4/12/19 Daniel Lazare on the Plot to Use George Papadopolous to Get to Trump

by | Apr 15, 2019 | Interviews

Scott talks to Daniel Lazare about the story of George Papadopoulos, the young man at the center of the FBI’s investigation into Donald Trump. Lazare recently reviewed Papadopolous’s book, in which he claims to be completely innocent of any wrongdoing and merely a convenient target for the FBI.

Discussed on the show:

Daniel Lazare is the author of The Frozen Republic: How the constitution is Paralyzing Democracy and a regular contributor at Consortium News. Find all of his work at his website and follow him on Twitter @dhlazare.

This episode of the Scott Horton Show is sponsored by: Kesslyn Runs, by Charles Featherstone; NoDev NoOps NoIT, by Hussein Badakhchani; The War State, by Mike Swanson; WallStreetWindow.comRoberts and Roberts Brokerage Inc.; Tom Woods’ Liberty ClassroomExpandDesigns.com/Scott; and LibertyStickers.com.

Donate to the show through PatreonPayPal, or Bitcoin: 1KGye7S3pk7XXJT6TzrbFephGDbdhYznTa.

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Sorry, I'm late.
I had to stop by the Wax Museum again and give the finger to FDR.
We know Al-Qaeda, Zawahiri, is supporting the opposition in Syria.
Are we supporting Al-Qaeda in Syria?
It's a proud day for America.
And by God, we've kicked Vietnam syndrome once and for all.
Thank you very, very much.
I say it, I say it again, you've been hacked.
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, say it, say it three times.
The meeting of the largest armies in the history of the world.
Then there's going to be an invasion.
All right, you guys, welcoming Daniel Lazar back to the show.
How do you like that?
I pronounced it right in spite of the E at the end of the name there.
How are you doing?
I'm fine.
How are you?
I'm doing great.
Very happy to talk to you again.
And what an interesting thingamajig that you wrote here.
Ran it as the spotlight on antiwar.com yesterday or the day before or something.
The tale of a deep state target.
And this is about George Papadopoulos.
Baby Doc, something I think is what David Stockman was calling him.
And so I guess I ought to introduce you with this as well.
That, hey, everybody, look, another American progressive slash leftist type who always saw right through Russiagate and reported otherwise all this time.
And so now you're on the case of who set up the president that you don't like and have no interest in defending but just because the truth is important.
Yeah, the truth is important.
But also, I don't like Trump, to say the least.
But what's very important is the authoritarian, unconstitutional means that we're resorted to in order to get him out of office.
I mean, that's the real important thing.
And this sort of indicates a kind of a breach in the rule of law, I guess, that I think is really dangerous, really suspect, and has grave political implications.
Yeah.
Well, and you know what?
It seems to go without saying, but I'll say it.
It's the lack of partisanship, right?
That's your problem.
That's what's good about you is instead of just being somehow married to the Democratic Party and determined to defend its interest and its view no matter what or what have you, you look at it from your own point of view, your own set point of view with all of your own principles.
And I know that, in fact, you wrote a book about how we ought to get rid of this constitution and have a new, more progressive constitution.
I'm not sure exactly what that means, what you describe in there.
But at the end of the day, essentially, hey, the law is the law.
And this guy won an election.
And whoever voted for John Brennan or Jim Comey, and how did they think that they get to decide these things for us?
And as you describe here, right through a bunch of trumped up lies, a case, it's almost unbelievable to say it.
It's so silly that the President of the United States is guilty of high treason in a conspiracy with the Kremlin to take over the presidency and disrupt our democracy, Dan.
Yes, exactly.
First of all, you raised a number of important points.
Yes, the law is the law.
The law itself is open to question.
But when people try to circumvent or subvert or even overthrow the law, it's very important to look into, ask who's doing it, to what purpose, what the implications are, etc.
And what I see with Russiagate is an attempt by, clearly by intelligence assets, intelligence agency-linked individuals who are trying to somehow cause a stampede, create a huge public uproar around the charge that Trump was an agent of the Kremlin.
That's manifestly untrue.
Now Mueller himself has said that it's clearly untrue.
And so it's very important to get to the bottom of who were the people who set this whole effort in motion?
Why did they do it?
Who were they trying to benefit?
What were the forces behind them?
And this is not conspiratorialism, but this is actually an attempt to try to understand why this conspiratorial madness seized vast parts of the American political structure, American media, etc.
That's right.
Hey, you can call it an investigation, or you can call it conspiracy, or whatever you want.
Something happened that we had a massive fake investigation that went nowhere after two full years of dragging us through this two and a half.
So there must be some explanation.
So get back to the beginning here.
They keep saying, I guess some people get this wrong, Trump defenders get this wrong.
It seems like a straw man, but maybe it's a thing.
No, it's not all based on the completely and totally discredited Steele dossier.
It's all about Papadopoulos.
He's the one who first brought up the link between Russia and Hillary's emails and the Trump campaign.
So what's the poor FBI to do, Dan, other than their due diligence to protect our democratic institutions?
Right.
Well, it's about George Papadopoulos, but it's about another guy as well.
This is really key.
A guy named Joseph Mifsud, M-I-F-S-U-D, who was an academic from Malta.
Malta is an island in the Mediterranean that was for a long time a British colony, who was working in London and running a kind of a think tank with lots of Middle Eastern clients at which a young guy named George Papadopoulos was working.
And Papadopoulos himself was an oil consultant.
And in March 2016, Papadopoulos, who was trying to advance his career and rise in the political world, sort of landed a plum job as an unpaid member of Donald Trump's foreign policy team.
It was a big job for a young kid.
And George was working at Joseph Mifsud's think tank.
And when Mifsud got wind of George's appointment, he sort of zeroed in on him and began befriending him and complimenting him and cultivating him.
Now, what's important is that the Mueller indictment of Papadopoulos and all the coverage in the corporate media painted Mifsud as some kind of Russian-connected guy.
And the implication is that he's some kind of Russian asset or agent.
But we now know that, in fact, Mifsud's connections had ample connections to Western intelligence, especially British intelligence.
There seems to be little doubt about that.
So in April 2016, Mifsud invites George Papadopoulos out to breakfast in London and tells him he's freshly returned from Russia, where high-level Russian officials have told him that Russia has dirt on Hillary Clinton in the form of thousands of emails.
So that's information, it's a tip passed along by a Western intelligence asset.
Then a few weeks later, George Papadopoulos is invited to have drinks with a top Australian diplomat named Alexander Downer, who also has ties to Western intelligence via a high-level private intelligence firm called Orbis, O-R-B-I-S.
And Downer says that while sipping a gin and tonic, Papadopoulos passed the same tip on to him.
Papadopoulos doesn't remember that, but Alexander Downer says he did.
And then a few months later, Downer then passes that word on to the FBI, and the FBI then launches a formal investigation into Russiagate, into the question of whether Russia is hacking the U.S. and gathering information on the presidential campaign in order to affect its outcome.
So the whole thing, the process starts with a Western intelligence asset feeding information to poor, hapless George Papadopoulos, who then relays it to another Western intelligence asset, who then passes it on to the FBI.
So in other words, it seems this whole thing was concocted by Western intelligence agencies.
Now, this is not conspiratorialism.
It's an attempt to simply figure out as conservatively and carefully as we can as to what was the process that got this huge ball rolling, this huge ball known as Russiagate.
Well, as you said, it did sort of go without saying this whole time, or it went with one big claim at the beginning that everyone else just repeated and took for the truth, that this guy, Mifsud, whoever he is, is a Russian agent.
And so there you have that.
And yet, so you're saying he's tied to MI6, but maybe he's tied to a lot of people.
I don't know.
Is there anything that says he's tied to the Russians?
I mean, other than just, you know, sources say in the Washington Post?
No, there's ample evidence that he's not tied to the Russians with a high-level British intelligence official named Claire Smith, whose job was to vet, for security purposes, top British government officials.
They taught a course at a campus, a privately-owned campus in Rome, for Italian military and law enforcement officials.
So if Claire Smith, if her job is to vet, for security purposes, top British officials, if she's teaching a course, a highly sensitive course for Italian military officials, and teaching it side by side with Joseph Mifsud, then it stands to reason that she would have also have vetted Joseph Mifsud, which suggests that Joseph Mifsud passed the vetting process, which means he's not a Russian agent or a Russian asset, but in fact is someone who's regarded as highly reliable and trustworthy by a top British intelligence official.
Oh, you just don't see how far it goes.
She's one of them, too.
No, I'm sorry, lady.
I don't mean that.
Okay, so, but now, I think the last time I talked with Aramonte, he said, this guy's missing from the face of the earth.
Yes.
Do you know about that?
Where is he now?
And what's the deal?
Is anybody asking him to testify somewhere?
I have no, I wish I knew.
I'd love to interview the guy.
But yes, I mean, what happens is Mifsud, shortly after this came out, he vanished.
And he vanished so completely that there actually were reports that he had died.
But an employer, an ex-employer of his, denies that's the case, and said he spoke to him subsequently.
But he has gone deep underground.
Guys, check out this cool near-future dystopia, Kesslin Runs, by our friend Charles Featherstone.
You might remember him, a regular writer for lewrockwell.com.
And this is a great story of, well, I don't want to ruin it for you, but you'll really like it.
Kesslin Runs, it's on Amazon.com, by the great Charles Featherstone.
You're getting much of this, obviously, you already know a lot of it, but you're getting much of this from this new book, Target, by George Papadopoulos.
And so you sort of, you know, you say there's a lot left unsaid in that book, and unknown by him.
He's trying to piece things together, sort of, I guess, the best he can.
But can you talk a little bit about that narrative, from his point of view, of this experience, where he's got all these different people are kind of coming to him and dropping these weird hints, and trying to get him to repeat things.
And it reminds me of one of these FBI jobs where they try to get some, you know, the slowest kid down at the Islamic bookstore to say he loves Osama into an open microphone, you know?
I mean, yeah, that's a good comparison.
I mean, look, Papadopoulos seems like a nice guy.
He's conservative.
You know, he's to the right politically.
He seems like a nice enough guy.
But he seems to be kind of naive.
He's very young.
And he suddenly landed this plum assignment as a foreign policy advisor to Trump, the man who was, by that point, was the clear, presumptive GOP presidential nominee.
And so suddenly, you know, all these people started coming at Papadopoulos, this naive, you know, relatively fresh-faced young kid.
And they started hitting him, you know, coming at him from all sides.
Mifsud, Alexander Downer, a guy named Sergey Millian, who turns out to have been a source for Christopher Steele's famous Golden Showers dossier, a man named Stephen Halper, who has longstanding CIA connections going back to the 1970s, and others, an Israeli-American businessman named Charles Tawil, who gives George $10,000 in cash, which George is smart enough to leave with a lawyer in Greece.
And, you know, and so these people are all coming at him, all bombarding him, all wanting to befriend him, to do business with him, to, you know, to ask him about Russia.
At some point, George Stephanopoulos sits down with him, with George Papadopoulos.
I'm sorry.
At one point, Stephan— I'm getting my Greek names mixed up.
At one point, Stephan Halper sits down with George Papadopoulos and, you know, and asks him point blank, you know, tell me about the emails.
The Russians have Hillary's emails, clearly trying to entrap him to get Papadopoulos to say something, you know, self-incriminating.
So, you know, so this one poor, hapless guy is being besieged.
And it really sounds, too, like this all started at his job, right?
Where he was like, hey, guess what, everybody?
I got this gig with Trump, and they all said, oh, no, don't do that.
And then they said, oh, yeah, you do that.
And apparently launched— it was his colleagues that did this to him.
Precisely.
So what happened is that, you know, initially when Papadopoulos discloses to his colleagues that he's landed this plum assignment as a foreign policy adviser to Trump, they're quite shocked.
They're very hostile.
They say, you must not do this.
He's a really bad guy.
He's a bigot, a racist, et cetera.
But then suddenly the mood changes.
And Papadopoulos then is like, you know, meets Joseph Mifsud, the head of the think tank, who is very warm, very friendly, takes him to dinner, and then, you know, befriends, cultivates him, and then a few weeks later feeds him this tidbit about Hillary's emails.
So it just seems to be a setup, really, an effort at entrapment to which there are a half dozen people who are taking part.
And you know what's not going on here is, see, the GRU decided they were going to do this thing and give this guy a say.
It's clearly just a ruse, nothing but.
It's clearly Western intelligence.
And we know from various sources that months earlier, beginning in late 2015, intelligence agencies, Estonia, Germany, Holland, perhaps France as well, were batting back information relating to having to do with Trump's Russian contacts.
So the intelligence agency sort of, you know, convincing themselves that there was some kind of conspiracy, some kind of collusion taking place.
And that's certainly what they're claiming.
I mean, this is just repeated the other day.
I guess, you know, they were saying this a couple of months ago.
But it came up in congressional testimony that, yeah, you know, we really thought that the president must have fired Comey on instructions from Russia or on behalf of Russia to implement.
Oh, no, it couldn't possibly be that he considered the investigation against him to be illegitimate because he was innocent and he was firing Comey for bringing that dossier to him and giving him the Hoover treatment about it.
I just want you to know we have this and all that.
No, no, no.
The much more likely explanation is that Putin made him do it.
And to me, Dan, that's the proof that they're lying and they know that they're lying because that is absolutely absurd that they're going to sit here and say, yeah, we couldn't figure out a better way to explain that than treason.
I'm not sure.
I still am not sure whether it's a lie or a kind of an act of self-convincing or self-hypnosis or what.
I mean, but it's a classic intellectual error.
I mean, go back to what we're talking about here.
They set this whole thing up in the first place.
All this stuff about they believe maybe it's true.
That's only later, a year later, almost, nine months later, when they're pretending that they're so convinced by their own lies and now they really have to turn this thing into a criminal investigation.
Yes, yes, that's true.
But it's a classic intellectual mistake.
I mean, you begin with a thesis, then you start investigating and you only latch onto that evidence that supports your thesis and you systematically disregard any other countervailing evidence.
So as a result, common sense, other evidence, et cetera, were all pushed aside and the only evidence that was seized upon were those that supported this original thesis.
So they wound up spinning this big tail, erecting this complicated castle in midair and it turned out to be a giant soap bubble because they hadn't considered any of the alternative explanations.
Yeah, that's true.
Standard trutherism.
It's the same thing that happened with the 9-11 truthers and with the neocons who were essentially the Saddam Hussein truthers at the exact same time.
It's the same thing we see right here.
Conclusion first, evidence later, and then as we can see with the Flat Earth guys or whatever to the nth degree or with the Russiagate people that you could convince yourself of anything.
You can build a case for anything and people will do that.
Yes, and these intelligence agencies, they seem to be kind of these very sort of closed networks filled with like-minded people with very similar mindsets.
Yeah, and they pretend that it's only fringe political people who believe in conspiracies and that kind of deal.
No, of course, the centrist professional, in fact, as I learned as a kid reading 1984 by George Orwell, all the worst propaganda is for the party members.
All the lies and all the cheers that these people are supposed to memorize and all the two minutes hate every day and whatever, that's mostly for them.
They're the ones who have to believe in this stuff.
The rest of us can kind of sit here and bemuse, but we don't really have a say.
So these people are locked there.
They're locked in closed networks.
Everyone they talk to agrees basically with everyone else and they start batting around ideas and each idea, each new bit of datum that they've uncovered tends to support their original thesis.
So they lock themselves ever more securely into this closed network and they wind up believing what later turns out to be a fantastic concoction that has no substance at all.
Now, so here's the deal.
You go back and add up all of the supposed ties between the Trump campaign and the Russians.
They add up to zero.
Zero times ten is still zero.
Really, no question about that.
You look at all the so-called intervention on Facebook and Twitter with these stupid ads.
Don't get me started on how stupid all of that is.
I'm not buying that for one moment.
I'm not carrying that one millimeter down the path of, oh, jeez, I guess you have a point there.
But what about, Daniel, the idea that the Russians attacked us by having their GRU hack Podesta, hack the DNC, give that stuff to WikiLeaks in order to prejudice the information supply against Hillary Clinton in the run-up to the election?
And before you even answer that, I just want to say, I like the cut of your jib, Lazar.
And Lazar, sorry, I can't say your name right.
And what I think that you should do is you should go through all of the pros and cons of the Benny stuff about the thumb drive stuff.
I don't know what level of computer genius you are, but I know you're a good reporter.
And you get all of the different sides of that and then find yourself some independent computer geniuses who don't have a dog in the fight but are really smart and can really look through and tell you which side they sort of take on that.
Because I want some resolution to all of that.
I want to know if the GRU and the Russians had a damn thing to do with this whole story at all or not.
And I'm certainly not satisfied either way.
First of all, let me clarify one thing.
I am a computer idiot, okay?
So I'm the last person that you should go to if you want some kind of brilliant insight into how these things work.
But I'm capable of looking at a timeline or trying to figure out whether these narratives make sense.
So it's a very important question and it's now very much in the news because of Julian Assange's arrest.
And in fact, the New York Times today stated as fact that clearly Assange collaborated with the Russians and then tried to cover up his tracks by putting out a phony Seth Rich story.
Now, so let's walk this back a bit, if you don't mind.
June 12th, 2016.
Julian Assange gives an interview on British TV in which he says that they have a big email dump coming on the way, okay?
Three days later, Guccifer 2.0, an online persona allegedly created by GRU, the Russian intelligence agency, begins announcing that he has himself hacked the DNC.
And he releases a small number of documents, none of them emails, which have nothing, which really are not at all pertinent to the campaign.
They're old, out of date.
They contain information that no one's especially interested in, et cetera.
On the following July 18th, according to the Mueller indictment, Guccifer sends WikiLeaks a one gigabyte document archive allegedly taken from the DNC and asks WikiLeaks to publish it.
And then five days later on July 22nd, WikiLeaks then releases a huge archive, a huge DNC email archive.
So the Mueller indictment says that the material that Guccifer 2.0 sent to WikiLeaks on July 18th is the material that WikiLeaks then released five days later on July 22nd.
But there's a problem, and it's a very simple problem.
Number one, why would Julian Assange announce on June 12th, some six weeks earlier, that he's gonna release a huge email dump when Guccifer would not send it to him for another four or five weeks later?
That'd be a very rash and unprofessional and foolhardy thing for Assange to do.
Maybe even a magical thing that he would be able to see the future like that.
Or I guess you could say maybe he was already in contact with the guy, but there's no evidence of that, right?
There's no evidence of that.
And even if he was in contact, you still wouldn't announce it before having the material in hand because WikiLeaks is very careful about the information it releases.
So you wouldn't announce you had this huge cache of data until you actually do have the cache of data and you've gone over it and you recognize that it's valid.
It has not been tampered with, et cetera, et cetera.
So he'd be extremely unlikely to do that.
And then number two, why would he then publish it five days after receiving it, which is far too small a time, too little time, to analyze it, to make sure it's all valid, to make sure that the documents have not been tampered with, et cetera.
So the chronology, the timeline doesn't add up.
So in that very sense, the Mueller narrative just doesn't seem to make sense.
And essentially what you're saying is that Mueller insists that you just trust him, that this is the chain of custody of the emails when you have every reason to believe that Assange already had the emails from somewhere else first, which then that being the case, assume I got that right, raises the question of, so who's Guccifer really?
Is that John Brennan, as Ray McGovern suspects?
It's just, we have no idea.
We have no idea.
It could be, he could be an honest to God Romanian who is not connected with Russia at all.
But the point is that on June 12th, Assange announces he has this huge dump, which he's gonna release very soon.
Five weeks later, Guccifer sends him a document, containing some kind of information.
And then five days after that, Assange releases the email dump he had mentioned no more than a month earlier.
So it just seems that the email dump, the WikiLeaks email dump would not be the information that Guccifer passed onto him a mere five days earlier.
It just doesn't make sense.
And I must add that Mueller's indictment is merely an indictment.
It has not been tested in a court.
And it does not claim to describe evidence either.
It just says this is true and that's it.
Yes, exactly right.
So it's a bare bones document, which is unproven.
And on the face of it is open to serious question.
So, but yet the New York Times regards it as the gospel, which is just, you know, which is exactly why the Times has gotten into such trouble over the story.
It doesn't ask questions.
It doesn't try to analyze.
It takes the FBI or the CIA or the special counsel's word for it without thinking, you know, through on its own.
It's part of the same closed network, the same self-confirming, self-congratulatory closed network.
Right.
Well, and so a little bit of a flaw in their narrative is that Jeffrey Carr, a computer security specialist back then said, and on my show said that, look, anybody can fake that their hat came from anywhere else.
And so just because it looks like this or that group or agency or government is behind a thing on the internet like that, it doesn't make it so.
And essentially no one could prove that it is so in any particular circumstance.
You could do your best guess, but that's as good as you're going to get.
But he also said in response to my follow-up that, well, gee, except for the NSA who can rewind everything that ever happened on the internet in, you know, whatever speed they want and go back and look at every one and zero crossing every circuit and network on the internet there, they could tell you who did the hack, but nobody examining the computer could.
And yet CrowdStrike said they were sure it was the Russians because there was a reference to Iron Felix and there were Cyrillic letters in there.
And so they deduced, but they didn't need the FBI to look at it because they were pretty sure already.
Right.
And as we know, the DNC refused to turn their servers over to the FBI for an independent inspection.
But the FBI said that didn't matter for some strange, very strange reason.
But in any case, I mean, it's very possible that Mueller is right.
It's very possible that GRU did hack the DNC.
That's really possible.
And some of the reverse engineering that Mueller's team seems to have engaged in, it's not unimpressive.
But it all still doesn't add up.
And by the way, computer security was so lax at the DNC that it's very possible any number of people were rummaging around in their computers, you know, taking stuff out.
Especially government agencies from around the world, yeah.
Yeah, it's very possible.
And so, you know, it's very possible that all these people were, all these spooks, all these hackers were invading their computers because they were essentially like a homeowner who leaves the front door wide open.
You know, goes away for a three-week vacation.
So, you know, any number of people may have entered that house and rummaged around and stolen stuff.
So we just don't know.
Well, at the very least, it's still in question.
I'm so sick and tired of, like, this is the last litmus test.
Well, at least you admit that the Russians still did the thing, or else, you definitely have no credibility if you don't at least agree to that.
Because everyone who's just been completely proven that they've wasted the last two and a half years of their lives on this collusion garbage, they're still the arbiters of who's got credibility and who doesn't.
And you better still at least admit to the truth of this thing that we all know is based merely on assertions of mostly anonymous government officials in the newspapers, that none of it has been proven at all.
As you said, you know, this indictment is merely an indictment and emphasize the M in merely there.
I mean, you know, the Mueller team, they issued 2,800 subpoenas.
They conducted 500 interviews, 19 lawyers and 40 FBI agents, you know, and they could not come up with any evidence.
And they were trying to, by the way.
You know, quantity can be a smoke screen for a bunch of garbage fake investigation.
But in this case, they were on a mission here, clearly.
I really don't doubt that they would have been quite delighted to have come up with evidence in support of the collusion thesis.
I think that seems to be quite clear.
But they didn't.
And to their credit, they were honest enough to admit it.
But, you know, this is the thesis that's been pushed by the corporate media relentlessly for the last two and a half years.
Everybody assumed that it had to be true to one degree or another.
And now the rug has been pulled out from under them in the most spectacular fashion.
And so therefore, you know, the credibility of the corporate media has been destroyed.
So, you know, so whatever else they have to say.
So the corporate media will have to struggle, you know, even more than they did after the WMD debacle in 2003.
They will have to struggle to reclaim their credibility.
They're just going to have to fire everybody and hire all of us then.
And they're not going to do that by regurgitating the same cliches, the same unexamined assumptions that they're still doing.
I mean, at this point, they might as well be working for Donald Trump.
Same thing I said to Jonah Goldberg back when he was leading the National Review and denouncing him in 2016.
How much is Trump paying you to do this?
Shut up, man.
If you really don't want him to win, these guys, they just can't help but blow it, man.
They want to, I think.
I mean, you know, I saw Rachel Maddow was still on the air, you know, still working herself into a frenzy.
Now accusing Barr of somehow doing Trump's dirty work by using the dreaded S-word, other words, spying, you know.
And they're fighting all kinds of rearguard actions.
But the fact is that, you know, they're like the naked emperor running around insisting that, you know, he really does have clothes on, even though everyone now realizes that he's naked as a jaybird.
So, you know, their credibility has been shot, and they just can't keep going on like this.
I mean, who would have ever thought that there's a story where the FBI and the CIA are the heroes?
I mean, I know in Tom Clancy movies and stuff, but in real life, yeah, no, not these guys.
So, yeah, let's hope that everybody gets, you know, a good dose of Vietnam syndrome out of this, a little bit more inoculation against, you know, government and media.
You know, what threw people for a loop was in Iraq War II, it was Bush leading the parade.
This time, the president himself was Saddam Hussein, but with the same forces arrayed against him in the story and all of that, you know, so that kind of confused people a little bit.
Yeah, so there are a few, you know, a few outliers like you and me, you know, who keep saying, who kept saying from the very beginning that just this didn't make any sense.
The Steele dossier just didn't make sense.
It was filled with contradictions, you know, the unconfirmed sensational reports about a Golden Showers episode, et cetera.
Yeah, the first thing I saw, too, where Paige gets a 19% ownership stake in this massive global oil company just for helping to arrange the deal.
Okay, yeah, yeah, yeah.
I'm sure that's exactly how that works.
Okay, hey, I have to go, man.
Oh, wait, you know what?
Oh, shit, yeah, I guess I better.
I'm sorry, I'm running late on everybody today.
Okay, no problem, no problem.
But you know what?
You did such a great job on this, and thank you so much for your point of view and all your great work on this, and I hope you stay on this story, too, because it ain't over yet.
Yeah, thanks a lot, Scott.
No, it's just beginning.
Yeah.
All right, you guys.
It's Daniel Lazar at ConsortiumNews.com, The Tale of a Deep State Target, all about George Papadopoulos and his new book.
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.

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