Sorry, I'm late.
I had to stop by the Whites 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, time to welcome Daniel Lazar back to the show.
You hear that?
I said your name right, despite the irony on the end there.
Very good.
And he's the author of The Frozen Republic, How the Constitution is Paralyzing Democracy.
I'm also against the Constitution, but I think for other reasons.
But anyway, and he writes for The Nation and other things.
Here he is at ConsortiumNews.com.
The Guccifer 2.0 gaps in Mueller's full report.
Welcome back to the show, Dan.
How are you doing, sir?
I'm fine.
How are you?
I'm doing great.
Hey, listen, so here's the thing.
Everybody knows that Russia did the hacks of the DNC and the Podesta emails.
And despite the falling flat of all of the rest of the accusations in Russiagate, Mueller says that, yes, it was Guccifer, this and that, like in the previous document there.
That's the GRU, see?
And they're the ones who gave all the WikiLeaks to Assange.
And come on, no person who doesn't accept at least that can be considered a credible and serious journalist or pundit or whatever in America.
Sort of like with Saddam Hussein's weapons in 2002.
We all know he has warehouses full of VX and sarin and mustard gas and an advanced nuclear weapons program.
The only question is whether we're going to do something about it now or whether we should wait around until he attacks us first, this kind of thing.
Anyway, so you're not going for that.
You don't feel that peer pressure to say, OK, OK, yes, yes, it had to have been the Russians if you say so enough times in a row.
Yes, I'm not buying it.
The Mueller report is a really interesting document.
It kind of tackles three topics, collusion, interference, intervention, interference and obstruction.
So we know we know there was no collusion, but that leaves the other two.
And the question of interference.
Now, the problem is that dealing with WikiLeaks is that Mueller essentially retold the story he told in his indictment last July of the GRU, the Russian military intelligence, which he laid out a scenario about how the Russians hacked the DNC.
And then via this persona, Guccifer 2.0 fed the information to WikiLeaks.
And the implication is that WikiLeaks is essentially a collaborator, an arm of the Russian government.
That's the line that Mike Pompeo pushes, for example.
So I suppose it's possible.
But the problem is that the the timeline that that Mueller lays out simply doesn't make sense.
It's just doesn't add up.
Oh, yeah.
So we've got plenty of time.
It's not a complicated question.
It's a very simple question.
On June 12th, 2016, Julian Assange announced that WikiLeaks had another round of Democratic Party disclosures coming.
That's June 12th.
June 14th, the DNC accuses Russia of hacking its computers.
That's two days later.
June 15th, Guccifer claims credit for the hack that was disclosed a day earlier and then says he has given a load of documents from that hack to WikiLeaks, which refers to the announcement three days earlier by Assange.
On June 22nd and June 6th and July 6th, WikiLeaks and Guccifer exchange various emails.
On July 14th, that is more than a month after Assange's original announcement, Guccifer sends WikiLeaks an encrypted one gigabyte file.
July 18th, WikiLeaks opens that file and July 22nd, WikiLeaks releases more than 20,000 DNC emails and 8000 other attachments.
So what's wrong with that scenario, with that timeline, that narrative?
First of all, why would Assange announce he's got a big email dump coming?
Essentially, 10 days before he hears anything new, anything from Guccifer 2.0, was there a previous conversation that Mueller has not disclosed?
And why would he announce it more than a month actually before receiving the file and opening it?
And then once he opens the file on July 18th, why would he then publish it just four days later?
I mean, after all, WikiLeaks takes great pride in the accuracy and veracity of what it puts out to the public.
So would four days be enough to go over 20,000 emails and 8000 other attachments to make sure that they have not been doctored, they're all genuine, etc., etc.?
I mean, WikiLeaks' record so far is flawless.
So it doesn't make sense.
How could Assange announce an email dump when he has not heard from the supposed source and would not hear from him for several weeks?
Why would he then receive some kind of file and then release the documents a mere four days later?
It just doesn't make any sense.
But that is essentially the narrative on which, that is the timeline, the sequence on which Mueller's narrative hangs.
Well, isn't that strange?
It seems like with all those high-powered lawyers, they could have come up with something that makes a little bit more sense than that.
A little bit better spin on those facts somehow, I don't know.
But the way it reads in the report, it's like, yeah.
So Assange made this announcement, and then two days later, he had a reason for making the announcement he made two days before.
Right, right.
And then a month later, he gets the material that he had announced in mid-June.
And then finally, after getting the material, opening the file, de-encrypting it, etc., he puts it out.
After just four days, in which he supposedly has inspected 28,000 documents.
You know, this was a big deal in the hearings a few weeks ago when I think one of these cops was making some claims about Assange and the WikiLeaks and the Russians.
And then Justin Amash held up a newspaper, held up a copy of The Guardian from June, from I guess June 12th or June 13th, saying, well, here.
See, that was already in the paper.
You try to pretend that this had to be inside information based on secret communications going on between these players, and yet that was a public announcement.
And, you know, I think it's something important here, too, is that even for the sake of argument, if you buy everything in the timeline and the rest of that here of what's going on, as Caitlin Johnstone pointed out, quite importantly, Mueller never accuses Julian Assange of knowingly working with the Russians at all.
If we assume that Guccifer 2 really is the GRU and if we assume that Guccifer 2 and DC Leaks are both the GRU and that Assange was working with them on this, that, or the other thing, there's no even implication in here that Assange was knowingly working with whoever was the real identity.
You know what I mean?
But they don't, for all of the smears that, as you just said, Pompeo essentially saying, or saying that WikiLeaks is essentially a front for the Russians and these kinds of things like that, there's no indication in the Mueller report that that's even the case.
And that's even assuming that the GRU is behind the leak at all.
There's still no implication that Assange knew that or was working with them on that in any way in here.
And there's a very important reason why they haven't accused Assange of that, because if they, assuming they get their hands on him and assuming they haul him into court, if they were to charge him with conspiring with the Russians, they would have to prove it.
And remember, the GRU indictment, the Mueller's indictment of 12 members of the GRU, he never expected them to place themselves in the hands of a U.S. court.
So it's nothing more than a press release, a publicity stunt.
It's not designed to be proved in court.
And that's why, that's evidently why he has not charged Assange with conspiring with Russia, because then he'd have to prove it.
And it's not easy.
And his indictment doesn't add up.
It's got weak spots that a defense attorney would pounce on.
Hey, but you know what's a great book?
The War State by my friend Mike Swanson.
It's a great history of the rise of the military industrial complex after World War II, the Truman, Eisenhower, and Kennedy administrations.
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.
So Mueller writes here that shortly after the GRU's, you know, supposedly first release of stolen documents through DCleaks.com in June, 2016.
She didn't give an exact date on that, do they?
GRU officers also used the DCleaks persona to contact WikiLeaks about possible coordination in the future release of stolen emails.
On June 14th, 2016, DCleaks, or at DCleaks on Twitter, sent a DM to WikiLeaks noting, you announced your organization was preparing to publish more Hillary's emails.
We're ready to support you.
We have some too.
Let's do it together.
What do you think of that?
And then at the same time, though, they say WikiLeaks was initiating communications with the GRU persona, Guccifer 2.0.
Again, Mueller's assertion here is that they're both the GRU.
Shortly after it was used to release documents, you know, liberated, stolen, they say here, from the DNC.
And so seven days after Guccifer's first release of DNC documents, it says here, WikiLeaks used Twitter's DM function to contact the Guccifer 2.0 account to suggest that Guccifer 2.0, quote, send any new material here for us to review, and it will have a much higher impact than what you are doing.
So in other words, the way that they put it here is that DCleaks and Guccifer 2.0 are both the GRU, and yet DCleaks is coming to Assange with some stuff that we know is all adulterated with Cyrillic metadata and all this weird stuff, right?
But Assange is having to go after Guccifer and say, hey, stop leaking stuff.
You're going to leak stuff.
Leak it through me so people pay more attention to it.
It'll get more prominence, this and that.
So it seems kind of strange, you know, the way one of them is really easy and the other one's playing hard to get.
They're both on the same mission to, in fact, get this stuff out through Assange in the first place, presumably, right?
Well, yes.
I mean, all I ask is that people apply—you know, I'm not asking for people to apply any kind of twisty-turny conspiratorial analysis, but just very simple common-sense analysis.
I mean, a sequence where you announce the release of some secrets when you have not received any secrets, you have no idea you will receive secrets until you get an email some days later doesn't make sense.
It suggests what really was happening is that Wikileaks by this point had a lot of people offering them information.
It was coming at them from all angles.
They're trying to weed stuff out, establish contact with a variety of sources, figure out which ones are genuine and which ones are not, and that one of those sources was Guccifer 2.0.
So there's just no evidence at all that the big cache of liberated emails that Wikileaks released came from the GRU or that Wikileaks was knowingly collaborating with the GRU or in any way had established contact, knowing contact as entering into an alliance with the GRU.
So it just doesn't make sense, and other things don't make sense either.
I mean, for example, if you're the GRU, why would you want to invent a character like Guccifer 2.0?
I mean spies are supposed to lay low, right?
They're supposed to sort of carry on in a low-key fashion.
But Guccifer 2.0 was conducting himself in a high-profile, flamboyant way, inviting reporters to chat with him via the internet, making all kinds of grandstanding statements.
Why would the GRU do that?
I mean why call attention to themselves in that regard?
It doesn't seem to accord with any kind of – any of the usual methods employed by spy agencies, which I said would treasure secrecy above all else.
Well, one thing that became clear very quickly about the Steele dossier was that so much of it was based on stuff that was already out in the news, and then it was just embellished.
So it made it sound like here's some secret information or whatever, but the fact that this or that meeting or acquaintanceship or whatever event had taken place was kind of already out there.
And so that seems to be possibly the same kind of thing here where – remember how your timeline starts here.
Assange says, hey, I got a bunch of stuff, and then all of a sudden these people start popping up pretending to be Russians or maybe not pretending but seemingly easy to discover as Russians saying, that's right.
We have these same emails too.
And so here we are posting them with Iron Felix's name on them and these kinds of things just to get busted essentially.
Yeah.
But only after the fact.
So Ray McGovern – and he admits he's speculating here.
He doesn't say he can prove it.
But he says he thinks that Guccifer 2.0 is John Brennan, that it was the CIA that did this in order to essentially pollute the narrative that this was all a Russian plot rather than a Clintonian plot as revealed in the emails, which was the real story.
Some people think it was the DNC.
Or some people think it was CrowdStrike, the private firm that originally investigated the DNC servers.
And there's always an outside possibility that Guccifer is exactly who he says he is, i.e. a Romanian hacker somewhere firing off these things.
So I don't really know.
But all I know is that the Mueller narrative kind of just fails on its face.
It just doesn't make sense according to the simplest, most common sense analysis.
Well, here's a piece of this report too.
The office was able to identify when the GRU, operating through its personas, Guccifer 2.0 and DCLeaks, transferred some of the stolen documents to Wikileaks through online archives set up by the GRU.
Assange had access to the internet from the Ecuadorian embassy in London, England.
And then a big black redaction.
And it says investigative technique.
And then that's it.
So, in other words, I'd tell you, but then I'd have to kill you.
We will not provide any evidence for our claims here.
You're just going to have to accept them or risk looking foolish for not believing in the thing everybody else believes in.
Remember like when Biden and Kerry and Hillary Clinton were all so wise to vote for Iraq War II because they were afraid what they would look like?
That they were afraid they would look afraid if they didn't support it.
So you know how this goes.
Or when Hillary and Jake Sullivan, her top aide, put out a report saying that the Trump administration had established a secret back channel to Moscow, operating out of the Trump Tower, which turned out – which actually Mueller examined and turned out to be completely baseless.
So, yeah, there are all kinds of phony stories going around.
And that one, by the way, had been debunked long ago.
Franklin Foer had put that in Slate, and immediately other reporters came out and said, yeah, somebody tried to shop that to us too, and it didn't hold up.
And you know what?
I'm sorry.
I used to be so good at remembering all of my footnotes, and I'm just losing my mind right now.
But there was a great piece that we ran.
I think it might have been in Real Clear Politics.
I think that's what it was, Real Clear Politics, that had this real in-depth rundown on these couple of lobbyists in D.C. who were shopping all these stories around.
And they were the origin of that Alphabank story and that kind of thing.
The whole thing is a fraud.
I mean, look.
I mean Mueller spent $30 million in two years and $30 million essentially coming up with nothing.
So clearly one purpose of the report is to justify this investment.
So the only way you can do that is by insisting that there was a big problem, that Russia was interfering in our democracy and it was interfering in a really massive way.
So therefore the report, even though it debunks all the old accusations of collusion, the report does build up these accusations of Russian interference.
And because Mueller knows he can get away with it because no one in the mainstream media, no one in the Republican or Democratic parties are going to challenge him on this.
They're going to pat him on the back and say, great job.
But this stuff is clearly exaggerated.
The IRAs, the internet research agencies' activities are grossly exaggerated.
The report builds them up to absurd dimensions.
And so plainly Russian interference, whatever it was, was not nearly as significant, nearly as important as the report lets on.
And certainly the charge that it was collaborating with WikiLeaks just doesn't hold water.
Yeah, well, you know, here's the thing further on this topic here from Aaron Maté on Twitter, quoting from the report here.
He quotes them saying, unit 26165, that's GRU officers, appear to have stolen thousands of emails and attachments, which were later released by WikiLeaks.
And he says, Aaron Maté says, I think Mueller is saying he doesn't know definitively that GRU stole DNC emails.
Note what he does know, quote, stolen documents included the DNC's opposition research into candidate Trump.
But as for emails, GRU, quote, GRU officers, quote, appear to have stolen thousand emails and attachments.
That's a pretty big climb down, even in the report itself.
And then Michael Tracy has another one here, too, where he says, this is the Mueller report, says the office cannot rule out that stolen documents were transferred to WikiLeaks through intermediaries who visited during the summer of 2016.
For example, public reporting identified Andrew Mueller Magun as a WikiLeaks associate who may have assisted with the transfer of these stolen documents to WikiLeaks and then a big redaction investigative technique.
And Tracy says here, so Mueller asserts that the GRU hacked DNC Podesta, but he doesn't establish a chain of custody whereby the hacked materials were transferred to WikiLeaks.
In fact, he explicitly leaves open the possibility that a non-state actor, as Assange always claimed, transferred the materials.
In other words, by bringing up this guy may have done it, he's admitting that he doesn't have – he's not – he could just claim without demonstrating it that, oh, yeah, no, don't worry.
We know that the Russians are the ones who gave them to WikiLeaks because of secret information we can't tell you regarding ones and zeros and network traffic.
But no, then he actually brings up a counterargument.
Actually, we don't know.
He could have got this stuff from this other guy, and we didn't investigate where he might have got it from.
Wait, what?
And how could he know since the FBI never took physical possession of the DNC servers?
They never got close to those machines.
Well, he even says that in here, although this is kind of silly to bring up at all.
But Marcy Wheeler, I noted, one thing that she said that – I'm not certain about this, but it sounds plausible – was that she calls this the single-server fallacy.
And so the DNC had different servers that were identified and inspected and whatever, which I think is a possibility, but it's still beside the point.
Jeffrey Carr told me, the computer security expert, as soon as this story broke back in the beginning in July of 2016, he came on the show and said, you cannot investigate a server and see who hacked it.
It's not going to tell you.
And it might tell you, but it might be lying.
And there's no way to prove it.
And then he said, oh, wait, no, yes, actually, that's wrong.
There is one way to prove it, and that is if you're the national security agency.
And then it's not a matter of inspecting the server.
It's a matter of having godlike surveillance power over every bit of internet traffic on this planet, and they can trace exactly who hacked what even by rewinding and going back to C.
And then that was a big point in January 2017 when the so-called intelligence report full of claims and no evidence came out, and the national security agency were the ones who judged only with moderate confidence that this had happened.
That wasn't even the NSA.
That was just the chosen NSA people.
They were only willing to kind of sign on, but they clearly were not the ones vouching.
Same thing for the reality winner document.
It had a yellow line, not a green line, on that chart showing that, again, the actual masters of the ones and zeros were not willing to go to the mat for this thing.
Well, there's a lot here to question, and I think that in general Mueller's handling of this material is every bit as tendentious as the NSA's, ONDI's, and FBI's, and CIA's handling of this material.
Real quick, last couple minutes here.
So what about obstruction?
Because a lot of those things are sort of – when you read it, it's like attempted obstruction.
He orders his aide to obstruct the thing, but then the aide doesn't follow through with it.
That happened over and over, his people saving him from himself here, this kind of thing.
But there were a couple things where tweeting about Manafort and Cohen particularly, threatening Cohen's family with criminal charges and this and that kind of thing.
That's the kind of thing where if you or I did that, the federal prosecutors would nail us to the wall, probably upside down.
So now, of course, he was only defending himself from an illegal putsch by the secret police.
So I kind of tend to give him a pass for this in a way since they knew they were lying the whole time.
Give me a break.
This whole thing is a hoax and always was a hoax from the beginning.
We're trying to prevent him from becoming president in the first place is where it came from.
Clearly, I don't know all the details are nailed down, but if they can be conspiracy kooks on this issue, so can I.
But so what do you think about that?
Obstruction and mitigating circumstances, et cetera.
I basically agree with you.
I mean Trump was like King Lear raging out of the heath against the howling wind.
And he says by March, he's saying, you know, my administration is being shut down.
I can't do anything with Russia because of this fear.
This is artificially engineered fear over Russian intelligence.
So the guy was desperate.
His administration is being shut down.
He's paralyzed.
He's stymied.
He can't fight it.
You know, and any attempt to fight it seems to make it worse.
So, yeah.
So the guy does, you know, the guy's Trump.
He's reckless.
He's stupid.
He's reactionary, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.
So he does some stupid things.
And really ignorant, too.
I mean, we saw in the last week where he's like, if you try to impeach me, I'll take you to the Supreme Court.
Oh, man.
He really has no idea what world he's living in at all, this guy.
Sorry.
Go ahead.
Yes.
He was paralyzed and besieged and trying to fight back and not doing a terribly good job of it and saying some pretty rash things.
But I agree with you.
The onus is really on the people who drummed up this artificial hysteria really with an attempt to derail Trump's policies and even perhaps drive him from office.
So I see this whole Russiagate thing as a deeply unconstitutional attempt at some kind of something approaching a coup d'etat.
And so the onus lies on those who instigated this movement, who tried to engineer his ouster in this unconstitutional way.
Now, here's what's so much fun here is they came at the king and they missed.
And yet, who's they?
It's the DOJ.
And so they're raging now.
Treason.
It's treason what they did, which, again, boy, put yourself in his circumstances.
He didn't get his 100-day honeymoon.
They didn't treat him like Barack Obama.
How unfair.
And yet, what can he do about it?
The inspector general's looking at it, but he's part of the DOJ.
He can't sic the Treasury Department on them or some kind of thing like that.
As Al Gore would say, there is no controlling legal authority for how Trump can hold these people accountable for what they've done.
Yeah, and also bear in mind— Oh, and Lindsey Graham.
I mean the GOP and the Congress, they are the CIA.
So they're not going to go after these guys in any real way.
And bear in mind that so absurd are these charges of collaboration that after the election, Putin didn't even have Trump's telephone number.
He was trying to find somebody to reach out to in order to improve relations.
They had no contacts.
He goes to the guy from the Alpha Bank, and he goes, I know.
I can't reach him either.
Precisely.
And they're arranging meetings with Eric Prince.
And Eric Prince, they admit he's not very—he doesn't seem to be very impressive.
He has no connections at all, but he's the best they can do.
Eric Prince is the founder of—what's that private security firm?
Blackwater.
Blackwater, yeah.
Right.
Anyway, so this whole thing just doesn't make sense.
It was like artificial, contrived controversy, which had Trump nailed to the wall upside down, as you say.
So Trump is flailing around doing a pretty piss-poor job of it, but no one could have done a good job under those circumstances.
So I agree.
These obstruction charges are most unimpressive, which is why Barr said—Barr didn't go along with it.
I have one more thing, man.
I'm sorry, but I've got to ask you about this.
Go on.
What about the reaction on the part of the same people who bought into this conspiracy all along that, see, they were right all along.
No one's even climbing down from this, it doesn't look like.
It's deeply contemptible, number one.
And number two, it shows that that truth is immaterial.
They are just launching a crusade in alliance with the intelligence agencies to drive Trump out of office, to essentially ratchet up tensions with Russia, even though the latest elections in the Ukraine show that their policies are in ruin in that part of the world.
But they won't stop.
They're going at him.
They're doing their desperate best.
People like Jennifer Rubin, the Washington Post columnist who was charging collusion night and day, now charges obstruction.
So for the last two and a half years, we've heard Russia, Russia, Russia 24-7.
For the next two years, apparently, we're going to hear obstruction, obstruction, obstruction 24-7.
It's just, it's so pathetic.
It defies description.
It's quite a climb down from high treason, but they don't seem to even catch the irony at all.
There's just no self-awareness kind of on that side.
And so I guess they're going to find out the hard way when Trump wins because he's going to run on – look at how dishonest these people are, that they'll do anything to essentially cheat and try to cancel the results of an election that they lost.
Is that what democracy means?
The Democrats win or else they call the secret police on you and make up fake charges of high treason?
I mean this is crazy.
I quite agree.
They have handed him a wonderful argument, which I am confident he will use to the utmost.
Yeah, and all – even on this show, think of all the oxygen that's being taken up with this story instead of all the other stuff we're supposed to be covering like all the innocent people that he's killing in six different countries.
I can name off the top of my head, seven, eight.
Yeah, yeah.
All right.
Thank you, Dan.
Great to talk to you again, sir.
Good talking to you, Scott.
All right, you guys.
That's Dan Lazar.
Lazar.
Damn.
That's Daniel Lazar.
He is at ConsortiumNews.com.
The Guccifer 2.0 gaps in Mueller's full report.
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.
