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All right, on the line, it's our friend Phil Giraldi, former DIA and CIA officer.
Now he's the executive director for the Council for the National Interest Foundation, Council for the National Interest.org.
And also, of course, he writes at UNZ.com and at The American Conservative, The American Conservative Magazine at TheAmericanConservative.com.
And I got a couple of articles here, Phil, one of which I have read, The Real Meaning of Sensitive Intelligence at The American Conservative.
Oh, and then the other is, Do High-Level Leaks Suggest a Conspiracy?
So this is almost a two-parter in a way.
The subject is the deep state versus the elected president.
And I guess, I don't know how you feel about this, but I'll go ahead and say for my disclaimer, I dislike all presidents.
And I really dislike this one.
I disliked him long before he was ever the president.
And yet, I dislike the CIA more, I don't know.
But what's going on here?
It's not really a matter of dislike as much as it is, you know, a question of who has the authority?
Who's the real boss here, the boys in Langley or the President of the United States?
Yeah, that's the question.
I mean, I dislike him too, and probably for a lot of the same reasons you do, particularly like the attack in Syria yesterday, which was hardly reported in the news today.
For example, yeah.
Yeah, just for example.
But the fact is, that has nothing to do with whether one respects our Constitution or not.
And the fact is that the dude has not been caught doing anything illegal except for those two attacks in Syria, which the media and Congress think are just fine.
So if you're going to impeach the guy, it's better if it's not being done by the CIA and FBI working in collusion to leak information that then the media construes in an embarrassing and sometimes inaccurate way to make what is essentially some kind of case.
That's what we see that was going on.
That's why I talk about, you know, sensitive information.
If you're in intelligence, sensitive information is merely a label.
That means that the source of the information is considered something that has to be protected.
That's the sensitivity.
But the way the media is reading it, every time Trump or somebody else opens their mouth, they're claiming that he was releasing sensitive information.
But that's not true.
The fact is, the information can be true, it can be false, it can be anything.
It's the method that makes intelligence of certain types sensitive.
And unless Trump is is revealing the method, he's not revealing anything.
All right.
So now let's get to this one, because, I mean, it's a scandal a day is hard to keep track.
I mean, I'll bring this one up just to dismiss it.
The Post ran a straight faced article saying Speaker Ryan caught on tape saying that Trump is being paid by Putin and on and on and on they go.
But they also link to the transcript separately.
And if you click on that, laughter is in brackets five times as the congressmen are clearly joking around.
But that didn't make it into the straight news until, you know, paragraph twenty five down at the bottom.
And that's the relentlessness.
And there's there's two or three of these a day, it seems like.
But so the biggest one and I was really looking for a way to be upset about this.
I was looking for the scandal in it because, you know, I don't want to be an apologist for a president, any president.
But the scandal is that he said to the Russians, hey, the ISIS is up to a thing where they might use batteries in laptops to blow up planes.
And I guess we don't know exactly what all he said to them.
But this is the one that they're really freaking out about that you're referring to here specifically, where they're making it sound like, I guess I'm not really sure.
It's sort of like the underpants gnomes.
There's just some question marks and yada, yada, yada and skip a few.
But somehow the Russians are going to tell the Iranians who are going to tell ISIS about the spy.
Is that it?
Yeah.
Yeah.
I mean, if ISIS can't already figure out, because there's been numerous stuff, articles in the press about laptops and how the US is going to restrict laptops on airplanes and stuff like that.
So we can't figure out and put this together.
The Washington Post, I guess, figures it has to help them.
And they certainly expose more information in their explanation of what they think Trump said than ISIS maybe had in the first place.
So, you know, the media is becoming our worst enemy on this, and they're looking constantly for stories.
And I also cited my article about how within 24 hours you get reports of stuff that takes place in the National Security Council, and it's in a newspaper.
And this is allegedly Trump's hand-picked National Security Council, which shares information at the very top level with the FBI, NSA and CIA.
So somebody within that circle, or I would suggest actually numerous people within that circle have been leaking highly classified information, whether, you know, you consider that stuff is classified legitimately or not, it's beside the point.
But this is highly classified information.
Well, you know, I read a thing at Red State, which is plausible to me, where Eric Erickson said that he knows one of these sources who's been leaking recently and that it's someone who really is pro-Trump and is a high level appointee and really believed in this guy and really wants to believe in him.
And he's saying that no one can talk to him.
He won't take a conversation as anything but an attack.
And so the only way that they can talk to him is by leaking to the media and hope that he sees it in the media and try to manipulate the boss through the TV, because it's the only way they can communicate with the guy, which, you know, as crazy as that sounds, I mean, look at who we're talking about, man.
He's a Simpsons character, for Christ's sake.
So I don't know.
I could see that as part of this being kind of a self-inflicted wound because of the way he operates, that he sort of, he has set up a system where they have to start leaking like crazy like this.
But now on the thing with the Russians, though, do I understand it right that I guess the scandal was the Washington Post is saying by saying this to the Russians, he put us in a position where we have to report this to you and now you know it, because otherwise no one would know.
It would have still been a secret between Trump and the Russians that he talked to.
It wouldn't have gotten, even if they say, I saw on CNN, they go, well, but then Russia could tell Iran and Hezbollah.
But then what are they going to do?
Tell ISIS?
Are they going to shoot ISIS?
I mean, what is it?
What the hell are they even talking about?
Because it seems like the leak doesn't even amount to anything.
The Russians are our allies, at least on this one issue, bombing the Islamic State in eastern Syria.
Right?
Yeah, absolutely.
The most ridiculous thing about the Post story was exactly what you just said.
Essentially, the Russians are going to shut down a source that's giving us good information on ISIS?
I mean, that's insane.
The Russians are fighting ISIS, and yet the Post says this, it makes the claim.
And then they've also made the claim that this information came from Israel.
Israel hasn't confirmed any of that.
And then they went on to say that an Israeli spy is now in danger.
They don't know that Israel, like the United States, collects most of its information by technical means.
There may not be a spy, even if it was Israel.
I mean, this stuff gets more and more ridiculous, the deeper you get into it.
And you know, it almost makes me feel sorry for Trump.
I mean, when he says, you know, this is a witch hunt and everything, he's absolutely right.
And especially because, as we've talked about before, the real core of this is the accusation that he usurped Duchess Clinton's rightful throne, that by colluding not just with a foreign power, Phil, but with the Kremlin, he stole the election away from her.
And he's the illegitimate president of the United States, and he must be stopped.
Now, I can see some GD Democrats over at CNN who are completely, you know, seized by this and convinced of this.
But it seems a bit over the line, even in the American empire, even in 2017, for the FBI and the CIA to be acting the way they are against the elected president.
I mean, at the end of the day, he really I mean, I guess they probably wouldn't let him.
But it seems like if I was him, I'd send the Marines to Langley and go, all right, let's fight and see, you know, bring it, tough guys.
I would have to agree with you, but I do simultaneously send a Marine battalion to FBI headquarters, too.
Yeah, yeah.
Yeah.
I mean, you know, the enemy is us.
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I can get all the rancor about Trump because I feel the same way.
My wife and I wake up every morning and the first thing we ask each other is what did he do last night?
And so I get it.
But the fact is that what the game they're playing at is a lot more dangerous.
And essentially, it's subverting our system in a very real way.
And then these guys are leaking classified information.
They're making judgments on what they're allowed to leak and what they're allowed to do, which is a judgment that's absolutely illegal.
And yet, not a single person, and this has gone on for months, not a single person has been caught in spite of the fact that, as you noted, the number of people that are in these rooms or have access to these documents is finite.
And probably you or I could go in there and do kind of a laundry list of people with access to the information.
We could figure this out in probably about 48 hours.
And yet the FBI can't seem to get it.
And that's what Trump was complaining about.
Right.
Yeah.
I mean, it seems like, geez, if I remember my history, I think this is where the plumbers came from.
Right.
Was we got to stop these leaks.
The FBI won't do it.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Careful on your precedents.
You follow their Trump administration.
All right.
So, OK.
Now, correct me if I'm wrong here, because, again, I would be perfectly happy to cut the rope on the trebuchet and launch Trump into the sun.
I really don't care what happens to him.
But I do care what happens to us.
And I do care about what's true and what's not.
So do I really have it right?
And I can be biased and hyperbolic sometimes.
So I want to make sure I'm right.
This really is like the case against Saddam, where there's 10 accusations, but none of them are anything.
Right.
So, yes, Flynn talked on the phone to the ambassador and said, yeah, don't worry about the sanctions, man.
We're about to get inaugurated in six weeks and then we'll worry about that then.
And it's probably true that.
Yeah.
So Sessions met with some Russian, I guess maybe the same ambassador in his Senate office.
And then it's also true that Flynn took some money from the Turks and then maybe Paul Manafort got some money from the Angolans or something.
But anyway, is there anything to any of this that says that really there was some kind of collusion that even implies to any any solid indication that makes you go, well, wait a minute now, I don't know, and think that maybe the Russians and the Trump team really did work together on some kind of October surprise type operation to put him in the presidency.
Is that true?
After all, the former CIA officer.
Tell me.
Well, you're right.
I mean, there's been no evidence whatsoever to show that there was any collusion.
But I would go beyond that.
There actually has been no evidence produced to show that the Russians did anything.
Have you seen anything?
I mean, it's basically been allegation after allegation after allegation, followed by a bunch of people in uniforms with a bunch of medals on their chest saying, trust us.
I think we've heard that before.
Right.
And I think that is really the sum of it, right, is they put out a completely shoddy intelligence report that even The New York Times goes, well, geez, guys, I don't know.
This isn't very impressive, but it doesn't matter because the next day that becomes the basis of all assertions.
Look, an intelligence report, even though that intelligence report itself, as we talked about when they first put it out, it's incriminating just the fact that it was released by the National Security Council in the White House and not the CIA.
And it's incriminating in the fact that half of it goes on about RT covers the fracking issue and all this kind of nonsense, which is basically a massive admission that they could not get the rest of the intelligence agencies to sign on and that they didn't really have a case to make.
Yeah, it's exactly the same thing.
I mean, you know, this is you cannot trust the government anymore.
I don't know whether you ever could.
But the fact is, it's become very clear that since 9-11, the government has an agenda and it's been playing this agenda real hard.
It's been fear mongering to convince the public that essentially we're threatened by various forces.
Now it's the Russians again.
We're back around to the Russians, even though, you know, if you compare Russia's military capabilities with ours, it's like a midget compared to an elephant.
But people don't want to hear that.
They'd rather be fearful and they're led by the nose as a result of this.
And that's what we're saying.
Right.
Yeah.
And, you know, as Andrew Coburn showed, it was even that was even true during the days of the USSR when they dominated all Eastern Europe.
They still only had enough supplies to fight for a week or something and no morale and their tanks didn't really work or have gas.
And it was all a big joke.
It was all a mirage.
Yeah, and the CIA knew all that.
But they were convinced by the politicians that that would not be a popular thing to report.
So they pretended that the Russians were out to conquer us.
Which is why they were caught by surprise.
They were too busy lying about how strong the Soviet Union was.
They were surprised when it all fell apart.
Absolutely.
Amazing.
All right.
Hey, listen, thanks very much coming back on the show, Phil.
I appreciate it as always.
OK, Scott.
Take care.
All right.
Bye bye.
All right, y'all.
That's the great Phil Giraldi.
He's at the American Conservative Magazine.
Do high level leaks suggest a conspiracy and the real meaning of sensitive intelligence?
You can also find him at UNS.com and he's the executive director of the Council for the National Interest.
And I'm Scott Horton.
Check out the archives at Scott Horton dot org and Libertarian Institute dot org.
And follow me on Twitter at Scott Horton Show.
Thanks.
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