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, 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 Peter Van Buren.
He used to work for the State Department, but he's a good guy now.
And you can find him oftentimes at the American Conservative Magazine, but you can't find him on Twitter, because I kicked him off of there for joking around.
He wrote some really good books, like We Meant Well, about his time in Iraq, and Hooper's War, which is a novel of post-World War II Japan.
But let's get real, it's about you and me.
Welcome back to the show.
How are you doing, Peter?
Scott, it's a pleasure to be back here.
A quick commercial note, the publisher of Hooper's War has gone out of business.
And for some reason, Amazon has raised the price of the book to $47.
Oh no!
It's not worth $47.
Yeah, it is too.
Listen, value is subjective, and it depends on who you ask.
Well, I've asked myself, and so what I would suggest, if your listeners are interested, since the rights have returned to me, I have made a Kindle version available for $9.99.
And if you go to the, Amazon is still having trouble sorting all this out, so if you go to the website, and it looks like it's going to cost you $47 to read the book, click on my name, and it will get you to a $9.99 Kindle version, until we get the rest of all this sorted out.
So my apologies, but I'm trying to do the best.
And by the way, that $9.99 represents nearly nothing for myself.
The way it works is that Amazon becomes the publisher of record, and takes the bulk of the money, and in order to get anything for yourself, that's pretty much near where the minimum needs to be.
You should be getting $7 of that $9 on the Kindle, man.
Yeah, I'm not sure, because right now the interim step here has been to go through Amazon as the publisher.
Well, you should put out, I mean, I would say, if you want to put out the paperback through CreateSpace, you should do that, and then you should get, if you sell the book for $20, you should get $7 on the paperback, and if you sell the Kindle for $10, you should get $7 on the Kindle.
That's, I think, the deal, man.
Right now, my main goal is to make sure that it's available, if anyone wants to read it, and then we'll sort out the rest as we go.
Luckily, there has not been a stampede of interest, so I think we're okay.
Hey, let's talk about this thing, instead of screwing around still.
You wrote this great piece.
I'm glad that you did.
Mueller Time is finally over, theamericanconservative.com.
Mueller Time is finally over by Peter Van Buren, and so, now look, this piece is about the obstruction thing, because I guess, like much of the media, you're essentially going, oh yeah, yeah, the whole Russian thing, yeah, no, that was a hoax, we all know that, forget that.
It's all about obstruction now, which is what they're doing, so it's important that you wrote this article here on that issue.
Let's talk about the collusion whole hoax thing here, because I seem to remember that a bunch of claims had been made about essentially, not necessarily legal definition, but in the public imagination, accusations of high treason against the elected president.
First, the Republican Party nominee for the presidency of the United States, then the president-elect, and then the elected president, and it seemed like kind of a big deal, and then also, yeah, it seemed like the feds climbed down pretty much all the way from that in this thing, huh?
That, in fact, is the headline that isn't happening, and it's not surprising, but basically, the last two and a half, three years of narrative, both from the federal government, first officially from Clapper et al., and unofficially from Clapper et al., posing as media people, has been that the president of the United States is a Russian asset.
He is under the control of the Russians, either because they've paid him actively or they have blackmailed him passively, and that the decisions and actions he has been taking as president have been done in the interest of Russia and at the direction of Russia.
We've gone as far as things like New York Magazine arguing that Trump has been a Russian active asset since the 1980s.
We've also been told that his kids were involved in this, that his whole business has been structured around this, and it goes up to the point of literal Manchurian candidate high treason in the accusations, and none of that's true.
Absolutely none of that is true.
There's not a single thread in there that is true, and the Mueller report makes that extremely clear.
Volume 1 of the report, the report is broken down into two volumes.
Volume 1 deals with the fact that Trump did not coordinate his actions in any way with Russia, and Volume 2 deals with the fact that Trump did not obstruct the investigation into the thing that didn't actually happen.
But Volume 1 is the first half, and they're roughly equal in length.
Mueller gives equal time to the thing Trump didn't do with the Russians and the thing that Trump didn't do to obstruct the investigation that didn't find anything.
As far as that's concerned, it's stunning to me how quickly the media has just kind of moved on.
There's a few diehards out there.
Adam Schiff seems to be leading the charge that maybe there's still something hidden under the redactions, or we still haven't gotten to the bottom of the secret tinfoil plot or something.
Politico insists on listing 25, quote, subplots that have yet to be resolved, including still keeping the Alpha Bank server thing.
And if people don't recognize these specific examples, please don't worry.
Some were nothing when they were first brought out in the public, and they've been proven to be nothing.
But bottom line, nothing.
There was no secret Trump Tower meeting that was there that was worth paying any attention to.
There was no quid pro quo for the hotel that never got built in Russia.
It's all empty.
It's garbage.
It's dead.
Yeah.
Well, you know, one thing there that you mentioned is some of these things people might not have even heard of.
They didn't get that much prominence in the coverage, which is a big flash-in-the-pan story or what, but it seems like Mueller went— like his predicate was anything anybody ever said, any news article that they wanted to— hmm, that sounds interesting.
Let's look at that.
Because, you know, so much of it, it reads like they, you know, brought this up almost only to debunk it.
You know what I mean?
I could see how if I was a Democrat, I would go, geez, these Republicans must really like Trump, because everything they say is like, well, here were some claims, and we looked at it, and we found no evidence for that.
On to the next one.
On to the next one.
On to the next one.
All the way through.
You take your choice.
I mean, either Mueller investigated each of these things, however minor, because he kept hoping that some rock would overturn to reveal something, or take the positive.
You know, he really wanted to put this to bed.
He really wanted to make it so that this was not the Warren Commission report that left a million unanswered things.
Right.
See, that's the thing, right?
It's all such BS that we don't take it seriously enough, but no, it's extremely serious.
On the level of who shot JFK, right?
Like, whether the president committed high treason with the Kremlin to steal the election from Duchess Hillary, rightful coronation, and all these things.
It's a really big deal, especially when millions of people believe in it.
Really doesn't need to be put all the way to bed.
And I think that's clearly what's going on there, too.
Yeah, and I don't want to re-adjudicate either the Warren Commission or the 9-11 reports here, but both of them chose to leave many, many questions unexplored.
And that alone has fueled speculation ranging to conspiracy theory.
Right.
But I think Mueller did try pretty hard to run almost everything that mattered to somebody at some time to ground.
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All right, so now here's what's in there a lot.
And we're going to get back to the computer hacking thing in a minute.
We're skipping the beginning and going to the middle kind of.
But here's what did happen a lot.
It was a lot of Russians and a lot of Trump campaign people kept trying to get each other's phone numbers and see if maybe they could figure out a time and a place to meet, discuss some things, this and that.
In fact, to the debunking, Mueller makes it very clear that what they were pursuing at all times was the questions of the future of the foreign policy of the United States of America.
There's nothing there about, you know, personal corruption or this, that, the other thing.
It's all about better relations for our countries in the future and this kind of just boilerplate stuff.
Same as Obama and Hillary wanted their reset back years ago.
Now, the thing is, is that when you look through all this, the picture of the Russians, Mueller is a little disingenuous because the report is not very good at separating out legitimate business people who wanted it in with the new most powerful guy in the world versus grifters who thought if they dangled something important and shiny, they might get an in versus so-called people with ties to Putin slash Russian intelligence and others who were just looking around for money and things like that.
They all get lumped into a big bucket called the Russians when Mueller does not show in any way that these folks were acting as a coordinated body or mass.
In other words, that's all speculative, that the guy who calls up and says, hey, I got dirt on your opponent, wanna meet?
And the person who shows his GRU credentials at the door are both being directed out of Moscow Central or something like that.
One can begin to imagine how a political campaign, the number of phone calls and things that must flow into a campaign from people who are trying to get some advantage and think they have something of interest to the campaign.
Some of them are nut cases, some of them think they have something of value that's actually not and others are just trying to get their foot in the door.
That's what the best take on the so-called Trump Tower meeting appears to be.
The Trump Tower meeting in June of 2016, supposedly some Russians with quote, ties to Russian intelligence or the Russian government or had eaten in a Russian restaurant once, claimed to have unspecified dirt on Hillary Clinton and they wanted a meeting.
Now, if you're in a campaign and somebody says, would you be interested in hearing something bad about your opponent?
More or less, most campaigns are gonna have some interest in that.
At the point where the meeting actually takes place, what it seems like immediately the meeting is about is they don't have any dirt, they don't deliver any dirt on Hillary Clinton and instead they've used that as an excuse to get some powerful people into the room with them and they start pitching their own ideas about policy and sanctions and things that are gonna be to their financial benefit post-election.
And if you look back at what Trump Jr.and I guess Manafort was there and Kushner, they're all in their notes and in their contemporary actions are basically saying, oops, we got played, we gotta get out of here.
Kushner is quoted in the Mueller report as sending a text to his secretary saying, please call me and tell me I've got an urgent appointment to get me out of this meeting, it's a waste of time.
And that's happened.
If there's anyone out there who's ever done business, you get approached by people and you would be wrong to simply deflect approaches because there's always a nugget out there.
But at the same time, this was not the Russian government running an intel operation.
Right, and they say that in there, right?
Where they even have, you know, from the testimony and- That's why nobody got charged.
I'm sorry?
You know, it's like a murder mystery where they show you who the killer is on the first page and then there's 200 pages of how they got back, working backwards to that.
Mueller speaks loudest in what happens here and that is no one is charged, no one is indicted.
Well, and in that case, he doesn't attempt to tie it back to the Kremlin at all.
He quotes this guy complaining that your father, who's this rich guy, but there's no indication that he was working for the Russian government in doing this.
He wanted to push us to do this meeting and I told him not to do it and now it blew up in our face and made us look like jerks and, you know, this, you know, you can see exactly, Mueller can see it for exactly what it is and then he explains it to us in that very same manner, you know, no treason here.
And that was the best one they had was the whole, the Trump Tower meeting, really.
But now, so the Alpha, the Alpha Bank guy, Peter, he, you know, that story, if I have it right, was he did meet with Putin and Putin was like, geez, it would be nice if I could figure out a way to communicate with these people and then so he tried some avenues to see if he could reach some kind of accommodation, maybe we could have a meeting.
This kind of thing.
And yet even there, there's no indication, Robert Mueller doesn't seem to believe even that any of this has anything to do with attempting to compromise Trump, to blackmail him, to control him, to get some dirt on him or let him know they have some or any kind of thing like that.
It's all just, oh great, Hillary's not going to be the president, so maybe we can get along better now, which is what we all thought.
Well, you know, you don't, you don't, again, it just muddies this up to start talking about Hillary, but I think it's important to talk about Hillary, not so much in the stupid thing that everyone tries to end arguments with about saying what about ism, but in fact to show that certain things are part and parcel to the way business gets done and back channels are one of those things.
Now they can be back channels for nefarious reasons or they can be back channels for good reasons, but the bottom line is, for example, in just one example, Hillary Clinton had extensive contacts throughout the Middle East alongside her Clinton Foundation.
She accepted huge sums of money from countries that are not always on America's side to help fund the Clinton Foundation.
She was in a lot of rooms alone without note takers with Saudi princes and what have you.
And she talked a lot of politics.
I can't, don't try to convince me that Hillary and an important Saudi minister in a room are just going to talk about the weather.
They're going to be talking about, well, Madam Clinton, after you're elected, you know, we're going to really have to take a look at what's going on in X, Y, and Z.
So this kind of back channel stuff and reaching out through these channels, particularly when you've got a country like Russia and the United States that have had a pretty rocky relationship is on the face, not a problem in any way.
It's almost a good thing.
And the problem, what happened here with Trump is the media in a kind of self-fulfilling wish fulfillment type thing took the most innocuous of acts and inflated them into near treason.
A perfect example, and Mueller cites this one as well, is Jeff Sessions' meeting with the Russian ambassador prior to Trump's inauguration at some point during the campaign.
And Mueller dismisses this almost offhandedly.
He says, you know, this was a public meeting of no consequence.
Boom, moving on.
Whereas the Sessions meeting with the ambassador was cited as one of the reasons Sessions had to recuse himself.
He was supposed to be fired, impeached, or shredded by the Democrats.
This whole thing was nothing.
And Mueller says so.
The same thing with the idea that the Republicans made some innocuous change to a plank in their platform about the Ukraine.
If you remember that, when the Republican convention took place, there was some wording that was changed.
And this was cited as an example of quid pro quo, blah, blah, blah.
And, you know, Mueller makes a point, again, very succinctly, and says that no one involved in that was working on behalf of the Russians and nothing about making that change appeared to be connected to any quid pro quo.
He didn't say, but parenthetically, I think everybody knows exactly how long planks in party platforms are taken seriously.
And that is until the last day of the convention when they're implicitly forgotten.
So the idea is, is that the media was allowed and the people encouraged and the Democrats joined in to conflate Russian things from a variety of people, from legitimate business people up to folks who may indeed have some kind of real connections to Russian intel.
They conflate them all as the Russians to take every innocuous action and assume not only the worst, but kind of inflate it till it becomes the worst.
And then to do this thing of, I guess we call it connecting the dots, the thing that Rachel Maddow got very, very wealthy by doing, which is to basically pluck a few events and say they must have a causal relationship.
This is classic failure of intellect.
It's like saying, if I take my umbrella with me today, it won't rain.
And at the end of the day, if I take my umbrella and it doesn't rain, well, that's obviously proof that taking the umbrella stops the rain.
The idea that two events occur more or less together in space time does not create a causal relationship.
It's a classic mistake, but the entire volume one of the Mueller report basically is about the media and the Democrats and a lot of innocent Americans making that classic mistake.
Well, you know what?
People always say begging the question when they mean raising the question.
But the actual begging the question means when you assume your own conclusion and stick with that.
And you see that in the Mueller report all the way through, where things that in and of themselves are perfectly innocuous all add up as a lot of dots.
It's not smoke indicating fire.
It's actually all just steam, just hot air.
It doesn't mean anything.
But a hundred times zero.
Wait, how much is that again?
Oh, okay, it is zero, but it looks like maybe it's really something because look at all the things that don't add up to anything.
And part of it too goes with the idea that what would somebody like Jeff Sessions be doing meeting with the Russian ambassador without taking an understanding that, well, actually he's a very prominent senator and senators meet with Russian ambassadors day in and day out all the time.
Dum-dum, that's how it works.
But if you don't know that and you already bought into the idea that, oh my God, Carter Page, George Papadopoulos, Michael Flynn, and Jeff Sessions, and all these people are meeting with these Russians, what does it mean?
It obviously means something.
But you're assuming your conclusion in the first place and only through that lens do any of those things look important at all.
It's a conclusion that's in search of facts.
And that's sort of a way to characterize this whole process is basically it was an investigation in search of a crime.
And in the end, there was no crime.
And Mueller in volume one conclusively, unambiguously says so.
Hey, but you know what's a great book?
The War State by my friend Mike Swanson.
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You'll learn so much and love it.
And check out his great investment advice at wallstreetwindow.com, a very successful hedge fund manager turned market explainer to the masses.
Check him out, great stuff, wallstreetwindow.com.
All right, now, so let's talk about obstruction of justice because here, you know, Bill Clinton, I would have settled for him being removed from office on any excuse, I didn't care.
But the trumped-up charge that they did trump up against him, it did begin with an actual predicate, actual crime.
He was incidentally, coincidentally, the president who signed the law making it a federal civil rights matter for there to be sexual harassment in an office place, right?
So then someone took him up on that and sued him for something that he had done.
When Paula Jones, he was the governor and she was a state something or other under him in the chain of authority there.
And it doesn't matter whether she had a legit case or not.
I think she had a half of one at least or something.
But anyway, he lied in that deposition.
And it was that predicate right there that then they handed over to the special prosecutor and this and that, then the perjury before the grand jury, and the rest flowed from that.
It wasn't from cheating on his wife, that wasn't the charge.
It all stemmed from a perjury rap from this civil deposition.
So anyway, in this case, it really is different.
And this is something where I hate to always cite Andrew McCarthy, but he seems to be the best one writing about this.
He's done some brilliant work on this, by the way.
This is a counterintelligence investigation.
If you assume for the sake of argument, all this stuff that he does assume is true because the CIA says so, that the Russians did all this stuff, then that's all fine.
But at no point should this have ever been turned into a special counsel criminal investigation unless they had probable cause to proceed against the president on that basis or against anyone in his government on that basis.
And instead, like you say, no, it wasn't.
It was just a fishing expedition.
And they were looking to see if they could find some collusion or coordination, as they put it.
Let me stop you right there because you've touched on something that's very, very important that has not received any real discussion.
There are two things here, right?
We've got the, I don't know, what do you want to call it?
The Russiagate case and the obstruction case.
And Mueller is very clear that these are two separate things.
He's called them volume one and volume two.
And his original job was covered by volume one.
One thing that's very important that's not been discussed is at what point in the last two and a half years was it clear to Mueller that there was no Russiagate or treason?
I'm using these words as shorthand, so everyone please relax for a second.
Well, and that's really the most important question of this entire thing.
And why did Mueller keep quiet about it until he finished part two?
Because this whole thing is an FBI plot against the president.
That's the real conspiracy here.
This is a push by the secret police to rein in the elected president that they have no right whatsoever.
It's just a COINTELPRO plot.
That's all it is.
That was kind of my rhetorical answer, what I was looking for.
Sorry.
No, you got it right.
No, but I mean, the idea is that we're seeing now information, for example, talking about the Steele dossier, which if it wasn't the initial thing that kicked all this off, it was in the top two.
And it followed, if it wasn't number one, it followed very quickly behind number one.
Whatever you want to say about it, it is a remarkably significant part of what started the so-called crossfire hurricane Russiagate investigation.
And so it's now becoming, there's evidence coming out.
If you guys read a guy named Chuck Ross, who writes on Daily Caller, he's following this very closely, that as early as summer of 2017, possibly even earlier than that, it was becoming obvious inside the FBI that the Steele dossier was garbage.
It was not accurate.
It was not factual.
And at some point after Mueller took charge of the investigation in May, at some point, he came to the conclusion that there was no treason or whatever Russiagate crimes that he was going to indict or charge.
Now at that point, why didn't Mueller come out to the public and say, the first half of my investigation is concluded.
There was no collusion conspiracy coordination.
We've still got a lot of other issues to look into moving on.
Why not?
Because it wasn't a criminal investigation.
It was politics.
It was politics, but see the interesting thing.
And again, I don't have an explanation for this at all.
Mueller did it once, you know, when, when Buzzfeed came out with its bombshell based on sources that Trump had explicitly ordered Cohen to lie to Congress, Mueller came out and said, that's not true.
It's absolutely not true.
He actually shut that whole thing down.
Buzzfeed, by the way, only waited until yesterday, I think over Easter weekend to actually pull back their, their reporting, but that's separate story.
The idea would be that in one instance in this saga, Mueller did actually get ahead of his issued report to say that thing is not true.
So I don't know why he did that on that one case, one instance and only one instance.
And I think we agree that he was part of a political, a nasty political process that allowed the American people to think for months, if not, maybe two years that the president potentially was a Russian asset when Mueller knew absolutely he was not.
That's something that needs to be looked into.
If I were the Republicans gearing up for my own post Mueller investigation, that would be one of the questions at the top of my list.
Why did you wait?
When did you know that you were not going to charge or indict for anything related to, to Russiagate?
And why did you wait?
And that brings us to volume two of the Mueller report obstruction.
Now, the most interesting thing to start us off on that is that we know now that in the infamous meeting between Donald Trump and James Comey, that Comey said to Trump, you're not, you personally are not under investigation.
In other words, Comey was referring, when was that meeting?
Was it, was it Jan?
No, not January.
When was that meeting?
March of 2017.
My, my I'm having a little brain fart, but somewhere early in Trump's term, he and James Comey had their famous one-on-one meeting where Comey told Trump and Mueller confirms this, you are not under investigation.
And what Comey was referring to, of course, was all things, Russiagate, treason, coercion, conspiracy, whatever.
Now that's interesting.
Cause that also hints that they knew as early as early 2017 that Trump was going to be, you know, exonerated from all that, but nonetheless, so Comey tells Trump that and Trump fires Comey, according to Mueller because Comey would not make those statements publicly.
So we know at that point in early 2017, Trump was not under investigation.
We know that after he was, after he fired Comey not to obstruct justice, but because Comey would not state publicly what Trump, what he was willing to say privately at that point was when the FBI opened the obstruction investigation.
I mean, ironically if Comey had said, fine, I'll issue a statement or Trump had not mucked it all up by blaming Hillary's emails or something.
The point is at that moment, the whole obstruction case was created out of thin air by the FBI because they fired their boss, Comey, James Comey.
There was no obstruction case before that.
The obstruction case took place after firing Comey.
And of course he's the president.
He can fire the FBI director if he wants to.
And Mueller makes that point very clearly.
Yeah, right.
And yeah, exactly.
Not my opinion.
Mueller says that, yeah, he can fire the head of the FBI.
That'd be a political question for the house and Senate to solve if they really think that it was obstruction to do so.
Well, let me correct you.
Let me correct you there because Mueller answers the question more completely.
He says that first of all, it's in the president's article two powers to fire Comey.
That's good.
That's straightforward.
He, and he had for this to be obstruction, he would have had to have fired Comey with the corrupt intent.
That's the legal term to obstruct the investigation.
The Mueller then goes on to tell us Trump's intent.
Trump's intent was that he was pissed off at James Comey for refusing to make a public statement to exonerate Trump the way he initially made a public statement that exonerated Hillary Clinton.
Right?
Remember back in July of 2016, James Comey stood up and said, we've ended our investigation into the Clinton email story.
And here are all the reasons in some detail why we're not going to prosecute Hillary Clinton.
She's free and clear and the media jumped all over that with the, with the catchphrase, no indictment means innocence.
Hillary is free to become president.
And Trump wanted Comey to do something similar.
Now we know Comey screwed up the Hillary thing later on, but that's a separate story.
The idea is that's why he fired him.
And Mueller says that is not corrupt intent to obstruct.
You got to have all three of those pieces there.
You've got to do something, which we found out Trump was legal for Trump to do.
Even if it's legal, it can still be obstruction if it's done with corrupt intent, but it wasn't, it was done in rage, I guess would be the simplest word to choose.
He was pissed off that Comey wouldn't throw the sugar at him, that Comey threw at Hillary Clinton.
And we can agree or disagree whether that was good or bad or noble or, or whatever, but it was not obstruction of justice.
And there's nothing to investigate there.
Mueller has told us that.
Yeah.
So I'm sorry to digress, but I think that's very important because there are places where Mueller, the report, I should say, does fudge the question of intent, but there are other instances where the report is very, very clear that they looked for, but didn't specifically did not find corrupt intent.
And in fact, found other identifiable intent that carried the day, I guess.
Well, you know, I followed the I'm actually fisking the whole dang report at the Libertarian Institute blog.
And I'm not to the obstruction part yet.
Cause I keep getting interrupted.
I'm not finished and, and haven't gotten quite that far yet, but I followed the link.
Buy coffee and whiskey first.
Yes.
Yeah.
It's so boring and lame.
It's just, it's every paragraph ends with a let down.
Oh, a bunch of claims were made and yet turned out to not be true over and over and over again.
It's kind of fun.
Kind of weird in a way.
But my point is though, I followed your link to the vox.com.
Here's the 10 instances of obstruction maybe in the report.
What a, what a nifty you know, a little shorthand cheat sheet for us all there.
So I went down through the thing and almost all of it was just silly and stupid.
Like in the previous example, but there was one that I thought, yeah, you know what?
That sounds like the kind of thing where maybe if just like a regular old millionaire did it, he might go to the, you know, to the pen for a little while was all the threats, the public threats and intimidation against the lawyer, Michael Cohen, like, Oh, you're a rat.
You know what I know about your family's corrupt dealings and all this kind of thing that he was bringing up.
Like he's the president of the United States to be saying stuff like that about his own lawyer, this kind of thing.
And I thought, you know, the just part wouldn't let anyone else get away with that.
But then I also thought that, yeah, no, I'm sorry.
And even though I have a whole other brief against Trump on all kinds of things on this, he has to get a pass for being the victim of an FBI illegal push here that this is not a criminal investigation.
This is a persecution of a president that the establishment didn't like and wanted reigned in their words reigned in.
And that's why they did this.
And so if in one of his rages, he tried to get his lawyer to fire Mueller, but then he didn't care about any of this.
He's got to get a pass on this and to hear everyone saying, well, you know what?
We got to impeach him for this.
He can impeach him for a no bill.
You know, he just, he just essentially got away.
You're going to, you're going to charge the president now with resisting arrest.
Cause that's all you got.
And they're, and they're trumpeting this loud.
They're acting like, yeah, see, we were right all along.
Cause it says in the second half of the thing that he's sort of criminal maybe, maybe that that Mueller couldn't all the way exonerate him.
And so possibly someone else could find more there.
Well, let me give you Mueller's answer to those questions because Mueller answered those questions.
I, you know, the, the overall answer, of course, the most important answer is by the time you finish reading the 448 pages, it does not say I therefore indict Donald Trump for the following.
There are no indictments.
That's the one that matters most.
At the end of the day, you're not half pregnant.
You're either, you either are or you aren't.
And Mueller ends his report without indicting Donald Trump.
So, or anyone else for obstruction or anything like that.
So that's the main answer.
The more detailed answer appears on page 61 of volume two, where Mueller is saying, you know, he's looking very closely at this question of intent because obstruction focuses both on the action that was taken and the intent there.
I don't want to get too long into analogies because it doesn't line up exactly one-to-one, but the idea would be that if the cops walk into the room and you're laying dead on the floor and I've got a gun in my hand and I said, I just shot Scott, that's the action.
I just killed you.
You know, you, I killed you.
I may have committed murder, but if you're going to try to get me for first degree murder, you've got to go into my intent in great detail.
And if I'm going to get away with this by claiming it was a legitimate act of self-defense, then you've got to get into intent on my part, defending myself.
So what Mueller knows, Mueller smart, any lawyer knows this, that with obstruction, the action, the act itself, the shooting of the gun, if you will, is not where it ends.
What it, where it ends is on intent because the court could find that you had done something to me that required me to shoot you in self-defense and I'm innocent.
Or the court could find that I'd been jealous of your success on, on the radio and, and had been plotting your murder for years.
So intent is what matters in obstruction.
And Mueller says that.
I think I understand it.
Volume two, page 61.
The evidence indicates the president was angered by the existence of the Russia investigation and the public reporting that he was under investigation, which he knew was not true based on Comey's representations.
The president complained to advisors that if people thought Russia helped him with the election, it would detract from what he accomplished.
Other evidence indicates the president was concerned about the impact of Russia on his ability to govern.
The president complained.
The perception he was under investigation was hurting his ability to conduct foreign relations, particularly with Russia, whether you want to call that narcissism or actually Trump worried that he wasn't going to be able to do the job of governing properly.
That is what Mueller said was Trump's intent when he took these so-called obstructive acts and without corrupt intent, meaning the intent was to destroy the investigation and cover up a crime and stuff like that.
You cannot, there's nothing to prosecute.
And at the end of 448 pages, Mueller says there is nothing to prosecute.
But you're telling me that the actions that he talks about that Trump took, uh, or things that he said and tweeted about Cohen, that that was explained in that same sub paragraph or whatever, in the same way.
Paragraph is, is talking broadly.
I don't, you can go to the specific pages.
I don't have them handy.
And see, because that sounds like the kind of one where maybe he was afraid that Cohen was going to talk about hush money for hose, which is stupid compared to this whole Russia thingamajig, but that maybe he was trying to intimidate his lawyer.
Cause I mean, if you're Trump, God knows what your lawyer knows about you.
You know, the other, the other thing about intent and Mueller talks about this here and there is the fact that all of this so-called evidence of Trump's corrupt intent, um, was done so grotesquely publicly that it, it raises a question of what's it even real.
I mean, is Trump, I mean, you're going to, everybody's going to say, yeah, of course he's that stupid because they hate Trump.
But I mean the idea that he would day after day publicize his, his ill intent on Twitter so that a prosecutor could basically build the case by cutting and pasting.
Um, there's an improbable aspect to that.
Um, it's not resolvable.
A hundred percent.
But the idea of, of saying, gee, I'm going to murder Scott Horton.
Um, I'm just going to keep saying that over and over and over again.
And even after I've been arrested and my lawyer is trying to make a case that I did it in self-defense, I'm going to send out some tweets saying, now I plan to kill Scott for, for years and years and years.
So I love this analogy.
That's great.
I'm sorry, man.
I love you, but I mean, I don't even own a gun, so there you go.
I've been told I'm pretty good with my hands, but that's another story.
The point is that to say that Trump would have, you know, improbably left this, this very public trail of corrupt intent.
I guess you could make that argument, but it's not an argument you want to go to town on.
Um, it goes to the whole underlying crime question.
Yes.
Technically you can have a conviction for obstruction of justice without an underlying crime, but in the absence of an underlying crime, you have to work a whole lot harder to show corrupt intent.
So if I robbed a bank and I knew I robbed the bank and I went out of my way to obstruct that investigation, well, my intent is sort of the, the burden of proof kind of leans that I was trying to interrupt an investigation that I know was going to put me in jail.
Cause I robbed the bank.
Yeah.
But in the absence of an underlying crime, you have to say, I have to sympathize that strongly with Trump to see how frustrated he might be being the president and being falsely accused of all this stuff.
Right.
That's great.
Right.
Which by the way, I am armed with a skateboard and I can defend myself.
There you go.
So it should be pretty even a rumble.
But the point is that, you know, if you want to make yourself feel better and claim that, you know, Trump's actions were driven solely by his narcissism.
And if that makes you feel better about accepting the reality of this, you know, go ahead, that take that as your, as your, as your way to kind of weasel out.
He says all this stuff about, yeah, but you know what, maybe there is a case in here and wiggle words and other places and that kind of deal.
And this is another question that I would be very interested in knowing the real answer to.
And I, the other thing I talk about in my article today on the American conservative is that.
Prosecutors generally.
The way it's done is you don't bring up.
Negative information.
That's not chargeable.
It's not part of it.
You don't, you don't slander people in these things.
You don't say, well, we caught Scott Horton in having that illicit affair, but he's innocent of the bank robbery.
I guess spending time with his mistress is not relevant to this case, but I just want to.
Really on my case today.
I know, I know.
I'm sorry.
Because if, because what happens if I choose anyone else as the example here, then, you know, kicked off another social media network or something.
Yeah.
I mean, I'm running out of them.
So the idea is that.
You don't normally bring up.
Negative information.
That's not chargeable or leading to that.
So that's a big question.
Why that ended up in there.
In addition, since Mueller concluded his report by saying no indictments, why spend.
About a quarter of the report.
Noodling around on stuff that sort of maybe is, I mean, they even use in their expressions that are, that are not related to a particular crime.
He talks about the fact that Trump is president might mean that his otherwise lawful actions.
Such as firing.
His otherwise lawful actions could constitute undue influence.
You know, it's like that's the kind of thing you argue about in a dorm room.
I don't think undue influence is, is in itself is a chargeable crime.
So why are you talking about it?
And the best explanation I can come up with at this point with what we know now is that not everybody on team Mueller agreed with the boss.
There were leaks just before the report came out that team Mueller, there were people saying we saw, you know, terrifying evidence that Bob Barr didn't feature in his summary.
And I think what we're looking at here is the internal arguments that went on inside of, of team Mueller.
And a lot of people did not agree with the boss that they should not indict Trump.
And for whatever reason, maybe he thought he was being more fair.
Maybe he spends too much time with the Talmud, which never makes any conclusions.
I don't know the answer, or maybe it was politics.
Just let's smear him when we've got the chance.
Mueller included all sorts of extraneous stuff that doesn't belong in a prosecutor's report.
Last but not least is the magic word exoneration.
Prosecutor's job is not to exonerate people.
There's no such thing as certificates of exoneration or trophies or, or, or anything along those lines.
Prosecutors make a decision.
We've all, we've, you guys have watched law and order, right?
I mean, we all know how this works.
The prosecutor looks at the evidence and decides, are we going to charge this case or are we going to let them go?
It happens all the time.
That's, that's what prosecutors do.
That's why they're in the middle after the police make an arrest and gather evidence and all that.
That's why the cops don't go to court directly.
The prosecutors look at this and say, it doesn't add up to a chargeable crime.
It certainly adds up to unethical, immoral, naughty, sloppy, unbecoming pick your favorite word, but if it's not a chargeable crime, we don't charge them.
And whether that's a case no one's ever heard of in a podunk court or the president, that's what you do.
You don't issue a certificate of exoneration.
You don't make a roadmap.
You don't drop breadcrumbs for the Southern district of New York to pick up at some point in time.
That's not what you do.
And if Mueller wanted to do any of those things, he's a big boy.
He knows the big boy words.
He was perfectly able to say in this report in black and white letters that I would have charged the hell out of this guy.
Had he not been the president of the United States and the department of justice, not believing that you can't indict a sitting president absent that one thing, I would have put a bunch of charges on top of Donald Trump with a vengeance.
He could have said some version of that.
He could have said that the issues that are preventing me from indicting Trump are beyond the constitutional role I play, or even the attorney general plays and need to be sorted out by Congress as they see fit.
Or he could have even said, sorted out through the impeachment process, which is designed to deal with and provoke these constitutional challenges.
He could have said any of that.
He could have included a hundred pages on the question of whether to indict a sitting president or not.
And the constitutional issues that swirl around all that he could have been as specific as all of the columnists and commentators think he was.
But he wasn't.
And in the end of the day, you've only got the report to look at and the conclusions it drew.
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What's funny too is according to Mueller's own logic, Trump could have fired him and still without corrupt intent, but just to protect his lawful presidency from these false accusations by the secret police that they were trying to Mount against him here.
Unlike the old independent council statute that they let expire after the star report back in the 1990s, which made him on fireable by the president and legitimately an outside office.
In this case, he's still under the justice department under the president's authority to fire.
And I also, I also understand that obstruction does not have to be successful in order to be chargeable, but it does in fact figure into the calculus at some level because ultimately the report, the investigation was not obstructed.
There was no crime.
There's no, there's no one got, no one got killed here.
And that remains the, these kind of core base realities are what's missing from almost all of what I've read and heard in terms of commentary, the core realities.
Well, that's the next thing I wanted to ask you about is, you know, cause okay, I admit I hadn't read the whole Mueller report, but like I said, I did read the first half of it and I did read the vox.com 10 point summary of the obstruction case there, which is not a bad summary as long as you kind of ignore their, their version of conclusion.
Yeah, that's fine.
The summary part is actually a good and it's linked inside my article at American conservative.
That's exactly correct.
Yeah.
So I looked at that.
So I'm somewhat familiar.
So listen, I got to say that you're you sound like you're right about this, but just how far from you is the rest of the consensus?
I admit I don't watch TV and I quit Twitter.
I know you got kicked the hell off of there, but, so I'm kind of deliberately unplugged from the daily stupidity kind of of the reaction, but I am seeing, you know, a little bit of the splash I see on Reddit and stuff like that where, and I see people writing articles.
I saw something by Michael Tracy about, Oh, on Twitter about how, I can't believe these people are still saying, look how right we are.
It's unbelievable.
And, and apparently it's pretty widespread.
So what do you think?
Well, you know, I, I don't watch a lot of TV, but I feel obligated when I'm working on an article like the one I've written here to see what other people are saying.
And particularly what people who I know will disagree with me are saying it's, it's useful for, for me, but it's also important to as a sign of a check on myself, because if I'm reading a developing consensus in the media, that something is true and I'm saying it's false, I need to kind of check myself and make sure I've not missed something.
It's 448 page report of events that took place over three years.
It's not impossible to, to, to miss something or to misunderstand something.
So I'm, I feel I'm pretty current on, on what's going on.
And there are a couple of Venn diagram, like circles that are still developing out there.
You've got the Rachel Maddow, Marcy Wheeler contingent who didn't see the same movie we did.
You know, that one with Bruce Willis, where at the end, you know, the kids saying all through the movie, I see dead people.
And you know, a spoiler alert at the end, it turns out that Bruce Willis and the kid and everybody else is all dead.
They've been dead through the whole movie.
Well, they showed him get stabbed to death in the first scene.
So why was that a twist?
I hate that guy.
Shama, Lama, whatever dude.
But the thing is that pretty much everybody who's seen that movie kind of walks out at some point saying, yeah, I guess they were all dead all the time.
Hmm.
You got it from scene one.
Other people needed it, headed to them at the end.
But the point is Maddow and Marcy Wheeler and those folks are still saying that that's not how that ended.
They're still arguing it.
They weren't all dead all the time.
There's missing footage.
It's a different edit.
You know, there's, they're basically still arguing that there are aspects of Russiagate that haven't been fully revealed or Mueller is sending us coded messages or whatever they're, they're simply.
Elizabeth Warren is saying the president should be the house of representatives should move immediately.
And the judiciary committee on articles of impeachment based on this report.
Yeah.
Well, she's trying to dig herself out of a current, what?
6% popularity rating.
She's behind Biden.
Who's not running Bernie Sanders, who probably won't live through the campaign.
Beto mayor Pete.
And I think Krusty the clown, I think is a point ahead of her at this point.
So she's just trying to, so you've got the, the, the, the conspiracy theorists who choose her in denial and they're going to keep connecting the dots until everyone realizes they're irrelevant and wrong.
Then you've got the Elizabeth.
Then you've got the obstructionists who think that Mueller has left us the Dead Sea Scrolls here, that if only we could get professor Robert Langford from the DaVinci code to help us sort it all out.
There's enough hard evidence of obstruction that we can impeach on, on obstruction alone.
And if we can't impeach him, we can have two freaking years of hearings and, and drag Trump through the mud.
That seems to be the largest group.
There's a third group that, and if you've ever read Charles blow in the New York times, he seems to be kind of spearheading this, which is okay, fine.
There wasn't treason and the obstruction thing is kind of complicated, but the report reveals Trump is such a lousy, immoral human being that we need to impeach him on some kind of basis of him just being an immoral, lousy human being.
And that seems to be the one that's gaining a lot of traction.
I'm guess it's early days, but that seems to be gaining traction because it's the one that doesn't require any evidence or legal knowledge to pursue.
You know, you don't have to say anything other than Trump is a lousy human being.
And I think even a lot of people who may support him for political reasons would be quick to agree that in fact, Trump is a lousy human being.
I, you know, I personally would not want to be his friend.
He seems to lie a lot.
He seems to not be a nice guy.
I can't imagine him being someone I'd want to spend time with.
But that's not what impeachment is all about.
But I think that meme is going to drive the talk of impeachment and it's going to kind of segue into a democratic message in the campaign, which is read the Mueller report, not as a legal document, but as a discussion of character and ask yourself, is that the man you want in the white house?
That's my guess at this point, but we'll see.
That's so funny.
Here's a guy who is daily, yearly, implementing a deliberate campaign of starvation against the poorest country in the Middle East, Yemen, but Barack Obama started it.
So you can't get a single one of these Democrats to say, listen, this isn't even just really bad collateral damage from the war against Al Qaeda in the Arabian peninsula.
This is a completely unauthorized war, not under the AUMF for Al Qaeda in the Arabian peninsula against their Houthi enemies that America used to back against them back before we switched sides, you know how it goes.
But, oh, well, who cares about that?
All right.
So nevermind, you know, war crimes that someone might quibble about quibble in context under the AUMF, say the war drone bombing Al Qaeda guys in Yemen or Al Shabaab maybe in Somalia, but this is, there's no even claim that this is under the AUMF and the Congress just told him to stop and he vetoed it and said, you're infringing on my power, but he doesn't have that power, not in the U S constitution.
He doesn't.
And so he could be removed for that, but he's more likely, you know, to be impeached for paying hush money to Stormy Daniels or some garbage man, maybe lying about it to cover it up.
That's what really gets you.
Maybe that's the real lead here is let's talk about this Stormy Daniels hush money.
There's a real felony for you.
Nevermind this Yemen distraction.
Yeah.
Before we, we, before we put Stormy to bed, it's important to remember that for that hush money payoff, which, which everyone now calls hush money payoff, but it's actually a non-disclosure agreement, which is a perfectly legal tool.
I myself am currently under one to at least three non-disclosure agreements, nothing related to anything of this.
And some of them are, it's nothing, not very important things, but the point is that a non-disclosure agreement, even if it involves cash pay money is a perfectly legal thing to do.
It happens all the time.
You just don't hear about it because of that, that non-disclosure part of it in their house.
But the thing is, is that the media has immediately declared this to be hush money.
But the point is, is for that legal non-disclosure agreement to actually be a campaign finance violation, which is all the, which is the absolute worst thing it can be is a technical violation of campaign finance law.
Again, intent has to be shown.
And so any attempt to prosecute that case is again, going to have to show that Trump's intent in making those payments, assuming you can prove all those sub details, was to affect the outcome of the election.
Trump, for example, could say, I paid her off because I was worried about my marriage.
Melania told me one more and we're done.
And I didn't want this one to come out or I decided I didn't want the legacy.
He can, he can say anything he wants, as long as he can come up with a plausible explanation that does not involve saying, I wanted to swim.
The election, the argument in his favor, of course, would also be that why would I be worried about one porn star swinging the election?
When the trail of porn stars and models goes all the way back into the, the, the eighties.
And you've been playing a tape of me talking about grabbing women, you know, hourly for the last couple of years, seriously, you think I'm worried about one porn star swinging the election?
Give me a break.
So, you know, I think that's another dead end that will be dragged around for, for a while.
But the Yemen thing I think is, is, is interesting as well because you know, the Democrats, not only, I think, are they not touching that because they're afraid of sullying Obama's legacy?
I think they love war.
I think they love the fact that the United States is starving Brown people to death.
And I think they love the fact that, you know, the fact that the United States is starving Brown people to death in Yemen.
They don't want to give Trump credit for it, but they are just as happy that he's doing it as pigs in poo.
Let's have, I mean, the Democrats have never had a problem with Trump war wise, except when he wanted to dial something down when he wanted to have less troops in Syria and Afghanistan and Iraq.
That's the only time they've said anything about Trump's war making really serious.
What you just said is correct.
99.9% of the time, but I mean in this case they passed both houses passed, you know, exact carbon copy versions, invoking the war, you know, of a resolution invoking the war powers act and ordering Trump to stop the war, which is really unheard of.
And it came from certainly not mass pressure by the American population that don't know a thing about it.
It was just very small groups that worked their asses off on getting some of these congressmen in gear to do this.
And it was the Democrats in the house and the Democrats and a few Republicans in the Senate that did it.
And I mean, man, you got to hand it to them when they deserve it.
At least they want to stop it, but holding them accountable.
That's something altogether, you know, altogether different.
I mean, yep.
I agree with you there.
Bottom line here is that the investigation and the report from the moment of conception were political things.
They never were anything other than that.
And Mueller has left a big steaming pile on the floor.
That is all about politics and every action the Democrats take from this moment forward is all about the calculus of how it will affect 2020.
What's going on right now in Nancy Pelosi's office is a bunch of smart people looking at numbers and statistics and election maps and saying, if we go ahead and investigate, how is that going to affect us?
If we move to impeachment, how is that going to affect the vote?
And they are calculating entirely based on their predictions of how it will affect the outcome of 2020.
People like Elizabeth Warren, somebody has got to try to profit, you know, in the short term.
And like I said, she's her campaign is going nowhere.
So she's got to do something crazy to get herself in the headlines and maybe soak up the radical wing of the Democratic Party votes on this particular topic.
But anyone who tells you this is not about politics at this point is absolutely lying to you.
All right.
One more important thing before I let you go here, please.
The recent past and near future of America's relationship with Russia.
Yeah.
What do you think?
You know, where can Trump go at this point?
Anything he does Russia wise is going to be he's going to be skewed.
I'm afraid that if part of the motivation behind the political here was to make sure the United States did not have a better relation with Russia relationship with Russia, they probably succeeded already.
They've thrown enough stuff into the machinery that Trump's hands are really tied.
Whatever he does, it will be wrong in somebody's mind.
He's too soft.
He's too weak.
The only good news is that it at least doesn't make it worse.
I think it just I think the quote unquote worse that's going to happen is it's going to kind of freeze the U.S.-Russia relationship wherever it happens to be around now.
Well, this is all through the or not all through, but in the Mueller report kind of over and over.
Somebody saying, hey, let's have a meeting.
Well, we can't have a meeting now because all this heat is on.
In other words, from the very beginning where the rubber meets the road, this has prevented any kind of rapprochement from the Obama years.
Yeah.
The good news is, is that Trump hasn't been driven by it to do to make things worse to prove, you know, he's not Putin's cock holster.
I'm not sure that's true.
I mean, more troops in Eastern Europe and sold lethal weapons to the Ukrainian junta that Obama was afraid to arm.
Let me let me let me round the edges off on that.
Maybe nothing as dramatic as it could have been.
I don't know.
The thing is, is that absolutely they have frozen the relationship.
It's not going to get any better.
It can't it can't get any better at this point.
Perhaps after the election, Trump would have a little more flexibility.
He didn't Obama say that once in an open mic.
Yeah, he did, didn't he?
Yeah.
And on the question of, yeah, you know what?
I don't want to be provoked, overly provocative with these anti missile missiles.
And I want to back down, but I can't do it now.
Yeah.
Yeah.
After the election.
In other words, a perfect, a perfectly reasonable concession of the Russians that he ended up not implementing.
But that was what he was talking about.
Well, this was one of the things that I always ran into with when I was with the State Department, with our less sophisticated foreign interlocutors is they truly, truly did not understand how much our foreign policy is driven by domestic political concerns, particularly those who came who were representing countries that were not particularly democratic themselves or parliamentary, where they had elections all the time.
It just wasn't this giant deal every four years like it is in the US.
You know, they didn't really understand how important voting blocks were to the president and how you you take these these world changing actions towards Israel because of the Jewish voting bloc, or you take what as far as some small country.
I don't want to be too specific because then everyone argues the specifics, but the United States will take action that dramatically affects one of the stands, for example, because of a critical ethnic voting bloc in New York that is focused on that.
Ninety nine point nine percent of the Americans don't even know where that country is, but the United States does something bombastic because they've got to get that that key voting bloc in New York of those people who have that same ethnicity.
And that kind of thing is so hard to explain.
And I found very few foreign diplomats or politicians who understood American politics well enough to understand how tightly these things are connected.
That was certainly the impression I got, for example, when I was in Iran.
Some very smart, very sophisticated Iranian political scientists and government people didn't really get how domestic American foreign policy is, how domestic politics drives American foreign policy.
Well, I mean, that's the thing, right, is in this case, it's the Pentagon and the CIA are the ethnicity that's got to be pleased.
They're the special interest groups.
They can be one of the groups.
All these arms manufacturers.
Yeah, that's a pretty big set of constituents demanding a certain policy bent, you know.
But it can zoom all the way into what are we going to do about the tariffs on Kazakhstani lime imports or something?
I'm making this up.
But I mean, yeah, that's going to like devastate the agricultural economy of Kazakhstan because there's a key district that is almost entirely made up of ethnic Kazakhstan.
You know, the idea is that that kind of granular way that American politics can work, whether we're trying to satisfy the special interest group of arms manufacturers in the trillions or the special interest group of lime importers.
Right.
Our politicians will, in fact, upset the global chessboard for those people.
Yeah.
It's public choice theory, essentially, right?
It's the economics of politics.
That's what Obi-Wan Kenobi calls it in Star Wars, too.
It's not another lecture on the economics of politics.
Essentially, there is no national interest.
There's just the interest of the people involved.
And the squeaky wheel gets the grease and all these kinds of cliches that exactly describe how the system works.
It has nothing to do with the popular will or the broader national interest at all.
No one knows what that means anyway.
There's certainly not anyone with power and the ability to do anything about it.
They all will have a more narrow interest.
And mostly, you know, the best book on this is Secrets by Daniel Ellsberg, where he talks about, hey, guess what?
50,000 people kept the Gulf of Tonkin lie a secret for 12 years until he blew the story in the Pentagon Papers and finally told the truth about it.
There were conspiracy theories about it, but 50,000 people kept the secret.
And it was all because, first of all, they could go to prison.
And second of all, just bide your time, Joe, and you'll be able to maybe move up one step.
And then when you're in your current boss's position, maybe you'll be able to influence his boss a little bit more.
And then just because of the economics of office politics inside the bureaucracies, everybody keeps a secret.
Everybody serves their boss, not what they think, but what their boss thinks.
And everybody just buys their time to move up one step in the chain, and everybody keeps a secret, even if it means millions of people are dying based on a lie.
Because that's not part of the equation.
That's a separate incentive that doesn't really apply to their point of view.
I want to underline that because after my own 24 years in government, I can absolutely assure you that large groups of people are perfectly capable of keeping secrets.
There's nothing dramatic.
It's not like on my deathbed, I've got all the answers for you.
But all sorts of stuff that happened, that's never come out.
It's never been in the press.
Just as a perfect example, you can see what's in my book about Iraq, We Meant Well, that there's tons of stuff in there that has just never been reported anywhere else.
It's not at the level of who killed Kennedy or anything like that, but it's probably a value of interest, maybe to historians.
I don't know.
But the thing is, is that from that all the way on to all sorts of things that are perfectly possible for lots and lots of people to keep secrets.
Here's an example that there was a prominent son of a very important politician, a foreign politician, a leader actually of a foreign country that was very important to the United States.
And his son almost got kicked out of an Ivy League university for cheating on a test.
And this was all taken care of and covered up and fixed up and what have you.
And that happened, I don't know, 20 years ago or something like that.
And not a word has ever appeared anywhere about it.
Lots of people knew about that in and out of government.
And never, ever, ever has that been so people can keep secrets.
Don't believe the whole thing about, well, it's too big a conspiracy for it to remain quiet all these years.
That is bullshit.
Yeah.
And that's why we need people like Daniel Ellsberg, by the way, whistleblowers, because they are the ones who are willing to stand out, say there's 50,000 plus one people who know about this.
Hey, there's another thing I could ask you to comment on.
I bet you have something to say about speaking of whistleblowers.
We got Chelsea Manning and Julian Assange are both in custody right now.
Peter, say something about that.
I hope that Chelsea had competent legal advice when she decided that she was going to refuse to answer questions about Julian Assange and got herself thrown back into jail for contempt of court.
I hope that someone in her circle saw, understood in some way that she was being set up, that they knew they were closing in on Assange and that they were going to pop him soon enough, whether they knew exactly it was going to be the next week or whatever.
I hope someone in her circle and her legal team had an inkling that she was being set up.
When she was called back into court and asked questions about her interaction with Assange, she had the option of saying, for example, I don't recall.
And they would have sent her home and said, we don't like you, but go away now.
She could have had the option possibly of pleading the Fifth Amendment or claiming that she was being perjured or prejudiced here under double justice, whatever.
She had a lot of legal options available to her that would have allowed her to go home that day.
Instead, she chose to take a very principled stand by refusing to answer questions about Assange.
The fix was in, and nobody in the world was happier than the U.S. government that she decided to take a principled stand, which allowed them to throw her in jail just prior to arresting Assange, meaning no press comments, no information, no new information, no contradictory statements.
And I'm sure they'll find a way to make it impossible for her to testify on behalf of Assange's defense.
He's going to be fighting his extradition from England.
She's locked up in Virginia indefinitely because contempt of court.
It's not a sentence.
It's a punishment, right?
It's not a sentence like, OK, you robbed a bank, so you go to jail for two years.
And when you're done, you know, you've paid your debt to society.
No contempt of court, as she's in there indefinitely being told that until you respond to this court, you're going to stay in jail and you're going to sit there and look at four cement walls every day until you realize you need to cooperate with us.
So I hope she knew what she was doing when she did what she did.
I don't have no inside information, but I worry that she wasn't competently advised and that she decided to take a stand because it was the right thing to do and didn't measure it against what was going to happen to her, not only personally, that she's in jail again, but also taking her off the chessboard.
When Assange is in jail, Assange, I've I've been seen competent legal reason that this is this extradition case is going to take at least a year, maybe two years or longer.
He's going to be right now, of course, the United States wants to extradite him and try him for assisting Chelsea in getting the U.S. government documents.
And he's going to fight that extradition.
It's going to go on for a year, maybe two years.
And I don't know what happens after after all that.
I hope that he has something.
Interestingly, just to tie it all together before we say goodbye, is that Bill Barr in his press conference before the release of the Mueller report took great pains to specify that.
The Trump campaign actions in being in touch with WikiLeaks in some form only would constitute a crime if they assisted WikiLeaks in illegally obtaining the documents.
And what that does is it exonerates The New York Times for working with WikiLeaks to publish their documents and to write about their documents.
And it is word for word the case they're making against Assange.
They're trying to make the case that Assange is not a journalist or a publisher, that his actions are not protected under the First Amendment, that he's basically in this specific instance, just a crappy hacker who helped Chelsea Manning brute force some passwords.
No different than the guy who went after your credit card.
So it all ties together in some nasty ways.
But personally, my main concern right at this moment is for Chelsea and whether she got the right advice or not.
Yeah, I mean, that's the whole thing is, too, is underlying this.
They already know everything about this case.
They already prosecuted and convicted Chelsea Manning and they already know about the password and they already know about all the chat logs and they already know, you know, there's.
And as you just described it, all they have on Assange is this ridiculous trumped up case where they twist the meaning of the English language so that we have to try to question what the definition of is is and whether Assange is a reporter or not, whether he has a license from the National Press Bureau.
Is that what we're doing now or what?
How does that work?
You know, the whole thing is trumped up.
And so then on that basis, it's just like Trump obstructing a fake investigation here.
You got Manning in contempt on a fake investigation.
And this is someone who, you know, I keep repeating this, but I need to make sure I'm right about this.
But I read somewhere that Manning has actually tried to kill herself two different times and I know has threatened.
Yeah, that would have been in Leavenworth, not in the current situation.
Yeah, yeah.
No, no, no.
Right.
But previously.
But but going to the point that like this is someone who has, you know, severe problems with depression and, you know, possibly some other mental health issues that she needs help with and this kind of thing.
And it's, as you say, this indefinite detention here.
And I see what you mean, too, about how it all fits in a giant plot to get her out of the way when it's time to come for Assange, too.
And isn't it funny, too, how all the journalists are forsaking Assange, but they're going ahead and throwing in Manning, too.
They're they're denouncing Assange.
Oh, yeah, he's not one of us.
Get him.
Leave us alone.
You know, like George Carlin, do whatever you want to the girl, but leave me alone.
But but then Manning, they don't even mention Manning is in prison here.
And then, oh, I don't know about that.
Yeah, whatever.
If I have to take her side, then I might get into why what Assange did was right.
Publishing the leak of this source.
And I don't want to get into that.
So forget her.
The press handling of Manning is yet another shameful episode because they decided somewhere along the way that her being a trans person was going to be the story, and that allowed them to not have to talk about the rights and wrongs of being a whistleblower.
And it allowed them to paint Manning good, Assange bad as the very simplistic picture.
And it's it's a shameful thing that they tried to hide the fact that they didn't like her as a whistleblower behind their virtue seeking of supporting her as a trans person.
Yeah.
And you know what?
That was actually a huge part of that blunder was Manning and Manning's legal team's fault were the day of the conviction.
They said announcing the name change and all of this stuff right then, right when the ball was right in your court and my court to launch the best defense we could of what Manning had done.
Instead, they couldn't even give us a week to talk about the WikiLeaks instead.
Now it's all about the genitals.
Oh, God.
That's great.
Yeah.
It's not military prison.
It's the local jail.
Yeah.
And that all said, geez, I just feel bad that she's back in jail.
And especially I feel bad because if this was a trap, she didn't blunder into it.
She ran in and said, slam the door behind me, please.
All right.
Believe it or not, this will be the dumbest question of the interview.
All right.
Is there such a thing as the judge saying, okay, well, you are in contempt, but I'm gonna go ahead and let you out anyway, because enough of this sort of thing.
I don't know enough about the specifics of the law to answer that.
I know in previous cases, there have been sort of interim solutions where the person says, you know, judges don't like to contempt.
And contempt is basically saying to the court, I don't accept you and your rules and I'm not going to play in this game and go to hell.
And no judge likes that.
I know that in the past, judges, some judges and completely different other cases, for example, have decided that there are other ways that she could testify that would kind of weasel around the idea that she refuses to cooperate.
She refuses to cooperate, but doesn't force her to cooperate in a certain way in order to get out of jail.
Yeah.
So hopefully some smart lawyers who know a lot more about this will get on this or on this and start to work at it.
But at this point, the problem is, is that she's now caught up in something way bigger than herself.
And that's the Assange case.
And that's going to affect what happens.
Flexibility that might have existed if Assange was not in this, if for some reason the Ecuadorians had changed their mind at the last minute, flexibility that would have existed in that scenario certainly is gone.
All right, man.
Well, I'll let you go.
I kept you long enough.
There'll be more to talk about.
Take care, please, and my best.
Thanks a lot, Peter.
Peter Van Buren, everybody.
He wrote We Meant Well and Hooper's War and his own website is WeMeantWell.com.
And you can oftentimes find him over at TAC, the American conservative magazine, TheAmericanConservative.com.
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.
