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, Ben, 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 Joanne Leon from the Around the Empire podcast.
Which is great and has, you know, just recently Mark Sloboda, Matt Taibbi on our current topic.
We're going to be talking about Kevin Gastola and Bradley Manning.
I mean, it's just like the Scott Horton show, only different over there.
It's really great stuff.
Welcome back to the show.
How are you doing, Joanne?
Doing great, Scott.
Thanks for having me.
I appreciate it.
Very happy to have you on.
And you know what?
You're one of the reasons I miss Twitter.
But I ain't going back, at least until after my next book is done.
But yeah, I miss interacting with you and some of the other great people on there.
And so anyway, I wanted to have you on because our mutual Twitter friend and so forth, Cohen Swinkles.
He runs this blog, ForeignPolicyFollies.blogspot.com, Foreign Policy Follies.
And he created this list.
He asked around on Twitter, hey, everybody, who was good on Russiagate?
And everybody chimed in.
And so he compiled this list.
And I think at last count, it was 145 individuals.
And let me see here, 32 organizations that he cites.
I've thought of a few more since then.
I will probably forget them and not remember them again in this conversation.
And we certainly don't have time to name them all.
But I thought it might be fun to go through this list with you and show the world, remind everyone, I guess, what they should already know.
There was not a real consensus about this just on TV.
Just like in Iraq War II, there were millions.
In fact, more than 100 million Americans knew better than to do that war.
And it's the same kind of thing here where many Americans were not buying this Russia thing.
And that includes in the media and especially in the alternative media, left, right, libertarian and the rest.
So happy you're here.
Let's talk about, well, I don't know, just off the top of your head.
Who are your favorites in the debunking of the Russiagate story since 2016, Joanne?
Yeah, Scott, I agree.
It was not a tiny caucus, as some have asserted, though it was a tiny caucus in the mainstream media.
That's for sure.
Actually, it was almost an empty caucus unless you brought the more independent media into it.
But among the more indie media, there were tons of people.
And there is sort of some of us interact with each other online and go on each other's podcasts and YouTube channels and things like that.
Others, others of us are we're really not political allies at all.
But, you know, we respected policy stances.
And, you know, this Russiagate skeptic is skepticism from the start.
And when I say from the start, I mean like from the first day in, I guess it was the middle of July when the DNC started pushing back and saying, oh, those, you know, those are the Russians.
It was the Russians.
Don't read those emails.
And we're all like, get out of here, you know.
But even before that, like, let's even go back.
I'm glad that Cohen put near the top of his list people like Robert Parry and Stephen Cohen.
Stephen Cohen has been a pre-Russiagate skeptic.
I mean, he saw this whole new Cold War building from 2013, maybe even before that, but certainly from the Ukraine, the Maidan.
And Parry, as Joe Loria has done a great job highlighting his early skepticism, you know, when he was alive, unfortunately never lived to see this through.
But I would say that those are two of the guys who were sort of leading light.
So I'm glad they were they were put at the top of the list.
But there were there were lots of us on the right, on the left, on the independent middle and the whole spectrum.
So, yeah, let's just look at Cohen's list here.
Some of my favorites.
Well, Gareth Porter is always one of my favorites, and it's pretty hard to pull anything over on him, you know.
So he was always somebody I could reach out to you.
All of us, you know, we've just we've been to this rodeo before.
You know what I mean?
And the Ron Paul channel, you know, Adams.
He was just didn't buy this for a minute.
I don't remember where Rand Paul was from the beginning of this, but maybe he was.
Kyle Kalinsky, you know, a good skeptic in his own.
And then he mentions Robert Barnes of Barnes Law.
That's not a political ally of mine, but I actually did start to watch his Twitter feed to see.
I'm not familiar with him, I don't think.
Yeah, I've seen him on on Twitter.
He's a lawyer.
And let's see.
So, well, Caitlin Johnstone, I mean, she was a strong voice through this from the start.
You know, we should also mention here Craig Murray, who was a source of mine on this show, said, I'm telling you, it wasn't the Russians because I know who did it because I met with this person.
And I should clarify whenever I bring this up, because obviously the most prominent source on this story is the Daily Mail, but they got it wrong.
He never claimed that he personally received the leak, just that he met with the leaker and knows who the leaker is.
And in fact, he said that he knew that the Podesta leak came from inside the American intelligence community, whereas I think he at least strongly implied that the DNC leak came from within.
Although he never said that it was that guy that was murdered, the Democrat that was murdered, Seth Rich.
He never named Seth Rich or anything like that.
But, you know, he's a writer, too.
So not only is he a source on this, but he's also been good on this from the very beginning.
And I want to mention Jeffrey Carr, too, who right away said, essentially, you cannot prove where a hack originated like this.
All of that can be faked.
And this was before the Vault 7 leak came out that showed that the CIA had a particular program.
Was it the Marble Cake program?
Something like that.
About just how to make it look like it's the Russians or the Chinese or whoever behind your hack.
At the same time, he confirmed that essentially the only people who could definitely prove who did it would be the NSA.
And there's no question that they would be able to look and see who did it.
So on one hand, the FBI can't trace back the hack in any real, in any reliable way.
But on the other hand, the NSA should definitely know for sure.
And as we know from the very first intelligence report that they put out in January 2017, that was a completely ridiculous thing anyway.
But even in there, they couldn't get the NSA to say they judged with high confidence that the Russian GRU was behind it.
When they're the only ones who could say for sure.
So much for that point.
Yeah.
Bill Binney has made that point over and over and over again.
In fact, why don't you go ahead and just talk about the team of Ray McGovern and Bill Binney here and their role in this?
Yeah.
Well, first I want to say that, of course, I was following your work from the start in this.
And there are two particularly important interviews that Scott did back.
I don't remember exactly when they were.
I'm sure Scott can link them, but they it was Jeffrey Carr.
He did an interview with Jeffrey Carr and he did an interview with Craig Murray where Craig, you know, tentatively.
I mean, he had to be very careful, but specifically noted that he had an interaction with someone who was involved in the whatever process it was.
You know, to get the emails from the leaker, he specifies was a leaker to Wikileaks.
And so that's a really important interview to listen to.
And then Scott's interview with Jeffrey Carr.
And then I've I've also got an interview with Jeffrey Carr because, you know, I have a couple of decades of I.T. experience under my belt.
I'm not I'm not a lightweight.
I'm not a cybersecurity expert, but I know enough to, you know, to do some analysis.
And Jeffrey and I talked about it.
What was it you asked me to go into?
Oh, yeah.
So Bill Binney and Ray McGovern.
So, you know, Bill Binney and Ray McGovern.
Scott, tell me if I get any details wrong.
They were out to dinner.
The VIPS group and others from the VIPS group, they were out to dinner in D.C. and they left dinner and Craig sort of peeled off from the rest of the group.
And that's where he met this go between whoever where he played this role in facilitating the exchange of the emails to get them to Wikileaks.
And, you know, Ray could not.
He wasn't at this meeting, this exchange, but he knew that Craig was there and he knew that Craig went somewhere.
So by the way, Phil Giraldi and Gareth Porter were both also at that dinner and they both confirmed that Murray snuck away early kind of thing.
But that they didn't go further than that.
But they could corroborate at least that much of it.
Right.
Right.
And I mean, that was enough for me.
I've followed these people for long enough.
They haven't said you're wrong or lied to me that I know of.
I find them to be of high integrity.
So I took that very seriously.
And so they were pretty convinced from the start that this whole issue of the Russian hack wasn't true.
Now, they went further to do a technical analysis.
And this is pretty controversial, this forensicator.
And they have actually analyzed some files, Goose for two files, I believe they are.
And they have done an analysis that shows that, you know, this couldn't have come from wherever, Romania or across the sea or anywhere outside the country.
And they felt that it was the data from the data that they have.
They believe that this data was not transmitted across the ocean, as is claimed.
So, you know, they've I won't go into any more details about that argument.
I'm not prepared to do that.
But, you know, they from what they know, and they probably well, you know what I was going to say, probably can't tell us all of it.
But I hate that argument, because that argument was abused so much in Russiagate, like, well, like John Brennan.
Yeah, well, I have the I mean, they've shown their work as best they possibly can.
Ray and Bill Benny and the rest of the IPS are the ones that have signed on to his work.
And, you know, Ray deserves a lot of credit for sticking with this.
And that, of course, is, you know, part of that whole consortium news group, which, of course, included Ray's good friend, Robert Perry, who, as you said, was good on this from the very beginning.
His last article was slamming The New York Times and The Washington Post, especially The New York Times, the paper of record as just referring as, you know, first of all, it's, you know, alleged.
And then a couple of weeks later, they just drop alleged.
And now it's all just, as he put it, a flat fact that all of this stuff happened when no one ever proved it in the meantime.
It's just that, well, we referred to it enough times in a row now that we're just going to pretend that now everyone agrees and go on.
And he died shortly after that.
That was in, I guess, December 2016, I think was his last piece there.
Anyway, so but we got a lot of people on the list.
So Yasha Levine and Mark Ames.
I have not been a fan since the Obama year started, but both of them are solid on Russia issues virtually 100% of the time.
So definitely worth mentioning them.
But talk about Kaitlin Johnstone, because I never heard of her before this issue.
And this is another one where she's a leftist.
She's not an American, but still, she clearly is concerned about what's going on in American politics, as the whole rest of the world is, as well, of course.
But this is another one who is arguing essentially against interest, right, because she's a leftist and has every reason in the world to despise Donald Trump and everything he stands for in every way, but just isn't buying into this.
Yeah, exactly.
And she really gets the whole war machine issue and she addresses it from a bigger picture, like we tend to do.
I don't know her personally, but I believe she's married to an American.
So that increases her interests.
And she's also an Australian who is very worried about Julian Assange.
She's a supporter of Julian Assange.
So these play into her interests.
But she's very, very concerned about the imperial wars and the propaganda.
And she's using her artistic skills to push back on this narrative and just to try to tell the truth.
And she was very vocal and she's taken a lot of heat for it, I think because she was so effective and she gathered a lot of followers.
And because, like me, and I think like you, while no one could ever accuse us of being Trump supporters, but if there's a policy that we agree with, particularly if it's an anti-interventionist policy, I'm going to support that.
Sorry to my political allies and friends who don't like that.
I am.
Because I just believe it's in our interest to, at the very least, praise it and support it, even if I don't really believe he's going to.
And it's good left-wing politics, too.
Any leftist ought to be jumping at the chance to say, look at these right-wingers being even better on war than our liberal democratic leaders.
That is intolerable.
We insist that you are better than the best Republican on these issues or else.
Yeah.
And I mean, this president clearly craves approval and praise, right?
So if there's an issue that you think is really super important, as I do think this is, well, then dish it out.
Dish out the support and the praise.
I just think that that's a no-brainer.
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All right.
So, we got some former CIA guys on here, too.
Kiriakou, Phil Giraldi, and as well as, of course, Ray McGovern, we mentioned there, and a couple of NSA guys.
Good to see, of course, Noam Chomsky on this list.
Speaking of arguing against interest, boy, here's a guy who, if anybody could be defined as opposed to what Donald Trump represents in every way, it's him.
And he always said, yeah, yeah, yeah, Russiagate.
In fact, he always says, yeah, yeah, yeah, Donald Trump.
The fact of the matter is, what's wrong with America is our system of government.
From top to bottom, beginning to end, he's merely a symptom, this kind of wisdom.
And I guess this goes overall, right?
This should go with saying.
And it all depends on how you categorize and define things.
But essentially, people who are leftist enough to not be Democratic partisans are the ones on the liberal side or left side who see through this.
So, if you're a liberal Democrat, then, of course, it's all true.
But if you're more of a progressive, like Aaron Maté, or even more of a harder leftist, then they hate Democrats.
Real socialists and communists and left anarchists and stuff, they hate Democrats.
They have no reason in the world to defer to the point of view that Hillary Clinton would have them hold.
And they certainly always opposed her and not because Russia told them to.
And so they see right through this.
I mean, that's really what it is.
It's a matter of being, if you stand for something, then you won't fall for everything, that kind of deal, you know?
Yeah.
And just to be clear, I think everybody knows this, but we're talking about the establishment neoliberal Democrats, like the Democratic leadership.
They're the ones that we are fighting against.
Of course, I think everyone knows there's a pretty big rift in the Democratic Party.
Some of us have peeled off completely.
Some are staying around to try to change it and reform it from the inside.
And then, of course, you have the loyalist neoliberal establishment Democrats are still hanging around.
So, yeah.
Hey, you know what?
One of my favorites on this list is Adam Johnson.
I want to stop and mention him.
He's another leftist from Fairness and Accuracy and Reporting nowadays who is just great on this stuff.
Yeah, he's great.
He's always been bulletproof on this.
And he's funny, too.
That's why I like him.
Yeah, he's great.
And Elizabeth Lee Voss, too, is really good.
And she's done a lot of work in support of VIPS and the forensicator and Adam Carter and those guys.
OK.
So she's also done a lot of work in support of Julian Assange.
So she's definitely – and I believe her partner is William Craddick.
They're both at Disobedient Media.
And they are – they've been pushing back at this thing from the start.
And we have to give Paul Jay at The Real News the credit for giving Aaron Maté the space to put so much focus on this.
Because I think he was not – I think he was a skeptic but definitely not as skeptical as Aaron.
So credit to him for that.
And I see Justin Amash's name on here.
I didn't realize he was a Russia skeptic.
Yeah, I didn't know about that either.
Thank you for being a lone voice in the Congress.
You know whose name is not on here but should be is David Stockman.
And he is really one of our very best guys in the libertarian movement.
Unfortunately, his website is on subscription-only type thing except for sometimes we rerun stuff at Antiwar.com.
He lets us republish there.
But he's written all kinds of stuff, very thoroughly debunking all of this for Antiwar.com in the past.
And also I want to mention Norman Solomon who – I'll go ahead and throw a little shade.
He could have been a bit louder in the Obama years.
But now here comes the Trump years and instead of just jumping on the bandwagon against Trump, he's saying on this Russia thing, no way, man.
First things first, principle first, truth first, no Cold War, no new or renewed Cold War with Russia.
And look at how dangerous this is and we cannot get caught up in this.
And has just – has really been sort of like internal education for the left.
This is the guy that made the movie War Made Easy.
I guess it's the book too, War Made Easy, about media manipulation and wartime and stuff.
And he's been absolutely great on this from the very beginning as well.
Yeah, I saw that movie years ago.
I need to watch that again.
But you know what makes Stockman stand out?
First of all, he doesn't just speak out.
He yells out and lashes out.
But he and Stephen Cohen and Robert Perry, they understand the deeper roots of this.
They understand the things that happen.
This goes for Mark Ames and Yasha Levine too.
They know about the looting of Russia, the Yeltsin years, and the reigning in, I guess Putin did with the oligarchs.
And then some of this seems to be pushback.
It's just this back and forth, this power struggle.
So they can give you those deeper roots too to help you really understand what's going on.
I would say Ray McGovern too.
He gives that too.
Yeah, I mean the whole story here is America being a bad sport at the end of the Cold War and kicking the Russians while they're down and expanding and containing them.
And for a while they said, well, we're going to lie with them.
So it's okay to expand all the way to their borders because they're going to be members of NATO too.
But then no.
Same old containment policy only now right on their border instead of a thousand miles west in Germany where the line used to be.
And then six or eight color-coded revolutions against their allies around the region and this kind of thing.
It's just crazy.
It's all America's fault.
Simple as that.
People argue, well, which is the bigger threat, China or Russia?
The USA is picking a fight with both unnecessarily.
It's neither China nor Russia.
It's us.
Get it straight.
Come on.
Right.
I mean it's just got this big new Brzezinski mentality that just won't quit thinking that we're going to overthrow, break up Russia and all this stuff.
And it's just crazy.
And there's also an element of people who did some bad things during that period of time not wanting to be held accountable for them as Russia stands up on its feet again and becomes a more organized and- That's interesting.
You know what?
Has Jeffrey Sachs been good on this?
Because I know he's been great on Syria, but he's sometimes blamed for being one of the guys who helped with all the so-called shock therapy and looting and destruction of the Russian economy at the end of the Cold War there.
Off the top of my head, I don't know.
I'll look it up while you're talking.
I wonder if he's been good on this particular thing.
Okay.
So while you're looking it up, I'll go on a different tangent here about Margaret Kimberley and Glenn Ford.
Oh, yes, definitely.
From the Black Agenda Report.
And they're just solid, great.
Yep.
Another example of leftists who absolutely hate Democrats and don't have one moment to spare for a bunch of garbage about some foreign enemy that we're supposed to hate and despise and kill.
And they've been absolutely great on, for example, Libya and Syria and all the things.
I don't know how long I've been reading them.
At least since 2011 in Libya and following Margaret Kimberley especially.
I've interviewed Glenn Ford before.
I think about Libya back then.
But there, of course.
And that's sort of been the first clue for everyone here that this whole thing is a hoax is because there's a foreign enemy being demonized in the thing.
And so par for the course.
What was I reading this morning?
Where it's sort of the entire agenda.
Of course, this is true.
I was just reading one thing like this this morning.
That underlying the whole thing is this massive begs question that Russia has it in for us at all.
That they're concerned with undermining American democracy at all.
Destabilizing our society at all.
Attacking our election.
Making us all hate each other.
The people guilty of all of this seem to all be in Washington, D.C. and New York City.
It's the media who have been undermining.
In fact, just think of right before the election, Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama both denounced Donald Trump for implying that the election could be rigged.
We might have Hillary win, but it'd be some kind of illegitimate result that it would be in question whether him and his supporters should really respect that result.
And they panic.
You can't say that.
And then what have they done this whole time?
Except try to pretend that he wasn't actually elected.
And all while demonizing the Russians.
Yeah, I mean, there is all the history.
But there's also just kind of the panic that happened.
This is my theory.
Okay, I'll just make it clear that this is my theory.
I mean, Hillary was supposed to just sail right through and win the primary and then win the election, right?
And she's got all the money.
She's got all the media.
She's got all kinds of chiefs.
I don't know how many.
Just all kinds of people and consultants, you know, planning for this and that and every contingency.
And, you know, Bernie came along and he was so far behind in the beginning.
Nobody thought it could win.
But, you know, she started losing ground.
She started out with something like a 60 percent lead.
And that just like whittled away.
And you could see the panic happening.
And then I think, okay, so there was this quote unquote investigation on the Hillary emails that was going on during her whole primary.
I think it started like 2015, right?
So she's nervous about that, even though we do know for a fact now that that investigation was a bit of a sham.
You know, they decided ahead of time that she wasn't going to be held accountable.
But I guess she's got a lot of baggage, right?
And she's always worried.
She and the people around her are always worried that some of this dirt is going to come out and it's going to get into the hands of the Trump campaign or one of his primary opponents before he became the candidate.
So, you know, I think that's what was motivating this whole thing before the DNC emails were released by WikiLeaks.
But after the DNC emails were released, you know, that's when they switch over to this Russia did it excuse.
Donna Brazil begins by trying to convince people to not read the emails because they might be they might be faked.
They might be manipulated.
And they came from the Russians.
So you shouldn't read anything from the Russians.
Chris Cuomo tells his CNN audience that it's against the law to read those emails.
Right.
So they really don't want you to read them.
This is their first goal is to just kind of combat this whole thing and just sort of catch and kill any dirt that might come out on Hillary Clinton.
And of course, they were armed with their own opposition research against Trump that they could, you know, throw out as soon as something bad came about her.
So I think that was the mix.
That was the sort of zeitgeist during that period of time.
But after Trump actually won the election, well, then everything changed because now you had a whole Obama administration that I think we can fairly argue at this point, used the state apparatus to advantage Hillary Clinton and to protect her and to advantage her in any way they could.
And now all of a sudden, they've got the guy that they were working against coming into office.
So they're panicking.
Now it turns into before you could say it was a conspiracy.
Now it becomes like a conspiracy to cover up a conspiracy, a whole different thing.
And other people took advantage of it.
You know, the foreign policy war hawks, they were happy, right?
You know, they were on Hillary's side to begin with, and they were happy for anything that would demonize Russia because it's been a long term project for them.
So, I mean, I think that's the whole, just a very, very high level look at what was going on here.
Well, I mean, so this is the thing too, right?
Is after the election, they wanted to rig it and have Mike Morrell brief the Electoral College and say that Trump was compromised by Russia and that they should throw it to the House.
They should give it to Hillary or they should throw it to the House so the House could give it to Paul Ryan or Colin Powell.
As crazy as that sounds, it's in the New York Times.
But so this is actually the purpose of the Electoral College, right?
For a bunch of fine gentlemen to say, you know what?
The rabble have spoken, but we sincerely disagree.
And we're going to make sure to elect a responsible establishment centrist who is going to do what they're supposed to do, so to speak, and not let some crazy Andrew Jackson type come and take over the thing.
And yet it didn't work that way.
Instead, the Electoral College worked to secure the election of the winger because, after all, the electors come from the state parties from around the country.
They're not all from Washington, D.C.
They're from the red states.
And so they're there to support their guy, and there was nothing that they could do about that.
But that was along the lines that they were thinking, that they were going to try to cancel the results of the election.
Then, as we know, as soon as that fell apart and that didn't work, they went on to, well, maybe we can invoke the 25th Amendment as some kind of backdoor coup.
As though the 25th Amendment says, yeah, go ahead and overthrow the president if you don't like him or agree with his policies, which it doesn't say.
So you know what I'm curious about is what's the real story behind Sessions recusing himself from this?
Because he could have just done like Janet Reno and said, whatever, man, I'm not appointing a special counsel.
I'm not turning this decision over to anyone else either.
And what are you going to do about it?
And he didn't do that.
That was absolutely bizarre.
And Rosenstein, too.
I mean, it's inexplicable.
Their actions are inexplicable.
Well, I'm not so sure about that.
I just don't know what the explicable part of it is.
But there's a story there.
True.
And it may have just been personal at that point.
I don't know.
Inexplicable for me, I mean.
Yeah.
So wait, let's list more people.
And I'm just going to name.
So these are the ones that we're hearing about the most.
And they do deserve some credit, of course.
Glenn Greenwald and Matt Taibbi.
The Jimmy Dore show has been great and entertaining on this all this time.
Aaron Maté, I think, is probably the very best in his repeated essays that he wrote at The Nation on this.
But, you know, I don't know.
It's one thing.
I think Greenwald has been great.
And, of course, he's a very careful journalist, so he couches everything in the sense of like, OK, well, I haven't seen the evidence yet.
But some of us have been willing to say from the very beginning this whole thing is total bullshit.
I don't care what they say.
Just wait.
It's all going to fall apart because I already am telling you the premise is false.
The whole thing is a scam.
And don't believe in it, which is a little bit better.
Although fewer people were hearing our voices when we were saying that.
But it is what it is.
But antiwar.com, of course, that includes Raimondo.
We know we just ran – Raimondo is very sick right now with cancer and is not writing as much, although he does have a new one today.
But we just reran a classic Raimondo, whatever, a rerun of him from December 2016 saying this is all a CIA, FBI coup.
Look at what they're trying to do.
Look at how fake it all is.
Don't fall for it for a minute.
And essentially got everything right in there.
We started our podcast in December 2016, and my podcast partner at that time, Dan Wright, and I, we were completely skeptical.
And another thing I just want to mention is not only were Russiagate skeptics skeptical about the whole Russiagate thing, but what you just mentioned, the extreme tactics that happened after the election, we were shocked by that.
Whereas the so-called resistance, they didn't even seem to be shocked by the fact that people would try to overturn the electoral college, use the 25th Amendment.
They were just charging forward in this state of mania of sorts.
Whereas the Russiagates were like, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, what are you guys doing here?
Hold on.
It really is just like Iraq.
Look, if Saddam wasn't behind the 9-11 attack, then how come we're attacking him then?
Of course he did it.
And so, in other words, well, Donald Trump must be a traitor because you're telling me the lie is this big?
The CIA and the FBI and everyone on TV is telling me that the president is compromised by Russia and it's not true?
I mean, it sounds more likely it must be true than that all those people could be that quote-unquote wrong about something on the order of Benedict Arnold level betrayal here.
Yeah.
And we have to mention, too, the people on the Russian network, the Sputnik and the RT, like Lee Camp, the morning shows, Lee Stranahan and Garland Nixon, definitely the John Kiriakou show and Brian Becker.
They've all been very good.
Brian McDonald, who I just did an interview with, and that'll be published later, but he's in that same camp.
Dan Cohen, Max Blumenthal is not connected with Russia, but he does work with Dan Cohen.
The guys at the gray zone, of course, Max and Ben, Ronny Akalik.
And I'm going to miss some of these people.
Moon of Alabama, of course.
Oh, yeah.
See, I actually even wrote that down a minute ago while you were talking.
Then I forgot about it again.
You know what?
Go ahead and stop and elaborate about Moon of Alabama for a minute for the people, could you?
Because he really deserves so much credit on a lot of different things, but especially in including this one.
He just has this insightful analysis that he's got almost, I'm trying to think of something he got wrong.
I can remember early in the Syria war, in the Syria war situation, you know, it was confusing.
There were a lot of people who I respected who were, you know, pro-rebel, pro-uprising, pro-revolution.
And so I'm thinking like, I don't know, you know, Moon of Alabama, I'm not quite sure if you're right.
But over time, he thoroughly convinced me and he was dead right.
He's just got, maybe it's because he's not in Russia or the United States.
He has a military background.
He reads a wide variety of different views and he just gets it right every time.
And he's up to date every day, too.
That's the thing.
I'm always stuck in the past, but labor in the last few battles or whatever, but he is on point every morning.
It's incredible.
Yeah.
I mean, he just caught me up on Libya yesterday because I had not been paying close attention as to who was backing who.
And he kind of like laid it all out.
But yeah, he goes in, he gets into details, he debunks specific things.
Yeah, he's just, I mean, he's a must read every day.
And he was a firm Russia skeptic, a Rushgate skeptic from the start and deserves, you know, a lot of credit.
Another guy who definitely not my political ally at all, but it's Andy McCarthy.
He's on Fox News.
Right, Andrew McCarthy at the National Review, the former federal prosecutor in the first World Trade Center bombing case and horrible war propagandist of the George W. Bush years.
And I don't know everything about him, but go ahead, because I agree with you completely about how important his work has been here.
Yeah, but I saw him on Fox News a few times or I came across him on Twitter.
Then he started a podcast and he will, you know, slice and dice.
And he'll also offer, you know, he knows how the DOJ works.
He's been in and around that community for decades.
So, you know, he in fact, he would have to call him a light skeptic, actually, beginning because he he had an open mind through this whole thing.
Well, he has said that he does not dispute at all that the GRU was behind all the hack and this and that and the other thing.
He's essentially arguing that this was a counterintelligence investigation.
There never was a predicate for a criminal investigation of the president or his group at all.
Right.
That's yeah.
Thanks for bringing that up.
That's one of his important points that he makes.
But as time went on, you could see him becoming more and more offended by the way that the law enforcement and justice department was being abused and what he thought and just unprecedented things were happening.
So while he respected some of the people who were involved, I thought he provided a balanced view of it.
He was willing to, you know, until I'd say until recently.
And yeah, he still buys into the the Russian hack, the GRU.
And hey, would I be surprised if the Russians hacked into the DNC and the Chinese and the Israelis and the Indians over time?
No, I wouldn't be surprised at all.
I just don't think that that's what happened to get those emails to WikiLeaks.
You know, I don't either, but I should stipulate, I guess I wouldn't be surprised to find out that.
No, actually, it was a GRU that gave them to Assange.
I don't know.
Hillary Clinton called Putin Hitler and she told Julian Assange or it was in the WikiLeaks that she had proposal.
Why don't we just murder this guy?
So you know what?
These things happen when you call people Hitler.
And by the way, like all four of Putin's older brothers were killed by the Nazis in World War Two, something like that.
So, yeah, I bet you he probably didn't like that very much.
So to me, it's all just fair game and come up.
But I refuse to accept the premise that if Russia did leak that stuff to WikiLeaks, that that was in any way an attack on our country in any way.
That's nothing but providing sourcing for good journalism.
We have every right to know what's in every single email she sent from the time she's sworn in.
Exactly.
And why were they on a private server in the first place?
By the way, Russia, if you're listening, there are still 30,000 missing emails.
And since Jason Leopold is no longer doing FOIA for a living and you can't foil that, which has been bleached off of the hard disk and destroyed.
You know, we're relying on you guys to find that backup mirror somewhere and publish those documents.
Which I want to say, because Leopold was doing a great job suing the State Department and forcing them to release her emails, just like everybody's accusing the Russians of doing.
So is Jason Leopold a traitor or a hero for showing us what a horrible secretary of state she was?
Yeah, I mean, and it's like Stephen Cohen says.
And other people have said, too, you know, everybody meddles in American elections.
They try to.
They try to influence our elections.
And we, like Noam Chomsky said, you know, for us to complain about people trying to influence our elections, you know, the rest of the world just thinks that's a laugh.
That makes it makes a laughingstock out of us.
Of course, countries try to influence each other's elections, particularly the one that's sitting at the top of the empire and messing around with everybody else at the moment.
But some people on the right hand, on the right side, I would think, I think you could call them conservatives.
You know, there's Chuck Ross at The Daily Caller, right?
You know what?
Peter Van Buren brought him up on the show the other day as well for to single out for praise.
And, you know, I realize now in hindsight that I had read a few things by him about this and had seen tweets by him about this.
But I never had really put it together that, oh, this is kind of a speciality of this guy and I need to follow him.
I'm only kind of realizing that in hindsight now.
But he did a lot of great work on this, huh?
He was one of those guys who was dissecting every story that would come out or everyone that he could.
Right.
So every time The New York Times, Washington Post or the whole mainstream media and the sort of the top dogs that were really getting the most broadcasting things the most.
Oh, hold on.
Sorry about that.
He was doing the day to day debunking.
And there was another guy, Jeff Carlson.
I don't know anything about him, but he has a website, The Market's Work, and he's on Cohen's list here.
He apparently had access to some of the transcripts that Trump refused to release, the DOJ and Trump refused to release or declassify.
And he's actually, as these things come out, like, you know, the or transcripts that just came out and the various interviewees of the congressional committees.
You know, some of the things he's being proved right at this point with some of the things that he disclosed over time.
And, you know, he also did good analysis.
I'm trying to think of who else on the, oh, Paul Sperry.
I know he does some.
Yeah.
Andrew Coburn.
He's the leftist, but we got to make sure I mention him because he's great.
Yeah.
I mean, it's hard to get all of these in.
Hopefully everybody will go to this list and read.
I hope I'm not forgetting anybody.
I mean, I did.
I'm on my 99th podcast episode, and I don't think that there was one person that I talked to that wasn't a Rushgate skeptic.
So this was not a tiny caucus.
Many of us didn't have a very loud voice, but we did interact with each other over time.
We found each other, sort of, you know, took, we used each other's work to, you know, to read each other's work.
And that's the main point that I want to make is that- And fought in the Twitter wars.
I mean, that's a part of it too.
And in fact, you know what?
I've actually, I quit Twitter.
I haven't signed in, but I did go trolling a few Greenwald posts and Michael Tracy posts and so forth to see them gloating, which they say, hey, I'm not gloating.
Yeah, you are.
And that's fine and good.
The people deserve to be, the guilty deserve to be completely stomped here.
But as I'm reading their posts, I can see that they're just endless numbers of hundreds of people responding who clearly are leftists, who clearly hate and despise all this and never believed it for a minute.
Not who are covering their asses now, but who hate liberals and never believed it.
Jacobin, we got to mention Branko.
I don't know how to say his name, but we run him at antiwar.com.
He's really great.
Branko Mrakovic or something or other.
Man, I love you.
I'm sorry about your name.
He's done great work.
And none of those guys at Jacobin, who are all some kind of Marxist flavor or whatever, they never believed in this or toe the line on this either.
They deserve credit for that.
But back to the real point is, when it comes to just kind of random leftists on Twitter, and of course, virtually all libertarians, it goes without saying, and a hell of a lot of right-wingers, although the right-wingers, of course, have a vested interest in it, but still.
But there are endless numbers of random Twitterers who were never in on this, who never believed it, who always looked at it the way regular skeptics of the Bush-Cheney government looked at the Iraq War thing.
Once you know enough to know that Saddam and Osama ain't the same thing here, guys, then you can tell something is up here.
There's an agenda.
They said regime change.
The rest of this is excuses for that policy.
It's pretty obvious.
If you don't want to believe in it, then you can see what's going on here.
Same kind of thing here.
So yeah, credit to all the randos on Twitter who said this is BS.
Exactly.
And thanks for the support, because we were getting hit all the time.
You're a Russian bot.
What was the latest one?
I just get this all-caps message, SLIME.
Someone calling me SLIME.
Oh, you're a useful idiot for the Russians.
Hey, I'd rather be that than a useless idiot toeing the line for the CIA.
And honestly, hey, let's just look at it.
It's the only fair way to judge.
George W. Bush, Barack Obama, our last two presidents, they got roughly a million people killed each.
And Donald Trump has killed certainly tens of thousands of people already.
And Lord knows, when we go and do the counting of the excess death rate in Yemen, it's going to be hundreds of thousands killed by him.
How many people has Putin killed?
I guess probably a good 50,000 in Chechnya 20 years ago.
Since then, I guess another maybe 10,000 or 20,000 civilians helping fight against the CIA and al-Qaeda in Syria, which is horrible but is still America's fault first.
And that's the worst of it.
So there's just no comparison.
And I'm from here.
I'm not just an American.
I'm a Texan.
It's still just true.
And so what are you going to do?
Yep.
Well, thank you, Scott, for giving me the opportunity to sort of point out that it's not a tiny caucus.
There are a lot of us.
And check us out.
We got it right.
We're not going to steer you wrong.
Best we can.
Yeah, man.
So first of all, Foreign Policy Follies, Cohen Swinkels, friend of the show.
And he's got this great blog, Russiagate Skeptics, published on March 26th here.
That's at foreignpolicyfollies.blogspot.com.
And check out Joanne Leon and her great show.
I mean, it's really a great podcast.
I was listening to the Taibbi interview this morning here.
Around the Empire at aroundtheempire.com.
Thanks again, Joanne.
Thanks, Scott.
Take care.
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.
