Sorry, I'm late.
I had to stop by the Whites Museum again and get the fingered at 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 that we've kicked Vietnam syndrome once and for all.
Thank you very, very much.
I say it, I say it again, you've been hacked.
You've been took.
You've been hoodwinked.
These witnesses are trying to simply deny things that just about everybody else accepts as fact.
He came, he saw us, he died.
We ain't killing their army, but we killing them.
We be on CNN like Say Our Name been saying, saying three times.
The meeting of the largest armies in the history of the world.
Then there's going to be an invasion.
Alright you guys, introducing Aaron Maté.
He is a host and producer for The Real News and has written a few, at least here, for The Nation.
The latest is called The Mueller Indictments Still Don't Add Up to Collusion.
Welcome back to the show.
How you doing Aaron?
Hey Scott, how you doing?
Very good.
Really appreciate you coming on the show to talk about this.
And, you know, I really should be doing the work to have the story as down pat as you, but I'm just, well, I'm letting you pick up my slack on all the great debunking here.
So, first of all, Paul Manafort.
Total scumbag.
Lobbyist for dictators all around the world.
Going back to Ferdinand Marcos and God knows who else all over Africa and Asia.
Really bad guy.
And he's been indicted for something or another.
And even apparently witnessed tampering and so has now had his bail revoked and is in jail.
And what a bad guy.
And doesn't this prove that Vladimir Putin controls Donald Trump?
Yeah, well, I mean, the first thing to point out with Paul Manafort is that, yes, he has been accused of many crimes.
But the most important fact about it is that none of them have anything to do with the actual issue we're supposed to be concerned about here, which is Russian interference in the or alleged Russian interference in the U.S. election and the Trump campaign's alleged complicity.
So Manafort is accused of basically a bunch of financial crimes related to his work in Ukraine, going back to something like 2007 or 2008, up until the period before the election.
And actually for this, he was already previously investigated.
He was investigated.
He was even wiretapped, but he wasn't charged after the election when Mueller, when the Mueller probe was formed.
That's when he's been charged, but for activities during that period.
And now just last week, he's been charged and jailed for new crimes or new alleged offenses, which is witness tampering.
If you actually read what he's accused of in terms of witness tampering, it doesn't strike me as explosive as it's made out to be.
But, you know, whether he's guilty of that or not, the point is that none of it has to do with what we're supposed to be concerned about.
All right.
Well, and so, well, just on that minor point there, what exactly are the allegations about the witness tampering?
He he texted some former business associates in Europe, and he also got his his aide, a Russian Ukrainian national named Konstantin Kalinic, to contact them as well.
And he he basically wanted them to he was reminded he was trying to remind them of what the nature what the nature was of his work in Ukraine.
And we're just trying to basically, you know, like like remind them of what he's been saying publicly about what his what his work was when he was in Ukraine, that he wasn't doing it for pro-Russian interests.
He was doing it for, you know, actually that when he was in Ukraine and working for for the president, the former president Yanukovych, he actually was trying to push Yanukovych towards the West, towards signing an agreement with the European Union and away from Russia.
But were but which actually would contradict this widespread notion that he was serving Putin's interests when he was in Ukraine.
So what he is being accused of amounts to basically sending some text messages to some potential witnesses, reminding them of that.
If you if you read the actual the the his new indictment and then his lawyer's response, it doesn't seem as explosive as it's made out to be.
Well, and it does bring up, though, as you're saying, this important point that when he worked for Yanukovych, who is, you know, known basically simply as Putin's man, although that's not exactly the case.
And he was twice elected to the presidency of that country.
And America overthrew him twice in 10 years in the Orange Revolution in 2004 and then again in 2014.
But it's important that you bring up that EU trade pact, because it sounds like some EU trade pact.
But this is what the coup was over when the European and American side tried to change the deal to make an exclusive deal that Ukraine could not have a trade agreement with Russia at the same time.
That was when Yanukovych balked and went with the Russians instead.
Instead of demanding austerity, they were going to give him a giant loan.
And so he said, why am I going to do this?
It's like I showed up at my wedding and you hand me a prenuptial agreement.
And so I think the deal's off.
And this was against Paul Manafort's advice.
I mean, you might wonder whether he was working for the CIA at the time or something like that.
That's right.
I know it's an important point.
And what's interesting, you describe it exactly right.
And basically for that stance where he basically he was trying to play both sides, Yanukovych was.
But for trying to play both sides, that gets labeled as being pro-Russian.
So according to the prevailing worldview, if you try to, if you reject the terms demanded of you by the West, that means you're pro-Russian.
Whereas really, he actually, Yanukovych was trying to play everybody.
He was undoubtedly corrupt.
There's no doubt about that.
Very corrupt.
But to say that he got overthrown or like to say that he was just like, you know, in Putin's pocket and pro-Russian and he was overthrown because of that is a real misreading of what actually happened.
Oh, and yeah, I guess I could have said too is when he turned that deal down, that was what then led to the protests by the radical right against him and all that.
The pro-EU side and then very anti-Russian side that the Americans ended up aligning with those people and helping them to do the coup d'etat in February of 2014.
Right.
You know, only thing there is I do think there was a genuine element of outrage over corruption.
I mean, like that was a part of it.
I'm not sure how big it was, but it was there.
It wasn't all just like the entire protest was not just far right.
Right.
But it all but certainly the far right elements in the US used all this, used the outrage over corruption for their own interest.
Well, it was the far right in Kiev that did the coup.
Right.
People out there protesting against corruption weren't the ones who seized the buildings and ran the president out of the capital.
That was the right sector.
Yeah.
You're right.
Yeah.
All right.
So and now, yes.
So this is important that this guy, Manafort, it's kind of poking a little hole in their theory.
Right.
That he was, you know, clearly somehow we're to say, oh, Ukraine, Russia, Manafort, Trump.
And we can leave out all the details and stuff, but we just have all those words and they sound really scary together.
Here was Putin's agent in Ukraine.
And then he's the same guy that Trump inexplicably hires to run his campaign for a little while, et cetera.
And yet there's really nothing that holds that together at all.
Yeah.
Now, the counter argument to that will be that when Manafort joined the Trump campaign, he then tried to leverage that to clear his debts with Oleg Deripaska.
It was a wealthy Russian oligarch.
But, you know, that's the problem with that one, though, is that Deripaska is not as close to Putin as everyone says that he is.
And regardless, there's no proof that Deripaska in his dealings with Manafort was acting on Putin's behalf.
He was obviously acting on his own behalf.
And then they'll point out that Manafort had an aide, Konstantin Kalimnik, who we're told has ties to Russian intelligence.
But there's been no evidence provided to substantiate that.
It's true that Kalimnik trained at a Soviet-era military school, but, you know, that's not so out of the ordinary.
I mean, certainly in this country, in the U.S., we have plenty of former U.S. military people, intelligence people who go on and take jobs in the private sector, the world of lobbying, consulting.
So when you quote the Atlantic magazine also throwing a little bit of cold water on that, too, and saying the allegations were, quote, never backed by more than a smattering of circumstantial evidence.
That's exactly right.
And you could say that that pretty much applies to this entire thing.
Well, yeah, certainly so.
All right.
Now, so is there anything else about Manafort before we move on here?
I think we got it covered.
Yeah.
All right.
Now, so Michael Flynn, after the election was over, Michael Flynn, the former general and head of the DIA, who was the incoming national security advisor there and the national security advisor for a short while there.
Why, he was caught lying by the FBI about his telephone call with the Russkies.
So explain that one away, Mr. Mattei.
The Flynn thing is a weird story, because when you think about it, it doesn't actually make any sense.
So Trump wins the election in November.
In December, Flynn has a couple of phone calls with the Russian ambassador at the time, Sergey Kislyak.
The first conversation is not about sanctions.
It's not about the U.S. and Russia.
It's actually trying to enroll Russia in the Trump transition's effort to undermine a resolution at the U.N. Security Council that was going to criticize Israel for building settlements.
And Obama, for the first time, was basically he was not going to vote for it, but he was not going to veto it, which would be unprecedented for him.
So Obama was going to let this resolution pass on his way out the door.
And so we know now from reporting in foreign policy in The Wall Street Journal that Netanyahu himself asked the Trump people to undermine that vote.
And since supporting Israel in an even more extreme fashion than Obama was going to be the Trump administration's new policy anyway, they decided to get started.
And so they did.
Flynn and Kushner took part in a really intense lobbying effort, calling ambassadors to try to get them to vote against the measure.
And one of those ambassadors that they called included Russia.
And so when Flynn spoke to FBI agents the following month in January, he apparently lied to them about the contents of that call.
And he also apparently lied to them about another call with Kislyak.
Oh, and by the way, Russia ended up saying no and ended up supporting the measure, which says something about the state of Trump-Russia ties at that point, where the first effort by Trump to get Russia to do something led to Russia rejecting it and voting with the rest of the world for that measure at the U.N.
So the next call between Kislyak and Flynn is about sanctions.
Obama, on his way out, also then imposed new sanctions on Russia for alleged meddling.
Flynn calls Kislyak and apparently says, listen, we ask you not to escalate the situation.
However you respond, don't escalate the situation, because things are going to be different when we come in.
And so Russia agreed and did not, after Obama imposed these new sanctions, Russia did not escalate the situation, did not respond with sanctions in response.
So we know all this.
We know the contents of these phone calls because they were recorded.
Kislyak's conversations were wiretapped and they were picked up by the NSA.
And what's interesting is that by the time Flynn was interviewed by the FBI in January, he knew that already.
He knew that his calls had been wiretapped.
But yet he still gets ruled for lying to the FBI, which raises the question then, well, if he knew that they were, his calls were wiretapped, then why did he lie?
I think it's quite possible that he did not actually lie.
I think maybe he left out some details or didn't remember.
Well, I mean, it's hard to believe, too.
I mean, here's a guy who's the former head of the DIA, who he wouldn't have to be that.
He would have to just be partially educated in these matters at all to know that there's a standing FISA warrant for tapping the Soviet or the Russian ambassador.
Always.
He's an agent of a foreign power in the country.
You don't need a probable cause of any crime or anything like that to have a counterintelligence wiretap on a guy like that.
So here's Flynn.
And then one of these calls, at least, he was on the beach in the Dominican Republic somewhere on vacation.
So he's even out of the country at the time.
He'd have had to know that call was being intercepted and was recorded.
And then it's impossible to me to even understand or imagine or figure out how a guy like that, and I know that Flynn ain't the sharpest knife in the whole drawer either, but still, that if he was talking with the FBI about phone calls that he knew were tapped, why he wouldn't build in enough weasel words to protect himself from these type of charges?
That like, listen, fellas, the best I can remember, that didn't come up or something, right?
Why would he say anything that's outright untrue?
And in fact, I don't believe that he did.
I agree with you that that doesn't make sense that he could have been so sloppy as to not build in a weasel word on each important sentence when it came down to a statement of fact there.
That's exactly right.
And so, so which raises the question and what actually happened?
Well, first of all, we know from reporting, this was reported on CNN, Washington Post, that the FBI agents who initially who interviewed Flynn didn't actually think that he lied to them.
They didn't detect any signs of deceit and they didn't think that he actually lied.
And when Comey, the then FBI director, later briefed members of Congress, according to Senator Chuck Grassley, Comey told them or Comey led them to believe that they would not be charging Flynn for making false statements because they didn't think that he lied.
And do I have it right that it was even this guy, Peter Strzok or whatever, who's now famous for being so biased on this case that he was the guy who determined that he didn't think that Flynn lied to him?
Peter Strzok, FBI agent who has just been in the news again because the new IG report from the Justice Department reveals that he sent more anti-Trump text messages than we previously known, including one telling his his lover that Lisa Page, another FBI agent, that we will stop Trump's presidency.
So, yes, Peter Strzok was among those who interviewed Flynn.
And the initial conclusion, if you believe what Grassley says, Comey told Congress, and if you believe the reports that initially came out about the FBI agents who interviewed Flynn, was that Flynn didn't lie.
And I think there's a clue in the indictment.
Mueller also accuses Flynn, but he doesn't charge him, but he accuses Flynn of failing to register as a foreign agent for Turkey and of hiding some, you know, like some lucrative payments from Turkey, which is a more serious offense.
So it's quite possible that Flynn agreeing to plead to lying is a plea down.
And also, meanwhile, we know that his son was under scrutiny from Mueller.
And one that he's apparently quite guilty of.
Oh, this is a violation of the Logan Act.
This is a guy who's the designated incoming national security adviser of the already elected, the president elect.
This isn't before the election.
This is after Trump is the only incoming president.
And this is his designated national security adviser.
He has every right to be in communication with the Russians.
And then, you know, whether on the Israel thing or on the Russia thing, and of course, the Israel thing all got played down.
It was the Russia part that was supposedly the scandal.
And then what was it?
He was saying, don't overreact to Obama's new sanctions because he's on his way out anyway.
What wasn't it?
The Russians instructing Flynn, tell Trump that he's going to relax these sanctions when he gets sworn in in a couple six weeks or whatever.
There was no indication whatsoever.
Of course, this completely ridiculous comic book fantasy to believe that the Russians were the ones who were dictating to Trump and Flynn what they were supposed to be doing.
As you said, you know, more than half of this is asking the Russians to please go along with them on Israel.
And they refused.
Right.
And how do we know this for sure?
The calls, as we've talked about, were wiretapped.
So if there was anything kind of like shady going on where Flynn and Kislyak are discussing, you know, Trump repaying Russia for its help in the election, they would have picked that up.
But they didn't.
And we know and we know that because even before even before Flynn talked to the FBI, The Washington Post reported that the FBI agents who had recorded the calls were considering closing the investigation.
Because they because they didn't pick up any illicit conversation at all going on between them.
So the whole Flynn thing is just it looks like it's been blown way out of proportion.
And now, was there anything about the actual attorney general here?
Because he recused himself over this.
Sessions did.
And yet the worst accusation against him, if I know, maybe I'm missing something, was he's he's on film, I think, even very briefly shaking hands and saying hi to Kislyak at some event, which obviously amounts to nothing.
And then he had another meeting with Kislyak in his office, which was in front of his staff, who were all retired army officers who worked for him there.
So, I mean, clearly, this is not a big treasonous thing.
Maybe Miller was there too, but still Sessions and a bunch of army officers meeting as a senator meeting in his office with the Russian ambassador.
There's no reason to even suspect malfeasance of any kind there.
So was there something else I'm missing?
Or that was on that basis Sessions recused himself and led to this special counsel in the first place?
I think so.
Well, because Sessions also was somewhat involved with the campaign, like he campaigned for Trump, that that also took a was a factor in his recusal, if I recall right.
But, you know, like the thing with Sessions is he's been accused of lying to Congress when he denied having contacts with Russians.
But if you look at the question he was answering that that has led to this charge against him, it was from Senator Al Franken.
And Al Franken asked him specifically, you know, like the way his question is framed, it's very much about did you have any, you know, contacts, like campaign contacts as a member of the campaign and about the about the campaign.
Not did you speak to a Russian national or a Russian official?
It was did you speak to any Russians about the campaign?
And he said no.
And, you know, if you're a senator meeting with a foreign ambassador, there's nothing unusual about that.
And but for that, that led to this whole thing about Sessions covering up his contacts with Russians and his recusal.
Yeah.
All right.
Now, so I guess let me ask you, this didn't make the cut for for your article on the timing, but it goes along with Papadopoulos and this and that and the rest of it, too, is this story that came out in The Washington Post a couple of days ago about this Russian national who's been for 10 years or 20 years or something, FBI informant.
Who met with Roger Stone and offered him incriminating stuff about Hillary Clinton for two million dollars.
And Roger Stone told him, beat it, pal.
Donald Trump doesn't pay anybody for anything.
You know, he could have said even contractors who do construction work for him.
Donald Trump isn't going to pay for anything, so forget it.
And it seemed pretty clear, although this is not to spin on liberal Twitter, but it seemed pretty clear in the article that even The Post seemed to be saying, I mean, it was a news story and they didn't know for sure, but they seemed to go ahead and go to lengths and explain all the reasons to believe that this guy was working for the FBI in the first place.
And yet the date is important here, because if I have it right, this predates any of these other FBI informants or any of these other people like Papadopoulos and then I'm forgetting Carter Page and the FBI's involvement with them.
So can you help me understand all that about kind of the timeline there?
Because it seemed to me from that Washington Post piece, like, wow, this really is a whole, just the FBI and the CIA decided to team up and entrap these guys all along.
And I think it's just hilarious, by the way, that I'm defending Roger Stone and Manafort and Sessions and Trump.
These most horrible people in the world.
I know you feel the same way about it, but the truth is the truth here.
So help me understand it.
No, I think it's a great point.
It's weird to have to defend all these vile characters.
I mean, whatever.
I've done nothing but defend Saddam Hussein and the Ayatollah and Kim and whoever, because what our government says about them is lies.
And Putin, too.
Everything they say about Putin, some of it's true, but all the worst stuff he's done, like in Ukraine and in Syria, is in direct reaction to American support for Nazis and al-Qaeda guys.
So, meh.
And of course, I think the broader principle for me is it's not about defending them.
It's just about being truthful.
And especially if we want to challenge them effectively, then it's, I think the broader point about this whole Russiagate thing is that it's not going to work to try to get them on a conspiracy theory that there's no basis for.
And so with Roger Stone, so this meeting with a guy named Henry Greenberg, that's what the Russian identified himself as, it's not his real name, that happened in late May 2016.
So that would be after Papadopoulos, the Trump campaign volunteer, was supposedly promised dirt on Hillary Clinton by this weird professor, Joseph Massoud, because that was in April.
But still, this is in May 2016, well before we're told the FBI investigation of the Trump campaign in Russia opened, because according to all the press accounts, that investigation opened on July 31st, 2016.
So in May 2016, we have Roger Stone now saying he was approached by a Russian national, who does turn out to be a longtime FBI informant, offering him dirt, as you say, on Hillary Clinton for $2 million, which Stone refused.
I mean, there's a few weird things.
On the one hand, Stone did, Stone isn't revealing this until now, and neither did Michael Caputo, another Trump campaign official who helped set up this meeting for Stone.
And they testified before to Congress, and they both never mentioned this meeting.
They now claim that they didn't remember it, which I find surprising, but at the same time, so that does raise a question.
Why didn't Stone and Caputo mention this until now?
They say they didn't remember it.
Although they do seem, we should say, they do seem to demonstrate that the exchange took place, and the Washington Post verified from Greenberg's side that this did happen, and Stone has some text messages about how, nah, there was nothing interesting there, etc.
That's exactly right.
Caputo wrote to Stone, how crazy is the Russian?
And Stone replied, wants big money for the info, waste of time.
And Caputo replies, the Russian way, anything at all interesting?
And Stone just says no.
So yeah, according to those text messages that, I mean, that then informs their explanation now that the meeting was so inconsequential that they just forgot about it.
But it's worth noting that when asked if they had any contacts with Russians about the campaign, they both denied this.
Now they remember it.
But it is also interesting that this Russian is a longtime FBI informant.
And we know from the reporting that came out just recently before this, that the FBI also used an informant in London, this guy, Stephen Halper, to make contact with Papadopoulos and Carter Page and another Trump official.
After supposedly Papadopoulos spoke to the Australian ambassador and told him about something he had heard about the Russians having compromising information on Hillary Clinton.
Now, the thing that's interesting about the Papadopoulos thing, which I think raises more questions and speaks to the scenario you raised, which is that the FBI may have been trying to entrap all these people, is that according to what we know, it actually appears that if it's actually true that Papadopoulos is what sparked the FBI investigation on July 31st, 2016, that the FBI launched it knowing way less information than we thought it did.
So it was previously the widespread assumption that when the FBI launched its probe on July 31st, 2016, that was because it had heard via Alexander Downer, an Australian diplomat, that Papadopoulos had told him of his conversation with Massoud in which Massoud told him about the Russians having stolen emails on Hillary Clinton.
And this conversation between Papadopoulos and Downer relayed this to the U.S. officials after seeing that stolen emails had come out on the DNC in July 2016, which prompted him to remember his conversation with Papadopoulos and that led him to go to the FBI.
But according to Downer, Papadopoulos never told him about stolen emails.
All Downer says Papadopoulos told him was that the Russians might have compromising information on Hillary Clinton and they might use it.
But he didn't say what it was, which means that the FBI, if actually it was Papadopoulos that launched this probe, then the FBI, instead of hearing this and just going to Papadopoulos and asking him what was up, they launched a counterintelligence investigation on the opposition political campaign just after hearing that secondhand that a low-level campaign aide had talked about hearing the Russians might have something on Hillary Clinton, which seems like a bizarre decision.
Yeah.
Well, now, so what about Carter Page and the the big dossier that says that he was corrupted by these Russian intelligence officers?
Carter Page case is interesting because he basically was he he was viewed as suspicious after joining the Trump campaign based on a case that he had cooperated with the FBI on.
So a few years before the Trump before the Trump campaign, Carter Page was apparently was apparently the target of a recruitment effort by alleged Russian spies.
It didn't go anywhere.
And then later on, he ended up assisting the FBI in their case against these Russians.
And he testified, he even testified for the FBI.
So then what's puzzling is that when Trump names Carter Page is like a volunteer low-level foreign policy adviser, that arouses the FBI suspicion over Page's potential contacts with Russia, even though what they knew about Page's contacts with Russia is that he had helped them indict two Russian spies.
And so that gets Page under.
So even in the spring of 2016, before the investigation officially opens, you have briefings with Comey and Loretta Lynch, and they're all talking about Carter Page, even though their experience with him had just been him cooperating with them against Russians.
And then when Carter Page goes to visit Moscow and gives a speech, that ends up in the Steele dossier, this intelligence report written by British spy Christopher Steele.
But, you know, what seems pretty my guess with Christopher Steele is that whoever his sources were, I think basically that they just read open sources.
They read the Russian press, they read the Washington Post where it was reported that Carter Page was giving that speech, and they made up a story about it.
So there's a pattern in the Steele dossier where something happens publicly, there's a news report, and then after that happens, some account of it and some spin on it appears in the Steele dossier.
And so you have that with Carter Page going to Russia later on after that happens and Steele writes about it.
You also had it when you have like a Washington Post report about a amendment at the RNC convention, an amendment to the platform on arming Ukraine that gets rejected.
And that becomes a Washington Post article.
And then later on after that, Steele writes that that was basically a quid pro quo where Russia accepted Trump's help.
Sorry, Trump accepted Russia's help in exchange for Russia no longer making Ukraine a campaign issue.
Hmm.
All right.
Which makes no sense on its face because as if like, was Ukraine a campaign issue at all?
No, it wasn't.
Yeah.
And how is Russia supposed to make it an issue in the American campaign anyway?
Well, yeah, like the supposition there is that Trump was going to otherwise make Ukraine a big campaign issue, which is pretty ridiculous to begin with.
Yeah.
And it's just curious.
I can't remember the source anymore, but there was a pretty good article that I think was written.
And interestingly and importantly, from someone on the left, maybe a liberal or progressive or possibly a leftist, that was kind of throwing some cold water on that whole story anyway.
And about how, you know, really they already had a pretty hawkish platform plank on Ukraine.
And the proposal was to make it overly long.
And then the person who intervened to change that was not directly tied in with the campaign people and their marching orders or whatever anyway.
And I'm sorry, I wish I remembered my footnote, but they just.
The whole story is so silly because these platforms like mean nothing anyway.
Well, that's true, too.
But even here it was like that story was much more complicated about what happened here.
And it was the complications clearly excluded Kremlin control over what was going on.
You know, it's just another red herring.
Like you have it right.
Some delegate wanted to make the platform even more hawkish than it already was.
That got rejected.
There were some Trump people around.
They might have said, no, yeah, we don't want to do that.
But the point is a meaningless change to a meaningless platform then led to this claim that that proved that that was a grounds for suspicion of Kremlin Trump contact.
And exactly.
And the final platform in the end, the final Republican platform, meaningless, by the way, turned out to be far more hawkish than the Democratic platform was on Ukraine.
So it didn't even it's like in terms of its actual message, the Republicans still had had a more hawkish message than the Democrats did.
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Thanks.
All right.
Now, I'm sorry, because I know that we're sort of I'm asking you about everything and not just the indictment so far and stuff.
And we can get back to the point on some of that in a minute.
But as I remember and I don't know what's happened to my Swiss cheese brain, I always remember every footnote every time.
But I read a great thing just a few weeks ago about how great it was.
I read a thing about how even Steele and his people didn't believe the golden shower story that they included it anyway, because they'd heard it from a guy who heard it from a guy.
And they had the whole anecdote, too, about where it came from and everything.
But that even they didn't believe it in the first place.
It sounds like, you know, like that one's kind of a side issue, but it goes straight to whether Trump had been compromised by the KGB or not.
Yeah, the now we're told that, you know, that Steele has been backing off from his claims, as you know, like, you know, that that the that the P tape thing, you only like, you know, think like gives that a 40 to 50 percent chance of.
What was the thing I read?
What was that?
Help me out.
Could you?
I believe he said that to he either said that to Luke Harding, the journalist, or to David Corn and Michael Isikoff, because both of them have books.
And I can't remember in which book that is, but.
OK, you know what?
I think it was when I was reading about the Isikoff book.
That was what it was.
Yeah.
Thank you for that.
OK, go ahead.
Sure, sure.
And yeah, there was a lawsuit.
There's a lawsuit involving BuzzFeed because BuzzFeed published Steele's dossier.
And so some Russians who were named in it had brought a lawsuit.
And in a filing, Steele even says something about that, that the dossier's claims are not verified facts, that they're raw intelligence.
So it's like Steele himself.
And if you, you know, according to like when he's been put under most pressure about it, doesn't even I don't think would not even stand behind what he's saying.
He just basically however he collected it.
He didn't even go to Russia.
He paid some people or he he spoke to some people.
They told him a bunch of wild stuff for whatever reason.
And but that like we know at minimum that the Steele dossier played a role in getting a FISA warrant on Carter Page.
Mm hmm.
All right.
And then so what about Trump Jr. and the meeting at the Trump Tower?
It seemed like he was at least trying to commit treason.
Yeah.
OK, so this is.
So, by the way, just to finish up on on Papadopoulos.
Sure.
Papadopoulos's wife now says that that that the reason Papadopoulos pled guilty is because Mueller was threatening to charge him for being an unregistered foreign agent of Israel.
And so that's why Papadopoulos pled guilty to lying to the FBI, kind of like Flynn.
Because actually, what's interesting about Papadopoulos is the FBI didn't ask him about his contacts with Massoud and about hearing about stolen emails.
He volunteered that to the FBI.
What?
Wait, does this mean that being an unregistered agent of Israel in Washington, D.C. is a crime?
Well, I mean, can you imagine if that was the thing now?
Yeah, exactly.
Right.
That's a good point.
Well, yeah.
So that's what a parent that's what a coordinate, Papadopoulos's wife.
That's what Mueller was threatening to charge him with.
So he pled guilty to his lying to the FBI.
They're going to have to shut down the AEI.
All right.
I'm sorry.
Go ahead.
And and she also says, more importantly, that he took no part in any collusion scheme and that he has nothing to offer Mueller on collusion.
OK, so that's Papadopoulos and that takes care of him.
Now, for a lot of people, he was sort of the hope for many people that he was going to own up to some kind of collusion thing.
Because we are told he heard about stolen emails before the DNC emails were publicly released.
But according to his wife, is at least they don't have anything to offer there.
So then the last major pillar of collusion claims is this Trump Tower meeting in June 2016, when a Russian lawyer, Natalia Veselnitskaya, meets with Trump Jr., Paul Manafort and Jared Kushner.
And because there was an email from the publicist who set up the meeting, this guy, Rob Goldstone, who wrote Trump Jr. on behalf of some Russian clients of his, that Russia was offering compromising information on Hillary Clinton and that this was part of the Russian government's support of Donald Trump.
But that has been taken as exhibit A in this whole thing, because you have it right there in an email.
You have Trump Jr. being told that the Russian government is supporting Trump, that they're offering dirt, and Trump Jr. accepting the meeting.
So, boom, there's your smoking gun.
But if you look, first of all, at the email that this music publicist, Goldstone, sent.
And by the way, put aside that if this was like the makings of a conspiracy between the Kremlin and Trump, it's pretty bizarre it would go through a music publicist, writing in an email openly that the Russian government is supporting your father.
That seems to be a giveaway that maybe this is not the high-level conspiracy that we've been told it is.
But anyway, even the email itself, it says, Goldstone is offering official documents and information that would incriminate Hillary in her dealings with Russia, unquote.
Okay, so Goldstone was not offering stolen emails.
So basically what Goldstone was offering had nothing to do with the stolen information that ended up being at the heart of this whole scandal, which is stolen DNC emails.
And then, so according to their account, the meeting ended after 20 minutes because Veselnitskaya had no information, had no dirt on Hillary Clinton and only wanted to talk about repealing the Magnitsky Act sanctions, which in response to those sanctions, Russia had banned U.S. adoptions of Russian children.
And so Trump Jr. and the rest of them didn't understand what he was talking about, and according to them, ended the meeting very quickly.
I want to follow up and make sure I understand here.
The part about the incriminating information they supposedly had about Hillary and her dealings with Russia, that was what in their own claims now was their puffed up attempt.
That was their excuse for the meeting, but not what the meeting was really about.
But they're not saying that they really do have that.
That's exactly right.
So Goldstone explained in testimony to the Senate Judiciary Committee, and he used that exact word, puffed up.
He said that – so basically his client was Amin Agalarov, who is a Russian pop singer, and the son of Aras Agalarov, who was a billionaire who put on the 2015 Miss Universe pageant with Trump in Moscow.
And so his client, Amin, asked Goldstone to get a meeting with Don Jr. on behalf of Natalia Veselnitskaya.
And so Goldstone says, you know, Amin didn't offer me any information really, so I puffed it up and I did that to get the meeting.
So if that's correct, then basically what we see as exhibit A in this whole thing is just a publicist's effort to try to secure a meeting for his client.
And based on the fact also that Veselnitskaya has been working on this issue for years, she's been lobbying against the Magnitsky Act for a long time, works with the Russian firm Previzon, which has been fighting a lawsuit based on those sanctions.
So much so, Veselnitskaya has been so involved in the efforts against the Magnitsky Act that her firm even hired Fusion GPS to fight it.
Fusion GPS is the same firm that was hired by the DNC in the Hillary Clinton campaign and then hired Christopher Steele for the Trump dossier.
And in fact, Veselnitskaya, on that same trip, she meets with officials from Fusion GPS.
So the same firm that ended up providing the dossier that fueled this entire collusion thing was also working with Veselnitskaya, the Russian lawyer, at the meeting that has fueled this whole collusion thing.
And they've been – and her work with them on the issue of sanctions – and she was working with Fusion GPS on the issue of sanctions.
So it's bizarre, but in fact, the fact that Veselnitskaya was working with the firm that ended up accusing Trump of being a Russian puppet shows just how involved she has been on this issue of sanctions.
Yeah.
Well, you know, this ain't factual, but it's just how it seems to me, is that – well, it's the same thing too, but I guess what I'm talking about is just sort of my appraisal of it.
Is it's just like Iraq in 2002, where they got a million of them, but none of them amount to anything.
It's ten times zero.
It's still zero.
And yet, you're supposed to just be convinced and convicted anyway that that damn Saddam Putin, he's behind this.
We know he's a bad guy and something's got to be done before too late.
And yet, there's one big thing that's still standing out.
And just like in Iraq War II, come on, you've got to admit, everybody knows he must have at least one warehouse full of mustard gas somewhere or something, you know, that he's saving for a rainy day.
And in this case, it's the DNC emails that must have been the GRU, military intelligence of the Russians.
And they leaked these completely factual emails showing Hillary Clinton for who she is and how is she supposed to survive that kind of sabotage.
And so what do you say about that?
Well, I think what's important to note there is that we still don't know who did it.
I mean, we, the U.S. intelligence community has told us that it was the Russians.
But still, you know, way more than a year later, after they accused Russia of it, they still haven't shown us any evidence that the Russians did it.
And no one's been indicted for it.
So it's like, and that's the one part of this whole thing that is actually, I think, a legitimate area of inquiry.
This whole thing about Trump contacts with Russians, the more we learn about it, there's nothing there.
I mean, Carter Page, I mean, he was scrutinized, but he had cooperated.
Papadopoulos, he sparked the investigation, we're told.
But apparently all he was told was not even about emails, was just some vague thing about Russians having some information on Hillary.
So the scrutiny of Trump-Russia ties to itself, there's no actual basis for it.
There is a basis for scrutinizing who stole the emails, because someone did steal emails, whether they were leaked or whether they were hacked, someone did it.
But yet this underlying crime is something that, you know, more than a year and we still know nothing about.
And yet in its place, it's been filled with all these fringe Trump characters like Papadopoulos and Carter Page and the absurd indictment of a Russian troll farm for making some silly ads that nobody saw.
So everything has pretty much gone away from the underlying crime, whoever did it, whether it was a leak or whether it was a hack.was already coming out on WikiLeaks anyway.
And these guys were basically adulterating it and trying to add, you know, breadcrumbs leading back to the Russians, something like that.
Yeah, like they put Cyrillic, they put Cyrillic inside the metadata.
They put obvious references to Russian history and culture in it.
So it seemed it's definitely curious.
You know, this is a topic I don't actually know that much about.
So, you know, like obviously Ray and Bill Binney, the former NSA expert, say that this was a leak and they base that on their analysis of the download speed at which the files were exfiltrated from the DNC.
I don't know about that.
I just don't know.
But, you know, certainly I think the questions that they've raised are important.
And it's just interesting to me that the issue that's at the heart of all this is something we still know nothing about.
Yeah, well, and in fact, when they released their intelligence conclusion thingamajig in January 2017, it just said in there that, hey, listen, just because we say so in here should not be taken as an assertion of fact in any way.
It had the most blatant disclaimer in the world.
And in fact, it was just like with the sarin gas attack of 2013.
And I guess now that I think about the last couple, too, you don't even have an official CIA estimate.
You have a government assessment that comes from the White House that's put together by handpicked political people.
And so and that was even their words.
Right.
We got a handpicked group from the CIA, FBI and NSA to come together and say this.
And even then they were full of all kinds of weasel words about moderate confidence.
And just because I say so doesn't mean quote me and all this.
Exactly.
Handpicked, by the way, were the words of James Clapper.
James Clapper, who has said that he thinks Russians are genetically predisposed to deception.
James Clapper, who has played a curious role in this whole thing, along with someone who has not gotten enough scrutiny, but he should and he will get more, which is John Brennan, who headed the CIA during the summer, during that pivotal summer when this investigation was reportedly sparked.
But, you know, Brennan met with British counterparts, British counterparts who probably had ties to Christopher Steele.
Brennan delivered an envelope to President Obama saying that there was high level intelligence that Putin had directly ordered this interference campaign.
Brennan has played a really curious role.
And look, and he's not doing himself any favors now by, you know, he's a paid analyst for MSNBC and NBC News, which is, you know, especially MSNBC has been the leading network to fuel this conspiracy theory.
And he goes out and denounces Trump at every second.
And so it's Clapper.
So both these guys are not doing themselves any favors and giving the Trump camp plenty of fodder to be suspicious of some sort of, you know, whether you like the term deep state or not, some sort of intelligence community plot against Trump.
Yeah.
Well, I mean, someone should let him know he's got the right to remain silent.
He doesn't have to.
But, you know, it's just looking like that.
But there's a paid analyst gig at NBC News for Brennan.
There's a paid CNN analyst gig for Clapper.
And Clapper has a book to sell now, which he's doing.
And, you know, you can say the same thing similar about Comey, who, you know, he's been milking this for his own advantage, selling his own book as well.
Crazy.
And, you know, seriously, after all this we've been through here and been over on the show today, I was listening to NPR news the other day, as I like to do when I'm driving around sometimes for fun, you know, and in the most dire tones, they talk about the Russian collusion of buying ads on social media.
And anyway, to our guest talking about the evil Russian plot against us.
And that was all they had.
That was all they even tried to use was this.
And you just barely even mentioned it because it's so barely even worth mention.
But there are indictments here of this troll farm and how don't you know that they used the, you know, magical FSB control of the Internet and Facebook ads to brainwash people's right wing uncle into voting for Donald Trump.
I think the ads is probably the stupidest thing about this whole stupid, I mean, the whole scandal is so stupid.
Because it's, I mean, except for the fact that emails were stolen.
Basically nothing out, but we don't know who yet.
Liberated is what they were.
But anyway, yeah.
Well, yeah, sure.
Yeah, yeah.
That's right.
I mean, because you know what, I mean, hey, this is legitimate public interest.
It's not like she's just some private lady.
She's the Secretary of State.
We're talking about the DNC and the and the Hillary Clinton's campaign.
And I guess the Secretary of State emails were separate.
Yeah.
So the Secretary of State emails weren't, weren't, weren't stolen.
Yeah, that was FOIA.
That was Jason Leopold stole those.
But, but the, but John Podesta's emails were stolen and the DNC's emails were stolen.
And yeah, they revealed a, you know, what all of us or at least what a lot of us already knew, which is the DNC was biased against Bernie, that they were uncomfortable with that Hillary's record was going to turn off, you know, important parts of the electorate, that they wanted to hide her Wall Street speeches for good reason.
Because going in front of Wall Street and getting a big payday, she, you know, basically told them how great they were and how she wasn't going to be hard on them if she was president.
Now, you know, I don't even I don't even think the emails, you know, like like they were damning, but they weren't.
I don't think they were like, you know, like a nuclear bomb on the on the Clinton campaign.
I mean, a lot of them were just sort of like bureaucratic internal emails.
They showed things, by the way.
And this is funny.
One of the things that they showed was that the Clinton team during the campaign managed to kill a story that Bloomberg was working on about Bill Clinton getting paid half a million dollars to go to Moscow to give a speech to this firm Renaissance Capital, which was which was fighting, which was fighting the Magnitsky sanctions.
Bill getting paid half a million dollars for that speech.
And around that same time, both Bill and Hillary and Obama opposed those sanctions at the same time.
And so this Bloomberg story, according to the emails that Wikileaks released, was going to tie Hillary's opposition to those sanctions to Bill getting half a million dollars.
That's interesting.
And how did they kill it?
Did it describe what they did to use their influence?
They don't describe it.
But what's funny about that is that case is a reminder that.
But what is it then they congratulate each other for getting it done?
Yes.
It was like a day summary of all the great things that they did that day.
And one of them was, hey, guys, we kill the story from Bloomberg.
I see.
That's awesome.
And this was in what year, by the way?
The speech was in.
I'll have to look this up, Scott.
I can do that while we.
OK, well, she ceased being secretary of state in January 2013.
So that's important context.
We're not just talking about the ex presidents, the former first lady from the 1990s.
We're talking about the lady who had within how many years had been the secretary of state under the current sitting president who was changing the deal here.
Or is this while she was actually the secretary of state?
This was in 2010.
Oh, man.
OK.
So, yeah, that's much worse.
This story just gets crazier and crazier when you realize that, in fact, I mean, maybe there is some financial tie between Trump and Russia that I haven't seen yet.
But all I've seen is that we're told that Russians have bought a lot of condos from Trump.
I'm sure there's some money laundering there, but that doesn't have anything to do with any of these accusations anyway.
Yeah.
And there is a big and there is a Russian.
It's not like he's the sitting secretary of state or anything doing that.
Exactly.
Like there is a Russian oligarch who bought one of Trump's mansions for a lot of money, overpaid for it.
But that was back like years ago before Trump was ever involved in politics.
But whereas this is Bill when his wife, the secretary of state, getting half a million dollars for a firm that is fighting Russian sanctions.
Well, of course, I mean, it's on the record, right, that he or she is collaborating with British spies and with, as you mentioned in your article, with the Ukrainians.
And I'm not sure if the Estonians, somewhere in there, the Estonians were coming up with stuff on Trump.
But I don't know where in the intelligence stream that went exactly.
Yeah.
And we also know that that the Emiratis and Israelis were meeting with Trump people during the campaign and offering them help, you know, so.
But it's the Russia part that we're all supposed to be obsessed over, even though there is, as we've been talking about, there's no proof that any of it was was remotely connected to some kind of Kremlin Trump conspiracy, which was not surprising because it's just the the scenario itself, even though it's the dominant prevailing.
It's the dominant preoccupation right now.
It's it's on itself.
It seems pretty it's so far fetched.
Like, what are Trump and the Kremlin going to collaborate about, like the timing of released emails?
And of course, if they did, wouldn't there not be all these like intercepts of their calls?
I mean, like we know, you know, the NSA got Flynn's call with Kislyak.
So why not all these other calls between Trump people and Russians?
Well, they did have that fake story about the computers talking to each other.
Franklin for in, I guess it was in slate that they ran.
And remember to now this is so silly and stupid that everybody just dismisses it and forgets it.
It almost makes you sound foolish if you bring it up.
But at the time, right after the election, they were still talking about and it was reported it was the post or something very close along those lines that confirmed that the Hillary Clinton campaign was still interesting.
In figuring out if they could get the CIA to brief the Electoral College to throw this vote somehow into the House of Representatives to go to Paul Ryan or Colin Powell or something like that, or maybe even still Hillary herself.
And even though even at the time that sounded crazy, because don't these people haven't they ever taken civics?
Don't they know where these electors come from?
These electors are not going to turn on Donald Trump.
Give me a break.
They come from the people who just voted for him in the state party systems and stuff.
You know, there's no way that was going to happen.
But it was, you know, even after it was leaked and sounded ridiculous, the Clinton people were quoted saying, yes, they are very interested in trying to see if they can figure out whether to do this, etc, etc.
They weren't even shy about it.
They were trying to portray this as like a just thing to do.
So it really does start to look like a plot between the leaders of the FBI, the CIA and the Clinton people to frame up this fake Russia story about Donald Trump.
And after all, you know, hopeful fools and ridiculous neocons were really terrified when he was saying things like, maybe we should be even handed in Palestine.
Maybe Germany and South Korea should pull their own weight in the world instead of, you know, being on America's dime all the time and this kind of thing.
And it really set the establishment into a panic.
I think quite an overblown one.
But they seem to really be worried that there was a Ron Paul in there somewhere who is going to undo the empire.
And so I don't know.
And it sounds like trutherism on the other side.
But which is more plausible at this point?
I think all that's fair.
I think, I mean, now it turns out that I think a lot of what Trump said was a con.
I mean, I think somehow he tapped into what people in the states needed to win were thinking.
They were skeptical of foreign wars.
They were tired of fighting in foreign wars.
There's a study that shows that there was a correlation between communities suffering higher military casualty rates and support for Trump because Trump to them was perceived as the antiwar candidate.
Now, of course, that was a con by Trump.
But certainly the con he was putting on alarmed enough people in powerful positions to, you know, to at least sign letters of voice and concern about him and possibly do things like we're talking about, which is work behind the scenes to undermine him.
And by the way.
And regular Americans, they don't know or care anything about NATO.
What's NATO?
But to Washington, D.C., it's the single most important project on the planet forever.
And they will not stand for anybody talking bad about it or or working to scheme against it and its expansion at all costs and at Russia's expense.
Yeah.
And by the way, you know, this like there are reasons to to speculate, like just how like how long intelligence officials pursued their potential campaign against Trump to undermine Trump even through his even after his election.
So so you talked about that story about the electoral college.
Then we know.
I mean, the reason we know about the Steele dossier comes from the fact that it looks quite likely that James Clapper or John Brennan leaked that to CNN and to BuzzFeed and actually briefed Trump on the Steele dossier for the purpose of giving themselves an excuse to leak it.
Because basically they we you know, before Trump took office in January, Brennan and Comey and and and Clapper set up a meeting with Trump and Trump Tower.
And they brief him not even on the Steele dossier's existence, but they brief him on the most salacious detail possible.
They brief him on the P tape.
They say, Mr. President, you know, we've received this report.
It says that there's there's a videotape of you with prostitutes urinating on a bed.
And we don't know this is true or not, but we're just briefing you that that this is out there.
And then days later, somebody leaks that to CNN that Trump was briefed on that.
So basically, it's like and that that gave CNN an excuse.
So basically, that briefing with Trump gave him an excuse to report on it.
And that led to BuzzFeed publishing the whole thing.
It's entirely.
So it's quite possible that Brennan and Clapper are responsible for getting the Steele dossier out there into the public.
Hmm.
And then was there was there any indication about the chain of custody between them and BuzzFeed, for example?
We don't know who leaked it to BuzzFeed.
We do know that somebody tied to Steele gave it to an aide to John McCain.
And then John McCain then gave it to, I believe, like John McCain gave it to a U.S. intelligence official.
I forgot who might have been Comey.
It was either Comey, Clapper or Brennan.
But yeah, like the chain of custody certainly is strange.
But we don't know who leaked it.
We don't know who leaked the whole dossier to BuzzFeed.
It very well may have come from the person who gave it to McCain.
But we do know that somebody close to Clapper, Brennan and Comey, if not Brennan or Clapper themselves, leaked the information to CNN that Trump was briefed on the P-tape, which then gave BuzzFeed the pretext to publish the dossier in full.
And by the way, the House Intelligence Committee, they accused Clapper of misleading them about his contacts with CNN, which is a clue that it was Clapper who leaked that meeting with Trump.
So basically, according to this narrative here, Clapper and Brennan set up a briefing with Trump for the purpose of leaking to the media this crazy P-tape thing about him, which is pretty cynical.
Hey, what the hell?
We're already over an hour.
So let me ask you one more thing.
What about, and this isn't a technical issue, this is more just overall appreciation of the situation.
What about the fact of everybody between you and the right, basically, is completely in on this up to their eyeballs and will never let it go?
That to them, the entire Trump phenomenon is a Russian plot against America.
And they're going to believe that from now on.
And there's millions of them, right?
Well, you know, I don't have any hope for the pundits, like liberal pundits who have been pushing this, because their existence is kind of predicated on this being true.
Because for them to not blame Russia and actually look at the factors that led to Trump winning, they'd have to take a look seriously at the sort of neoliberal consensus that they've been promoting that they're a part of for many years.
That many of Trump's voters believe that they're rebelling against, whether that was accurate or not.
Many people voted for Trump.
Which included millions of people who voted for Obama for the same reason.
Hey, he's not Hillary Clinton.
He's a black guy.
I don't know.
Maybe he'll care about me.
And it's the same crazy reason that they switched to Trump.
Well, at least he's not a Clinton or a Bush, right?
Yeah.
Obama promised hope and change.
Trump promised to make America great again.
Hillary Clinton, what was her message?
It was basically it was it was her turn, you know, that that that she was that like her and her people were sort of entitled to this.
And it didn't it didn't unfortunately convince enough people.
And and so I don't have any hope for the pundits, but, you know, I have hope for common sense and for average people who aren't encumbered by their by their ideological financial stake in this whole narrative.
Who don't need to latch onto it as a as a means of protecting their own privilege and as a means of avoiding the lessons that we all need to learn from Trump's victory.
And, you know, it's unfortunately right now it's like there's a media sort of lockdown on like the parameters of discussion where we have to assume that Russia definitely interfered in this massive campaign.
And we have to we have strong grounds to suspect that Trump was involved.
And we can't question the the evidence free claims of our intelligence officials, nor their motives.
But, you know, I think as time goes on, you know, you have to hope at least that that that that stranglehold will be harder and harder to maintain.
Yeah.
All right.
Hey, thanks so much for coming back on the show to talk about this, Aaron.
Thanks, Scott.
Thanks for having me.
Really appreciate it.
That's Aaron Maté, everybody.
He is a host and producer for The Real News.
And that is therealnews.com, of course.
And here he is writing in The Nation.
Again, the Mueller indictments still don't add up to collusion.
All right, you guys, and that's the show.
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