Sorry, I'm late.
I had to stop by the Whites Museum again and give the finger to FDR.
We know Al-Qaeda, Zawahiri, is supporting the opposition in Syria.
Are we supporting Al-Qaeda in Syria?
It's a proud day for America.
And by God, we've kicked Vietnam syndrome once and for all.
Thank you very, very much.
I say it, I say it again.
You've been hacked.
You've been took.
You've been hoodwinked.
These witnesses are trying to simply deny things that just about everybody else accepts as fact.
He came, he saw us, he died.
We ain't killing they army, but we killing them.
We be on CNN like, say our name, 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 John Kiriakou.
He's former CIA, but he seems all right, mostly.
He wrote Accidental Spy, and now his latest is The Convenient Terrorist about Abu Zubaydah, co-written with Joseph Hickman, who is also a whistleblower.
He of Guantanamo Bay and the other Scott Horton's great journalism about the Guantanamo murders there in 2006.
Don't confuse me for him.
Different stuff.
Same topic.
Welcome to the show.
How are you doing, John?
Hey, thanks.
I'm doing well.
Thanks.
Thanks for having me.
Very happy to have you here and happy to see you sticking up for Chelsea Manning.
I tried to invite a couple other people who'd written Chelsea Manning things, and I guess I didn't hear back.
And so I really needed somebody to come on and talk about Chelsea Manning, and you did it.
And you got a great one.
It's at the American Conservative Magazine today, theamericanconservative.com, Chelsea Manning's Don't Tread on Me moment.
So what moment is that exactly, John?
You know, Chelsea was subpoenaed to testify before a grand jury, apparently against Julian Assange.
That's what we all expect, and I think that's exactly what the request was.
And she was offered immunity, but she just refused to rat out Julian.
And so she was prepared not to take the fifth, but to take the first, the first, fourth, and sixth amendments.
Now, this is very unusual, and I mentioned in the article that it reminded me very much of something that Pete Seeger, the famous activist and folk singer, did in the 1950s when called to appear before the House Un-American Activities Committee.
All of his friends and colleagues took the fifth, and he challenged the very veracity of the panel, saying that he had a First Amendment right to association, and he wasn't answering any questions from anybody.
Chelsea Manning did essentially the same thing.
But you're saying, I think in here there's kind of two courses on that.
On the one hand, it's a principal's stand, but it's also a legal strategy as well.
So can you please explain both angles there?
It is actually a legal strategy as well, because what the prosecutors were looking for was for Chelsea to repeat testimony that she gave in her own case back in 2012 at Fort Meade that was in a military court.
The problem there is that if you try to recount earlier testimony, something that was on the record, that was given under oath, and you make a mistake, maybe your memory isn't what it used to be, maybe you just forget a key detail, they can charge you with making a false statement, which is a felony.
They can also charge you with perjury, which is a more serious felony.
And I think Chelsea just didn't want to take that chance.
But so now why not just say, hey, I plead the fifth?
What's the difference there?
Well, like Pete Seeger, she's challenging the entire system, the entire grand jury system.
It's being held in secret, which is normal for grand juries.
But beyond the grand jury being secret, the charges are secret.
We don't even know what Julian Assange has been charged with.
And the only reason we know that he's been charged with anything is because a knucklehead at the Department of Justice accidentally released it in an unrelated case in the Eastern District of Virginia.
And then, so this is, I understand what you're saying about the false statement thing, because they'll get anybody on that and they'll get you as hard as they want to, too, right?
Look what they did to the people around Donald Trump.
So many people are saying, oh, 31 felony charges and 13 people.
Well, they're all nonsensical, what are called process felonies, what some of us call throwaway felonies, felonies that otherwise would never have occurred had the investigation not been commenced in the first place.
For example, Michael Flynn.
Mike Flynn, one day when he was the national security adviser, took a call from Rod Rosenstein, the number two at the Justice Department, saying, I'm going to send a couple of my boys over to talk to you.
Just a friendly chat.
You don't have to have an attorney present.
Well, that was a setup.
And so when the two FBI agents went to see Flynn, they knew exactly what the answers to their questions were.
Flynn said something that was different than what he had said previously, and they charged him with a felony count of making a false statement.
Now, they do that not to put you in prison because the federal guidelines for making a false statement are zero to six months.
The likelihood that you'll get any prison time is almost nil.
But what they do is they hold that over your head to force you to cooperate, either against someone else in the case or in another case.
And so you have a choice.
You can either turn rat and maybe get this thing lifted from your record, or you could double down and just take whatever they give you.
It's not a very nice choice.
Yeah.
And then, so now, let's see, I want to make sure.
Oh, yeah, no, we got to cover.
So Manning refused to testify, and the judge then said, all right, well, I'm locking you up until I feel like letting you out on contempt charges.
Yeah, that's literally what they can do, Scott.
The thing about contempt charges is that you're just locked up.
It's not like you're put on trial.
They have you in the courtroom.
They say, we want you to answer these questions.
You say, I'm not answering them.
They say, we're holding you in contempt.
They literally put the cuffs on you right there in the courtroom and take you to a cell, and you don't get out of the cell until one of two things happen.
Either you change your mind and testify, or the grand jury is no longer impaneled.
But when a grand jury is impaneled in the first place, it's impaneled for a period of up to 18 months.
And if after 18 months there are no charges yet, it can be extended for another 18 months.
So Chelsea Manning is looking at the possibility of three more years in prison.
And look, you mentioned Russiagate, and you wrote some great stuff.
You were mentioned earlier by Joanne Leon on the show for one of the ones who got that right, and I'd like to talk with you about that in a little while here.
It seems like there's a real parallel here with Russiagate in that we already know that there is no underlying crime.
This is a person being investigated.
This is a phishing expedition.
They're trying to come up with something, some way to twist the definition of doing journalism into espionage, trying to claim that WikiLeaks is not the New York Times or the Washington Post or any other legitimate news organization.
It's a non-state intelligence agency.
And so even though any reporter who said to you, Kiriakou, hey, tell me some secrets from CIA days or break in there and get me a document or whatever, that's still just doing journalism.
That's doing good journalism.
But they're saying no.
If Assange said to Manning, hey, I'd like it if you got me a thing, that that would amount to a conspiracy to commit espionage rather than just being a journalist.
And that then whatever Manning was guilty of, Assange would be guilty of conspiracy to that, which is essentially a giant fraud.
And according to the Washington Post anyway, the Obama administration had decided that there's no legitimate way to split these hairs legally, where they figured that they could build a case against Assange that wouldn't also apply directly to the New York Times, which leaks classified information mostly on their behalf, sometimes in scoop form, on a regular basis, and that they don't want to overthrow and take on and change that dynamic.
And that's the crux of this entire case.
You've really hit the nail on the head here.
What we have is, well, first of all, Barack Obama was no friend of whistleblowers or WikiLeaks or Julian Assange or anybody else in that community.
So for the likes of Eric Holder to come to the decision that WikiLeaks couldn't be prosecuted without also opening up pretty much every mainstream media outlet to criminal charges as well says a lot.
That Donald Trump is willing to do it says even more, because I think you're exactly right.
WikiLeaks is a journalistic organization.
Julian Assange is a journalist.
He's won myriad journalistic awards.
He is not – and WikiLeaks is not a non-state intelligence service, which is what Mike Pompeo said when he was CIA director.
And then if you prosecute Julian for doing what every journalist tries to do every day, then you're going to have to prosecute The New York Times and The Washington Post and CNN and all the others, because you can only argue prosecutorial discretion for so long before people say, no, it's not prosecutorial discretion.
It's bias, and you're going to have to answer to that.
Well, and so Manning right now, there's all these rumors, and I have not had the time, I swear, this week to nail down the veracity of what all is going on here.
But there was at least a threat that he was going to be kicked out of his sanctuary there, which is apparently serving much more like a solitary confinement, prison-like experience for him, just like Manning.
Something we left out about Manning, I'm sorry that we skipped, is being held in solitary here, or at least was being held in solitary.
Is that right?
Yeah.
She was released yesterday from solitary.
Thank goodness.
And this is someone who has been a legit suicide risk in the past too.
Oh, in fact, Chelsea has attempted suicide twice as a result of solitary confinement.
Yeah.
So at least that much has changed for now.
But that seems even deliberate there.
I don't know.
Anyway, but to Assange then, there's this threat that he's going to get kicked out of the embassy in Ecuador, where then he'd be at the tender mercies of the MI5 who'd turn him over to whoever who would turn him right over to the Americans.
You know, there's an irony here too, Scott, because the crime that he's being accused of having committed in the UK is failure to appear, right?
Well, failure to appear for what?
For a hearing on two sexual assault charges that the Swedes had filed, but both women recanted and the charges were dropped.
So he's being accused now of failing to appear for a hearing on a crime that was never committed.
So it's nothing more than a setup.
And even the Brits will kind of smile at you when you tell them that.
It's just a setup.
A setup for the Brits to arrest him and hold him just long enough for the FBI to land a plane in London and hustle him on board and bring him back to the States.
Everybody knows that.
Everybody knows now that he's going to be charged in the Eastern District of Virginia.
Everybody knows that he's going to get Judge Brinkema just like I did and Jeffrey Sterling did and Ed Snowden is scheduled to have.
So the fix is in.
The plan, the US-UK plan is already pretty well known.
Yeah.
Well, listen, I don't want to take their side at all, but I do want to, I guess, say I can understand their side of the story about how just absolutely terrified of WikiLeaks they are.
Not that that justifies anything that they've done here.
But, you know, there was this huge story that I don't know if we ever had a chance to cover on the show here.
You may, I bet, understand and remember the details of this better than I do.
But there was an important story that said that Julian Assange was negotiating with the CIA about he would withhold the Vault 7 documents and not publish them.
And then the negotiations were leaked, I think, by his lawyer or something to John Warner in the Senate, who then spilled the whole beans and ruined the whole negotiation or some kind of thing like that.
Can you tell us about that?
You know, I only saw that as a rumor like you did.
And who knows?
It's entirely plausible.
I know that right after Ed Snowden went public with his revelations, I was in touch with him and I made a recommendation as to attorneys.
And he engaged them immediately, and then they engaged the Justice Department in negotiation to bring him home.
Ed said that he was willing to do time if he were allowed to say in open court why he did what he did.
And the Justice Department refused to agree to that.
And so the negotiations fell apart.
I think negotiations are probably a normal part of all of this.
God knows my lawyers spent hundreds of hours negotiating with the Justice Department.
If Julian's attorneys were, you know, worth their salt, I would expect them to try to do the same.
Well, and essentially, again, there is no underlying crime here.
There's only a thing that really frustrated and angered government employees who have prosecutorial power and so might as well have.
That is it.
That's exactly what has happened.
Okay.
And so now let's go back to Manning.
And, you know, WikiLeaks had been around and had published all kinds of great stuff already.
But Manning, you know, everybody agrees.
I don't know if she has ever had to say absolutely.
Oh, I guess, yeah, at the elocution, of course, did sit, you know, take responsibility for the leak.
Tried to deny it for the longest time for defense strategy purposes.
So we all know, did the leak of the Iran and Iraq war law.
I mean, pardon me, the Iraq and Afghan war logs and the Iraq war logs, including the collateral murder video, as well as the Guantanamo files.
Not Andy Worthington's book, but some other Guantanamo files.
And also, of course, the State Department cables that were current up through 2009 and had contained all of these documents together as released by WikiLeaks and as covered by global newspapers.
Have either been at the core of, or at least, you know, the documents corroborated certain details or upheld certain major portions of probably, you know, more than 10,000 important newspaper stories or, you know, journalistic endeavors that have been published since.
And this is, it's on such a regular basis, we see it all the time and don't even think about it.
That, oh yeah, based on the WikiLeaks, State Department cables say this, that, the other thing.
That 100% of the time, that's Chelsea Manning did that.
We finally got even the State Department version of April Glaspie's briefing with Saddam Hussein on July 25th, 1990, when she told him that we don't care if he invades Kuwait or not.
And everything.
So this is someone, as you say, you know, the headline here, Chelsea Manning, Chelsea Manning's don't tread on me moment.
This is another don't tread on me moment where this is someone who has sacrificed everything already, was facing and was sentenced to a term of 35 years in prison.
And knew good and well that it could have been a lot worse than that going into it, who is now again saying, sorry, your honor, do your worst because I'm not giving in.
And I mean, this is really huge.
And you know what I think you even say in the article, John, like, yeah, you know, Chelsea might annoy you.
And I think, yeah, I had to quit following her on Twitter because I think, you know what, I wish you would just stick to talking about Iraq war logs and stuff.
That's her area of expertise anyway.
But but so what?
Right.
It's sort of like what you're saying here is the over personalities aside, overall description of job performance and heroically liberating documents and then standing up for truth and standing up for songs with this kind of integrity that that says everything and nothing else matters compared to that.
Oh, yeah.
You know, I did say in the piece, you don't have to like Chelsea.
You don't have to want to go out and have a beer with Chelsea to know that Chelsea's right.
And another thing, Scott, you look at Chelsea Manning.
We all agree.
Fewer emojis, Chelsea, fewer emojis.
But anyway.
No, I'm sorry.
Good.
We do.
We do agree.
Yes, please cut the emojis.
I can't handle it anymore.
Although I did I did very much enjoy her feud with what's that idiot actor James Woods.
That was a lot of fun.
I had missed that when I quit Twitter in time, thankfully.
But anyway, go ahead.
He ended up blocking her.
But anyway, what is Chelsea Manning?
Five, four, five, five, maybe 120 pounds.
And she is tougher than 99 percent of the men that I know.
She just will not back down in the face of a government that's that's potent enough to to do their worst like they did last time.
I mean, she never blinked at 35 years in prison.
And here she is again taking them on.
I have great respect for that because most people would have just caved.
Most people would have said my job is too important.
My family is too important.
My kids, my this, my that.
She didn't care.
She stood right up.
Yep.
And so importantly, again, going back to those war logs, I mean, and the State Department cables.
This is what touched off the Arab Spring revolt in Tunisia was this was the background.
Those State Department cables describing Ben Ali's corruption were all the rage in the media for three weeks leading up to the suicide by self immolation of that poor guy.
I always say his name wrong.
That started off that revolution that then led to all kinds of chaos for good and for ill across the Middle East, I guess, mostly for real, but still hugely important in every way.
And, of course, the Iraq war logs helped to defeat Obama's attempt to negotiate for the American presence to stay in Iraq past the sofa, which I think the Iraqi government was going to stick with that anyway.
But certainly said, hey, look, these atrocities being revealed in these war logs that you denied all along.
They're a deal breaker.
There's nothing we can do now.
So this is all very, very important at the time.
Yes, very important.
Another important point is that is that everything that Chelsea released was true.
Chelsea released information, as you rightly pointed out, that exposed war crimes, possibly crimes against humanity.
Another important point is that is that everything WikiLeaks has released has been true.
Everything.
And WikiLeaks has never blown a source.
So if you want to leak something and you want to be confident that your identity will be protected, it's WikiLeaks.
That's the only place you can go without Chelsea Manning.
Again, you don't have to like Chelsea.
You don't want to have to have a beer with her.
But without Chelsea Manning, we would not have known that our soldiers in Iraq were committing war crimes.
We may have suspected.
We already knew, but it was a lot of cooperation.
Yes.
Now, there was a lot documented already, really.
She changed contemporary history.
Absolutely.
Absolutely.
No question.
And then and now here's the other thing, too, is they had such a propaganda campaign back in 2010 and 2011 about this.
Oh, blood on your hands, blood on your hands.
When all that happened, of course, was the DOD, the CIA, the State Department had blood on their hands.
And Chelsea Manning was letting us know about the blood on their hands.
So all they could do is just try to turn that around and try to accuse Manning and Assange both of some kind of treason.
When Assange is Australian anyway.
He doesn't owe us any allegiance.
But when the whole thing of it is the rat, Adrian Lamo, that turned Manning over to the FBI in the first place, also tried to entrap then him, Bradley Manning, into making it that much worse and try to tempt him and say, listen, you could be selling all these documents to the Russians or the Chinese and make a fortune, you know, and all of this kind of thing.
And Manning responds, no, you stupid.
This isn't about that at all.
I want the American people, especially in the people of the world, to know the truth so they can use democracy to make reforms with free information and all this stuff, just like we all learn in sixth grade civics how it's supposed to be.
You know, if the American people knew the truth, they would object.
We have to tell them.
That's all.
And of course, not money.
Of course not.
Turn it over to China.
Are you kidding?
But that was what the U.S. government, I think, had told the rat, you know, to try to do that, to try to pull that kind of scam.
And it went nowhere, of course.
That's right.
It was like pure Thomas Jeffersonian free market of ideas type argument about perfectly in line with what we all understand the First Amendment to be about in the first place.
That is it.
I agree.
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Hey, listen, I think it's great that you wrote this thing.
Now, well, geez, I don't know.
I mean, I guess things can only get worse here.
There's no indication that they're calling off this grand jury.
And, of course, Manning's not going to give in here.
So, at this point, she really is looking at an extended period of time.
And we really are looking at some sort of trumped-up cage against Assange going forward, it seems like here.
You know, let me add something from my own personal experience about that issue.
When I was approaching trial back in 2012, I hired O.J. Simpson's jury consultant.
He had also been the jury consultant for George Zimmerman in the Trayvon Martin case.
He had done William Kennedy Smith in his rape case.
This guy is a major player.
And so he came up here.
We got him a security clearance so he could go through my files.
And in the end, we were all sitting around this enormous conference room table.
I had 11 attorneys at the time.
And he said to me, and I'll never forget it, he said, if we were in any other district in America, I'd say let's go for it.
We're going to win it.
But the Eastern District of Virginia, you don't have a chance.
He said, look at who your jury is going to be made up of, either employees of or relatives of employees of the CIA, the FBI, the Defense Department, the Department of Homeland Security, and intelligence community contractors.
You don't have a prayer.
And that's it.
He was right.
And anywhere else, you'd be up against a bunch of cops, wives anyway.
But this is way worse.
This is way, way worse.
And that's why no national security defendant has ever won a case in the Eastern District of Virginia.
And then couple that with the fact that Judge Brinkman is a hanging judge and just simply won't allow you to mount a defense.
You don't have a chance.
If the government's not willing to deal with you, you're going to go to prison for a very, very long time.
You know, this is a real thing, man.
We're going to have to figure something out, because there's been a few great articles.
But somebody has to do something to intervene here to get the judge to just intervene and just say, man, you're off the hook for this trial.
You're not going to squeal.
You're not going to squeal something.
Because I don't know.
I'm really worried about this person.
And man, just think how I'm being selfish on behalf of the USA for all future history here.
Just think how ugly America's going to look if Bradley Chelsea Manning kills herself in prison or shortly after getting out or something from breaking under this kind of pressure.
You know, just think.
I mean, this is just crazy that this is going on.
Especially when, you know what, Russia or not, and I think not, Trump does owe WikiLeaks the election.
You know what?
They've really helped out.
And that might be, you know, Hillary shouldn't have threatened to kill Assange, and maybe she would have not found herself in that position.
Maybe she would have anyway.
I agree with that.
But, you know, Trump, of all people, and, you know, Pompeo, as you mentioned, he was head of CIA before he was Secretary of State, and he was campaigning for Trump and praised WikiLeaks for, you know, their efforts in the campaign.
Donald Trump's exact words were, God bless WikiLeaks.
It doesn't get any more clear than that.
Seriously.
And, you know, okay, so now listen.
I don't know how much time you got.
Actually, I have almost no time.
Let's talk about Russiagate for just a second here, and I'm just going to have to be late for my next thing.
I want to know whether you think that the Russian GRU was really behind this hack at all or what.
No, I don't.
Bill Binney, who's the former number four at NSA and is a member of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity, it's a group that I'm also a member of, retired CIA, NSA, FBI, military people.
Bill Binney has released a definitive study saying that the information that was downloaded from the DNC server was downloaded at a speed that could not possibly have been done remotely.
It could only have been done in person onto a thumb drive because it downloaded at something like 20 times the speed that it would have downloaded had it been remote.
And so that tells me that there was a whistleblower inside the DNC probably pissed off because Hillary had stolen the election from Bernie Sanders, and then that person, whoever it was, decided to give the information to WikiLeaks.
I do not think that this was a Russian intelligence operation.
You know, because this is the thing, and it was – I mentioned this on another interview.
I spaced out who it was I was talking about.
It was Danny Sherson's new one that's coming out tomorrow, something like that.
It was talking about, of course, the most important part of all of this is never mind how they gave Donald Trump the Saddam Hussein treatment.
It's what they've done to Vladimir Putin and to Russia in terms of what they have changed these words into to mean in the minds of the American people.
Where the polls say – I think it was won a few weeks ago – 73 percent of Americans consider Russia to be this major threat that – I mean, how many times – they've heard for three years straight they've attacked our democracy.
It was compared to 9-11 and Pearl Harbor and even Kristallnacht.
I mean, jeez, what the – this is – and they will stop at nothing to disrupt us, to divide us, to destabilize us, to discredit our constitutional system.
It's like a war going on.
And now, how do you climb down from that?
And in fact, if you bought into that, how do you stop being wound up about that either?
How do you ever forget how mad you are at those guys for what they've done even though they never did do it?
Right.
Right.
And that's an ongoing problem, I think, in our relations with Russia.
The Russians are being accused of everything these days.
And the funny thing is is that they're being accused by Democrats.
It's like this weird role reversal now where the Democrats are trying to sabotage relations with Russia and the Republicans are trying to foster it.
I just don't get it.
Well, it's just simple partisanship.
But boy, it just has such disastrous consequences when you have so many people.
I mean, you know, the basic mindset before that was like, I don't know, Russia, we're essentially friends with them, right?
That's what anybody would have told you, right?
You know, I don't know.
But now they would not say that.
Now they go, oh, my god, yeah, what are we going to do about them?
Yeah?
Yeah, exactly.
And then we're going to convince ourselves that we're going to have to do something.
And that's where it gets really dangerous.
Yeah.
Well, you know what?
I'd like to think that with the report in and out yet, of course, and yet they've already folded up the operation without charging anyone with conspiracy.
And everyone who was charged, as you said, was outlying the FBI on minor inside issues, none of which had to do with building a case toward a conspiracy of Trump working with the Russians at all.
And, you know, it's funny because it sounds so silly that we almost sound silly repeating it, right?
When they were the ones who were really saying that essentially that he was guilty of the highest treason, that he was a spy, that he was a compromised agent of Russia.
Not just that they had intervened in the election and helped him to win, but that now or maybe even before he owed them everything, you know?
And this is, I mean, my God, man.
It's sort of like if you can accuse a Sandy Hook mom of lying that she ever had a daughter, you better really be sure you're right.
It's the same kind of thing like this.
You're going to launch a whole FBI, CIA putsch against the leader, the elected chief executive based on this kind of thing.
You better really have something.
I know.
I figured out a way to end this with a question.
What do you think about Robert Mueller dragging this thing out for two years?
Because now the Trump side is saying vindicated by Mueller, but they're not saying, hey, man, how come he didn't vindicate Trump?
I don't know, a year and a half ago, if not two years ago.
Right.
I want to I want to know the answer to to the question of why the FISA warrants kept getting renewed.
Like where was the judge on this?
When the judge said to the FBI, look, there's no evidence here.
And then in the next breath says, OK, I approve a renewal of the FISA warrant, heads should have rolled.
We don't have any idea why that happened.
It's really is I sound hyperbolic repeating it, but we're talking about they launched this thing against first a major nominated candidate for the president of the United States of America.
Right then and there, you're talking about crossing major lines.
You better be sure you're right before you even start going down that road.
Right at that point.
And I think we already know their motive was to prevent him from being elected based on these rumors and these kind of trumped up charges in the first place.
It was only after he won.
Well, they tried to throw in the Electoral College or they talked about trying to throw it in the Electoral College.
They backed off of that plan.
Then they recognized, I guess he was has to be sworn in.
But so they released this intelligence report saying that he was only elected because of Russian intervention, essentially without really proving it at all.
And then shortly after launched the real, I guess, counterintelligence and criminal investigations of his administration.
You know, as Joanne Leon was saying earlier today on the show, it seemed like that part was mostly the CYA.
That was the part where, geez, he wasn't supposed to win and for them to be left blowing in the wind and in his crosshairs.
And so they better really double down on the thing and really make it seem like he's guilty of something.
And that's the only reason they investigated and that kind of deal.
Only now, here they are two years out.
They've dug themselves that much deeper of a pit, it seems like.
Yeah.
Yeah, I agree.
It just doesn't seem to get any better.
It only gets worse.
What a crazy story this is.
See, I remember saying in July of 2016 that, well, this is never going to take because even though the USSR is gone, essentially the whole trope about you're an agent of the Kremlin is a throwback to old Commie Red Scare stuff.
And this guy is a Republican real estate tycoon for Manhattan, for God's sake.
It's not like he's even one of these Lincoln Chafee liberal Rockefeller Republicans.
You know what I mean?
He's the kind of guy who certainly considers himself a patriot, regardless of what the rest of us think of him.
Never mind whether it's possible, but how is it even possible that the American people would buy into this at all?
It just, on the face of it, seems so goofy to me.
Again, I think that's why they really had to turn it into an investigation, to give it that credibility itself.
That there must be something there or they wouldn't have taken it this far.
I agree.
And really, in the end, all it's done is serve to further balkanize the American body politic.
The Democrats are more isolated on their side.
The Republicans are more isolated on the other side than there are those of us either in the middle or around the edges that are just shaking our heads, not knowing where to go now.
Yeah.
Yeah, I guess we'll see.
I don't know what's going to happen, because they can't climb down.
We've already seen, after the Barr summary, that they're going, oh yeah, well maybe obstruction then.
Maybe firing Comey was obstruction.
And never mind, the whole thing about the entire case for the Russia treason is over, essentially.
And they all still assert that, oh yeah, well you have to admit that Russia did the hack and Russia attacked us.
They're still the reason he won, whether he was in on it with them or not, and this kind of thing.
Even though that's still not proven at all.
The closest we've gotten to proving there is a lot of assertions with actually no real explanation.
Never mind solid proof to back up the claims in that indictment against the GRU guys.
And I guess I'm skipping around here, but you already answered about how you agree with the Binny take there.
So what do you make of that indictment where they blame all these GRU guys?
Is that just made up out of whole cloth?
What do you think of that?
I think it wasn't.
I think, though, that it's apples and oranges.
I think that the Russians, and the Russians, in air quotes, who is this?
Is it this?
I mean, they claim it's from GRU headquarters and they had cameras in there or something, it seems like.
Constantly, constantly probing our network systems, just like we're constantly probing theirs.
The Israelis do it.
The Chinese do it.
The North Koreans do it.
The Iranians do it.
Everybody does it.
So we caught them, and it's technically a violation.
But does it mean that they were somehow conspiring to get Donald Trump elected president?
No.
No.
These are apples and oranges.
And it's like the Democrats just want everybody to believe that it was a concerted effort.
It was an operation, a preplanned operation to get Donald Trump elected and to defeat Hillary Clinton.
And there's just no evidence of that.
So then do you think that the Guccifer 2 personality actually just works for the CIA and they went to go and pollute these WikiLeaks documents with these, you know, Cyrillic letters and Iron Felix references and stuff just to sort of divert the issue and, you know, pollute it and make it look like Russian involvement then?
Yeah, I think that's a real possibility.
But it might not have been the CIA.
It could have been the Israelis doing the same thing.
Because who had as much invested in getting Donald Trump elected as the Republican Party did?
It was the government of Israel.
And look what they got out of it.
We moved the embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem.
We recognized Israeli sovereignty over the Golan.
Bibi Netanyahu yesterday said that if he wins reelection tomorrow, he's going to annex the settlements in the West Bank.
I mean, a Donald Trump presidency where the U.S. government is not going to make one word of complaint.
That's exactly what the Israelis wanted.
And what better way to divert attention than to put Cyrillic letters in the programming code?
Yeah.
Well, and I mean, in fact, we only have CrowdStrike's word for that even being the case, right?
We don't even really know that that's true.
Do we have they turn that over to any independent examiner yet?
No, they haven't.
They just want us to take their word for it.
Yeah.
Well, I said it all along, and I actually ripped this off from my old friend Tim back in 2002, when he said, you know, when you go down the list, weapons and relationships with Nidal Hassan and whatever this kind of, it's sort of 10 times zero.
There's a lot of claims about why we got to invade Iraq, but none of them are good enough.
And so really, if none of them are good enough, even the ones that are true, even if we say, OK, maybe he's got one warehouse full of mustard gas or something, he's going to start a war over that.
So if you took all these things and said, are they, first of all, either true or good enough for war or not, it's zero times 10.
That's zero, not 10.
And it's the same kind of thing here we could tell all along.
It's just claim after claim after claim, like just like a bunch of Michael Ledeen on TV in 2002 over just, here's a bunch of stuff you can't sort through at all before we take action based on it, essentially.
That's it.
That is it.
And then, so what's funny, though, is I guess at the end of the day, they had to either put up or shut up, and Mueller didn't dare put up something that he wouldn't be able to actually make a case out of.
And so what a wimp, kind of, right?
After all of this, after dragging this out, and that does seem like the thing that's actually people aren't controversializing enough, is that he dragged this out so long.
And we're talking about not just Alger Hiss or some schmuck being accused.
He was guilty, by the way.
But we're talking about the president of the United States under a cloud of suspicion of treason.
And this former FBI director of all this stuff, let this go on for two years.
You know, in the Bob Woodward book, I'm sure you know, he talks about how Trump from the very beginning told his lawyer, Dowd, to give Mueller and his team everything.
I don't have a damn thing to hide.
This thing is not true at all.
I don't care.
Give them everything.
You have 100% carte blanche.
No invocation of executive privilege.
No hiding behind lawyer tricks.
Here's everything because it's not true.
Everybody knows that.
And that book came out at least, what, a year, a year and a half ago, something like that.
I mean.
It did.
So that's the part that really does need to be investigated.
Trump wants to cite Mueller now, of course, for his vindication, which I guess is fair enough.
But he has a lot to answer for, for even allowing this thing to continue, it seems like.
Indeed.
Yeah.
All right.
Listen, I'm sorry I've kept you so long here.
Thanks so much for doing the show.
And especially back to our original subject, sticking up for the great Chelsea Manning, who, as you said, has truly sacrificed so much for all of us.
She really has.
Thanks so much for having me.
Thank you, John.
All right.
John Kiriakou, guys.
The Accidental Spy.
And then his latest is with Joseph Hickman, The Convenient Terrorist, about Abu Zubaydah.
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.
