Sorry, I'm late.
I had to stop by the Wax Museum again and give the finger to FDR.
We know Al-Qaeda, Zawahiri, is supporting the opposition in Syria.
Are we supporting Al-Qaeda in Syria?
It's a proud day for America.
And by God, we've kicked Vietnam syndrome once and for all.
Thank you very, very much.
I say it, I say it again.
You've been had.
You've been took.
You've been hoodwinked.
These witnesses are trying to simply deny things that just about everybody else accepts as fact.
He came, he saw us, he died.
We ain't killing they army, but we killing them.
We be on CNN like Say Our Name been saying, say it three times.
The meeting of the largest armies in the history of the world.
Then there's going to be an invasion.
Okay, you guys, on the line, I got the great Jim Bovard.
He wrote, well, all kinds of things.
I'm not going to list them all.
I'll just tell you my very favorite one is Attention Deficit Democracy.
Boy, is that a good book.
But, you know, there's a bunch of real good ones too.
Terrorism and Tyranny and the Bush Betrayal and Lost Rights and Freedom in Chains.
Oh, I started listing them all.
The Farm Fiasco and the rest of it.
He's a regular over at the Future Freedom Foundation, FFF.org, where he wrote this here thing, Obama's Forgotten Frauds and Debacles.
And then also, this one is in the Future Freedom Journal.
And we're going to talk about this one here in a minute.
Attorney General Barr, defender of FBI snipers.
Leave it to Jim to remember the 1990s.
All right.
First, let's remember the Obama years.
Welcome back.
How are you doing, Jim?
Hey, doing good, Scott.
Thanks for having me on.
Well, so I saw on TV that people don't like Trump, so therefore Obama was great.
In fact, even George Bush wasn't so bad, they say now.
Oh, my God.
You know, I'm starting to lose faith in Americans' memories.
And before, I know you had a lot of faith in their memories.
Depends on how much I was drinking that day.
Yeah, this is being challenged.
All right, well, take a swig and tell us about Obama.
What's your problem here anyway?
Well, I mean, it's, I think you nailed it that folks are so unhappy with Trump that all of a sudden people have forgotten a lot of the BS and wars and other abuses that Obama did It's almost like he's, if you think back to 2000, 2007, 2008, it was possible for Obama to run on a hope and change platform because he practically had a halo.
There was that famous campaign poster that made him look like Jesus.
And the expectations he had, I mean, he was only in office for like 12 days before he was nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize.
Folks were seeing him as being such a savior.
And it's funny because over the next eight years when he was president, he didn't do so good.
And it was really hard to maintain faith.
And even lots of smart liberals kind of said, well, he's really bad on civil liberties, and we don't need these extra wars.
But since January 2017, he's had a rebound.
And if you look at some of his speeches, it's really funny to see, you know, for some reason, prior to 2009, he was in favor of open government.
And now again, he's in favor of government transparency.
There was kind of an interlude where he didn't do so good on that.
Yeah, when he was the guy in the chair.
Yeah, yeah.
But it's funny as all get out to see the media cheering him, Obama, for condemning cynicism.
Oh, it's terrible that America has become cynical.
It's like, dude, you know, you helped send an entire generation to the depths of cynicism.
Yeah, seriously.
It's like Bush not realizing that he's the only reason Barack Obama got elected.
Well, Barack Obama is the only reason Donald Trump did.
Down the slippery slope we go.
Yeah, I mean, it's mostly one rascal after another.
And I think that Obama got a lot of help from John McCain.
I mean, because he was practically, well, I'll try to sound nice.
It's a struggle.
But it's interesting if you look at the wars that Obama started, the bombing campaigns, the illegal spying.
People forget that in 2008 he was seen as the civil liberties savior.
And he promised no more illegal wiretapping.
He was going to end the state secrets, documents abuses, doctrine abuses.
But once he became president, the National Security Agency greatly expanded its surveillance of American people.
And we didn't know much about that.
There were a few hints here and there.
And then in June 2013, you've got Edward Snowden, a whistleblower hero who blew the roof off the NSA and a lot of other government lies.
And what did Obama do?
He found a friendly venue.
He goes on Jay Leno and says, there's no spying on the American people.
It's like, OK, if this is a level of BS which we have to swallow in order to maintain support for Obama, then why bother?
Seriously.
And then, you know, it bothered me about that Snowden thing.
Besides, I mean, all the truths in the documents.
But the way they did Snowden was they waited till he was changing planes in Russia and then they stripped him of his passport.
And then they said, see, he's a guilty traitor seeking the protection of Vladimir Putin.
When it was Barack Obama who stranded him in Russia, he was trying to get to Ecuador where the CIA could have just walked down the block and grabbed him anyway.
Well, they try to pretend that, oh, yeah, essentially.
In fact, you know, they ran stuff like this in The Wall Street Journal and The Washington Times and so forth, where they pretended that, yes, see, this is all proof that Snowden is a traitor.
And he did all this in cooperation with the Russians.
And they ran such a counter story against his heroism based on that.
And it was Obama's decision to do it.
Well, and it's interesting to think back then, you know, it was understandable that folks would have been suspicious that Snowden said that he wouldn't get fair play from the U.S. government.
And you see how, you know, U.S. government's been fair with Julian Assange, right?
Yeah, exactly.
I mean, I'm glad that.
And Manning and Drake and Sterling and all the others Obama nailed to the wall.
John Kirikou.
Yeah, it's to see how the folks have forgotten that President Obama had one of the worst records on press freedom.
President Obama was dragging out the espionage act from Woodrow Wilson.
He used that, I think, almost three times as many times against whistleblowers and journalists as all other presidents combined.
There was a great comment that James Risen had in The New York Times.
That the Obama policy had made the attorney general America's chief censor.
And he said President Obama was a lot worse than George W. Bush on press freedom.
And Bush was bad.
Hang on just one second for me.
Hey, guys, you know, you probably need a new website.
A lot of people do.
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And what about the wars, Jim?
Obama's wars.
Obama's wars.
Yeah, well, there was a really good book I could recommend called Fool's Errand on the folly of the expansion by Obama of the Afghan war.
And people told him it wouldn't do any good.
But, you know, shit, it was so obvious even Biden recognized it.
And that book was praised as Bovardian by the great Anthony Gregory.
Oh, that's excellent.
Highest praise.
Well, I'm happy to hear that.
It's very accurate by Anthony.
I was going back over some of my old files and came across a number of excellent stories he did in the years after 9-11.
He said to me, actually, it was not a review.
We were just talking and he said to me, it's very Bovardian.
And I said, oh, I'm quoting you.
That's your review of my book right there.
Hey, well, you know, I haven't talked to Anthony for a while.
I hope he meant that as a compliment.
Oh, absolutely he did.
All right.
That's what we're talking about.
All right.
Well, but there was one of my this is something which you probably covered in the book.
But there was a CIA analysis before Obama did his Afghan search that said it's not going to do any good.
But Obama wouldn't read that.
So, you know, he didn't want to mess up his pure vision.
And then and then then you go to Libya.
And I'd be interested to get your thoughts on this because you were following this day to day more than I was.
But it seemed like Obama had at first some decent instincts.
But then you had the three witches, like from the play Macbeth, who just stampeded him into bombing Libya.
Is that a fair assessment or what?
Yeah, I mean, it really does look like that.
I mean, Michael Hastings reporting and and it's backed up by quite a few others, actually.
There's a Josh Rogan who's quite a neocon.
But he had written some decent stuff about Afghanistan in those days and so forth.
And there were some other reporters who all told the same story, essentially, of a meeting in the Oval Office where it was, you know, the writing Valkyries versus everybody else.
And that and I can't ever get over this part.
This just came up in another interview a few minutes ago about how Samantha Power.
Remember, she had called Hillary Clinton a monster during the campaign.
So then Obama made Hillary the secretary of state.
Oops.
So Power got relegated to this low level position at the NSC, where she complained that she was relegated to doing do-gooder rinky dink stuff like helping Sunni Shia reconciliation in Iraq.
Circa 2010, 11, right when you might have thought it mattered.
But no, that was a waste of her time.
She wanted some attention.
She wanted a promotion.
And so she helped start a war.
And she got Connelisa Rice and Hillary Clinton.
I mean, pardon me, Susan Rice and Hillary Clinton to go along with it.
And Hillary was convinced by one meeting with the Libyan Chalabi at a hotel in France.
Don't worry, lady, it's going to be great.
And they did it.
Wow.
Jabril was his name there.
And they fought the war for Al-Qaeda and they knew it.
And Sid Blumenthal, who had helped to advise her to start the war, was also the guy who warned her that, hey, our guys, the jihadists, are rounding up blacks and murdering them just for being black.
And so we better look out.
And then, of course, she didn't look out.
She continued to fight the war on their behalf all the time.
While Gaddafi and his family and government were trying desperately to continue to negotiate.
The whole war took nine months and led to the complete cleansing of the black African town of Tawarga there full of migrant workers.
And then later the re-institution of chattel slavery in Libya for the first time in I don't know how many decades at least of sub-Saharan Africans, as even CNN covered.
I don't know if they blamed it on Obama or not, but yeah.
Anyway.
And then Syria, of course, is that much worse.
But everybody knows the story of that one.
Well, yeah, it's still in the news, unfortunately.
There's vast numbers of people dead thanks in part to Obama's policies.
And but, you know, I don't know there was any learning curve on that.
There was a lot of other BS that Obama did and people have forgotten about.
He was he was probably the most anti-gun president we've ever had.
He put the IRS in charge of my family's health insurance, Jim.
The IRS.
Yeah, that's bad.
That's also bad.
And I didn't want to join up.
But then they doubled my price.
So I had no choice but to join up.
But then that means the IRS is in charge of whether my lupus wife has health care or not.
Oh, dear.
Yeah, it's Democrats.
I agree.
I agree.
It's a mess.
It's interesting that President, ex-president Obama is getting a lot of praise for talking about how presidents need to be honest.
But again, there was year lapse.
There was a line he used in 2016.
He said, it's easier for a teenage teenager to buy a Glock than to get his hand on a computer or even a book.
And it's like, you know, Amazon Prime does not deliver Glocks.
You know, it does.
It does.
Maybe in Texas.
I don't know.
I haven't checked the rules in Texas.
But in Maryland, you know, you can't get a Glock from Amazon Prime.
But there was just so much demagoguery.
Prior year, Obama talked about neighborhoods where it's easier for you to buy a handgun than it is to buy a fresh vegetable.
But Obama never told us where it was easier to get a .38 special than to buy carrots.
But this is the type of crap which he was always shoveling.
And because there was so much media deference, for some reason, he never got a reputation of being dishonest like Trump has gotten.
You know, there was still a bit of a halo, even though in spite of his bombing, in spite of his killings, in spite of his lying.
Yeah.
I mean, Trump really is the aberration here.
Obama goes to show that it's really not a liberal media or a corporate media so much as it's a statist media.
And they treated George W. Bush with all the same deference, at least through Hurricane Katrina in 2005.
It wasn't until after Katrina that you could finally question whether maybe this guy is not the most competent manager in North America.
Maybe someone else could do a bit better.
Before that, forget it.
Before that, you just hate Bush.
What's your problem?
And that was the exact position of MSNBC and CNN and all the major newspapers and everything else.
From the time of 9-11 on, these are the most competent protectors that we could possibly have.
Yeah.
And it didn't matter how much idiocy or deceit was used.
I mean, if you look at the 2004 presidential campaign when Bush was running for re-election, it was unfortunate the Democrats did not have the balls to bring up the torture issue or to bring up Bush's lies about the Iraq war.
I mean, the Democrats were afraid of that.
I think they could have beaten Bush if they raised the issues, but they were cowed like much the media was.
Yeah, exactly.
I mean, there's just no question really.
Same thing for Bernie Sanders versus Hillary.
If he just attacked her foreign policy, he would have won the nomination easily.
But he refused to hit her on the thing that she was the very worst on.
Yeah.
And the thing about Bernie was he was pretending to be high minded.
I'm not going to talk about your emails.
Well, I mean, there were a lot of federal crimes there.
So, but, you know, for some reason we're supposed to just mosey along as if nothing happened.
But that was that was the part of the dominoes that helped wreck Hillary, happily so.
Yep, absolutely.
Sorry.
Hang on just one second for me.
Hey, guys, you know what you ought to do?
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You know, well, here's a little bit of a segue.
Barack Obama and Eric Holder appointed John Durham to complete the cover up of the CIA's torture and murder regime from the George W. Bush years.
And this is the same guy that Attorney General Barr just appointed to get to the bottom of the secret police push against Donald Trump and the whole big fake Russiagate scandal here.
So we can expect them to all get away completely with blue bloody murder, which is kind of ironic.
I love the irony of that, that Donald Trump is the most powerful man in the world, bar none.
Assuming that the CIA and the FBI and the DOJ do what he wants.
Otherwise, and the military, otherwise he's helpless.
He's just a guy in a room.
And so here, the guys who screwed him are the CIA and the FBI and the DOJ.
So he can't do anything about it.
Yeah, I mean, it remains to be seen what that Justice Department prosecutor finds in this case.
He might do a lot better than he did with the torture stuff, which was appalling.
I think there was one other big case he was involved in, wasn't there, that he actually did a pretty good job on?
Not that I know of.
Well, it's certainly possible that I'm mistaken here.
But no, I mean, it's encouraging that some of the top people in the Justice Department are at least talking about investigating.
It's better than we've had in there.
And the folks there are certainly a lot smarter than Jeff Sessions.
So, I mean, that's a big first step.
I mean, the problem is that Brennan and Comey and Clapper and McCabe and these guys are very guilty of a very serious, I don't know exactly the penal code that applies, but they're way out over their skis, lunch and some COINTELPRO stuff against the president like this.
But they are also far too high of officials to ever go to prison, no matter what.
And so they're going to have to escape.
And there's just no way that otherwise we're looking at decades in prison for something like Jim Comey or something.
It's unthinkable.
Yeah, well, you know, from my perspective, I'm not so much concerned about whether people like that are actually convicted and sentenced.
What I want to find out is what happened, because there was a lot of shenanigans which went on behind the closed doors.
There's a lot of confidential stuff we haven't seen.
Some of the excuses the FBI has made for withholding information have been laughable.
But, I mean, it's very much like the J. Edgar Hoover era.
And if we're able to get the facts, then that's more important than this person or that person doing time.
Yeah, well, and because we all know that the law does not apply to officials this high, even at the Department of Justice.
Rule of Law Incorporated, supposedly, we know it's a political question.
That's whether somebody like John Brennan could ever be put in a penitentiary.
And the answer to that political question is no.
Not even if he personally killed little kids with his bare hands on video.
Could someone like John Brennan be put in a penitentiary in the United States of America?
Well, Scott, I hope you're not opposed to former communists like Comey and Brennan.
So, I mean, simply because of their party or their ideology in their youth.
You know, it was Brennan's support for Al-Qaeda in Syria that turned me against him.
But, yeah, the fact that he started out deep red is not a good argument in his favor, for sure.
Yeah, and that was something which Comey mentioned, that he'd been a communist or he'd supported communism early in his life or career or something like that.
That's funny.
So, speaking of communism, what about Barr's opinion on the right of the FBI to murder any of us that they feel like?
Well, Barr was a champion of sovereign immunity for FBI snipers.
Which FBI snipers, Jim?
Lon Horiyuchi.
From the Waco massacre and the Ruby Ridge attack?
Well, Ruby Ridge, for sure.
That's something which is confirmed.
Is it not confirmed that he was stationed in the undercover house across the street from the Branch of Indians on April 19th?
My understanding is that, yes, that he was there.
And driving a tank that day, too, I heard.
Or maybe not that day, but I think so.
Yeah, yeah.
I'm not sure of the details.
I haven't looked at that.
And, you know, I always dance.
Well, anyhow.
We'll go back and check.
So, but, yeah, Barr was attorney general when Ruby Ridge went down.
And he was, you know, Barr, I think, initially said he didn't, that some of the top people in DOJ said, well, we really didn't know what was going on.
But they knew.
I mean, there was a lot of contacts from the FBI operations in Idaho back to headquarters.
And I think Barr was on at least two of those phone calls.
I'm not sure.
I might be mistaken on that.
But after Barr left office, he had, you know, lawyers have to do pro bono work in order to keep their law license.
And Barr's biggest pro bono effort was to get total immunity for FBI snipers and probably other federal agents who, you know, shoot down people.
And if you look at some of the outtakes from the briefs that he helped organize for the Alon Horiuchi case that Idaho brought against him of manslaughter charges, they were very sweeping as far as government immunity.
It's like, how do you reconcile this with a free society?
There were some great opinions by federal judge Alex Kaczynski on this.
He was very outspoken, very principled, and he was someone whose family fled from Romania when he was very young.
And I think that might have given him more insights into the dangers of boundless government power than most Americans appreciate.
And, you know, so here's the thing of it, too, for people who are not familiar with this story, we can't go through it all.
But this is a case where the state prosecutors in Idaho tried to indict and prosecute an FBI agent for committing a crime on the clock on, you know, at a crime scene.
That is absolutely unheard of.
And in this case, it was because he really, really deserved it.
Yeah, well, if you look, you know, if you go back and see what Alon Horiuchi told other government officials after he shot and killed Vicki Weber as she was standing in the cabin door holding her baby, young baby.
If you look at the kind of maneuvers that the FBI and Justice Department did during the trial, the federal trial for Randy Weber in 1993.
Yeah, there's just there's there's so many different levels of outrage here.
And I don't know.
You know, it's sad that most of this stuff has gotten swept under the rug and that people don't use this when they're trying to evaluate how much trust they should have in the federal government.
Yeah.
Well, so you know what?
I'm sorry I'm over time here.
So last question real quick here.
Before the George H.W. Bush administration, what was the rule for federal agents killing people?
Were they not allowed to shoot on site?
Is there was there a law that said, here's your 007 license or how's that go?
Well, it was something that the federal agents were supposed to avoid.
That was the suggestion.
If you kill them, you're doing it wrong, right?
Like Guantanamo Bay.
Well, well, it's like it happened at times.
I mean, there was a sea change at Ruby Ridge and Waco as far as the federal government asserting it had a right to do things that would have horrified earlier generations of Americans.
But on the other hand, no one had ever really tried to hold them accountable before those atrocities.
I think that I think that there were some cases.
I can't recall.
I know that there were a number of cases which went down badly for the feds.
But it was great that the jurors in Idaho stood up and said this is called BS on the Justice Department of prosecutors.
So don't have a good answer on that one.
Yeah.
Well, so I mean, but this guy, Barr, essentially, this is like a David Addington, Dick Cheney view of executive power and the unitary this and that.
He's just as bad as any of those hawks at the Federalist Society and that kind of deal.
Is that about it?
Well, I don't know.
I mean, Barr said a number of things which I very strongly disagree with.
It seemed like Barr is trying to get to the depth, the depths of what happened with the FBI and other federal agencies involved in basically tampering with the 2016 presidential election.
I certainly support him in that effort.
Oh, absolutely.
And that's my thought, too.
I mean, if Barr can do a good job and get us some hard facts on that, then that's greatly to his credit.
Yeah.
All right.
I'm sorry I got to let you go.
But thank you very much for coming back on the show, Jim.
Great to talk to you.
Hey, thanks a lot, Scott.
Good luck.
All right, you guys.
That's the great Jim Bovard.
He's at jimbovard.com and at fff.org.
And this one is in the Future Freedom, their journal.
And it is called Attorney General Barr, Defender of FBI Snipers.
And that'll be up on their website in a while or so.
And this other one is on the FFF website.
It's called Obama's Forgotten Frauds and Debacles.
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.
