Sorry, I'm late.
I had to stop by the wax museum again and give the finger to FDR.
We know Al-Qaeda, Zawahiri, is supporting the opposition in Syria.
Are we supporting Al-Qaeda in Syria?
It's a proud day for America.
And by God, we've kicked Vietnam syndrome once and for all.
Thank you very, very much.
I say it, I say it again, you've been had.
You've been took.
You've been hoodwinked.
These witnesses are trying to simply deny things that just about everybody else accepts as fact.
He came, he saw, he died.
We ain't killing they army, but we killing them.
We be on CNN like, say our name, bitch, say it, say it three times.
The meeting of the largest armies in the history of the world.
Then there's going to be an invasion.
All right, you guys, introducing David Stockman.
He was former budget director at the beginning of the Reagan years, way back when.
And he has a website called Contra Corner.
And he wrote a bunch of great books, including The Great Deformation, which that's really the one, man, right there.
But then is Peak Trump.
That's the latest.
The Undrainable Swamp and something, something like that.
Welcome back to the show.
How are you doing, David?
Great to be with you.
I read the thing.
I just can't remember the title.
That's all.
Yeah, that's OK.
The last part is The Fantasy of MAGA.
All right.
And I think we're getting evidence of that by the day.
Got that right.
Well, let me say about your writing, too, that I recommend it.
I mean, you write all these great articles and you care about all the same stuff I care about, too.
So that's nice.
But, and I've heard this said by others, too, you write just like you talk.
And it's all, you know, it makes for great reading.
It's interesting prose.
It's not like trudging through some, you know, well, I mean, some of the math can be difficult at the economics parts.
But you know what I mean?
The writing is really engaging and great.
And so people should not let the thickness of the books intimidate them.
They'll blaze right through.
OK.
Well, thank you very much.
Yeah.
You know, this is pretty serious stuff, but in some ways there's a lot of humor in it.
And, of course, the issue that we're going to talk about today and that's been prominent in the last week or so is finally molar time is over.
We have the report.
It proves that there was absolutely nothing to this whole Russiagate meddling collusion, folks.
And that when you read through the 448 pages, you know, it just shows you how ridiculous the underlying story was.
And you have to shake your head, really, in disbelief to think that night after night after night on CNN and MSNBC and, frankly, you know, The Washington Post, New York Times, NBC, all the rest of them carried on serious discussions about collusion based on what?
You know, I didn't have to read the Mueller report.
A lot of this stuff was in the public domain and bits and pieces over the last year and a half.
But when you consider the fact that they wiretapped the campaign of a Republican candidate for president based on Carter Page, and then you go through and read the entire eight pages that they came up with, and it's a total clean bill of health.
They didn't even indict him.
And everything that was alleged at the time, such as that he went to Moscow and had some secret negotiations about an energy deal, all of this is debunked completely by the Mueller report itself.
So there is a lot, if it weren't so serious, you could sort of laugh your ass off, frankly, reading this.
But, you know, hopefully somehow some of this will penetrate through to the American public.
You know, the other big figure in this was Papadopoulos.
I call him Baby George Papadopoulos.
He was 29 years old, no count, drifter, looking for a job.
For crying out loud, he just got out of graduate school in 2011, held a couple of jobs temporarily, and ended up on the Trump campaign as an unpaid member of an advisory committee that they desperately scrambled to put together in March 2016.
And for a reason that it's kind of hilarious in itself.
There was a crisis at the campaign headquarters because Trump was being, you know, manhandled by the media after he said that to a question, where do you get your foreign policy advice and views?
And Trump answered, honestly, he said, by watching cable TV.
And so, you know, the whole establishment media went nuts, tut-tutting and harrumphing about that.
Oh, yeah, they don't know anybody like that.
So they quickly put together an advisory committee.
But here's the point.
The entire Republican foreign policy establishment, which is heavily, heavily neocon, as we know, or they're all tainted because they've been there for the last 20 or 30 years with Bush senior and Bush the younger and Bush the elder and half of them with Clinton and some of them with Obama, too.
But the point is, they all were boycotting the Trump campaign.
They were never Trumpers.
So when he had to put this committee together, he practically got it by his staff drafts people out of the phone book.
That's how they got Carter Page.
That's how they got baby George Papadopoulos.
And yet somehow these guys were agents of a shadowy conspiracy going on with Kremlin and Putin to throw the election in Trump's behalf.
I mean, it's ridiculous.
I'm glad all this stuff is out.
And hopefully, as the full import of this begins to spread and sink in, people will understand that they have been scammed, really, in a way that I, in my whole 50 years of watching public life and participating in it in both Washington and Wall Street, I've never seen anything this threadbare.
This preposterous.
And I'm speaking now of the Russiagate collusion in that entire period.
So it's kind of a reminder that we're, you know, we're in uncharted waters here.
We're at a time where, you know, the leadership of this country in some ways has lost its mind.
It really doesn't even know how to assess information or weigh evidence or put things in perspective anymore.
And I guess the point here is the Mueller report, maybe, despite, you know, it was billed to be the smoking gun that was going to take Trump down.
And I have no grief for Trump.
I think he's going in the wrong direction on so many things.
But still, it didn't take him down.
What it did was take down the narrative of the establishment, despite, you know, what everybody expected.
Well, I'm not so sure that that's true, right?
Because of, you know, what you just talked about, where the people in the media, they're so into this belief system, essentially, they're not weighing it.
You know, Greenwald, and a lot of people don't have to agree with Greenwald about anything, and might disagree with him about lots of things.
But one of the things he said here, he was like, look, there are a lot of things that are a matter of opinion, you know, that you can have all sorts of spin on all kinds of things.
But some things are simply empirical questions of whether or not Carter Page engaged in an elaborate conspiracy with the Russian government.
He either did or he didn't.
There's either evidence or proof of that, or there's not.
And no matter how you feel about any of these things, that stuff, you have to — there's no — I mean, and it should be, like you say, that when you get it this wrong, then, oh, well, now you have to suffer when the consequences come.
But they're escaping from that by simply just refusing to acknowledge.
And they're saying that, essentially, the Mueller report confirms what they were saying all along.
A headline yesterday on NBC was — it doesn't begin with the word well, but I guess it should have — well, Trump did leave everything wide open to the Russians.
That's what's in the Mueller report, is what could have happened, or this kind of thing.
Right?
They're not backing down one bit.
They're just finding other ways to spin out of it.
I agree.
But even then, you know, we don't need to dwell on Carter Page excessively here, but the report in black and white declarative prose says they found nothing that validated all of the claims about Carter Page engaging in a conspiracy.
They showed that I wrote in my book that came out, you know, weeks and weeks before this, that Carter Page went to Moscow in July 2016 on his own.
The campaign wouldn't even pay for his fare or, you know, endorse him as a representative.
And while he was there, he met with an old buddy from his days as a broker, stockbroker at Merrill Lynch in Moscow from 2003 to 2007.
And his buddy from way back then is now the investor relations director at Rosneft.
OK.
So he has a drink with him, and that's one item that was totally discarded.
And then he gave a speech at a conference that a lot of people were invited to.
At the conference, he shook hands at the cocktail hour with the foreign affairs minister of Russia and exchanged four words and then listened to the guy's speech and learned that they would be more favorably inclined to the open-mindedness of a Trump ally.
So he got that by listening to the speech.
So my point is, this is all in the Mueller report.
It was all innocent.
In fact, the sponsors of this conference thought, well, you know, he's on this advisory committee, Carter Page, maybe people over at the Kremlin would find it interesting to talk to him.
So they called the head of, you know, the head of the press office there.
The guy spent a couple hours checking, sent an email back.
And get this, it's in the Mueller report.
We checked into him.
He doesn't count for much.
There's no point in the meeting.
That's what it says.
Now, those are the facts, and they're 180 degrees at variance with the idea that Carter Page was a secret agent, emissary, interacting with the Kremlin to, you know, influence the campaign.
And this is only one example.
The whole report is full of it.
But I want to add a point here that I think puts some context to this, and that is that the Democrats are so bereaved, let's say, by their loss of the 2016 election to the worst candidate that the Republicans have ever fielded in 100 years.
And I would put Barry Goldwater and Al Flandin in that camp.
And they lost to Trump, you know, almost impossible to lose to Trump, really, when you think about it.
He kind of fluked out because he won some of those Rust Belt counties in Michigan, Ohio, Wisconsin, etc.
But they can't explain how they lost.
They can't acknowledge that Hillary was an awful candidate.
They can't acknowledge that their mainstream philosophy and policy has left Iowa to America high and dry.
And in the process, they created what I call a total taint theory.
And that is, anybody who is Russian, of the entire population of 141 million people, must be in some way a tool of Vlad Putin sent over to do harm to America.
So no matter who you have a contact with, no matter how innocent, appropriate, or normal, if the name is Russian, somehow that's another little piece of evidence that there was a conspiracy to tilt the election.
Now, this is worse.
This is as bad—you know, if you just set it side by side and compare, this is as bad as McCarthyism and, you know, finding a red behind every desk in the State Department in 1954 and 55.
This is really dumb.
This is juvenile, you know, demented thinking.
And it shared, amazingly, I would say 80 percent of the Democrat establishment, including all the so-called liberals and progressives who would normally, you know, not give the time of day to this kind of, you know, xenophobia, really.
And belief that every single thing that comes from the deep state or so-called IC, intelligence community, is the gospel truth.
I mean, the world has been turned upside down.
Progressives and liberals now love the CIA.
You explain that.
Hey, here's a book for you high-tech businessmen out there.
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But I sure liked it.
I think you really will, too.
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It's just like what happened in Egypt, where they overthrew the military dictatorship.
And it's taken a bit—the process is a bit more drawn out on our side.
But they overthrew the dictatorship, but then the conservatives won the elections.
So then the liberals asked the military to protect them from the conservatives, instead of embracing the fact that, hey, we can have regular elections now, and maybe we'll win in the future.
And that's what's going on here, is the Democrats are so emotional about the particular Republican who won here, and what a winger he seems like.
And so they would prefer that the secret police handle it, if that's what it takes.
And I have friends like this who they say, oh, I know that Russiagate is BS, but anything to take this guy down because he's so dangerous.
And that's the idea.
Yeah.
But, you know, the ends and the means, you know, historically, there's always been this issue about how can you accomplish appropriate or virtuous ends by nefarious or immoral means.
And, you know, you have it here.
If that's what they think they're doing, then they really need to rethink the fact that the one reason that you could vote for Donald Trump, and I did, you know, I voted for Trump, I wasn't going to vote for the other one, is that at least he hadn't spent 30 years in Washington absorbing what I call the philosophy of empire first, and all the rationalizations for every stupid intervention we've had since Korea to tell you the truth, and Vietnam, and then Gulf War I, and all the rest of it.
And Trump had none of that.
He was a clean slate.
He was fairly quick study, superficial and, you know, impulsive from one moment to another.
But he said, what the heck, why are we engaging almost in Cold War 2.0 with Russia and Putin?
Maybe we should try rapprochement, see what our differences are, and see what we can negotiate.
Of course, that's exactly what needs to happen.
And that's a big theme of Pete Trump in my book.
And that Russia, with a GDP of 1.5 trillion, in other words, the GDP of NATO is about 30 times bigger than that of Russia, and that somehow all of this makes sense, and that they're a grave threat to Europe and the United States and the free world and, you know, motherhood, the flag, and every other thing that's good, is just complete nonsense.
And we need to get over that.
We need to—and it all started, really, with the confrontation in Syria, with the chemical thing with Obama in 2013, and then the coup on the streets of Kiev that we were behind.
We were the messers in 2014.
And all of this needs to be sorted out and reversed.
And Trump, I think, was on the road to do that, but he got so demonized—I mean, the Russians got so demonized, and Putin got so demonized, and this Russiagate hoax got so out of control and proportioned that he's been stymied at every turn.
You know, one of the great things that Trump did so far is he went to Helsinki.
He had one hell of a good summit meeting with Putin.
He came out of it, and the press conference that the two of them held is really where the world should be going, where the U.S. should be going.
And yet he came back to the United States and was practically shouted out of town for what was alleged to be, by the mainstream media and bipartisan establishment, treasonous behavior.
And he's made the way for a reduction in this gigantic warfare state budget that we have.
The one thing that he could do has been totally stymied because of the stench, really, that has risen from this whole Russiagate matter, and the ongoing Mueller investigation, and now the bitter end of mainstream press that still can't let it go.
And they keep digging into this, taking stuff out of context and finding little clauses and footnotes to hang their hat on.
It's really a pretty sad state of affairs.
Well, you know, and by the way, you talked about all the liberals and progressives falling for this CIA, FBI group as protectors of America from our democratically chosen results and all this kind of thing.
A lot of leftists are exempt from that.
If you look at the list of Russiagate skeptics, you and I are on there, but so are a lot of left-wingers, and that's because they're ideologically, I guess, bad enough on economics that they hate Democrats, and they don't believe in Democrats, and they don't believe in America's foreign policy in the same way that Trump doesn't.
They just don't believe that, oh, yeah, America's here to save the day for everybody all the time, the way the Clinton and Bush centrist consensus has it.
And so they're the kind of people just like you and me who, before any of this happened, already knew about the history of the color-coded revolutions of the Bush years and Clinton, Bush and Obama, all three expanding NATO up to Russia's borders and things like who was really behind that coup in Ukraine and why it mattered that there were a bunch of Nazis participating in it and waging this war against the people in the east.
And for that matter, opposed the backing of al-Nusra that led to the rise of the Islamic State in Syria that, as you say, Russia then intervened in that one.
A lot of left-wingers, in other words, because they had knowledge and because they were not partisans of the so-called left-wing party and they'd been paying attention to this history, they were inoculated from this whole thing.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Tell me another one about how Russia is the world empire threatening poor little old us when we already know better than that, essentially, is what they were saying, just like you and me.
Well, you know, that's exactly right.
If you take the anti-empire foreign policy dissenters, whether they're from the libertarian slash conservative side, the Ron Paul side, let's say, or from, you know, the counterpunch side on the left, we all saw through this Russiagate thing instantly.
OK.
And both sides, you know, laid this out step by step as it went along.
And frankly, it was only the mainstream bipartisan consensus, including the most of the so-called liberal or progressive elected politicians who went along with this.
And, you know, it makes sense, because these same people have embraced what, you know, what we know to be the wrongheaded, empire-first, bipartisan foreign policy status quo.
Now, when you think about it, I call CNN, and I think you probably do, too, the war channel.
It is the war channel.
On any domestic issue, at any day of the week, they get themselves all worked up about race issues and other politically correct liberal causes.
But on foreign policy, they might as well be the hired PR agent for the CIA, the Pentagon, and the rest of, you know, what we call the warfare state.
And to think about that, and you were talking about what we understood about what happened in the Ukraine or all of our interventions in the Middle East that have been so counterproductive, destructive, and wrongheaded.
You know, turn on CNN any given night, and you've got James Clapper on there.
You know, what a goofball idiot that guy is, besides being a liar and, you know, a war criminal, effectively.
And yet here he is on CNN pontificating every night pure nonsense baloney right out of the Deep State playbook.
It's just, you know, another measure of how upside down in some ways and discombobulated the politics of the moment are.
Hopefully there's some way to break through this, and I think it's going to be quite interesting.
You know, we talk here about the dissenters on foreign policy who then could see through the Russiagate thing pretty easily.
Their vision wasn't clouded.
But consider what's going to happen in the primaries with Tulsi Gabbard, you know, as the one Democrat in the field who really has a very insightful, sound view on foreign policy and the whole interventionist, you know, regime that we've had for years and years.
And she actually has got some pretty good credentials.
She was, you know, in the military, on duty in Iraq twice.
So I just can't wait for the primary debates.
They're probably going to put her in the undercard group, unfortunately.
But nevertheless, you know, the rest of them will probably start throwing rocks and it'll at least open up the debate on the Democratic side in a way that is long overdue.
Well, and as we've seen with Trump suppressing all these views, you know, as the as the center goes insane and the left and the right are the reasonable ones in comparison and that kind of thing.
We could see how trying to keep those views out.
We don't argue about trade around here.
We don't argue about war around here.
We don't argue about, you know, central banking around here, that trying to stifle that stuff just makes it worse.
And so I think I'm with you that the harder they go after her and they already are just target Tulsi.
Don't let her say another anti-war thing.
Accuser something quick again, more.
And there's like six or eight accusations against her already.
They're not doing that to anybody else.
Why does she stand out?
I know it's not because she's a brown skinned woman.
It must not be that it's it's it's a foreign policy, obviously.
And it's because they're terrified that she knows what she's talking about.
And they don't they don't know how to handle it.
Anyway, I agree with you that it's going to redound in her favor then, because it's essentially a giant opening in the marketplace that they're trying to suppress anyone from billing, which just makes it that much more of an opportunity for her.
Yeah, I know.
You know, they've been digging her for having a meeting with Assad.
OK, well, aren't we supposed to have meetings with leaders of foreign countries?
That's what Obama said.
Oh, you know, I mean, when Richard Nixon could go to Moscow to meet with Brezhnev and then go to Beijing to meet with Mao, Mao is the biggest killer in human history.
Forty, fifty million people perished, you know, in Red China during the heyday because of starvation and, you know, firing squads and all the rest of it.
But, you know, he did that.
And now these leftist liberals are dumping all over her because she went to Syria to investigate what the true facts of life are on the ground.
It's an amazing turn of events, and it'll be very interesting.
And she's very capable.
I think, you know, I don't agree with her Medicare for all.
And, you know, he's a quasi socialist, I think, domestically.
But I've sent her maximum contribution of money to her campaign because I want her on that stage.
I want her standing, holding forth because she is really articulate on foreign policy.
She can explain the non-interventionist view of the world, you know, as well as about anybody in public life today.
Yeah.
Well, unfortunately, I got to point this out that, you know, and I know you know this, you wrote all about this, too.
When you're looking at the policy in Syria or Libya or Yemen, where America is outright flying as the air force for al-Qaeda terrorists because our government and Israel hates Iran more and hates, you know, the Shiite side more.
Well, that's just treasonous.
That's just crazy.
And if you have a combat vet from the Anbar province in western Iraqi Sunni stand from Iraq or two like her, well, she knows the difference.
And she knows it was al-Qaeda that knocked our towers down, not Hezbollah.
And, you know, she's sophisticated enough to know better than that.
So that's great.
When Obama's policy there, for example, Trump's still in Yemen right now is just absolutely treasonous fighting on the side of al-Qaeda guys against their worst enemies there.
So if she's better than that, that's great.
But at the same time, and she just put out this hawkish thing about Saudi the other day, this little video about how they back Wahhabism.
And so then she talks about how it's not that they back groups that do violent things.
It's that they back the ideology that inspires violent things to happen.
And all this essentially parroting George W. Bush era propaganda about why they hate us and establishing that she is tired of the war for terrorism.
But you're damn right, she's going to fight a war against it under the AUMF for eight years if she can.
She in fact said in that thing, she said, there are now hundreds of these terrorist groups after listing AQAP and al-Shabaab and then running out.
And I don't even know if she said al-Nusra.
And then she goes, and then there are hundreds like this spread throughout the world, which is straight out of Condoleezza Rice, 2001, 2002.
Yeah, well, I missed that one.
I think her point was, though, and there is a larger point here, I don't want to exaggerate the jihadi, Sunni jihadi terrorist threat.
I think it's very de minimis in the world today, especially after ISIS, which was Washington's own creation.
The Islamic State was more or less liquidated and abolished.
But I think a larger point she was getting at is to demonize the regime in Iran and the Shia as being terrorists, including Hezbollah, is asking for even bigger trouble because Bolton and Pompeo are leading Trump by the nose into a confrontation in the Persian Gulf.
With Iran, that is utterly unnecessary.
They abided by the terms to the letter of the New Deal.
They had never invaded any country.
I'm talking about Iran right now, in the last 70 or 80 years as far as I know.
The only place they're involved is where they have been invited by sovereign governments.
They were invited into Syria by the elected government.
They are aligned with Hezbollah because it's the largest elected political force in Lebanon.
They have provided minor aid to the Houthis in Yemen, who happen to be a variation of Shia.
It's just another case of total distortion and exaggeration as to what they're doing.
So they're not state sponsors of terror.
They have an independent foreign policy.
And what these jerks in Washington are really saying is that you Iranian leaders are not entitled to have any foreign policy except the one that we tell you you can have.
And we can tell you where you should make your alignments and your alliances and what countries you can deal with and what countries you can't.
And if you don't toe the line, we're going to come in with economic warfare in the form of sanctions.
We're going to shut down your oil industry, which is your major economic asset, until you toe the line and kowtow to the Washington view of what you should do.
That's the real problem in the world today.
And I think Tulsi Gabbard is right on in understanding that this is a very dangerous drift underway.
She's been good on Russiagate, too.
Yeah, yeah.
But the problem here is that Trump is listening to his ignorant son-in-law, okay, who basically is a wholly owned subsidiary of Bibi Netanyahu.
And so when you put together two bloodthirsty neocons, Pompeo and Bolton, and then you add the idiot son-in-law, who's, you know, carrying water night and day for Netanyahu.
No wonder old Donald is completely off the rails on this thing.
He's surrounded by the worst possible advice you could possibly get.
Yeah, it's too bad he doesn't just surf the internet and read stuff because he might stumble across the National Interest.
Hey, they make a big, the National Interest Foundation that put out the National Interest magazine website.
They make a big appearance in the Mueller report.
He might start reading the skeptics blog, maybe.
Yeah.
A little bit of dark band for you there, boss.
Yeah, you know, that's another one.
I mean, there's about eight or nine pages in there on that group, as if somehow they were subversive agents, you know, attempting to help the Kremlin and Putin.
Well, see, the director was born in the USSR.
Yeah, I know, I know.
That goes back to the point I was making.
Like Paul McCartney.
Yeah, that's the point I was making, though, the total tank theory.
If your name is Russian, if you've ever been to Russia, I guess, you know, that's a sign that something nefarious is underway.
This is really so, you know, superficial and stupid that it's amazing that, you know, the alleged adult bipartisan establishment, you know, can put this stuff out with a straight face.
It's funny, you know, Bill Moyers used to say that, wow, you know, in my lifetime, it's really changed where now the delusional is no longer marginal.
But he was talking about marginal people, you know, marginal points of view taking over power.
I don't know exactly what he's referring to, the neocons, maybe.
But the real deal is, like we're talking about, the centrists are total truth or nutball chemtrail kooks when it comes to this Russia stuff.
They're not, you know, they're completely impervious to facts.
But anyway, I want to go down this list real quick with you here.
And then, you know, you can take it from there.
But I want to make sure to give you a chance to address a few of these things, because I want to ask you about obstruction, too, in a second.
But because that's a big part of this narrative now.
But when you go through, you mentioned Page and Papadopoulos, there's the whole story about the Republican Party platform, and it's mentioned of whether it's going to arm Ukrainians or not.
There's all the accusations against Jeff Sessions, and of course, Michael Flynn.
And never mind, I guess if you want to, you could also address all the accusations against the Internet Research Agency and the GRU for the hack, if you want to talk about that stuff as well.
But the Mueller report, it's actually, I would say in some places, it seems like they almost feel sorry for Trump for putting him through this.
And they pretty, you know, pretty harshly debunk a lot of the theories themselves and seem to almost take pains to say, you know, there is another point of view that would explain this, which is, you know, something much simpler.
Yeah, you hit it on the head.
You know, you almost think that there was some mole in the Mueller operation that was basically trying, in a very understated and sophisticated way, trying to get out the truth by, in a backhanded sense, showing that none of the, I call them the six key factors in the Russiagate story make any sense.
And that's not only Carter Page and maybe George Papadopoulos, but also the other items you mentioned, including the Internet Research Agency.
That's a real joke.
We'll get to that in a second, the so-called troll farm in St. Petersburg.
But the one that I really bear down on hard is the so-called Trump Tower meeting with the Russian lawyer in June 2016, which you cannot stop hearing about on CNN any time of the day or night you turn it on.
But if you go through the Mueller report itself, it basically shows what I said in my book long before it came out, in that this meeting was a case of mistaken identity.
And the lawyer who was there, Natalia Veselnitskaya, was there in behalf of clients who basically were victims of Bill Growder in the Magnitsky Act.
She doesn't even speak English, number one, so you've got to sort of scratch your head.
You know, cool hand Vlad Putin is going to send a non-English speaker to Trump Tower to plot on how to meddle in and troll an American election?
Are you kidding me?
And when you say mistaken identity, that's essentially a figurative speech for mischaracterization of the entire meeting itself, is what I mean by that.
Yes, yes.
But by mistaken identity, I mean she wasn't there in behalf of the Kremlin and the project of Russian meddling in the U.S. election.
She was there with a whole brief about the American meddling in Russian matters and a bill of indictment against Bill Growder, the guy who's behind all of this and the Magnitsky Act, and wanted the Trump campaign to know that, you know, the whole thing was a bill of goods.
And that's why she was in the United States, defending the client against Growder's accusations and that, you know, this had nothing to do with an election.
Even the dirt she promised was about money that had been, you know, moved out of Russia with Growder when he was run out of Russia by Putin in 2005 for not paying taxes and violating their laws about who could buy open market stock in Gazprom.
But anyway, all that money, hermitage capital, came back to the United States.
One of the big investors in hermitage capital was the Ziff brothers, who were big hedge fund guys and mainstream, heavy Democratic contributors.
And the dirt she had was that these guys through Growder got dirty money, and they were giving it to Hillary Clinton and the Democrats.
Now, that had nothing to do with anything that was on the radar screen about, you know, collusion between the Kremlin and the Trump campaign.
In fact, the meeting only lasted by—and here's the thing.
It's the first sentence of that section.
You just have to read it and then, you know, have a good laugh, because that's all—you know, the whole meeting lasted 20 minutes.
The whole meeting—and by, you know, the last five or ten minutes, as you can see right in the write-up, Donald Trump Jr. was sending messages to his staff, please call me so I can get out of here.
He was texting, you know, a couple of his colleagues who were there, saying this is a waste of time, why are we here.
These are the facts.
This was a nothing meeting.
It was, as I say, mistaken identity.
It had nothing to do with Russiagate in any way, shape, or form.
And ironically, it was about Washington meddling in Russia, not vice versa.
This has been known in the public domain for months and I think a year and a half.
I've been writing in my blog, you know, ContraCorner, about this a year and a half ago.
But all the time in the interim, the mainstream media was sort of jabbering away and gabbing away about the Trump Tower meeting.
And when you read that, and you even have the Mueller write-up, and you have even a, you know, quasi-honest frame of mind, you realize the whole thing was a very big nothing-burner, as we say.
Now, I'll go very quickly to the Troll Farm.
This is really crazy, okay?
Nowhere in the entire brief, the entire Mueller report, does it say there's any connection, that there was any instruction, that there was any involvement of the Kremlin in what this little bitty St. Petersburg Troll Farm was doing.
And when you dig into it, you basically find out that it was, I call it, the hobby farm of one of the Russian oligarchs who was doing his oligarch thing.
And that is, in Russia, it's such a Wild West communications environment that most of these oligarchs have, you know, a social media operation designed to, you know, sully their enemies and support the state, because all of them, all of the oligarchs there who remain oligarchs, you know, have to embrace the state or they get run out of the country.
But in any event, he put this little hobby farm together, and basically they were doing the normal thing of, you know, hiring kids in their 20s for $4 an hour to plaster stuff on the social media in Russia about internal matters.
But this guy really got ticked off in 2014 after the coup in St. Petersburg, I mean, the coup in Kiev, and the blatant accusations from Washington that this was caused by Putin and Russia, and that, you know, Putin had annexed Crimea and all this other stuff which isn't true.
And so he decided, well, if they want to treat us that way, he was a real Russian nationalist, then I'm going to fight back, and he hired a few more kids, there were never more than 80 to 100, to begin putting out stuff on the social media in the West, and Facebook and Twitter and all the rest of it.
But when you go through what they put out and how stupid it was, most of it was in English as a third language, and this is all in the public domain, you can find it, a lot of it was put out by the Senate Intelligence Committee investigation.
It didn't amount to a hill of beans, and it was all over the lot.
You know, the $100,000 worth of ads that Facebook says the St. Petersburg troll farm purchased, half of it was after the election, so that wasn't going to affect the outcome.
And of the stuff before the election, I mean, what's $50,000 in an election that probably had $20 billion spent by both parties, independent committees, and the media that covered this night and day?
So what's $50,000 is nothing, it's not even a pebble in the ocean.
And then if you look at what they posted, you know, you can't tell where it was coming from.
Some was anti-gun control, some was pro-gun control, some of it was, you know, Black Lives Matter, some of it was kind of redneck, right?
It was just random nothingness.
And how they keep citing this, I mean, all you have to do is look at the ads, and it's clear that, you know, this was, as I say, a great big nothing-burner.
They always said that a determined prosecutor can indict a ham sandwich.
Well, 13 people associated with the IRA, the St. Petersburg troll farm, were indicted, but, you know, they indicted a nothing-burner here, even more ridiculous than a ham sandwich.
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And you're right, too, and it's worth reiterating the point that they just have this one tiny little throwaway paragraph that says that, well, ties, which means nothing, ties between the leader of the IRA and Putin are well established.
And then they just link to the New York Times, which says that these guys are friends.
And then, so even in the Holy Grail Mueller report, you're still supposed to just use your imagination to fill in the gap that Putin probably asked him to do it, right?
Yeah, yeah, right.
And the thing is, I think the only thing they had in there was that the guy, I can't forget his name now, Prozhin or something like that, who owned the IRA and was, you know, a big food entrepreneur in Russia and was called the Putin chef and all that because of a restaurant he had in St. Petersburg.
And then he got contracts for the military and education system and so forth.
But the only tie they had was he was in a picture with Putin.
So, you know, the fact is, if they had any evidence that this was orchestrated, organized and commanded by the Russian security forces or the Russian state, it would have been in there.
And there's not a word in there because, you know, it wasn't.
That's the first thing.
Second, a lot of this stuff was being posted to get clicks for advertising revenue.
And third, you know, if you take the minor amount of awkward stuff they put out on Facebook and Twitter and compare that to the environment in which it happened, someone pointed out that just the Facebook postings occurred during a year and a half period when there were 33 trillion messages posted on Facebook.
So, you know, the view that they actually attribute to the IRA, obviously, just noise in the system.
All right.
One last thing here before I let you go, which is that we're still talking about Donald Trump here.
And so, yes, he was being unfairly persecuted by the secret police here.
But his reaction was to certainly try on multiple occasions, not certainly, allegedly, try on multiple occasions to have his staff obstruct justice for him.
And luckily, they saved him from himself on those.
But then there's some where, you know, threatening Michael Cohen's family with criminal charges and calling him a rat on Twitter.
That's the kind of thing that would get you or me sent to prison.
No question about that.
But then there's the whole thing about he wasn't really obstructing justice because justice wasn't being done.
So I don't know what's your opinion about all that.
Well, my opinion is there was no crime and there can't be obstruction unless you're obstructing the process of justice in the prosecution of a crime.
And there wasn't any crime.
Even Mueller says that clearly.
And secondly, you know, there's this whole kind of construct being created by the Democrats, the mainstream, you know, Washington policy officials and echoed in the media that they call it the rule of law.
And that some way, somehow the Justice Department is not a executive department subject to the authority of the president, as it says in the Constitution, and that the president can be accused of almost any godawful thing.
And if there's an investigation going on, he's not entitled to take any action whatsoever to defend himself or to change, you know, office holders and personalities if he thinks they're wrong.
Well, this is nonsense.
You know, this is nonsense.
And yet they've created this whole notion that the Justice Department is above elected control.
OK, now that's that comes from the lawyers, the establishment lawyers who buy this trade decade after decade and would like to believe that even, you know, the American people when they elect the president or they elect the Congress, their voice doesn't matter if the elites, let's say the permanent establishment elites, think otherwise.
And that's clearly what's going on here.
Of course Trump had the right to fire Comey.
Of course he did.
OK.
And unfortunately, he went along with Sessions for way longer than he should have.
He made a big mistake putting him in there.
You know, if he would have put in Bill Barr day one, none of this would have happened.
In fact, the investigation, and this is the point I made in some posts in the last couple of days and really in the book, you know, the Mueller report is about the wrong investigation.
The real investigation should have been of Brennan and the top tier of the FBI that had a little cabal that was designed essentially to disrupt the election process and prevent Trump from taking office and then once elected from governing.
Now, that's a real serious matter.
I mean, that's a fundamental threat to American democracy when the permanent government, the deep state, on its own motion undertakes that kind of action.
And that, you know, that was the real thing.
But my point is, Trump couldn't even bring himself to fire Sessions because then they would have been all over that and the Senate Republicans wouldn't have appointed or, you know, confirmed a new attorney general anyway.
You know, so this is, again, sort of a piece of the fact that especially after 1990 when the Cold War ended and it became a unipolar world and all of that, that you've created in Washington a permanent imperial city where they think they rule the world and that anybody who tries to get in the way of business as usual, empire as usual, is fair game for the kind of outrageous actions that were taken by the FBI and Brennan even before the election.
I mean, this is one of the things I really go over in some things I've written lately.
There is not one chance in a thousand there should have been a wiretap on Carter Page.
They didn't know enough, they didn't have, and he wasn't even, he never had met Trump once, he says, and he's not been prosecuted for lying that he's ever talked to Trump in his life.
So they never, ever should have had that wiretap in the first place if they thought there was a problem with Carter Page.
They should have come to the candidate and said, you may have a mole laying down your organization.
Trump would have said Carter Page, who he?
And, you know, if he had heard what they had to say, he probably would have pitched him out the window on the 39th floor of the Trump Tower.
You know, but they didn't do that.
They started a whole, you know, illicit wiretapping campaign on the headquarters of the Republican candidate.
I mean, that is the biggest tell in the whole thing right there.
They didn't come to Trump and say, sir, we have to warn you that we think this guy might have talked to a guy that could look compromising for you.
You better keep him at arm's length.
They didn't warn him.
Instead, they took advantage of it.
They pretended to believe in it, essentially, to get this FISA warrant and start this thing.
Yep, exactly.
And frankly, if they would have done due diligence like we have to do if we're in the investment business or any other business in life, they could have very easily found out who Carter Page was, that he was a former stockbroker in Merrill Lynch in Moscow.
And then he went out and hung out his own shingle.
And he started this company that had one employee, him.
And he was constantly running around conferences all over the world.
You know, peddling himself as an expert in energy, particularly Russian energy.
I think we have to presume that they did know that.
Yeah.
But they also knew that he was.
There had been a whole investigation between 2013 and 2015 run by the FBI in New York involving a couple of Russian diplomats who were really agents, I guess, of the intelligence community.
They tried to recruit him.
It didn't work.
He was looking for business.
He thought he was innocent.
He thought they would help.
He figured out they wouldn't.
They thought he was an idiot.
And that's a quote right out of the FBI report.
And the FBI agents who then brought this case against these Russian operatives gave him a clean bill of health.
I mean, the FBI already knew that.
It happened in 2015.
And how they would then go from that to a wiretap on the headquarters of a Republican candidate shows you that they were looking for any excuse to throw, you know, barriers or the insurance policy, as I think Stroh called it, in front of the Trump campaign.
All right.
You know what?
I'm sorry.
I'm so late, but I got to ask you this one more thing now.
So here you have the most powerful guy in the world.
They came at him and they missed.
He's still there.
And he's calling it treason, which is not right and goes to show just how hot his stack is that he's blowing right now here.
I'm mixing that metaphor right.
And yet, what's he going to do about it?
It's the Justice Department that did this to him.
And so who can he use to get back at them?
The Republicans in the Senate.
Lindsey Graham isn't going to really take on the CIA and the FBI at the core of this plot.
Right.
So who is?
Well, I'll tell you what, there's maybe a chance here.
Maybe there's some hope, because Trump is so steaming mad about this.
I mean, he should have declassified all this information a long time ago.
That's one of the chapters of my book.
I say, Mr. Trump, tear down this wall of secrecy, OK?
He could have declassified all this.
Maybe he was told tactfully, wait till after Mueller, then do it.
But if he wants, he's got a good, pretty good man there that's got some guts and some brains, Bill Barr, now Attorney General.
Maybe they'll, you know what I say, wheel to the right and go after Hammer and Tong, the whole FBI, Andy McCabe, Stroke, Brennan, Cabell.
Because, boy, the trail's there.
I mean, these people left breadcrumbs everywhere they were.
I mean, how does Stroke and Lisa Page exchange 50,000 messages, texts in any period of time, OK?
Well, you know, the initiative has been held by the plotters this whole time, and they have defined every turn of this thing.
And Trump has just absolutely failed at the art of the deal here when it comes to turning this story around at them.
He's just constantly begging and pleading for mercy and reason, essentially, which is a losing position, like what Jeb Bush would do or something.
And so at this point, he's still, it looks to me like he's still reeling in on the defensive and hasn't figured out a way to really turn this around on them in any kind of effective way.
I'm afraid that may be true, but I still think there's a glimmer of hope.
There's an opening that they could go after that, because there are a lot of rank-and-file Republicans on the Hill for all their failings on the big issues of war and the Fed and massive public debt and all the rest of it.
I'm talking about the Freedom Caucus.
They just talk.
They do nothing.
But here they're really riled up, and maybe they can keep enough heat on the White House and enough backbone behind Trump that the Justice Department goes after them, because once, you know, once an investigation starts, a cycle starts, people will get invested in it, and they'll want to drive it to a conclusion.
And maybe we'll see some turnabout as fair play here.
And, of course, is over there at the Contra Corner.
Check out David Stockman there.
And also, don't forget about his book, Peak Trump, The Undrainable Swamp and the Fantasy of MAGA.
More in Afghanistan at foolserend.us.
