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.
Okay, guys, on the line, I got Phil Giraldi from the Council for the National Interest.
Not to be confused with the Center for the National Interest featured in the Mueller Report for no real reason whatsoever, except to discount lies.
But anyway, that's Council for the National Interest.
Where is it?
I forgot the web address.
Phil, help me.
It's www.councilforthenationalinterest.org.
See, I knew that.
It changed.
It used to be CNI Online.
Yeah, that's right.
Councilforthenationalinterest.org.
That's the email address.
Right.
Yeah, exactly.
I don't know what the hell I'm doing up here, man.
I'm just trying to get by.
The Council for the National Interest, councilforthenationalinterest.org.
I did know that.
I've said that out loud like a thousand times I should know it.
But anyway, also unz.com, that's where you find all the things that he writes.
And this one is called The Conspiracy Against Trump, The Deep State Plot to Undermine the President.
And so here's the thing is that I really like this angle because there's so many different angles on this story, especially now that the Mueller report is out and what have you.
But you're really rewinding all the way back here to the origin of this thing.
And it ain't Jim Comey.
It's John Brennan and his friends.
Yeah, that's the way it looks to me.
And it looks to other people that are smarter than I am who have looked really in great detail at all the progressions of how this information was kind of developed and how it leaked out.
Did I forget to mention that you're a former CIA officer and that a bunch of your friends are, too?
Yeah, that's right.
And indeed some of my friends have done analysis of this and have come up with pretty much the same conclusion that I did, that this was an actual conspiracy.
And it was mounted by the – headed by the director of the CIA at that time, Brennan.
And it brought a bunch of other people in from FBI and NSA.
And essentially the idea was to torpedo Trump, which in retrospect looks like a good idea.
The awful part is you don't want your national security services messing around with elections.
Right.
Well, and certainly, you know, it kind of matters anyway that the reasons that they'll target him was only for the things that he was slightly good on rather than any real danger that he posed.
Yeah, yeah.
They're the ones who are dangerous.
Yeah, he was going to talk to the Russians and try to improve relations, and he was against more wars in the Middle East and wanted to wind down the wars that were already running.
And that's at least what he promised or what he said, and that's why a lot of people voted for him.
But this was, of course, anathema to the people in the national security industry who have jobs, careers, prestige that derives from the wars we're fighting.
I remember back in, I think it was probably in 2012, and there was some meeting of the press corps and a bunch of lobbyists and stuff in some room at the Pentagon.
And someone shouts out, boy, I sure hope Ron Paul doesn't win.
We'd all have to get real jobs.
And then instead of laughing, everybody got all like quiet and uncomfortably nervous.
You know, it's just, it's not like he was going to win anyway, but they just hated even, they didn't even laugh.
So yeah, there are people like that for sure.
Now, but so here's the deal now, Phil, is that I'm going to try to be very moderate and middle of the road here and say that, OK, I read the report, and it does say that the entire thing about Trump and his team working with the Russians was a giant hoax.
You got me there, OK?
There's nothing to it at all.
But, geez, a bunch of FBI cops, CIA officers, why, they would only ever do the right thing in order to protect the republic from some kind of madman.
And so, and you know what?
Carter Page had been to Russia before and things like that.
So therefore, they apparently stumbled into this investigation in good faith and they did their best.
And at the end, they admitted that actually there really wasn't anything to it.
So what's your case that, yeah, no, that's not right at all.
It's much worse than that as far as the origin of this story.
Yeah, well, my case is basically that they were out to derail Trump right from the beginning.
And part of this has to do with, you know, they might argue now that this was a national security issue at the highest level where this guy was going to be the Manchurian candidate.
He was going to be dangerous.
Now, in fact, they might have been right, but that's not the real reason why they did this.
The real reason why they did this is because many of them were deeply and closely linked to the Hillary Clinton campaign, and they expected to be rewarded when Hillary won.
And they fully expected that Hillary would win, but they figured sticking it to Trump and destroying him would guarantee that.
So their motives is what I'm questioning here.
And the fact is that some of them, like Brennan and like Michael Morell, another CIA renegade, these people were accusing Trump of being a Russian agent.
And there's no evidence of that.
In fact, these two guys are CIA or CIA analysts.
They don't even know what an agent looks like.
And the way they described Trump being controlled by the Kremlin didn't make any sense to CIA officers who actually know anything about that sort of thing.
So it's like, you know, there was this fraud about, you know, why we did this.
This is for the good of the country.
That's bullshit.
You did it because it was good for you, and that's why you did it.
And you never for a second thought that you were destroying the U.S. Constitution and you were essentially doing what has ruined republics and democracies in the past, intervention by the security services and by the military.
Yeah, which is absolutely huge.
And actually, so let's get back to that in a second, because I think that's important here.
So I want to clarify, though, that when you're saying it may be true when you're talking about how dangerous the guy is, are you talking at all about ties with the Russians in the lead up to the election, or you're joking around referring to his, you know, ties to Israel and his policy toward Iran and this kind of thing?
Well, I'm referring—no, I'm not referring to any ties to the Russians, because there aren't any.
But what I'm referring to is his general conduct of foreign policy, which is getting increasingly dangerous and will get mighty dangerous next week when we start this boycott of Iranian oil.
And this stuff is just inept, and he's inept at almost every level, at almost everything he does.
And, you know, his margin of victory came from two constituencies.
It came from people who were concerned about immigration and people like me who were concerned that Hillary Clinton would be going to war with Russia within a week.
And we felt that Trump was the peace candidate, insofar as there was a peace candidate, based on what he was saying.
So this is essentially the two issues that Trump won on.
And the fact is he's reneged on both of them.
He's done nothing in either area except do damage, particularly in the foreign policy area.
And so, yeah, Trump is inept, and he's advised by people who should be locked up in a cage somewhere.
That's Moulton, Pompeo, and Elliott Abrams.
And unfortunately, that's what we've wound up with, but that still doesn't justify a military security services, however you want to cast it, overthrow of a legitimately elected president of the United States.
All right, so I want to get back to that case a little bit in a second, but we should sum up here real quickly that whether or not it's because of the pressure of this Russiagate fake scandal in the first place or what, that he's been very anti-Russia in real terms.
Sending arms, regardless of what it says in the Republican Party platform, sending arms to Ukraine, to the government that Obama helped install but was afraid to send any guns to.
He added Macedonia and Montenegro, two countries to NATO that he could have stopped that and didn't.
It was already in process, but still.
And then, of course, bombing and killing Russians and attacking Assad two different times in Syria.
And working on this attempted regime change in Venezuela and all these things.
So you'd have to be 100% Russiagate truther to just say, well, either I'm ignoring those things or, oh, he's only doing that to try to dissemble and disguise the fact that he's really Putin's puppet.
But I would say if that's true, he sure is good at it then.
Oh, getting us out of the INF Treaty on the intermediate missiles and all of this stuff.
You know, threatening to re-mid-range nuclear missile-ize Europe where it hadn't been the case in 30 years.
And from what I hear, Chas Freeman and them were saying, I talked to him on the show, this is about so they can put mid-range missiles off the coast of China.
That's why they want out of the treaty.
It's not even about Russia, but they're willing to risk everything with Russia over China.
Some Putin's puppet this guy is, huh?
Yeah, exactly.
Well, actually, you left out the bill in Congress, which is seeking to have Russia declared a state sponsor of terrorism.
And it's seeking to have some militias they've allegedly identified in Ukraine as terrorist groups sponsored by Russia.
Unlike the Azov battalion and those guys aren't terrorists.
Unlike those guys, yeah.
So that's exactly it.
It seems every week there's something new.
Just like every week about Iran, there's a new escalation.
There is an escalation in terms of the sanctions, in terms of how we're punishing Iran.
And, I mean, right now we're fighting, basically, I don't care what anyone calls it, it's an economic war with Iran.
I mean, this will be an act of war.
If we did this to Britain, or did this to France or Germany or Russia or China, you know, this would be considered an act of war.
And so I'm absolutely astonished that these idiots in Congress don't see it, don't understand just how dangerous this situation is.
Well, OK, so we'll get back to the case about the coup in a second.
But let's stick with this for a minute here about Iran.
So can you compare Obama's crippling sanctions to what Trump is doing now in repealing the last of the waivers for America's allies, at least here?
Well, I think this is what Trump has done since he ended the participation in the nuclear agreement a little over a year ago.
It has basically been a series of escalations against Iran.
We started out by renewing the sanctions that had been removed when the agreement was made, and we never removed many of the sanctions that were supposed to follow on to Iran showing compliance.
So those sanctions were still there, and we added the old sanctions on top of them, and we've been adding more sanctions ever since at intervals.
And basically many of the sanctions are against the Iranian government per se, but it also includes sanctions on financial services, which means that the Iranians cannot buy, cannot get credit essentially, and cannot buy medicines, they cannot buy food.
And there is clear evidence that there is starvation and people are dying from inability to get medicine.
So this has been going on and on and on.
But now we're playing hardball when we're declaring that part of the Iranian military is a terrorist organization.
And then next week is the big one.
Next week is we are telling a bunch of countries, a number of which have already said they're not going to comply with our demands, Turkey, Russia, China, India probably.
And basically it's going to be interesting to see how this plays out.
Yeah.
You know, one of my favorite quotes of you is, hey, the Iranian government tried to kill me before.
I'm not a big fan of them.
And so I like that.
But, you know, so let's stick with this topic for a second more, because I actually have a new email friend who I'm pretty sure is asking me earnestly and in good faith, although he's a really tough nut to crack on this one, that like, yeah, but what about Iran this?
And what about Iran that?
And they blew up our Marines in 1983.
And don't they support the Houthis?
And what about Iranian danger?
And TV says all the time, Phil, that they're the greatest state sponsors of terrorism in the world.
They're trying to take over the whole Middle East.
And we've got to roll this back.
They chant death to America and all these things.
And, you know, I know that you come from the right, you're a former CIA guy and you're a patriot and all of these things.
And the Iranians tried to kill you before.
And so it seems like you're in a pretty good place to add some maybe realistic perspective to Iran's role in the world and America's role over there.
And, you know, maybe what are the real clashes between our interests as well as the fake ones?
Well, the thing is that the whole case against Iran is somewhat contrived.
It's based on certain assumptions that what Iran is doing is aggressive and is intended to destabilize and to create.
You know, it cracks me up when I keep hearing about this alleged land bridge that Iran is building by way of Iraq, Syria, Lebanon.
So it will be able to dominate the Mediterranean Sea.
I mean, this is so ridiculous, but it's cited all the time.
They're building a land bridge.
I mean, you know.
A road.
A road, it's called.
Yeah, yeah.
But it's like the Iraqis are going to submit to this violation of their own sovereignty.
You think the Syrians are going to do that?
Even the Lebanese are going to do that?
These countries have a community of interest, and the community of interest was to get rid of ISIS.
And they've succeeded in doing that virtually without help from the United States.
So there are a lot of myths.
And then Hezbollah, of course, is seen as a proxy of Iran.
Well, that depends how you play the Hezbollah game and how you describe it and how you look at its history.
The group was basically a resistance group against Israel.
And it therefore had a community of interest with Iran.
But Iran does not direct Hezbollah's actions, and Hezbollah is not directing the actions of the people in Yemen.
It's like—I'm sorry, Iran is not directing the people in Yemen.
So it's like if you construe everything in the worst possible way and see Iran as the dark force behind all this, then, yeah, you can make these arguments, but these arguments are ridiculous.
And I would say that the crowning argument for people like us is that, why don't you guys explain to me how exactly Iran threatens the United States?
Because that's really the only reason to have soldiers there, and it's the only reason to be so aggressive with them.
What exactly is the way that Iran would threaten the United States?
I've never seen anybody even try to explain that because it's totally ridiculous.
If Iran were a threat to the United States, then, yeah, we would be looking at options to deal with that as a national security issue.
But it isn't.
Well, and in fact, they have to desperately reach for these ridiculous lies like, oh, actually, Iran was behind 9-11 all along, or this used car salesman from Corpus Christi was going to blow up the Saudi ambassador for no reason at all, and this guy's not even a prince or nothing.
The whole thing was a joke.
In fact, on that one, you and five other former CIA officers immediately came out on the record saying, I don't buy that one, not for a minute.
That was completely debunked right away.
But let me ask you about that, Phil, because, in fact, I remember Pat Buchanan saying that it wasn't even really Hezbollah, but it was the Amal militia, and that, yes, Iran had helped them do it at the time, but is that really right?
And then how many years ago was 1983 again, and is that an unresolvable problem that they did that?
Well, yeah, and of course, yeah, but the fact is that, again, the issue becomes because one group, Group A has a relationship with Group B, then everything that Group A does is attributed to Group B.
And that's exactly the kind of arguments they're using with Iran.
And there's also the Khobar Towers, which, of course, was blamed on Iran in Saudi Arabia, but, in fact, was carried out by al-Qaeda.
That's what I was referring to before.
And so, you know, this happens time and again.
If Iran is going to be the enemy of choice, then we have to make arguments that convince people like your friend emailing in that Iran is definitely a bad player that's out to get us.
And that's totally ridiculous.
And, of course, the really amazing part is Iran, of course, as a Shia country, doesn't support terrorism at all.
I mean, how many Shia terrorists have you heard about lately?
So the fundamental thing that started us in this war on terror got us going down the road to terrorism.
They're all Sunnis, and yet we're somehow trying to implicate Iran, desperately implicate Iran into the terrorist game, which it's not into.
Right.
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Well, and it's so obvious, too, when they say, oh, radical Islam and over there and, you know, Muslims.
Well, hey, there's a massive regional, you know, alliance slash sectarian war going on between the Suudis, Saudis and their allies and the Shia Iranians and their allies.
And they're fighting over land and power and money and influence and old grudges and all these things.
But we're supposed to just lump them all in together and ignore the exact most important distinction that you're making there.
Did Hezbollah knock down the towers?
No.
So who's really the worst terrorist in the world?
Is it the Shia Iranian side or it's our friends, the Saudis, and their al-Qaeda shock troops?
Yeah, I think, you know, if you really look in terms of who is – if you consider radical Islam as being legitimately the enemy of the rest of the world, who's supporting these people?
It's the Saudis and some of the Emirates, some of these – in fact, even including the Saudi royal family.
I mean, this is, you know, pretty much well known.
And the fact is these people, by supporting the Wahhabi, the radical form of Islam, using money to build mosques and schools and stuff like that, which preach all this, are the principal supporters of world terrorism.
And probably if there's a second group that's a principal supporter of world terrorism, it's the United States.
I mean, who created al-Qaeda in the first place?
Yep.
And where'd they get all those guns and all that money?
Even during the Iraq War II, when the Americans were on the side of the Shia in the Bata Brigade and all those guys fighting on Iran's side and against the Sunni Arab minority there, the Saudis were bankrolling the Sunni insurgency.
And Zarqawi and his guys read it in the Post.
Yeah.
Yeah, absolutely.
Absolutely.
So, I mean, it's a question that we know – or we should know who our enemies really are, but apparently people in Washington don't care.
Yeah.
All right.
So now back to this whole thing about Trump here, because see, I've got to agree with you.
I've got a bias where I think that this whole thing was a plan against him.
And in fact – so there's a couple of things I want to bring up here, is you have this guy Stephen Halper, who was essentially a fixer for the Bush family and whoever going back, I think, to the October surprise in the 80s, something like that.
And he was apparently on the case of infiltrating and spying on and collecting information and whatever, engaging somehow with Page and Papadopoulos before the official story that we've been told so far.
And then also there was the interesting fact that I'm pretty sure David Stockman pointed out that was this thing in The Intercept about how Sater, who was Cohen's partner, who was helping to seek – and they failed completely to deal with the Russians to set up the Trump Tower deal – that apparently he has been a longtime and long-known FBI informant.
Right.
He was the one – it wasn't Trump.
It was he that came to Cohen and said, man, we really ought to get this whole Russia-Trump Tower thing going.
Now, I don't know – I don't want to speculate to be too crazy about all this kind of thing, but I wonder if you think that those are important data points that really go to show that possibly this thing really did start simply as a plot to get Trump.
There was no suspicion about Russia in the first place.
It was a what are we going to do to get this guy?
Let's make it about Russia.
Yeah, I think the Sater story demonstrates that this was possibly entrapment by the FBI, that essentially they were using a go-between with classical entrapment, where you convince somebody, hey, there's a good deal around the corner.
Well, so what?
It's with the Russians.
And it's a way of getting somebody to do something that they would not otherwise do.
And there seems to be a lot of that that goes through the narrative here.
And these people are people that are not exactly big-time criminals, but they're people that were willing to bend all the rules if there were enough money waived in front of them.
And that's – follow the books.
That's always the best rule.
And these guys saw money and they saw profit coming in.
And that's kind of the story.
Papadopoulos, of course, was also dealing with the Israelis about some oil deals.
And, in fact, when he was having trouble with his security clearances, it was about the Israelis rather than Russians.
Yeah, that was interesting.
In fact, he did an interview with Michael Tracy.
And I haven't listened to the whole thing.
It's two hours long.
But in there he says that, yeah, they were persecuting me because I'm friends with Doug Feith and worked with him at the Huston Institute.
Oh, wow.
That's beautiful.
Don't joke laughing over there.
I wasn't sure if that was going to be a surprise or not.
Yeah, apparently.
And the inside joke for everybody else doesn't know that of all the neocons, Feith has been repeatedly investigated by the FBI for passing secrets to the Israelis, him and Pearl and some others.
But there was this other story that an Israeli gave him this stack of money, $70,000, and he was like, yeah, and dropped it off at some lawyer's office because he didn't want to leave the country with it.
That sounded like a setup too big time, you know.
And he saw it as one.
Sure.
Absolutely.
And now, so John Brennan, the leader of al-Qaeda in Syria, former head of the CIA.
He, Bob Woodward revealed that, I'm pretty sure it was Woodward who said, you know, he was the one who pushed more than anything and almost included the Steele dossier in that January 2017 intelligence report.
The one that, the bulk of it was about how RT had covered fracking to make us look bad and all this garbage, right?
Right.
And had no, no even claim of evidence whatsoever about the Russian hacking.
And in fact, he even had a giant disclaimer that just because we say something in here doesn't mean we stand by it and all this funny stuff, you know.
But he wanted to put the Steele dossier in there.
He was insisting, yeah, any fool can look at that thing and know better than to believe that a word of it is true.
Yeah.
No, yeah.
It's been attested by a number of sources that, yeah, that is actually true, that he was going to put this dossier, of course, which even the Mueller report is claiming is full of unconfirmable information.
Let's be polite about it.
And, you know, and this is Brennan who claims to be an experienced intelligence officer and, you know, didn't.
Well, of course, because he is a somewhat experienced intelligence officer, he knew exactly what it was.
And he knew exactly that this was all speculative.
And this is when you hire somebody to go somewhere and say, get me dirt on somebody, this is what you get.
And Brennan was pushing that.
I honestly think if you look at some of the YouTube's of Brennan's performances, both went towards the end there when he was still director of central intelligence.
And then shortly thereafter, before he was out of the agency, he sounds demented.
He's always angry and he's always pointing and screaming.
I mean, there really is something very much wrong about this guy.
Yeah.
You know, I've always thought so.
But, hey, so a thing is, too, is this guy, Mike Morrell, you mentioned him, you know, he'd written this thing in the New York Times saying that Donald Trump was a witting or unwitting agent of Russia.
That was one of the key phrases they clued in on here was.
Oh, yeah.
Well, anybody who agrees with the Russians about anything is an unwitting agent of them kind of doesn't mean a thing.
But I saw a clip of him where someone, you know, at some event, a questioner asked him about the Steele dossier.
And he said, oh, yeah, no, I don't believe in that thing.
And I read it a bunch of times.
And it's all essentially a bunch of unconfirmable claims, whatever.
You know, it seems notable, I think, that it was laughable in the first place.
And, in fact, I don't think I ever read the whole thing because I got to the part where Page got a 19 percent commission of a Russian state-owned oil company for helping to for a promise to help.
He got promised that as a payment to help get some sanctions lifted or something like that.
And at that point, I knew this whole thing is completely fake.
You know, whatever is in there, a lot of it was like, I don't know.
But when I got to that, I was like, come on.
You know how I knew that?
It's because that whole scandal about Petraeus and his girlfriend and all of that.
Well, remember, he was tied up with that other Tampa Bay socialite lady who had infiltrated General Allen or whatever, something like that.
And there was a big write-up about her and how she was really trying to climb the social ladder.
And one thing she did was actually help to arrange an oil deal and then tried to demand some giant payment for that.
And that was what really led to the beginning of her downfall in high society or whatever, because anyone of their salt would know that the standard fee is a $1 million commission, no matter how big the oil deal is.
It doesn't go by percentages or whatever.
Anyway, so I just had remembered that.
And then here they're promising Carter Page 19 percent ownership in this company, which I forgot who calculated that.
It was hundreds of millions of dollars.
Yeah, that's right.
But no, I'm supposed to believe that John Brennan read that and went, oh my God, we better do something instead of, yeah, right, who cooked this stuff up?
Which really goes back to, again, raising the question of who was really behind this whole thing in the first place?
Because that guy Steele, I know he was paid to come up with opposition research, but was it supposed to be complete garbage?
I mean, if it's going to be effective, it has to be – well, I don't know.
Let me put it this way.
Between my two stints in the CIA, I worked in the private sector for a while for a security company that did exactly this kind of stuff.
And when a client was paying you good money and he wanted a product that would provide the dirt on somebody, you went out and dug up the dirt.
And you knew, and he knew, that a lot of this stuff would be unverifiable, but that was all part of the game.
That's the way it worked, because he wanted to get negative information on whoever the target was.
And you, as a private enterprise person wanting to get paid and wanting to make more money than that, would give him exactly what he wants.
So I was not surprised when I saw the Steele dossier.
I said, hey, I've seen this a hundred times.
And the fact that they couldn't pick up on it, or worse than that, that they did pick up on it but decided to use it anyway shows they're idiots.
It's just depressing.
I mean, that's the whole thing is them using it anyway.
And then it's just like with anything else with the FBI.
They're always trying to CYA and make them problems worse, just like with all the terrorist attacks in the 1990s that they refused to get to the bottom of because they'd be embarrassed by the truth that they could have stopped if they'd done their job the last time.
It's that kind of thing here where they go, well, you know, we tried to stop him from getting nominated and that didn't work.
So now that he's the nominee, we got to try to get enough controversy here to stop him from getting elected.
And then when that didn't work, they were even in a worse panic.
Remember this thing?
I love bringing this up because it sounds so silly.
I know that I was sounding silly for bringing it up.
But no, it's really a thing, that they had a plan.
They were going to have Mike Morrell go and brief the Electoral College about how this is all unfair and the Russians stole it from Hillary and they should give it to her instead.
Or at least they should hang it and send it to the House of Representatives so that they can make Paul Ryan or maybe Colin Powell the president instead.
What in the world?
I mean, these people are completely crazy.
And then they go straight into the whole expanding the counterintelligence, making it a criminal investigation of Trump and now an obstruction of justice case against Trump and all these things.
I don't know, man.
It seems like, as you were saying before, this is a pretty big deal inside the constitutional system.
It's the kind of thing in other countries that sometimes leads to irreparable damage in the way that the system is supposed to work with these regular elections and this kind of thing.
Yeah, yeah.
The thing is, it's not to defend Trump to be saying these things, because Trump does what he does, and in 2020 he's going to have to face the voters for what he does or doesn't do.
And certainly a lot of the criticism of Trump has been right on target.
But the fact is, we live in a country where we've just gone through an experience of the security services essentially trying to change the result of an election.
And that is serious stuff.
And the Democrats are not even kind of getting that, or if they're getting it, they don't want to say it.
I read somewhere, I think in the New York Times actually, Lawrence Tribe, the lawyer, the preeminent lawyer from Harvard University, who is now saying we have to continue the investigation because otherwise Russia will meddle and change the results of the 2020 election.
I mean, this is idiocy, you know?
Well, the head of the DNC said, we are at war with Russia.
Yeah.
Right now.
Yeah.
And it's been said numerous times, and these people really do believe it.
This isn't just PR from them.
This is PR that already worked on them.
They're just regurgitating it about how this is just like the time the Japanese attacked us at Pearl Harbor and the time Al-Qaeda attacked us in New York City and this and that kind of thing.
Essentially, they have no context for, even if this was true, how bad it really is or isn't at all.
But they're in a real panic.
They're so driven by this.
And they're so – and this has been apparent for a long time too, that regardless of however the Mueller report ever came out, that these people are never climbing down from this.
I mean, we're talking about a level of belief and an explanation for the way things are here that cannot be shaken.
The only solution for them is for a Democrat to get elected finally or something.
Otherwise, they're going to be stuck like this in this madness, you know?
Yeah, I agree.
I agree.
I've seen that on Twitter, not just like the kooks themselves and the media kooks, the centrist kooks, but all of their retweeters and all of their kind of random believer-inners of this stuff.
I see it on Reddit too where any dissent against any of this stuff is obviously Russian-influenced.
And any accusation against Russia, against Assange, against whoever that's part of this story, all of it sticks no matter how ridiculous it is.
They all believe it anyway, even the stuff that contradicts the other stuff.
And it's really a level of delusion.
It's pretty damn dangerous.
And it goes back to the same thing, same as Iraq War II, right?
Is that – come on, man.
I mean, if it wasn't true, they wouldn't be saying it.
You know what I mean?
You're telling me they're going to attack Iraq for false reasons?
Come on.
They wouldn't do that.
Right.
They might accuse Iraq of things falsely, but they wouldn't start a whole war based on that.
That's crazy.
And so it's sort of the same thing here.
If the FBI and the CIA are making this harsh of a move against the president, it's because their counterintelligence investigation mandated that they protect us from his treason.
Clearly, or else it wouldn't be like this.
And they don't have the imagination to see any other explanations for that.
Yeah, absolutely.
And I guess partisanship helps reinforce it too.
Like, hey, this is what we all think and all that kind of deal breaker.
Yeah, it's groupthink.
And the groupthink is that Russia interfered in the 2016 election.
Now, I don't deny that Russia was fooling around in the 2016 election, but there's a big difference between what intelligence services do – because I used to do this stuff myself – and whether this really is destabilizing the situation or creating a different result.
And, of course, there's no argument to be made that it either destabilized anything or created a different result.
Are you skeptical at all of the story that the GRU did the hacks against the DNC and the Podesta campaign stuff?
Yeah, I've been following those stories.
Yeah, sure, sure.
But I think the evidence still remains to be convincing.
Yeah.
That's what I thought you'd probably say, because I agree with that.
They haven't tried to prove it, right?
They just – Assert it.
Just like with the rest of it.
They just go, come on, everybody knows this is true or else you're a dummy.
That's right.
You don't want us to call you a dummy, do you?
Right.
Or a Putin puppet.
Yeah.
Or a Russian robot.
Of course, of course.
All right.
Well, listen.
Okay, so one more question about this too, though, is what is the Justice Department, what did it to him?
Obviously in a plot with the CIA here, but so Trump's mad as hell, but what instrument does he have to enforce any real accountability here other than, I guess – The only accountability can come from Congress.
If Congress chooses to investigate the possibility that U.S. government agencies were involved in this process, they could call these people and they could subpoena them.
They could even push to have charges filed against them.
Yeah, that would be the only place.
Trump has only limited ability to strike back.
And yet the GOP and the CIA are synonymous, right?
So there's no chance that the Senate Republican leadership is going to go after this at the core of it, are they?
If you start going after this stuff, you discover that both parties have done some pretty awful stuff on a regular basis.
Right.
That's what Schumer said.
He goes, you don't go after you, meaning anyone with power in D.C.
You don't go after the intelligence community.
They have eight ways from Sunday at getting at you if you do.
That's right.
And he certainly – he sounded terrified, honestly, in that.
But yeah, so that's the thing of it, though, is that – but it can't be over yet exactly because he's still the president for a year and a half.
And he's angry as hell and keeps accusing them of treason and demanding accountability here.
And yet – so we have Lindsey Graham and we have the inspector general.
David Stockman says, well, he'll just – the only thing he can really do is declassify everything related to Russiagate.
But he's not going to do that either because his NSC is going to tell him – Pompeo and Bolton, they're not going to let him do that.
So – but it's just funny because just in the same way that all of these hawks are so frustrated and driving themselves crazy with all of their failures, that's his problem too is he's got this short temper and he's not very good at figuring out stuff.
I'm sure you saw where he said, if you try to impeach me, I'll take it to the Supreme Court.
He's either getting bad advice or no advice and knows nothing about what's going on here.
And so I don't know.
It's just – I think it will at least remain funny to see how this continues to work out because there's such a partisan interest in accountability now.
Just as much as there's an accountability on the part of all the liberal truthers to keep believing in it anyway for the right wing that feels vindicated about all of this.
Again, I'm not so sure about the senators, but certainly the Republican Party voters and activists and website readers and so forth, they're not done with this yet.
So I don't know.
Well, we'll see.
It'll be interesting to see how certain things play out starting next week with the Iran business, which will impact on Russia and other issues.
This is alive.
The game is still in play.
Right.
Oh, one more thing there was Nunes made referrals of – I forgot – eight or ten people to the Justice Department, which I guess the law says they have to follow up one way or another with that.
So not like I'm expecting much there.
And the inspector general is right now investigating the origin of this thing.
He's been mandated to.
Obviously the IG is just the IG, but that could really – it could be the start of something more I guess.
Yeah, absolutely.
I mean it could.
There are a lot of things that can come out of this, but the question is how does this become a legal liability to put some of these people in jail?
That's the hard road.
That's what I want to see.
And you know what?
I don't know exactly what the law is, but I mean I think it is a law.
Maybe they changed some guidelines or they – maybe they did change the law back a few years ago.
They adjusted it somehow, Phil, didn't they?
But by and large the CIA is supposed to be forbidden from interfering in – certainly in American elections, but in any kind of American domestic policy.
That's exactly right.
I mean I'm not saying I believe that that's how things go all the time, but there are statutes that say that it's a crime to do so, right?
That's not just a suggestion.
That's true, but every rule has a feature that allows it to be overruled.
Sure.
The rules about the CIA not interfering in domestic politics or news dissemination in the United States, if the director of the CIA decides there's something going on that he has to do that or wants to do that, he can do it.
Yeah.
And he can always just plead ignorance to the FISA court and things and just say, well, I thought that Carter Page stuff was something.
I'm just – I'm pleasantly surprised to find out that it turns out it wasn't.
What a surprise.
Yeah.
Well, anyway, all right.
Well, great to talk to you again.
Thanks for coming on the show.
Okay, Scott.
Yeah, you take care.
All right, you guys, that's Phil Giroldi.
He's the director of the Council for the National Interest, councilforthenationalinterest.org, and regular writer at UNZ.com, The Conspiracy Against Trump.
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.
