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 their army, but we killing them.
We be on CNN like, say our name, bitch, say it, say it three times.
The meeting of the largest armies in the history of the world.
Then there's going to be an invasion.
All right, you guys, introducing David Stockman.
He used to be a congressman and Reaganite economic advisor in the early Ronald Reagan years.
And then, of course, had a career on Wall Street.
You see him often on CNBC and these kinds of financial news channels, complaining about the wars every chance he gets.
And he writes at David Stockman's Contra Corner on the Internet.
We republish a lot of it at Antiwar.com.
His books are The Great Deformation and Peak Trump.
Welcome back to the show.
How you doing?
Very good to be with you, Scott.
Very happy to have you here.
And you really are one of our best guys.
I'm very happy to publish you all the time and to read your stuff.
It's always so great.
And not least on Russiagate.
This one is called Not Mueller Time At Last.
I always say Mueller because that was the old airport here in Austin was the Mueller Airport.
Anyway, Not Mueller Time At Last.
You know, geez, I think even for you and me, we were probably a little bit disappointed in just how lousy Robert Mueller's performance before the Congress was last week.
What did you think was behind that?
Well, the performance was lousy because the underlying case was lousy.
It was a hoax from the beginning.
And not just on the issue of collusion narrowly framed in the sense that Trump or some campaign operative were in direct cahoots with the Russians in efforts to influence voters in the election outcome.
Obviously that never had a snowball's chance in the hot place of being correct.
And Mueller's report knocked that down when it came out two months ago.
But I'm getting at in this latest article in response to his pathetic appearance before the House and Senate, the larger issue, and that is the whole argument that there was a huge, as he called it, multiple systematic efforts to interfere in the 2016 election by the Russian state, Russian intelligence, and that, you know, implicitly, because he couldn't prove it, but implicitly that somehow threw the election to Trump.
And what I have gotten, what I've dug into in both my book, Pete Trump, and in this latest piece is, you know, the case is so threadbare that what you need to do is lay out one by one the key pillars of this whole meddling case or tent poles, let's say.
And when you do that, I think there are six of them, they easily knock them down.
And of course, when you knock down the pillars or the tent poles, the whole thing comes apart.
And what you have left is an entirely different case, and that is, how did this phony case come about?
And the real meddling actually happened not from the Kremlin, but on this side of the, you know, Atlantic pond by deep state operatives led by John Brennan, the former director of the CIA.
Okay.
So I think today our purpose ought to be to look at the six, what I call tent poles, of the Russia meddling case, knock them down, which you can do easily, and therefore, you know, clear up the picture, which is really one that's very worrisome and dangerous, and that is, a Republican candidate who, you know, was a random fluke, nevertheless, had the good sense to see that we don't need to start Cold War 2.0, that Russia is no threat to America, or even Europe, for that matter, and that the order of the day was rapprochement and cooperating with them to try to extract ourselves from the mess in Syria and the Middle East, and recognize that we had no business meddling in the Ukraine in the first place.
Now, those are the things that Trump said during the campaign.
It drove, you know, set off the alarms in the intelligence agency and the whole agencies and the whole warfare state apparatus that if this guy was elected, he might move the world towards peace and, you know, undercut the case for the $600 billion defense budget that they had then.
So let's go to the six pillars.
The first one is the DNC emails, which allegedly were done by nefarious Kremlin operatives, GRU intelligence agents.
But I think the evidence is clear that this was a leak, not a hack, that William Binney, who is considered the father of modern electronic surveillance and was at the NSA for decades and decades, has done a forensic analysis that I think overwhelmingly proves that they couldn't have hacked these emails at the speed that the documents indicate from 5,000 or even 1,000 miles away, that it was a local download on some kind of thumb drive done by someone in the DNC apparatus who didn't like the way the campaign was going and probably a pro Bernie Sanders operative.
The point is that those computers were never even examined by the FBI or any other agency in the so-called 17 intelligence agencies.
The case that it was Russian intrusion or hacking, it came entirely from a paid DNC contractor by the name of CrowdStrike, who, as many people know, is run by a fanatical anti-Putin Russian whose family left decades ago.
And, you know, the underlying point, which I think is critical, is really the DNC hack is the most serious charge that underlies this meddling case.
If it were a hack by Russian intelligence, there would be a record in that NSA, NASA record, because they intercept everything that comes over the Internet into this country.
And if they had, let's call it the smoking intercept, that would have been known long ago.
In fact, Mueller could have asked for that day one on the job when he was appointed in 2017, and none of this, you know, gong show would have been necessary.
It was either there or wasn't.
Well, obviously it wasn't, because he didn't find it.
He didn't even ask for it, and it never leaked, all of which would have occurred.
So the point is this first tentpole, you know, falls on its face.
There never was a hack.
It was a leak.
Hang on just one second.
So you're constantly buying things from Amazon.com.
Well, that makes sense.
They bring it right to your house.
So what you do, though, is click through from the link in the right-hand margin at ScottHorton.org, and I'll get a little bit of a kickback from Amazon's end of the sale.
Won't cost you a thing.
Nice little way to help support the show.
Again, that's right there in the margin at ScottHorton.org.
So, you know, I talked with Benny about this, and certainly the part that to me is ironclad is that whatever happened here, essentially the way I think he put it to me and the way Jeffrey Carr put it to me back in 2016 was no one by examining the server could really prove who had done it, because all that could be fake.
There's really only one organization in the world that would absolutely know, and it's what you're talking about.
The National Security Agency has godlike omniscience over every one and zero, every packet going over the Internet at all times.
They can rewind it and look at whatever they want and see just who used what VPN to hack into what at whatever leisurely pace they feel like.
And so they would have the ironclad answer.
Black or white, up or down, yes or no, simple as that.
And we don't have that from them.
However, I want to say about the speed, you know, I've talked with Benny about that too, and I'm no computer genius, so I'm not in a very good position to cross-examine them and so forth, but I tried to do my best just a couple of months ago.
I talked with Ray and Bill both again, and I did get some comments from some computer geniuses in the audience saying that, you know what, I'm not so convinced of that.
You know, just because it was supposedly the GRU behind it doesn't mean that they would have had to exfiltrate the data to Russia straight from the server.
They could have, you know, taken over a computer nearby and then, you know, exfiltrated the data to there and then did it, and that these speeds are not so ironclad, proven, must have been a thumb drive thing.
So I don't know about that, but I think there's room for debate about that.
And, you know, I'm not so sure that Benny is even 100% ironclad about the way that he talks about it.
I mean, when he was on the show, he did kind of say, well, you know, this is the best I can tell, and I'm willing to be criticized here in a pretty open way.
So anyway, I just wanted to bring that up because I see a lot of that like, hey, Benny says, and I think certainly half of what he says is indisputable there, about the NSA would know for a fact, but the part about the thumb drive I would like to see resolved by, you know, really high-level computer geniuses arguing loudly with each other, you know?
Yeah, well, that may be, but I think the first point is the determinative point, and that is NASA would have a record because everything that courses through the Internet coming into this country from abroad is captured and stored in these massive server farms that we as taxpayers pay for.
So the record is there, the intercept is there, the footprints are there if it happened, and obviously it didn't because that would have come to light.
Totally agree, totally agree.
You know, and also the silly argument that they, well, maybe it's not been made available, it wasn't even hinted at in the Mueller report, it hasn't been leaked because they're trying to protect sources and uses.
That's, you know, that's idiotic.
Yeah, I don't believe that for a minute.
Everybody knows since 2013 that, you know, all the Internet traffic is intercepted, so you're not protecting anything, you're not, you know, safeguarding some kind of great state secret.
And by the way, let me say here too, David, real quick that, you know, Craig Murray said on this show that he met the leaker from the DNC stuff.
He seemed to claim to know that the Podesta leak was also from the American intelligence community.
But I have pseudo, sort of, kind of confirmation, Gareth Porter and Phil Giraldi both say that they were there at the dinner that night where Craig Murray left early and had this important meeting.
And now he didn't say, as the Daily Mail falsely reported, that he received the leak, but he did say that he met in the woods with the leaker in Washington, D.C. and talked all about it and can verify 100% for all of us that this person has no tie whatsoever to Russia, that this was from internal.
And he did not imply that it was Seth Rich, by the way.
He just said this was internal to the Democratic Party.
Well, there could be dozens and hundreds of people who were in the Democratic apparatus who were pro-Bernie rather than pro-Hillary, and they saw how the thing was being rigged, and somebody probably got extremely upset about it, and the rest is history.
But the point is that that is a seminal event.
If they can't prove even that the act occurred by Russia, if there isn't an NSA intercept, then I think we move on to the others, and they're much easier to knock down and even flimsier.
The St. Petersburg Troll Farm.
I've spent a lot of time on that.
I wrote it up at length in the book.
It wasn't a Kremlin operation to begin with.
It was established in the U.S. District Court when Concord Management, the ownership company of the Troll Farm, decided to contest the Mueller indictment of the 13 ham sandwiches that worked there.
And essentially Mueller and his team had been put under a gag order by a U.S. district judge.
You can't say that the Kremlin had anything to do with this Troll Farm because you haven't supplied a shred of evidence.
Now, the fact is I call it a hobby farm.
The guy, so-called Putin's cook, a food industry entrepreneur who became a second-tier oligarch and a small-time billionaire in Russia, is basically an extreme nationalist Russian who established his little, you know, internet trolling operation like all of them have in Russia to fight the internal wars.
And he really got P.O.'d, let's say, when the Ukraine coup occurred in February 2014 and turned his little Troll Farm in the external direction internationally and started to take shots at the U.S. because he well understood that Washington was behind this coup.
So as it got into the election, he staffed it up.
I've looked at all of this.
You know, these people were paid $4, $5, $6 an hour to sit at a desk 12 hours a day hacking out social media messages on Facebook and Twitter and all the rest of them.
Most of it was done in English as a third language.
You know, the volume of what they put out sounds large when taken in the abstract, but when put in the context of the massive traffic over the social media organs or networks, it's trivial.
You know, during the 17 months in which allegedly 80,000 messages were posted on Facebook, overall 33 trillion messages were posted on Facebook.
So, you know, it's not even a drop of sand, a grain of sand in the ocean.
More importantly, if you look at the content of these social messages, most of them were kind of random.
Some were, you know, pro-gun control, some were anti, some were pro-Black Lives Matter, some were kind of quasi-racist, some were Islamophobic, some were left-wing oriented.
Most of them didn't mention either candidate.
I mean, it's just a bunch of damn nonsense written by amateurs.
When you look at allegedly this caused people to go to rallies in Florida and a couple other states, we looked into that in my book.
I posted the pictures, but you can find them on the Internet.
There are about four people standing around in the middle of a small park in Florida cities holding up a sign.
You know, so this is election influence.
Of course it isn't.
It's just complete nonsense.
They hyped up this troll farm, which according to some was even in the commercial business of, you know, posting clickbait in order to generate revenue from advertisers.
You know, I don't know whether you can prove that or not, but the point is— Hey, it makes sense.
I think we all wish we had done some of that clickbait during 2016 and made some money there.
Yeah, I know.
The point is if you scratch a Democrat or an ever-Trumper or even the lazy people in the mainstream media that just keep regurgitating this, they all point to these social media campaigns as if they were something ominous, nefarious, extensive, systematic, organized, and so forth.
And it's not—you know, it's the opposite of that.
It's a joke.
You can boil it down to four letters.
It's a complete joke.
And now even a U.S. judge has put the kibosh on that.
Well, and even in the report, they say, well, you know, this guy that owns this company is widely reported to have links to Putin.
And then the footnote is a New York Times story where they say, look, here they are having dinner together or something.
I know.
That's right.
One is the New York Times story.
The second is a couple of pictures with Putin.
Well, I mean, if you're in Russia, you get your picture taken with Putin.
Frankly, if you're an oligarch in Russia, you're either in jail because you don't tithe, or if you're not in jail, you're doing things to make nice to Putin.
But so what?
This guy clearly—I mean, if you look at this, and people actually knew about the St. Petersburg troll farm long before 2016.
There were big pieces written up about it in The New Yorker and elsewhere.
And it was simply part of the political wars fought in Russia by the oligarchs who, you know, in the U.S., the billionaires own the sports team.
I guess in Russia they all operate a troll farm in order to fight actual and perceived enemies over the Internet.
Anyway, that's complete nonsense.
The third tentpole, as I call it, is the Carter Page slash FISA warrant thing.
You can't get anything more threadbare than that, starting with the fact that Carter Page never had a private conversation with Donald Trump, never met him, was drafted onto this advisory committee that they threw together at the last minute in March 2016.
And, of course, there's a hilarious reason why that committee of, I think, 67 no-count people you never heard of was formed.
And that is, a few weeks earlier, Trump had been asked, candidate Trump, where he got his foreign policy advice.
And he said, by watching cable TV.
Well, you know, that caused a lot of, you know, laughter in the mainstream.
So they tried to cover, you know, the candidate's words a little bit with his advisory committee.
But it met once.
It was a photo op.
That was the end of it.
Carter Page was just a entrepreneur who had been a broker, Merrill Lynch broker, in Russia in the early 2000s, knew a little bit about energy, had a few contacts there.
Left Merrill Lynch, set up a shingle to try to be an international energy consultant.
Basically failed, lost most of his money.
And, you know, that's the story.
And when the Trump campaign came along, he sent in his resume in the fall of 2015.
They said, we're not really interested.
It was only early in 2016 when they were desperate for somebody with some international expertise.
All of the Republican foreign policy people were boycotting the campaign.
They were all never Trumpers.
You end up with Carter Page.
So, again, that thing was entirely concocted.
It was merely an excuse to wiretap, in exquisite terms, the Trump campaign and Carter Page, who couldn't possibly, possibly have been a Russian agent.
Since, you know, the other part that has come out quite extensively is that there was an attempt to recruit him in 2013 and 2014 by some Russian agents posing as UN diplomats or something like that.
And the FBI itself investigated him and concluded that he hadn't collaborated at all and that the Russians actually thought he was kind of an idiot and weren't even interested in recruiting him after a few conversations.
So, all of this is known.
And yet, somehow, the mainstream media can't, you know, make that clear.
And for all the 475 pages or whatever it was of the Mueller report, you know, there's no clarification at all that there was zero case for a wiretap on Carter Page.
In fact, you know, the pattern, the practice was that if the intelligence community felt that a campaign was being infiltrated by a nefarious agent of a hostile foreign power, the first thing they would do is go to the candidate and share the concern and talk about how, you know, this suspicion could be resolved or handled.
They didn't do that.
They didn't go to Trump.
They weren't interested in going to Trump.
They were interested in undermining Trump, which is, you know, the underlying predicate.
Yeah, and you know what, that's really worth emphasizing here.
We're not talking about the Green Party candidate or something like that.
Not that that would be okay, but we're talking about a major party candidate.
And in fact, it was clear from, you know, by 2015, by the end of 2015, that he was going to be the nominee.
Who was going to stop him?
Rubio?
I mean, so he was the major party candidate the whole time.
And this is a huge, this is, I would like to say, an unprecedented amount of chutzpah on the part of the FBI and the CIA to take him on in this way.
And that is the number one indicator, as you say.
If they really were suspicious at all that the Russians were trying to get at Trump, they should have gone straight to Trump to warn him.
You got to fire all these guys.
The Russians are out to get you, to compromise you, to blackmail you somehow.
There's an operation going on here, and you need to be aware of it, Mr. possible president-elect here.
But nope.
Yeah, you know, and what reinforces that is that who Carter Page was, he wasn't like a lieutenant.
He wasn't head of the campaign.
He wasn't second string, third string, or fourth string.
He was a nobody.
They weren't even paying him.
They put his name on the advisory committee because they had a press conference and photo op and then moved on after March 2016.
And yet, on the basis of that, to go directly to a FISA warrant and wiretap rather than going to the leadership of the campaign or the candidate himself is the smoke and gun, so to speak.
It tells you all you need to know about what the real motivation was.
Now, you have the same thing on the Trump Tower meeting.
I mean, you turn on CNN or MSNBC or any of the rest of them, and the first thing that comes out is the alleged sinister meeting at Trump Tower.
Well, the fact of the matter is that the lawyer who was there, who was at the center of this whole thing, was actually in the United States defending a company that was a victim of the Magnitsky Act that, you know, was part of, a victim, I guess I should say, of the whole Bill Browder hoax that led to the Magnitsky Act.
And that really, the point I'm trying to make is that really is about U.S. meddling in Russia's internal affairs.
That's what the Magnitsky Act is about.
So she wasn't here to, you know, conspire with the Trump campaign about U.S. elections.
She was here to make a case to the Republican candidate or the Arab, you know, nominee apparent at that time, June 2016, that this Magnitsky Act was a terrible thing and the sanctions that came through it were bad and it led to, you know, the retaliation by Putin against American adoptions and the rest of it.
But this is all, you know, the evidence is all there.
This was entirely a harmless meeting and it turns out that the dirt she had that had been promised to Don Jr. was basically stuff they got from the FEC, the Federal Elections Commission, about certain Democrats who had been big contributors to the Clintons and Hillary, who had been investors in Bill Browder's, you know, funds that stole billions of dollars from the Russian people.
And it turns out she got her supposed dirt from Glenn Simpson.
Yeah.
And the same guy.
Not only that, you know, it's not only she got the dirt from Fusion GPS, but she met with Glenn Simpson before on the very day that she went to Trump Tower for this meeting to talk about how bad U.S. meddling in Russian affairs was.
You can't think of anything that's more upside down, more ironic than the deep pinning, you know, the Trump Tower meeting as some key evidence point about Russian meddling.
Then, of course, we have number five is the Steele dossier.
It's pure garbage.
You don't, by now, everybody knows that.
It's not worth getting into.
Number six, I think, is the most, one that I find the most compelling.
And that's the baby George Papadopoulos, you know, CIA setup.
Clearly, he was even less important in the scheme of life than Carter Page.
He was 29 years old, was out of graduate school a couple of years ago, had a couple of half-assed jobs, and again, got put on this committee.
And was then, you know, subject to this entrapment effort, I guess you would call it, by Professor Mifsud and the key CIA operative in London, Steph Helper.
And it's all very clear that this guy had no idea what he was getting into.
They were deliberately trying to entrap him.
And as it turned out, that's where the whole Australian channel was activated, and the messages were sent at the time of the leaks, you know.
The meetings happened in London in April and May, but nothing really was sent by Downer, the Australian diplomat, to the State Department until actually the DNC emails were leaked in late July.
So the reason I find this one especially, well, first of all, it's ridiculous, but the reason I find it especially intriguing is that this Stephen Helper had been collecting millions of dollars writing worthless papers for an analysis agency buried somewhere deep in the DoD, and had been plying this trade for decades and decades.
And as a matter of fact, my own little encounter with him in life I think might be of interest to mention here, and that is way back in 1980, during the very end of the Reagan campaign, I had been drafted to be Reagan's sparring partner in the debate rehearsals for the big debate that really determined the 1980 election and then from there the course of history.
And that was the Cleveland debate with Jimmy Carter.
Well, I bring this up because I was out in Michigan running for re-election, minding my own business.
I had been the sparring partner for the debate with John Anderson.
Reagan sort of liked the way it worked because I hit him pretty hard, but I was obviously respectful.
But anyway, he insisted that I come back to Washington and be the debating sparring partner.
And I mention this because I got back to my apartment and on the front door was a huge brown envelope which I took inside, opened it up, and it was a thousand-page briefing book for Jimmy Carter for the presidential debate.
It was his briefing book that had been pilfered either by somebody in the campaign and had been delivered to me.
So I studied the thing for a couple of days and I probably did a better job than I otherwise would have getting Reagan ready.
He won the debate with his famous line, there you go again, Mr. President.
But the end of the story is that the guy, the intermediary who had stolen the briefing book and put it on my doorstep was Steph Alford.
And way back then, his father-in-law was number two at the CIA.
He was already in the apparatus.
I tried to draft him to be head of national security at OMB once I got that job and it turned out I couldn't get him because they were sending him over to the State Department to keep an eye on Al Hay.
I only mention this because it shows this guy's been in the pocket of the deep state of the intelligence operations for the last 40 years.
And you know, it's just another piece of the whole story of what happened here.
And in sum, it was that the leadership of the intelligence community, centered at that time by John Brennan, a terrible, terrible guy, decided that Trump was an existential threat to, let's call it the warfare state, the war party.
That his views on America First, of abandoning regime change, of seeking rapprochement with Russia, of questioning whether NATO had outlived its purpose, which it clearly had, because the Cold War was over for 25 years.
That this couldn't stand and that they would take matters into their own hands and use the apparatus of the intelligence system and this massive surveillance system that we have, that we spend $75 billion a year on, to meddle in the election and then to undermine Trump's presidency, even after he was elected, through all those efforts that were made in November, December, and through January 20.
So, you know, that's the real story here, that the six polls of the meddling story, Russia meddling story, collapsed upon examination.
And what you're left with is the real story, which is the Brennan-led, you know, deep state intervention in the 2016 election.
Now, maybe, finally, at last, we'll get to that, because it looks like the attorney general is, you know, pulling out the stops to get to the bottom of all of the things that transpired that led to this very dangerous breach of the integrity of our election process.
And the utter abuse of power by the intelligence community.
Hold on just one second, be right back.
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All right, well, so I want to get back to that investigation in a second, but I want to focus on what you said there about the motive.
I mean, Trump had said, geez, I don't know why we need NATO.
They should buy more planes from us and focus on counterterrorism more.
He never really said, I would like to abolish NATO or anything like that.
But that's what a lot of these hawks heard, apparently.
And you hear Trump even now all the time compared to Pat Buchanan, when in fact, it was Henry Kissinger that he was listening to, who I guess is five clicks to the left of the neocons now or something.
But what he was saying was essentially an American imperialist nationalist position, which was let's ally with Russia against China.
And so maybe there's a difference of opinion between different think tanks about just who all we should be containing and in which locations.
Brzezinski famously favored playing the great game in Central Asia versus in Mesopotamia.
But that is, I thought, within the three by five index card of allowable opinion when you're talking about differences within different leaders at the CFR and this kind of thing.
I mean, Henry Kissinger is not a paleo conservative.
Right.
Yeah.
You know, that's exactly it.
Trump was basically a non-system actor, had spent his whole life as a real estate speculator and TV personality, host, whatever that show was worth.
I watched it a few times and then found it pretty kind of stupid and boring.
But in any event, he wasn't schooled in what was acceptable opinion and what wasn't.
And that's why it would be obvious to anybody who hadn't been drinking the Kool-Aid for a couple of decades after 1991 that the whole point of NATO was to contain the Soviet Union, to have 50,000 tanks on the Central Front, and that it was no more.
The tanks had been melted down.
The threat was gone.
There was no point in NATO.
Now, Trump didn't exactly say that, but he, you know, raised a question you weren't supposed to raise.
And, you know, we know the whole story about how George Bush, the elder, and Jim Baker promised that NATO wouldn't be expanded by a single inch eastward.
And the next thing they knew, there was 12, 13, 14 countries and statelets added to it right up to Russia's borders.
And, of course, that's what led to Ukraine.
And, by the way, right during that whole discussion, one of the suspicious positions that Trump in his campaign took was that we're not so sure that we're in the right on the Ukraine matter, and that supplying lethal weapons to the Ukrainian government may not be the right thing.
And so they removed that clause that some of the neocon Republicans from Washington had put in the draft of the platform, and that somehow became evidence, another piece of evidence, that, you know, Trump was a Russian agent.
Now, how stupid is that?
I mean, that is weaker than even some of the crazy stuff that McCarthy was saying back in the 1950s.
In other words, you can't even have a variant opinion, a dissenting opinion on something as small as lethal weapons or not to a suspect government in Ukraine that wasn't elected, came to power via coup.
Obvious that we were there all over it.
That wasn't the secret.
And yet even that minor deviation from, you know, the mainstream policy became a cause for suspicion.
It's just further evidence that what this really was about was about foreign policy.
It wasn't about American election.
It was about stopping someone from entering the Oval Office who might raise inconvenient questions because the world had changed mightily.
In other words, regime change was a failure everywhere.
Trump was saying that.
And the same thing about Russia and our overextension as a global policeman.
I didn't want to hear that because, frankly, you wouldn't have a 600 or now we have a 750 billion defense operation if we hadn't conferred upon ourselves the role of global policeman or, you know, the proprietor of empire, however you want to put it.
If we really had America first, a homeland defense in this day and age with all the technology and weapons that we have, you know, we wouldn't need even a $250 billion defense budget to keep the country perfect and safe.
They know that and they can't stand any breach in the case that protects the 750 billion that's there today when 250 billion would do.
This is the $500 billion question.elephant in the room that the deep state, the war party, and all its auxiliaries have to defend because they all live off of it.
All the think tanks in Washington, all the defense contractors, all the self-important House members and senators who run around the world, you know, as some kind of imperial legatees.
All of that depends on maintaining the fiction that the only thing that prevents the world from descending into chaos or World War III is the American empire.
In fact, the American empire is the thing that's likely to trigger it if it ever would happen.
Well, you know, it's this kind of stuff that's doing the most to discredit the establishment.
And, you know, in this one, in a way, kind of no one got hurt, at least so far.
It's worse than the Cold War.
But they, you know, the establishment media and the Democratic Party and all of the proprietors of this Russia hoax, I think, are taking a real black eye for this as they well deserve.
And, you know, it's funny you read, like in The New Yorker, virtually every month they have an article by a very concerned NPR liberal Hillary Clinton lady type decrying right wing and left wing conspiracy theories.
And how people are just devolving into this political ignorance and stupidity and embracing the most fringy of beliefs and views.
But nowhere in there is a recognition at all that, you know, it really was the center, the conservative Democrats and the liberal Republicans who sold us Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden are going to kill you with chemical weapons if we don't start this war.
It was them that sold us that Qaddafi was raping his way across Libya and was going to kill every child in Benghazi if we didn't start a war there.
The same ones who started the war in Syria, backing a bunch of Al-Qaeda terrorists, speaking of John Brennan, backing a bunch of Al-Qaeda terrorists and calling them moderates.
And then pushing this whole Russiagate thing, which to anyone who didn't have a vested interest in believing it, has been the most ridiculous thing from the very beginning.
I agree with Scott.
I agree with all that.
But here's the real downside, the negative, and that is the Democrat mainstream party apparatus was beside itself with grief, let's say, consternation, anger about how in the world did they lose the 2016 election to the very worst candidate the Republican Party had ever featured.
And I think that's true.
I mean, he was a worse candidate in some ways than Goldwater or even Al-Qaeda, and yet they lost.
And so they simply repaired to, defaulted to a predicate that said it couldn't have happened on the up-and-up, on a level playing field.
There had to be some kind of nefarious influence, intervention, and the Russkies were the agent of that outcome.
And so as a result of that, and I laid this out in this article you mentioned at the beginning, they have uncritically accepted every flimsy, silly, stupid, easily refutable piece of the Russiagate narrative.
We've gone through a lot of it here in the last few minutes, because it justifies the predicate that we lost because Russia interfered.
Now, that's bad enough, but it has led to an absolute decimation of what used to be, I would guess I would call it the peace wing of the Democrat Party.
It's gone.
And as a result, the politics now in Washington are really so one-sided.
The Republicans on foreign policy and defense are dominated by the neocons and the warmongers and little Marco Rubio and Mitt Romney and all the rest of them.
And the right-wing think tanks all have a vested interest in keeping this thing going.
And now the Democrats, you know, have become even more virulently anti-Russian and therefore willing to, you know, accept sight on seeing these massive defense increases and various kinds of provocations that the Trump administration itself has done in order to kind of cover its tracks, I guess, canceling the INF Treaty, new sanctions on Russians or, you know, anything you can imagine.
So, really, you know, the political system has fallen, I would say, fallen under the total control of the warfare state as a result of this unfortunate Russian meddling hoax.
Yeah, it's really sad to see a bunch of, you know, liberals, descendants of the anti-Vietnam War, New Left rallying to the CIA against the elected leader.
It's such an interesting dynamic, the way this played out.
And so this is back to the real conspiracy here.
Note, the whole troll thing never happened.
It wasn't really a thing at all.
The hack of the DNC, completely unproven at best and not really the likely explanation for how WikiLeaks got their hands on those documents.
I mean, Aaron Maté and Daniel Lazar and others have gone through that timeline over and over again, right there in the Mueller report.
It makes no sense at all.
The collusion Papadopoulos and Page and Flynn and Sessions and Kislyak and all these things, the Ukraine part of the Republican Party platform, all of that completely debunked even in the Mueller report as all adding up to absolutely nothing, never mind even the obstruction thing.
So which brings us back to the real plot here, which was John Brennan and Jim Comey and their guys launching this counterintelligence investigation and then criminal investigation into the Trump group based on these lies.
And so, you know, you brought up Halper and Misfood.
And of course, there's I'm sorry, what was the guy's name that was the advisor to Cohen who was saying, hey, let's bring back up the Trump Tower issue, who is also an FBI informant, a Sattler.
Yes, yes.
Yeah, I know you're talking about the name doesn't matter.
Sattler, I think, right?
Yeah, yeah, exactly.
Who actually had been an FBI informant for 20 years.
Right.
So, I mean, is it really it's that obvious, isn't it, that this whole thing really was a put on from the beginning?
There really was no Russian plot.
There was only an American FBI, CIA plot to frame up a major party candidate for president.
You hit the nail on the head.
That's the heart of it.
It's upside down from what the, you know, mainstream narrative is.
And hopefully now, though, with the investigation of the investigation now clear to run full steam because the attorney general is, you know, giving them the authority and the resources.
Maybe in the next six, eight, 10 months, enough of this will come out and there's leaks constantly.
We will end up seeing how nefarious this really was.
And maybe somebody will wake up about the need to go back to where we were in the 1970s after the Vietnam fiasco.
When the church hearings and all the other developments when I was there as a young guy on Bethel Hill in the 1970s really finally caused the defense budget to be shrunk dramatically in real terms and the intelligence apparatus to be sharply constricted and curtailed in a way that we need to have happen again.
Yeah, we got a real problem there.
And that is that Durham is the guy that Eric Holder hired to help George W. Bush and the CIA get away with torture and murder.
Well, that's that's that's an issue.
But I don't know.
There's more people than Durham involved.
He's got partisan reasons, apparently, for wanting to dig into some of this.
So we'll see.
Well, I mean, I sure agree with you.
There's a lot there.
It'd be interesting to see him just turn over some sort of whitewashy IG type report here when there's...
I doubt whether he will, though, because, see, there's a lot of dissent within the rank and file in the FBI and even in some of the other agencies about what happened here.
In other words, this wasn't like a massive deep state army top to bottom working in lockstep to pull off this attempted coup.
Let's put it that way.
It was actually, as Brennan, as was indicated at the time when the January 2017 report came out, it was a handpicked group of people from the FBI, the CIA and the DNI that really ran this thing without any of the normal procedures and vetting and information.
Analysis and validation that the apparatus normally uses.
So there's a lot of people who were not part of it, who didn't approve of it or have grievances for being left out.
You know, there's a lot of different motivations who are leaking out like a sieve.
That's where all these reporters who are now on the Russia hope speak, the conservative reporters.
That's where they're getting all their stories.
Right.
Yeah.
And there are some good ones, right?
Like John Solomon in the Hill.
Yeah.
And that's what I'm talking about.
Solomon, Sarah Carter and a couple of others.
They're being fed stuff day by day from the down in the balls because basically the institutions weren't involved.
It was just a cabal of a few people at the top of the FBI and the CIA.
You know, the irony is, you mentioned 1970s and that's where I started.
I was an anti-war protester in the 60s.
I somehow became a Republican.
I'm not sure how that happened.
And worked on Capitol Hill.
When you compare where the political system was in the 1970s with where it is today, you know, you have vertigo when you look at it.
But the biggest piece of this, and I think maybe you've talked about it before, Scott, is that in 1976, before he got recruited to join the CIA, which I think was 1980, John Brennan was some left wing malcontent who voted for the Communist Party candidate for president because Jimmy Carter was too hawkish.
Yeah.
You can imagine that.
And then he grew up to be the leader of Jabhat al-Nusra.
You know how things change.
Yeah.
So, you know, talk about where something went wrong.
He's almost the poster boy for, from the anti-war point of view, the high ground that we had achieved by the early, mid-70s.
How far we've receded, how far we've retreated that, you know, Brennan leads the charge on this case, but also for some of the really bad stuff that was done by the CIA in these regime change operations during not only the Obama administration, but several administrations.
Hey guys, Scott here.
I've got some books you should read.
The War State by Mike Swanson, a great history of the early Cold War.
No Dev, No Ops, No IT by Hussein Badakhshani.
How to Run Your Computer Business Like a Good Libertarian.
And Kesslin Runs, a near future dystopian novel by the great Charles Featherstone.
Check them all out in the margin at scotthorton.org.
Oh yeah.
And don't forget Fool's Errand, Time to End the War in Afghanistan by me.
Hey, let me ask you this.
Was Robert Mueller part of this plot all along?
I mean, he dragged out his so-called investigation for two years.
Well, you know, now people are beginning to scratch their head.
I mean, he seems so out of it and so uninformed about so many things, like who was Fusion GPS, you know, commented upon over and over, that it almost seems like he was a respectable, highly credentialed figurehead that they brought in to preside over a process run by Clinton partisans that he really didn't control or wasn't in charge of.
That's a pretty plausible theory.
I mean, for him to let it go.
And, you know, he could have leaked from the beginning that, OK, well, we're not finding any connections to Donald Trump here.
This isn't going that direction.
We are going to have some prosecutions because Carter Page misremembered a date or whatever.
But they could have made that clear that, listen, the president is not a secret agent of Russia.
But they didn't do that.
They let it stand for two years.
They let the Democrats and TV spin this story.
Yeah.
And so therefore he's complicit in that sense, because he was FBI director for, I forget how many years, a long time, but in the apparatus most of his career.
He would have known that if there was a Russian hack, Russian intelligence hack of the DMC emails, that the electronic footprint was there, Intercept was there.
Same thing for the Steele dossier, right?
His FBI agents would have been coming to him.
In fact, they already knew before he even took the reins of this case that that Steele dossier, page by page, does not hold up, boss.
He must have known that from the very beginning.
And in fact, as long as we're at it, sorry, one more thing.
I always forget this, but it's really important, is in the Bob Woodward book, he makes it clear that Donald Trump's lawyer, Dowd, I think it is, said to Mueller's right hand man, okay, here's everything.
And in exchange, you promised to be fair to us now.
But they gave them everything and did not resist.
They turned over every document because Trump said, no, I didn't do it.
Go ahead.
Give them everything.
Yeah.
From the very beginning.
So they could have leaked that.
Instead, we find that out in Bob Woodward's book, which came out, I think, just one year ago.
And then even then, it didn't change the narrative at all.
Yeah.
On the other hand, the reason it went on for two years is not only because the internal team, Mueller's team, was totally Democratic Clinton partisans, but because they were enabled to keep this farce going by the mainstream media.
I mean, night after night after night, 24-7, frankly, CNN never let go of it.
It was like a dog that had a bone in its jaws and wouldn't let go.
MSNBC, Rachel Maddow was off the deep end crazy.
And, you know, the Washington Post and the Times and the rest of them kept reporting, you know, all this stuff that obviously didn't hold up, even if you read the story at the time.
But that's what kept it going.
If they didn't have this echo chamber in the media, it may have, you know, this investigation could have been a lot shorter and, you know, got to the confession that it ended up with anyway, and there was no collusion.
Yeah.
Well, and again, I mean, for people who are interested in this and maybe have a bit of a bias against the CIA and the FBI, I guess regular people were buffaloed by this to a great degree, but mostly anybody with libertarian or right-wing partisanship at all, or anti-Democratic Party partisanship anyway, could see right through this whole thing.
I mean, come on.
Even if, you know, like if you look at it from the point of view of Andrew McCarthy over at the National Review, where, hey, if the CIA and the FBI say the Russians did it, then the Russians did it because that's the law that you have to believe them.
However, and then he goes and just completely demolishes the rest of the story.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I mean, Andrew McCarthy is a hardline neocon, you know, anti-Russia, Russ-Russophobe.
Okay.
But even he couldn't avoid the evidence that this whole thing was a hoax.
And he's a former federal prosecutor, so he's very much in favor of the FBI and the DOJ as institutions and is no Trump fan either.
Oh, he's a true believer.
And even he basically became one of the, you know, strong voices pointing out all the inconsistencies and impossibilities and stupidities that this case was built on.
Yeah.
All right.
Well, listen, I can't tell you how much I appreciate your time on the show again here, David.
Great stuff.
Okay.
Well, listen, great to talk about this issue.
And, you know, it's only a piece of a much larger one, and that is the empire and how we're ever going to bring it to heel.
Yeah.
All right.
Well, so sounds like a good topic for your next article in our next interview.
Okay.
Very good.
All right.
Thanks, David.
Appreciate it.
Okay.
Bye.
All right, you guys.
That is David Stockman.
He's a former congressman and economic advisor in the early Reagan years, and he wrote The Great Deformation and Peek Trump.
Both excellent.
And you can find his latest at Antiwar.com, not Muller Time.
At last.
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.
