gotten some intelligence in some form from somewhere.
We don't know if that intelligence is valid or not.
You know, and certainly Mueller could have presented it knowing that it would never be tested in court because it's not as if these Russians are going to come to the US.
So I mean, but it's also I also can't rule it out because it is a very detailed picture.
You know, I I don't think it's, you know, like problem.
The problem is that there is Julian Assange has suggested that at least as far as I understand what he's saying, that the incline in attributing the hack of the Democratic Party to the GRU, there was a conflation.
But with the of that hack with other hacks that the GRU or other Russian actors have carried out.
There was apparently some Russian hacking of the State Department and even the DNC a year or two prior.
And I believe Assange has suggested that that there's been some conflation there.
I will say this, that I don't think we've been we've seen enough underlying evidence yet to determine either way.
I do think we have to take Robert Mueller's indictment of those officers seriously.
And as a form of evidence, I also think that just in general, the theory of the case itself makes no sense to me.
What motive would Putin have had or the Russian government to have had to hack into Democratic Party emails, commit a crime, knowing that if caught, which they were apparently caught very easily because, you know, there's this claim that like they left their fingerprints and all that.
What you know, knowing that that would elicit even more sanctions from the U.S. and even a harsher reaction, which is exactly what happened when Russia was already under sanctions over Crimea and Ukraine.
And it's not as if they want to invite more.
Those sanctions are not good for Russia.
It's a relatively weak power.
Nobody thought that Donald Trump would win the election.
So even the like the motive there for Putin to do that and invite just more punitive measures against him that that only hurt him because, you know, Putin needs money and leeway to be able to hold on to power because, you know, Russia is struggling and sanctions and more isolation will cost Russia more.
So the theory to me wasn't there, especially since nobody thought Trump would win.
And you know, so I definitely think it's I definitely think it's it's the issue is not settled.
I just I don't know enough about the computer jargon to say that the theory about it being a leak and not a hack is convincing, you know, and there are when I read it, I can understand what they're saying.
But I know that I don't know enough to ask all the proper follow up questions to make sure that I agree.
You know, but this is why, you know, this is why I mean, listen, listen, the one public that tried to look at this issue in a remotely serious way to basically do its job as journalists was The Nation magazine.
As far as I mean, in terms of having a debate about it, because basically everybody, all the mainstream journals, The New York Times, Washington Post just took CrowdStrike's claims on faith.
They said, yep, the Russians did.
And they called Binney a conspiracy theorist.
Yeah.
When he's William Binney.
Yeah.
But did anybody give them an opportunity?
I mean, like what should have happened is, you know, is that Binney should have and others.
And, you know, Scott Ritter, I know, has analyzed this, too.
I think he wrote a long piece analyzing the the GRU indictment.
You know, people like Binney and Scott Ritter and Ray should have been given an opportunity to debate this in public and go up against the experts on the other side.
But none of that happened except for basically in The Nation magazine after a article on the initial Vips finding was published.
They then had a forum because actually other members of Vips like Thomas Drake didn't agree.
So they had at least a discussion there.
And, you know, but that shouldn't have just been confined to a left wing magazine.
That should have been in the mainstream, because that's what, you know, journalism is.
We need to have the opposing sides of this, of the issue.
Now, of course.
I'm sorry.
Go ahead.
I'll just say also, whether the Russians even hacked emails or not, I actually don't I mean, I care, but I just don't think it has nearly the significance that it's been given, because, you know, I mean, right now, for example, the U.S. is trying to overthrow the government of Venezuela by imposing, you know, draconian sanctions, trying to basically starve the country.
I mean, you want to talk about interference.
I mean, even like calling that interference is is is is is is is far too soft.
And so, yeah, I mean, hacking someone's emails is not a good thing.
But it does not in terms of its the its the actual its its its level of criminality compared to what, you know, countries do to each other around the world, especially the U.S.
It just it doesn't even compare.
Well, and, you know, this is the thing, too, is they refer to this all the time as a well, everyone agrees about this.
There's no dispute about this.
Everyone knows that Russia attacked our election.
They hacked our election.
They attacked our democracy.
They did this, this, this.
And they characterize it in this way.
And they hardly ever even actually refer back to what they're referring to, which, of course, Evidently, is this leak of the e-mails that we all had the right to see anyway.
Well, you know, I mean, look, they were stolen.
Right.
So there is a there is I mean, that someone someone's private communications were stolen.
Right.
However, if if she had kept all her emails on her State Department server, then Jason Leopold would have already finished releasing them all from his FOIA requests.
The only reason that he wasn't able to do that is because she was keeping them privately and secretly illegally at her house so that Jason Leopold could not get them with his FOIA requests.
Listen, I'm certainly happy that that those leaks were were released, just as I am with any government.
I think that's important to say, because it's supposed to go without saying that, yeah, we still hate and fear Putin because of his horrible attack on our election, that he leaked these e-mails that we all had the right to see, including the e-mail from the Podesta group running the campaign that said, we want our friends in the liberal media to support Donald Trump because he'll be the easiest to beat in the fall.
The Pied Piper strategy.
Yeah.
So they were cheating and then they got hoisted by their own petard.
Bill Clinton actually had encouraged him to run in the first place.
That one in the e-mails.
We already knew that.
But still, you're right.
How come these e-mails, Aaron, didn't prove what a great secretary of state and leader of American society Hillary Clinton was?
How come they didn't boost her rating by 10 points when they came out?
Because it just goes without saying, they revealed how horrible she is.
They revealed all this stuff that she knew about horrible things going on that she turned a blind eye to or helped to participate in.
And, you know, that thing you mentioned about the Pied Piper strategy and the fact that Clinton even called Trump to encourage him to run, I mean, it's just yet one more instance of like so many of the Democrats blaming Russia for the consequences of their own failures.
I mean, this is what this is all about.
So, I mean, Russia has been for them this like perfect boogeyman to blame everything on when these stolen e-mails, whatever you want to say about them, I don't think they did anywhere near the damage to Clinton that Clinton and her people's own actions did.
And of course, it's not just Clinton and her own people, then it's also a media that gave Donald Trump billions of dollars worth of free airtime because it was great for ratings.
So all these people who gave us Donald Trump as a result of their own, you know, narrow-minded, myopic concern for protecting their own privilege and their own power had a perfect foil in Russia because Russia could be blamed for everything.
And that's what that helps.
I mean, it's a big part of this two year obsession.
It's basically a nonstop effort by people in privileged sectors to deflect responsibility from the consequences of their own actions.
And you know, it is almost a perfect mirror image of Trump's conspiracy theory about Barack Obama that he pushed more than anyone else in this society with more prominence than anyone else that Obama was secretly born in Kenya and had no right to be the president, that he had usurped John McCain's rightful throne and didn't belong there and all this kind of thing.
And so if this was just against Trump and the idea of his presidency being illegitimate, in that way, then it'd be perfect poetic justice and who cares?
And yet, though, the Obama conspiracy theory never targeted Kenya for a regime change or a nuclear first strike, whereas we're talking about demonizing Russia here and setting back American-Russian relations to the 1980s, to the first Reagan administration level of enmity here over nothing, which endangers all of mankind, which is the most dangerous thing in the history of mankind.
And the comparison to the birther thing is even more apt because it also includes sort of a similar level of xenophobia and chauvinism.
Right.
So Obama was not a real American.
And you know, Obama was from Africa and, you know, and he's a threat to this.
This immigrant is a threat to our country.
Well, look at this whole Russia thing.
Donald Trump is a traitor.
He's a Russian asset.
The Russians are are nefarious.
You know, James Clapper said stuff like this.
He said that the Russians are genetically predisposed to lying.
You know, like so basically this Russophobia was mainstreamed.
And so instead of a case where the birther conspiracy theory was confined to like, you know, Alex Jones and Fox News and, you know, others on the right wing fringe.
In this case, the the Trump Russia conspiracy theory was mainstreamed across like respectable liberal opinion, you know, in which, you know, it was totally acceptable to call to say things like Trump is guilty of treason.
And and, you know, like the Russians are all, you know, are liars and they're trying to destroy us with as deathly as you say, hugely dangerous consequences, because, you know, not only does it fuel tensions or help fuel tensions between the U.S. and Russia, it also means that all the policies that Trump has actually been carrying out that increased tensions with Russia, like pulling out of the INF treaty, like, you know, bombing Basra al-Assad twice in Syria, like Trump right now is trying to stop a vital gas pipeline between Germany and Russia.
Trump is trying to overthrow Putin's ally in Venezuela.
Trump has increased the number of U.S. troops and war games on Russia's borders.
All these things get overlooked and ignored because they undermine the prevailing drive to believe that Trump is actually doing Putin's bidding.
Right.
Yeah.
You know, I was so disappointed in the State of the Union speech when Trump says, and that's why I'm pulling out of the INF treaty with Russia.
And the Democrats all just sat there on their hands and I'm going, hey, you guys aren't impressed by that.
What does this guy got to do to hate Russia enough to satisfy the Democrats?
It's just pathetic.
It's you know, it's literally for the for the benefit of of holding on to their conspiracy theory.
They're willing to increase the chances of global extension because, you know, a new nuclear arms race is not in the interests of anybody except for weapons manufacturers, basically.
And tensions with Russia are just are extremely dangerous, as we know from history.
But yet it's it's more important to these people to cling to this narrative that Trump is compromised by Putin because he won't believe that Putin ordered the hacking of the emails and he says nice things about Putin sometimes.
And by the way, because Trump just wants to build a hotel in Russia.
That's the best explanation I can come up with for for for why he's said such nice things about Putin and Russia.
But you know, it's like they're they're more interested in their own narrative than they are in and in in taking actual policies that could help save the world from extreme danger.
And it's it's so irresponsible.
And that's why the the immediate consequences of this, you know, hoax are not nearly as grave, obviously, as the Iraq war.
But over the long term, they very well could be, you know, depending on just how damaging Russiagate has been to building an effective movement against, you know, warmongering and and and and organizing people around actual policies and actual politics and not just a conspiracy theory.
Well, and that's why it's so important to just even if people pay minimal attention to this thing, to continue paying at least minimal attention over long periods of time.
And you start to see how, you know, in context here, America has been really poking the Russian bear through the Bill Clinton, George Bush and Barack Obama years.
And all the worst stuff they've done, like cease Crimea or intervene and kill civilians in their intervention in Syria are in reactions to American policy.
And we've expanded our military alliance to include the Baltic states of Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia, right on Russia's border.
They're talking about putting a permanent garrison in Poland where, you know, the Russians have this little strip of land, Kaliningrad, there between the Baltics and Poland where they have Russian military forces stations.
This is all very important context that gets left out of the whole thing.
But but when you include it, you see how this is not like a James Bond movie where Vladimir Putin is this evil ideological villain hell bent on causing problems with us.
It's really America that's picked this fight with them.
Yeah.
And, you know, as the great professor Stephen F. Cohen points out, Russiagate has basically engendered this climate where diplomacy with Russia is criminalized.
So, you know, if Trump wants to meet privately with Vladimir Putin, all of a sudden it's assumed that, you know, something shady is going on when really this is how diplomacy is carried out.
There's a huge irony here in the fact that the very nuclear treaty that Trump walked away from, and obviously he was convinced to do this by John Bolton because John Bolton, you know, one of his reasons for living, I think, is to destroy global arms control agreements.
He pulled the U.S. out of the anti-ballistic missile treaty in the Bush administration.
And now he got the U.S. out of the INF under Trump.
But one of the ironies...
The agreed framework with Korea, too, in the 2000s.
Exactly.
Exactly.
Exactly right.
And the INF, how did we get the INF?
We got the INF because of a series of private conversations between Reagan and Gorbachev.
Right?
So those same private conversations led to one of the most important arms control agreements in the world.
And now the irony is that the person who we're accusing of being a Kremlin duke because he's meeting with Putin privately has now pulled out of that, you know, and set off a new nuclear arms race.
And yeah, like what you're saying about the overlooked history of how it's the U.S. that has, you know, you know, there's a quote from the scholar Richard Sakwa that says that NATO exists to address crises that result from its own existence.
You know, and I think that's very apt.
And Russiagate was a way to justify, you know, the continued NATO expansion and, you know, this continued effort to see Russia as this mortal enemy, which can then justify spending on weapons and then can also justify the salaries of all the think tanks and pundits who make their living off of, you know, basically warning about Russian social media bots as an existential threat to the United States.
Right.
Oh boy, there's an angle we didn't get to cover.
There's all the censorship on social media as a result of this hoax, too, but we all know that story.
Listen, I can't tell you how much I appreciate your time on this show and all the great work you've done on this over the last couple of years here.
And I really look forward to reading more of you in the future here.
Well, Scott, thanks and thank you for continuing to have me on throughout this whole process.
This is my, I think, third time on your show, if not more.
And so I appreciate the opportunity and I appreciate the insight that you've brought to this topic with the coverage you've done.
So thank you.
Right on.
Okay, everybody.
That is Aaron Maté.
He writes at The Nation and at the Grayzone Project over there with Max Blumenthal.
This one is called Rip Russiagate.
All right, y'all, and that's it for Anti-War Radio for this morning.
I'm your host, Scott Horton.
I'm here every Sunday morning from 830 to 9 on KPFK 90.7 FM in LA.
You guys can hear the rest of this interview in the archives at scotthorton.org.
See you next week.
All right, y'all, thanks.
Find me at libertarianinstitute.org, at scotthorton.org, antiwar.com, and reddit.com slash scotthortonshow.
Oh, yeah, and read my book, Fool's Errand, Timed and the War in Afghanistan at foolserrand.us.
