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 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 their 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 Ray McGovern and Bill Binney.
Now, y'all know Ray.
He was an analyst at the CIA for 27 years, including he was the head analyst at the Soviet division there for a while.
Briefed President Reagan and Vice President Bush Sr. in the morning back in the 1980s, etc., like that.
And has been a great peace activist this whole century long, that's for sure.
And Bill Binney, of course, is the famous National Security Agency whistleblower, and the guy who invented the thin thread program that was then trashed and replaced by the horrible stellar wind, illegal, unconstitutional spying regime that the Bush administration inflicted on us all.
And so welcome both of you to the show.
How are you?
Pretty good, thank you.
Thanks.
Oh, and I should have said both members of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity.
And what's at issue today really is the core, or one of the cores, of the Russiagate scandal.
And that is the assertion by America's intelligence agencies and police agencies that the Russians were the ones who hacked and leaked the DNC, the DCCC, and the Podesta emails, gave them to WikiLeaks, and weaponized this information to somehow rig the election against Hillary Clinton in 2016.
And the Mueller report essentially takes that without demonstrating.
In fact, the few claims that are made have some inconsistencies in them, maybe we'll talk about a little bit of that.
But there's nothing demonstrated to prove any of this in the report.
There's only referrals back to the previous indictment of the GRU officers that they had offered last year.
But anyway, so this part of it, even though Trump has essentially finally been acquitted, at least of conspiring with the Russians to collude and rig the election of 2016, it still goes without saying, and everyone knows, that the Russians were the ones who did the hack, and they did the leak, and they did it on his behalf.
And this is something that you two gentlemen have been challenging.
So I guess, who wants to go first and give us a summary of your take here?
Well, maybe I could do the forensics first, Ray?
Well, let me just introduce the forensics, actually.
Okay.
Scott, when I was actually, when I was a deputy chief of Western Europe, the National Intelligence Office, I had access to everyone in the intelligence community, not just the CIA, to write or to advise or to help with the National Intelligence Estimate or anything else that came out of the community.
Now, a lot of the stuff I had to deal with, like, you know, what happens if the Italian communists come into the government?
That's squishy stuff.
Who knows?
You pick the best analysts, and you do your best.
But when a technical issue comes up, like, suppose the Turks kick us out of Turkey, and we lose all our intelligence collection facilities against Russia.
What happens then?
Well, that happened to me.
I was running that estimate, and Bill Colby, who was my boss, the head of the CIA, said, look, just talk to Admiral Showers.
Showers is on the intelligence community staff.
He knows chapter and verse about our collection facilities against Russia and Turkey.
He'll give you the straight scoop.
Now, I asked Showers to stop by my office.
He did.
He wrote the first draft, and it was beautiful.
It said nothing happens if we lose all our technical facilities in Turkey, because we have satellites coming online here that will do ten times as good a job.
We'll fold those sites down anyway.
Now, Kissinger did not want to hear that.
We told him anyway.
And the confidence that I had was from the reality that Admiral Showers knew chapter and verse about this, and if he didn't know some technical detail, he had at his beck and call all the technical analysts.
So why do I say all that?
I say all that because when you have this power, when you have this knowledge of who's good and who's going to give you the straight scoop, and when you can identify the precise technical specialists that you need to solve this problem, well, it's a heck of a lot better than doing squishy political analysis, okay?
And I had that.
And we in Veteran Intelligence for Sanity now have that.
When Bill Binney and Ed Loomis, two former technical directors at NSA, when they joined our ranks, we could tell them with every confidence that they were not only going to tell us the straight scoop, but they were uniquely prepared to do so since they had been there at the founding of NSA's technical capabilities.
And so this, just by way of introduction, when you have this kind of thing, you use it and you ask them or you learn from them what the real deal is.
Now, the last thing I'll say is that for some relatively unknown reason, we think we can figure it out, James Comey, the head of the FBI, when the DNC, the Democratic National Committee, cried out in June of 2016, we've been hacked, the Russians hacked, here's telltale Brits, we've been hacked.
What did Comey do?
Well, guess what?
He didn't use the computers.
He didn't look at them.
He didn't examine them.
He left it to this dubious psyche headed by and paid by the Democratic National Committee.
And so when he was asked about that, he said, well, yeah, you're right.
You're right, Senator.
Best practices would have indicated that we should have seized those computers.
No, we relied on CrowdStrike.
Bottom line here is that if you rely on CrowdStrike, which is what they did, without doing their independent forensic studies, which is what we did, OK, you have no chain of custody, you have no credibility.
And with that, I'll just turn it over to Bill, who can speak in glory to tale, the increasing, the accumulating evidence that we have that the thing was leaked from the inside.
It was not a hack and it could not have been a hack for reasons A, B, C and D.
OK, so go ahead, Bill.
And I'm sorry, I guess I should have gotten that right.
Former technical director sounds pretty authoritative and important.
So could you please begin to explain the case here of what is your forensic examination, forensic examination of what and what is it you found here?
OK, the first thing we found was with the Guccifer 2 data that was posted on the Web.
It was like 16 gigabits of data, you know, you know, hundreds and hundreds of files.
And what they did was they posted in terms of giving that.
Well, the way we looked at it, we looked at the file title.
In other words, what was the name of the file and then the number of characters in the file, then the timestamp at the end of the file.
So and they came after file after file over something like 14 minutes.
And so when you looked at them, that meant that you could see the file stamps, stamps between the files that meant you could subtract any two times and take the number of characters in between them and to calculate the transfer rate.
So that's what we did for every file in there, except the first one.
We didn't have a timestamp to start it.
But at any rate, the point was we could calculate the rate of speed of transfer of that data out of whatever, wherever it was stored.
So and that meant that we got a range of speeds that ranged from 49.1 megabytes down to just 10 or so megabytes per second.
And so it gave us an average of 22.3, I believe it was, megabytes per second.
But the highest rate was 49.1 megabytes.
Now, we knew from some of our people in VIPS that were members of who had worked their whole career in communications.
Excuse me.
We knew that plus we knew from our own experience that speed would not go across the web, across the Atlantic to Europe.
And so that's what we said initially.
And some of the people in VIPS challenged that.
And we said, okay, we're going to try it.
And so we did.
We tried it from Albania, Serbia, the Netherlands, and the U.K., just to see if there was a distribution that we could project in terms of loss over distance to the east.
And, in fact, that was it.
We had less capability the further east you went.
But the fastest we got in terms of the transfer rates was 12 megabytes per second, less than one-fourth what was necessary to take it down at the highest speed from what we call now the download of that data, because that speed is compatible with the thumb drive.
But it will not go across the web.
Now, some of our members in VIPS insisted again that it would go across the web.
So we said, okay, we will help you try and test and make sure it does.
So just tell us where you want to do it because we can't find any place that will do it.
The highest we got was between two data centers that had a high-speed line, you know, 1.5 gigabit line, something like that, from New Jersey to London.
That was the highest speed.
So we've not heard back from them since.
So we're waiting to test anybody's hypothesis, but we can't.
I mean, I've got volunteers in Europe, hackers in Europe.
They're friends of mine.
They'll do it.
We've got a gigabyte database set up over here by a friend over here.
So where do you want us to try it, you know?
Well, what about next door or in the neighborhood or in the same city?
Because it wouldn't necessarily have to go back to actual Russians, right?
No, no.
That's right.
But here's the key.
We have calculated that from that the rate that the telecom or the service providers allow you to use on the Internet, that is from a 100-megabit line that you lease, they allow you the equivalent of 8.8 megabytes per second.
And at a 200 megabit, you get 1.6.
You see the progress.
For every 100 megabits, you get 0.8 megabytes, which turns out to be the equivalent of for every 100 megabits, you get the equivalent of a 1064-kilobit telephone line.
And so you progress it up.
The wider bandwidth you lease, the more you have.
But for every 100 megabits, you get another equivalent of 1064-kilobit lines.
Listen, I've got to tell you, I am so overmatched here, Bill.
I'm the worst at math out of all of the things that I'm not good at.
So I've got to tell you that right now, and I know that this is not standard for at least a residential connection, but I have a very good AT&T fiber optic connection that runs at 300 megabytes.
And I know that there's a divide-by-eight and a multiply-by-eight, and I forget which way and what.
But that's pretty damn fast.
I know that.
I don't know how fast I could upload something to Russia.
See, the fastest we got on a 1.5-gigabit line was 12 megabytes per second, which is less than one-fourth of it.
And that's because of the rate limitations going across the Internet to Europe.
Now, the point is, whatever line you have, if you have a dedicated, if you can use the whole line, sure, you can send it.
But you've got to have that line leased all the way to Russia.
And that doesn't happen.
So here's the part where I guess I'm lost.
If I'm a crafty Russian spy, don't I just hack into a computer in the same network and download it from there?
And that's all you're looking at.
Is it going across the network locally or in the neighborhood?
And then I pilfer it from there and run off with it from there, but you're not seeing the evidence of that.
No, we're not.
And NSA should have that, since they've got the Fairview, Stormbrew, all the upstream programs and the muscular-associated programs, to be able to copy everything that's being passed across the net worldwide.
Yeah, but I mean, so does that make sense so that you would allow for the possibility that if it was, if they used a VPN that was nearby or some kind of pseudo-VPN from across the street, that that might work?
Sure, but let me put it to you this way.
And I've always done this in terms of intelligence production.
I operate on proving what is, not what is possible.
Anybody can think of any number of things that are possible.
The question is, what can you prove?
That's what we were after.
So in other words, though, but I mean, like you said before, that the USB rate fits within that range.
That sounds like quite possible, quite possible even.
But dealing with the possible rather than proven, right?
Well, all we did was say it was downloaded locally.
It couldn't go across the web.
I see.
So you never said that it was a USB 2 thumb drive necessarily.
No, I said it is within the range of that.
Right.
That doesn't prove that.
I see.
It could be a CD-ROM.
It could be another, you know, if somebody, I mean, you'd have to have an operation of a covert operation to get into it, to do it, to move it from that DNC network to another network.
You know, so there's all kinds of possibilities.
The question is, what is, not what is possible?
Yeah.
But no, so, but I, I, I plead guilty again on the, on mathematical and technical ignorance here.
But I saw where critics wrote that.
Look, if you do the math, the, the average of 20, 20, 22.7 megabytes, that's just 100 and 180 megabits.
And then, so that's well within the range.
That's a little bit more than half of my current upload rate that I have right now at my residence.
Oh, and this also goes to another question, I'm sorry, that I meant to ask, which is, where was the server anyway?
Was it at the DNC office building or it was on the rack at a server company in a city somewhere?
Were they releasing it or what?
Well, I don't know.
See, that's the point.
The only thing I know is that it was a local download, wherever local is.
And I wasn't saying that it was from the DNC either.
That's the one thing when we, when we proved that Goose for Two was a fabrication.
That came with another fact about Goose for Two.
If you took, you put two, two files out there, one on a, dated the 5th of July and one the 1st of September of 2016.
But if you looked at those groups, you had holes in the time and the files on 20 and 5 July.
And you had the similar kinds of situation there in that one September.
But if you looked only at minutes and seconds on both files, those two files merged without conflict into one file.
So the random probability, that mathematician that I am, is one chance in 60 to the 18th power.
That's a pretty small number.
It's better than, it's better than DNA matching, by the way, by orders of magnitude more.
But what's the other explanation then?
That's simply straightforward.
This guy's playing with the data and he's playing with us.
It was easy to do a date rate change, so we couldn't.
So that meant we had to prove, this was the, the problem then says that we have to prove everything he says by another means, not by him.
Because he's fabricating and playing with this data and also playing with us in the process.
So, but the other damning material really came from the DNC data posted by WikiLeaks.
That's really the damning stuff for Mueller and company.
Okay, well go ahead and elaborate about that.
Because the DNC, this is posted by WikiLeaks.
So this is the data that they had, they put out there on the web for people to look at.
So we went through and looked at it and said, hey, there's, for all the DNC data came down in three downloads on the 23rd or 25th and 26th of May dated.
The, they all, all those files evidence what is FACT format output.
So what it means is simply when you're reading to a storage device, the program file allocation table process rounds off the last modified time stamp on the file, on each file to the nearest even number.
And so that meant to us that, I mean, we looked at 500 files, so each file ended in an even number.
Now the random probability of that happening is one chance in 2 to the 500th power, which is like one chance in one followed by 150 plus zeros.
So that says there's a program doing this, and the program that does it is the FACT file program.
So that meant it was read to a storage device and then transported physically before WikiLeaks posted it.
So Mueller has to deal with that physical transfer.
He's claiming it's a hack, but that evidence shows that it was a download to a storage device.
Period.
Okay.
So when you, the preceding indictment, I forget the title of the indictment, but the indictment that's, it's named after, I think one of the GRU officers that they accuse.
Bill, when you read that, did you learn anything from that that made you rethink any part of this at all?
No.
In fact, they never produced any evidence in there that was usable.
I mean, what...
Well, they certainly didn't.
No, no, no.
I mean, they did not even pretend to demonstrate what they were saying.
But I guess even in the narrative that they lay out that these were the people who did it and this is sort of how they did it, that didn't impress you at all?
No, because in other sections they say, and they apparently, they apparently did it.
So you either do it or you don't, and it's not apparent, it has nothing to do with it.
But I mean, the point is we had direct evidence for the DMC data that was downloaded to a storage device, period.
So that negates all that crap that they're talking about.
Sorry, hang on just one second.
Hey everybody, buy my book, Fool's Errand, Time to End the War in Afghanistan.
And it's available all over the place in EPUB format and of course in paperback and Kindle at amazon.com.
And you can also get the audiobook version at audible.com.
If you want a signed copy, check out scotthorton.org slash donate and help arrange that for you there.
It's Fool's Errand, Time to End the War in Afghanistan.
Find out all about it at foolserrand.us.
All right, go ahead and jump in here, Ray.
Yeah, these facts keep accumulating.
And the allocation table bit was the most convincing because, as Bill explained, forget the factor.
But the only time that is used is for storage.
It has nothing to do with hacking.
It has nothing to do with the Internet.
It's just to store the information.
So, as Bill already indicated, before Wikileaks published that data, it had been stored to this storage device.
We think a thumb drive, but whatever.
So now what does that mean?
Well, that means that even Mueller, now if you read that report closely, even Mueller does not rule out the fact that this material may have been physically given to Wikileaks.
So, you know, he's repeating what the intelligence community said.
And the worst piece of intelligence analysis I have ever seen, I've been at the business 55 years, this intelligence community assessment, which was a misnomer.
It was only three agencies, CIA, FBI and NSA.
And they said out of the blue without any evidence that, yes, Putin directed this hacking.
Now, the hacking is one part of it.
The lack of evidence is another.
And to the degree there's any evidence at all, it seems, correct me if I'm wrong, Bill, but it seems that they got it from CrowdStrike.
Now, CrowdStrike is notoriously unreliable.
They've shown that by their failures in Ukraine and elsewhere.
And they're run by anti-Russian folks from the Atlantic Council.
So, you know, CrowdStrike, even if a chain of custody was established, which it is not, it all begins with CrowdStrike.
So, you know, our point here is that you can talk about the lack of a predicate, let's say a lack of a predicate to investigate Trump.
But, you know, there's a lack of a major premise for the whole thing.
And the major premise is that the Russians hacked them.
That's the way it all started out.
And that's what the intelligence community assessment said.
OK.
And it cannot be proven except through CrowdStrike.
And we don't even have Bill.
Do we have any of the data from CrowdStrike itself that we can examine?
I don't know.
No, but we've asked for that.
So either or both of you, elaborate about the significance of what Bill's saying there about Guccifer manipulating the metadata and all that.
What's the bottom line of that fraud, Bill?
Well, it means he's a fake.
Plus, we had timestamps for him that were— Now, I don't, because of the ability to modify the timestamping on the data itself in the computer, depending on the time of the computer, we had timestamps for operations within the East Coast of the U.S., within Central Time U.S., and also in the West Coast one time.
But, you know, so I couldn't prove any of that, so I wouldn't say any of it anywhere as anything that's really reliable.
But the real reliability is the fact that he's played with the data, manipulated it, and is manipulating us in the process.
But does that mean that he's not a Russian, though?
I don't follow that part.
Well, the implication is that he's in the U.S.
I see.
I mean, you can't prove that, though.
Now, keep in mind, I'm only after what is, not what is possible.
It is possible he's in the U.S., yes.
Can we prove it?
No.
We can say, though, that there is an organization with the capability to hack into the DNC or any other computer or server, and leave little breadcrumbs, blaming it on someone else.
And that entity is the Central Intelligence Agency.
Well, it's not the Central Intelligence Agency.
Don't believe that word.
Yeah.
And, you know, so this is something in the realm of speculation, not, you know, hard science.
Yeah.
Now, listen, I mean, I appreciate that both of you guys are only going so far and not making claims that— or not attempting to make claims that you don't think you can back up and that kind of thing, but I wonder, is it not— can you not find out, is it not in the newspaper anywhere, whether this server was somehow at the DNC office or whether it was on the rack at the local server company, and can you not call the server company and say, what was your upload speed that day, and this kind of thing?
Because that seems like it could all be verified, right?
Well, I mean, you could do that, but the question is, I mean, on the speeds, the speeds are still constant.
I mean, it's like the rules for using the Internet.
Okay?
So that doesn't—that didn't change at all.
And you could ask them all you want, but you'd still get the same answer, which is that 10—64 telephone kilobit lines, 10 of them for every 100 megabits you rent for the distance you rent it.
So that doesn't add anything to us.
Yeah, I should add there that we did look into exactly the transfer speed existing on the Internet at that particular point in time.
The incident was July 5, 2016.
We knew exactly what the capability of the Internet was at that time, and as Bill has already pointed out, that copy onto an external storage device was made at a speed three or four times the rate that the Internet could tolerate at that time.
So we do have those specifics.
And, you know, that's why I say when you have these things verifiable, it's a different thing than squishy political analysis, or as the Intelligence Community Assessment depended upon, quote, assessments, end quote, which, if you find print, they're recognized to be, well, not provable, but just our best guess.
Yeah, it's on page 13 of their ICAN.
Yeah, no, I mean, they did make it clear that, yeah, just because we assert something in here doesn't mean we're saying that this is true, and all kinds of stuff like that.
It was great fun to read.
But back onto the point here, though, and listen, I'm a level zero computer genius, and I know a lot of computer geniuses that know a lot of things who even they might not know all of the right questions to ask here, and I know that I don't.
But I guess it still seems to me like a pretty stark statement to say that this would be impossible to upload at 180 megabits, when right now, at least, I can upload at 300 megabits.
And it does work.
I mean, I do the speed test, but I also upload audio files at an extremely high rate these days, guys.
And I know that, and this is just a residential account, and that if I had a business account, I could be up at more than 1,000 megabits.
And so I'm not so sure.
It doesn't sound to me, just as an absolute layman customer-level expert here, that it's absolutely impossible that a server on a rack at a server company might not have a fiber optic connection that runs at a really high rate of speed, whatever bits per second, back in 2016.
Well, you see, that's, of course, what we tried last year with the – I mean, the year before, 2017.
That's what we tried between data centers with high-speed lines between New Jersey and London.
That was the highest speed we got.
That was 12 megabytes per second.
Again, if you go by the limitation they allow on the transfer rate, per 100 megabits you only get the equivalent of 10 64-kilobit lines, or 0.8 megabits.
And so if you do the 1.5 gigabits or 15 times 0.8, you don't get up to the 41 point.
In fact, you are only at one-fourth the speed at 12 megabytes per second.
That's the point.
We did that.
That was what we did.
Okay.
That makes sense to me, I guess.
You're saying – in other words, Bill, do I understand you right?
You're saying the file's so big or so small that it doesn't get up to full speed before it's done?
Well, no.
It's just that there's that limitation on the pipe all the way across the Internet that says if you rent a line to the distance wherever you're going, if you rent a line to that point, like if they rented a one-gigabit line dedicated to them alone all the way to Russia, then they could transfer that data at that rate.
But nobody has that, and they don't allow that.
They basically allow you to have the limitation of being able to transfer 0.8 megabytes for every 100 megabits you buy to whatever your destination is.
So that's the problem with it.
We already tried that, and we couldn't get it.
The best we could do was that 12 megabytes.
Somebody thought that we could still do it.
We said, okay, tell us where you want us to try it.
We'll help you do it and demonstrate that it can't get there, and you can be assured that that was true.
So the question was, where do we want to do it?
Let's try it there.
We'll help you do it.
We couldn't get anybody to even define that.
So if they aren't going to come out and say where they think it can be done, we did the best we could with the resources we had, and no one in the intelligence agencies have said anything about that either, by the way.
They haven't come out and said anything about it.
We're all waiting for them to do that.
They haven't said anything about the technical forensics that we put forth and published.
In fact, I brought that up when I talked to Pompeo when he was director of CIA.
I brought that issue up, and I said to him, very simply put, your agencies and the agency of the intelligence community are not giving you the truth, and that's really bad.
And why did you get to see Pompeo, Bill?
I forget.
President Trump told him that if he wanted to learn facts about Russiagate, he should talk to me.
That's even more important and more corrupting and all of that within the intelligence community.
That says they're not telling the president the truth.
They're not telling him any facts.
That's bad.
Trump told Pompeo to invite you in after our July 24 memo to Trump, telling him about this and telling him about our initial forensic work, correct?
Yep, that's correct.
And so I met with him on the 24th of October of 2017.
And at that time, did he not have staff with him to help him understand all the data there?
He certainly did.
There were two people, and all they did was ask me how did I do it.
I explained it just like I did here, and nobody said a word.
Well, tell us more.
I mean, tell us more about, I don't know, if not Pompeo, or yeah, him too, but the experts there about what, their body language, et cetera, they ran out of questions for you?
They were satisfied or not?
Well, they just asked me, you know, they asked me how did I do the calculations?
And I told them it's all published on the web.
All you have to do is go look at it.
You can do the calculations yourself.
And, you know, it's just a matter of doing the things that we did.
Look at the timing between the timestamps at the end of each of the files.
Take the number of characters transmitted between the timestamps and divide them out.
You get the speed.
So, you know, it's not rocket science, or if you want to look at it that way.
It's pretty straightforward stuff, you know?
You know, when Bill told me about this, Scott, it seemed to me quite clear that Pompeo was going through the motions.
He made it clear in his first sentence to Bill, now that I recall, look, you're probably wondering why you're here.
It's simply because President Trump told me that if I wanted to know the real story about Russian hacking, I needed to talk to you.
Now, what happened was, and I'm remembering this gradually now, Bill, you reported almost in a lighter vein.
Pompeo said, well, have you had any contacts with the FBI?
Would you pick up on that, Bill?
Yeah, he said basically he'd like me to talk to the FBI and NSA.
And I said, fine, I'd be glad to do that, but I would not help them violate the constitutional rights of U.S. citizens like they're doing now.
So that's probably why he never talked to me.
He may not have let me talk to him because he knew what I was going to tell him.
You know, because I don't mix words.
These people are criminals.
When I was remembering this, it was on a lighter vein.
And didn't he ask you, do you have any, have you had any contacts with the FBI?
And you told him about...
Yeah, he did.
He asked that, but he said then he'd like, he was going to get in touch with them and have me go talk to them.
So I was ready to do that, you know?
Hey guys, check out this cool near future dystopia, Kesslin Runs, by our friend Charles Featherstone.
You might remember him, a regular writer for LewRockwell.com.
And this is a great story of, well, I don't want to ruin it for you, but you'll really like it.
Kesslin Runs, it's on Amazon.com, by the great Charles Featherstone.
And so, and now, Ray, actually, could you talk a little bit about, in the Mueller report here, see, I keep calling him Mueller because that was the name of the airport around here when I was a kid.
They changed it.
But anyway, can you please talk a little bit about how, in the Mueller report, when he gets to the chain of custody here, he actually has some weasel words built right in there about, seemingly this was transferred to that, and it sort of kind of looks like, and I was actually surprised to see that they were, like, why bother doing that?
Why not go ahead and outright lie when essentially you're lying anyway?
But the way it's written is they really say that it appears that there's something like a chain of custody here, rather than really attempting to establish one, even.
Yeah, you know, it's the language of an indictment.
People think an indictment is proof of something.
And, of course, lawyers like to say that you can indict a ham sandwich.
And if that ham sandwich has Russian dressing, I mean, it's a piece of cake to mix metaphors.
It's a piece of cake to indict.
OK, so the indictment doesn't prove anything.
He's wedded to what he adduced as his indictment basis.
And, of course, he just regurgitates that.
Now, we talked with Ed Loomis, who's the other technical director with us in Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity, the other technical director, former.
And we said, well, what about all that detail, Ed?
For God's sake, you know, Mueller gets all this detail and says, well, you know, some of that detail was new to me.
But it doesn't prove anything unless we know where the detail is coming from.
It looks like it's all coming from CrowdStrike.
It could be manufactured by the 2,000 people that Brennan had in his computer offensive cyber warfare group.
So it doesn't prove anything.
It's just really nice detail.
But anybody can serve up that kind of detail without a chain of custody.
All right, guys.
Well, so what do you think I'm leaving out here?
Well, I think, you know, for all the relevance of it, except that we covered pretty much what needs to be covered.
So I think we are we we've gone over what what what evidence we have.
Now, this is all the evidence we have to prove what is not what is possible.
Anybody can do what's possible.
You know, I'd like to you know, we get so engaged in this that sometimes we forget some of the the main factors here.
Before we were able to do a lot of forensics, Bill established that NSA collects everything.
OK.
Now, I said, Bill, come on.
Well, all emails.
Ray, believe me, where they can and they do.
OK.
So I said, well, Bill, that would mean that any hack they would have collected.
And he said, Ray, of course.
And I could prove it from these from these slides that Ed Stodden brought out to Hong Kong.
These are the trace routes.
He said the same thing to me on the show three years ago.
And that was really the thing, right, was this is what the security expert Jeffrey Carr said, was that essentially by examining the server and and looking at its telltale signs of who broke in, you could never prove who did it because anyone could fake it, not just the CIA, but lots of different organizations could fake it.
And and yet on the other side of that, there's only one organization that could prove what happened there.
And it wouldn't be from examining the server.
It would be from simply rewinding the Internet and watching it that day and figuring out which way those packets went.
And that's essentially the way the NSA software works well enough where they can go back.
And so they're the one and only source.
And they can tell you definitively 100 percent who did it, if they're allowed to.
Yep, that's right.
So it happened and we don't really have that right.
In fact, so let me ask you this, because in the reality winner document that was leaked by Matthew Cole or, you know, published by Matthew Cole at the Intercept and got her arrested, which is terribly unfortunate.
And she was trying to prove the thing was true.
And but notably on there, we had a yellow line, meaning moderate support for this by the NSA on the most important of the technical claims.
It seemed like that was a bit of a, you know, pretty obvious thing, if not like a kind of smoke signal and cry for help by those guys.
That's correct.
And yet, though, a lot of time has passed and they've had the GRU, this and that and whatever.
So I mean, are we hearing from from NSA people?
Nobody seems to be leaking that they hate the current narrative and that they really don't believe in it.
It seems like some of them might.
A lot of military guys kind of lean right might have voted Republican this time, certainly over his opponent, this guy.
And yet, but we don't hear much of that.
So I wonder kind of where's the shades of gray I'm missing in this story where I mean, clearly we're talking.
I mean, I think and Ray, you and I have talked about this in the much larger sense of this whole thing as a CIA, FBI put on in the first place and frame up job in the first place.
But, you know, in the more narrow sense on these questions of who hacked and leaked, what seems like we might hear some more dissent from inside the government if you guys were right.
What do you think of that?
Well, I would say that most of them are too afraid to do anything right now.
And the reason they do are afraid is because of all the access and coverage, because it's not just the fact that they're looking at the data.
See, NSA has got hundreds and hundreds of trace route programs embedded in the switches and servers of the network worldwide.
That means they're tracing the individual packets as they flow through the network.
If your listeners want to read about that, they could Google trace watch or trace route.
Trace route is the one that traces the packets going between how long it takes to go from one segment to another in the network worldwide.
So you get the timing of this transfer of the packet, the individual packet.
And then you can look at trace watch and it will tell you who's coming into your.
It's a good one for your people to have on the computer is one will tell you who's in your computer, who's been in your computer.
You can even set up code to block them if you want.
And that's been my idea of cybersecurity anyway.
But it's like detecting intruders.
These programs make it possible to do that because all that information is in the packets.
And so you can see that.
It goes through the TCP IP packet format.
If you Google TCP IP space IP packet packet format, you can read all about what's in it and how.
And you can then start to see and understand how you can how you can follow all this stuff through the network.
Yeah.
Right.
Well, let me just interject here.
The general question for a history major like me is if it's true and I I can see from the from the packets, from the trace routes and everything else that it is true.
What NSA may miss GCHQ or some of the other five eyes will get.
If it's true, they have everything.
Why doesn't the president simply go to the NSA and say, look, I want the information on this hacking.
I want it tomorrow.
I want you to bring it to me, Mr. Director.
And I want to straighten this thing out right now.
Why doesn't Trump do that?
I'm not sure, but some of the stuff that he tried to declassify about the flies of Warren, I think it was, was argued against by the Israeli and UK governments.
So there may be some connection there that they don't want known.
Like to the CIA, something like that.
I think it's also that he's afraid.
Yeah.
After all, he's he's really doubled back on.
He was going to release the FBI documents on the assassination of JFK.
He says in the morning he's going to do it in the afternoon.
So now I talk to the Department of Justice changed my mind.
All these things.
Well, even on this, I mean, he in the Mueller report, he says to Mike Rogers and to the DNI.
I forget if it was still Clapper at the time or who was the DNI or I guess it was Coats that, hey, guys, why don't you guys tell everybody that I'm innocent?
And because the way he figured was, you know, implicit was that they knew it wasn't true.
So here the FBI is picking on me.
NSA, CIA, go tell the people that, you know, that it's not right, at least.
And give me some breathing room.
Now, they the way they say was, oh, heaven forfend.
He was trying to get us to intervene in an investigation.
But I guess he was acting like, of course, it goes without saying that they already know what the truth is.
Their subordinates would have told them, you know, in the first place if there was anything to this and that kind of thing.
But so he ought to have the imagination to say, OK, well, now that the investigation is over, now come out and tell them I'm not guilty.
NSA, now that there's no question of obstruction, now come out and explain who really did this thing and what the hell.
But I guess on the other hand, he's probably his political people are saying, why drag that out when he's already won in a way?
But I don't know.
I think the issue is that if we don't ever get the truth out of what really happened, these kinds of things will continue to happen.
These people who did this, who attempted this soft coup, really need to be brought out in the open and explain their explain their actions in a court of law.
And I would add to here as again, an admitted math and computer illiterate here, basically, that for anyone who doubts the way that you present the facts here or the questions, the way you set them up and your thought experiments and your technical ones and et cetera, that on the other side, the government has proven nothing.
And as you say, they haven't even attempted to.
All they've done is make claims.
And then they've addressed those claims with giant disclaimers that say, just because we claim something doesn't even mean we are saying that we believe that it's true.
Like, what the hell are they talking about?
And that is the best that they've done so far is make a bunch of blind accusations.
I actually wonder whether, you know, I saw, what's her name, the Johnstone, the Canadian writer saying, you guys shouldn't be moving the goalposts to where the burden of proof is on you now, when they've never demonstrated a thing here.
That now it sort of makes it where it's up to you to prove that they're wrong when no need to.
Well, also look at it this way.
They've ignored every forensic fact that we can demonstrate and it's demonstrable to the public in the world.
Anybody can go look at it.
And they've never asked any of us to testify to the Mueller group, to the House and Senate intelligence or judiciary committees or any of them.
So they don't want to hear the truth.
That's the point.
Yeah.
Just to buttress that, it's kind of obvious, but I'll say it anyway.
There's one fellow who knows chapter and verse about how WikiLeaks got the DNC emails.
His name is Julian Assange.
They certainly have him in a position where he can't say anything right now.
And that's a large part of the reason.
Which, meanwhile, was the opposite of that.
They could have marched right in there and questioned him.
Yep.
That's right.
Well, that's true.
But in any case, he's out of circulation now.
Were he able to explain what he said he would explain in March of 2017?
Namely, who didn't?
Who didn't give him the information?
As soon as Mark Warner, a senator from Virginia, heard about that, he called Jim Comey and Jim Comey said, stop.
We don't want to negotiate.
We don't want to know.
We don't want to know from Julian Assange who didn't do it.
Julian said he'd give technical information to prove who didn't do it.
I guess the who has to be the Russians.
So what we have now is a situation, just to broaden it out.
Larry Johnson has done some really good work.
And he's looked into all these very suspicious contacts that Trump's campaign had with the Russians.
And guess what?
In all eight instances, those contacts were initiated by the FBI or the CIA.
Now, things are getting pretty hot and heavy here.
And it looks like the gauntlet has been thrown down.
Witness the fact that Devin Nunes, now vice chair of the intelligence community in the House, said three weeks ago, I have eight referrals for criminal prosecution to the to the Justice Department.
I'm going to refer them to the Justice Department next week.
Whoops.
What happened?
He didn't do it.
OK, so something is is hindering people like Nunes from following through.
I'm afraid it's Trump because he's afraid he doesn't want to do it.
He's pulled.
He's thrown Nunes under the bus before.
So as as objectively optimistic as I'd like to be that this thing, the truth will come out.
It all depends on Trump.
And here's a guy that won't even ask the NSA what the real scoop is.
Instead, he sends Bill Binion to talk to the head of the CIA at the time.
It's a guy who is trying to be very, very cautious so that he doesn't get caught in the middle and he doesn't get thrown under the bus himself by the deep state.
You got Comey, you got Brennan, you got Clapper.
These are very, very, very powerful men.
Those are on the top of Nunes's list for criminal referrals.
Well, and that's the whole thing here, right?
The irony of all this is they came at the king and they missed.
But who came at him?
The Department of Justice.
So who's he going to get revenge against?
And what cudgel does he have to use?
The Department of Justice is his weapon, but it's null and void in this case.
So all he can do is stomp his feet.
There's a new sheriff in town.
His name is Barr.
Come on.
Barr, just like the rest of these guys, he has no interest whatsoever.
And neither does Lindsey Graham in the Senate have any interest whatsoever in truly getting to the bottom of the thing that would threaten these institutions in any way.
Well, we'll have to see about that.
I think Barr is off to a good start in one way.
And that is, he said he was going to look at how this whole thing started.
Well, Pat Robertson investigated Doug Fyke, too.
Or Pat Roberts, I mean.
So we got some good stuff out of that, but I don't think you would argue it went all the way.
You know what I mean?
Pat Roberts?
Yeah, I remember when the Senate did their investigation of the Office of Special Plans, it was like, well, thank you for acknowledging it existed, but it's not like this is real accountability, you know.
Yeah, but when Rockefeller became chair of that committee, he issued a bipartisan report that said the evidence it used to justify the attack on Iraq was uncorroborated and even nonexistent.
Those were his words.
So the thing came out all right.
It just required a new chair in the Senate Intelligence Committee.
So these things have a way of working out.
Well, let's hope it's a hell of a fight.
I mean, you're talking about the power of the president of the United States versus the power of the equally powerful Department of Justice.
Let me add one more thing, OK?
These guys, the Clappers, the Brennans, the Comeys, they were so convinced that Hillary was going to win that they took all manner of illegal, unconstitutional things to do and they didn't hide their tracks.
Now, why do I say that?
Because people like Devin Nunes have their tracks.
OK, so the issue is really joined.
It's in black and white what they did, the FISA thing and the whole business.
So it all depends on whether Barr can strengthen Trump and say, look, you know, either we do it now or we or we sort of give up on the whole business about who's in charge here.
And that remains to be seen.
That's why it's so exciting right now, in my view.
And that really means that if we don't fix this and address it in the courts and hold people accountable, then we are going to have this same situation perpetuated ad infinitum until we address it.
That means we're liable to do more weapons of mass destruction and go kill a couple hundred thousand people or conk and gulp and go kill a couple of million or go into Libya and destabilize the entire Middle East in Libya and Syria and do all these never-ending wars.
So unless we fix, I mean, after all, these are problems that our government has and they got to admit it so they can fix it.
If they don't fix it, we'll never get better.
Yeah.
Well, so what's next for you guys?
It seems like now that the Mueller report is over, it's the perfect time to raise this again, maybe get some other computer scientists you haven't approached yet to talk with who have a little bit of, you know, an audience that they bring to it and try to move it forward a little bit again.
Yep.
Well, we've already done some of that with some of the people we know, computer science people, some of them.
Through the grapevine, we got comments even from people inside the intelligence agencies.
And they, of course, are with us on everything and understand everything we're saying.
So, yeah.
The big problem being we can't get in the media.
Yeah.
Well, that's the other problem, yeah.
I mean, the mainstream media doesn't want to hear it because it's not the narrative they're pushing.
Yeah, certainly not.
Although, you know, here and there, there are a few places that are still prominent and still brave enough to do some good reporting.
I mean, I expect you'll hear from Matt Taibbi.
He's writing a book about this now over at the Rolling Stone.
You might get something, you know, he's from there and also is writing a book.
Right now it's called Untitledgate, but it's on the question of the origin of this entire thing.
And there are, you know, some who are prominent and on the right who, you know, might have an interest in defending Trump to some degree.
But if that means, you know, that they're interested in getting to the bottom of this, so much the better.
And, you know, Daniel Lazar, of course, at Consortium News is undertaking his own multi-part investigation into all of this himself and that kind of thing.
So anyway, best of luck to you guys in, you know, getting this argument heard.
Just to pick up on that, Matt Taibbi's first chapter is out.
We've read it.
It's excellent.
But who knows about it?
The New York Times, The Washington, it's not out there.
So this is really, really frustrating.
No matter how much good work is done by Taibbi or anybody else, it doesn't get a hearing.
It's like that proverbial tree that falls in the forest.
There's nobody around to listen.
So if you can figure out a way for us to get a decent hearing, well, that would be the solution here right now.
I've just, just to let you know, I can't talk about it publicly, but just today I've issued an affidavit in the courts saying exactly what we just discussed today.
Oh, that's interesting.
So it's a sworn affidavit.
It's in the courts this afternoon.
Can you say in what case it's involved?
No.
All right.
But it's not your first, Bill.
You've done it before.
Yeah, I've got affidavits in the Third Circuit and also in the Ninth.
But this one is in a case that can't be avoided, OK?
Well, you know, this is just exactly like 16 years ago in the run-up to the Iraq War, where even the anti-war faction, you know, in mainstream politics anyway, the best they could do was, we all know he's guilty, but let's let the United Nations inspectors have a little bit more time first and this kind of thing.
Because nobody wants to outright say that, come on, man, Richard Perle and Doug Feith and Dick Cheney are lying to you.
Snap out of it and stop believing in stupid things like Saddam Hussein could ever be a threat to this country.
And instead of that, it was, well, we have to accept every premise, but then disagree that we shouldn't do anything about this threat or whatever, which ends up being a very weak and losing argument.
And that's really what's going on here, too.
I don't know exactly about all the facts myself.
I really am not equipped to evaluate them all.
But certainly, I'm a great judge of the social psychology of the situation, where all serious, even critics of the Russiagate conspiracy agree that, well, sure, the Russians must have done it.
I'm just saying Trump didn't do it with them and this kind of deal.
I think we're all still sitting here waiting for them to even attempt to prove it.
And I don't know why anyone should have to believe this for a minute, other than they don't want to look too silly and outside the consensus.
Which, after what we've been through for two and a half years, and their confession now that Trump didn't do a damn thing, and neither did Page or Papadopoulos or Flynn or anybody else, Sessions or any of the rest of this stuff, that no one should feel any peer pressure whatsoever, whatever their profession or whatever their status, to go along with any of this story.
Why not all of us shout and demand that prove it, then, or shut up?
You know?
Yeah.
Where's the beef?
Exactly.
And the burden is on us?
Shouldn't be.
Absolutely not.
You know?
Well, if we put the burden on us, we've already proved that it wasn't a hack by the Russians.
It sure seems like it.
I guess we'll have to stop at that.
Oh, go ahead, Ray.
You know, Scott, when you say nobody told Bush that he was being deceived, we did.
In mainstream politics, I said.
You know what it was.
Hey, there were millions of Americans out in the streets.
I mean, there were 100,000 out in the street in Austin, Texas, against that war.
No question about that.
But I just meant in what was allowed in official discussion on TV and inside the Democratic and Republican parties, essentially.
Right?
Yeah.
That's the point.
And the point is that those who do honest work, the media being the way it is, don't have a prayer to get into there.
You have the Jimmy Risens and you have all these people that kind of buy into this thing.
Isn't it tragic?
The major premise is not only not demonstrated, it's very faulty because of the lack of custody, chain of custody.
It's a real mess.
And so what really has to happen here is these people need to be brought to account.
As you've already said, it looks like there's a powerful force like Nunes, like Barr, that have said that they're willing to do that.
And as soon as they look into the origins of this thing, it's all going to fall into place.
The question then will be, does Trump have the guts?
Does Trump have the guts to pursue it and say, look, these guys are criminal?
Yes, go ahead, Nunes.
Send these criminal referrals on Hayden, on Brennan, on Comey, on Clout.
Attorney for Loretta Lynch, on the whole of them, right?
I fill in the blanks.
Yeah.
All right.
Well, let's go ahead and stop there.
I want to thank you both very much for coming on the show today and talking about this with us.
You're welcome.
All right, you guys, those are a couple of the veteran intelligence professionals for sanity.
Ray McGovern, former CIA analyst, and Bill Binney, former technical director of the National Security Agency.
And you can find all the VIPS memos at ConsortiumNews.com and virtually all of them, anyway, at AntiWar.com as well.
And here are a couple on this.
I'm not sure if these are the best and most recent, but we have Mueller's forensics-free findings.
We have Intel vets challenge Russia hack evidence.
Too big to fail.
Russia hack one year after VIPS showed a leak, not a hack.
And on like that at ConsortiumNews.com.
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.
