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, he died.
We ain't killing they army, but we killing them.
We be on CNN, like, say our name, Ben, 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, time to welcome Ray McGovern back to the show.
As you know, he was a CIA analyst for 27 years, former head of the Soviet division and former morning briefer for Reagan and Bush Sr. in the 1980s.
And he's been essentially an anti-war activist this whole century long, since the dawn of the terror war.
And great on a ton of things, and especially and including lately, this giant fake Russiagate scandal.
Although I guess there really is a scandal here, but it ain't Trump's ties to Russia.
That's for sure.
Welcome back to the show.
How are you doing?
Thank you, Scott.
Doing well.
Very happy to have you here.
And I've got to tell you, man, I really like this article here.
Lots of important stuff to talk about in this piece.
DNI nominee intent on getting to bottom of Russiagate.
That's running at antiwar.com right now.
I think probably originally ran at Consortium News there.
And this is about John Ratcliffe, a Republican congressman from Texas, who's been nominated by Donald Trump to replace Dan Coats as director of national intelligence.
Which, let me just say first of all, so we can mention this, but dismiss it and get on to the real story.
That it's not Fred Flights, who is John Bolton's assistant at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, and right-hand man who had been leaked to some hawkish media back a week and a half or two ago, that maybe he would be the new DNI.
Which, Lord help us all, that had happened.
So that didn't happen.
Thank goodness for that.
Instead, we've got this guy, John Ratcliffe.
And as you say, this is going to be determinative, or it very well could be, when it comes to the unfolding of the real Russiagate scandal here, Ray.
That's right.
Yeah.
It really all depends on the final analysis on whether the president is emboldened enough to take on the deep state.
And as you recall, he was warned against doing that as being very, very foolish by none other than the Senate Majority Leader, Senator Schumer, who asked Rachel Maddow to ask him this question.
What about, what about Trump pursuing the intelligence community?
And here was his answer.
This was Chuck Schumer.
You know, I used to think that Trump was a pretty smart guy, pretty smart businessman.
And, you know, he wouldn't bite off more than he can chew.
But he's done a very foolish thing in taking on the intelligence community, which has six days from Sunday to get you.
So he's in a very foolish mood now.
Rachel should have asked him at that time.
Now, Senator Schumer, are you saying that the president of the United States should be afraid of the intelligence community?
Of course she didn't.
That's exactly what he was warning.
That's the third of January.
Trump is still president elect.
They just wanted to shoot that cannonball across his bow because just, well, what, less than a week later, he was going to get treated to the so-called intelligence community assessment, which said in a word, Look, Trump, you owe your victory to Russian meddling.
And besides, we have a dossier on you.
So, you know, maybe you ought to heed what Schumer said.
Don't take on the intelligence community.
Now, there's lots of evidence that Trump has heeded that advice.
He's pulled the rug out from under Devin Nunes at least two major times.
When it came time to declassify the sensitive information on the CIA role in the assassination of John Kennedy, he bowed to the FBI and the CIA and said, I know there's legislation that requires me to do this, but the FBI and CIA won't let me right now.
But in six months, we'll revisit it.
And nobody thought to ask him six months later, would he do it now?
So there are lots of reasons to be suspicious that even if you assume that Attorney General Barr, that Inspector General David Horowitz of the Department of Justice, which has purview over the FBI, of course, and this fellow Durham, John Durham, the guy out there in Connecticut who has a checkered record himself.
Even if you assume that they're going to be really, really honest in pursuing what really happened, and I think you and I are agreed at what really happened, it should be called Deep Stategate, not Russiagate.
Well, if they are pursuing this and pursuing it hard, now they have an ally in John Ratcliffe.
And why do I say that?
Well, I say that because Horowitz, the Justice Department IG, has justice and FBI covered.
OK, what's the big gap?
The big gap is the intelligence community.
The big gap is John Brennan.
Why he peddled a dossier to the ranking member of the Senate at the time, Reid, and didn't tell anybody else.
There's lots of evidence out there that has these people really sweating bullets now.
Now, I'll just say one more thing, Scott, because it's necessary for people to understand.
Maybe not so much for your listeners, but for others.
People ask me, you know, Reid, how can you—are you saying, how can you say that the very top officials in the Department of Justice, in the FBI, and in intelligence were playing fast and loose with the law, the Constitution, were meddling themselves in the election process, were trying their best to help Hillary and to defeat Trump, and then after Trump won, try to emasculate him and not let him do the thing?
How can you say—how did they think they could possibly get away with it?
Well, the answer is very simple, folks.
And, you know, you don't need a crackerjack analyst to come up with the answer.
You could just read, if you want to, James Comey's book.
And in that book he says, quote, Why would I say that?
Well, if you're sure she's going to win, even if people uncover some details of what you've been up to, some of the chicanery, well, you're not going to get indicted for God's sake.
You're going to get praised and maybe promoted.
So they were sure she was going to win.
And the other thing, of course, the corollary of this is that if you're sure she's going to win, you don't have to take rudimentary steps to disguise what you're doing.
You don't have to cover your tracks for God's sake.
So you're fast and loose with putting things on paper, putting things on hard drives.
And the rub is that a lot of this stuff is now available to people like Devin Nunes, the ranking member of the House Intelligence Committee.
And there will be head to pay.
There will be hell to pay if the president is encouraged by these folks that I just mentioned to go ahead and solve this thing and tell the American people what really happened.
And what really happened was a kind of a soft coup attempt.
And we can prove it.
Yeah.
I mean, so this is the thing, right?
I really like the whole exercise in or the demonstration of how all these things come together in this case, where it reminds me of George Carlin, which I guess you must have really identified with him a lot, right?
Irish Catholic.
I know you're from the Bronx.
I forgot what neighborhood he was from, from New York.
But he would always talk about when he was a kid going to Catholic school, how they would always try to come up with these conundrums for the priests.
Hey, Father, hey, Father, could God make a rock so big that even he can't lift it?
You know, this kind of thing.
So that's what we have here.
The most powerful person in all of world history who can appoint and who has appointed an attorney general, a director of national intelligence.
Well, I wouldn't say he's got his man at the head of the CIA right now.
More like the CIA's man is running the CIA, bloody Gina Haspel over there.
But can he actually use the DOJ to investigate the DOJ and the CIA and truly hold them to account?
I mean, it sounds completely crazy.
But at the same time, boy, he's really mad.
He's the president of the United States, and they falsely framed him for treason.
And then dragged on this fake investigation, essentially a criminal special counsel investigation, for two full years, pretending there was even a question to investigate here.
And he calls it the greatest political hoax in American history.
Like, worse than that time FDR let the Japanese attack Pearl Harbor, deliberately, I guess.
Whatever it is.
Anyway, and so it seems like one of those George Carlin conundrums.
Like, what's really going to happen here?
And as you said, it comes down to the personnel, too.
The people in charge.
John Durham is an important example.
This guy who's now been appointed by Barr to get to the bottom of this kind of thing.
He's a very institutional kind of guy from what I know of his history.
But so whose side is he really on?
Whose job is he really doing?
The president's job and the attorney general's job?
Or he's here to be the cover-up pretend investigator to close the whole thing down, like John Danforth on Waco and this kind of thing, you know?
Well, you're right to ask these questions, Scott.
There are a couple of pointers that will become available in the next few weeks.
Now, Michael Horowitz, who is the inspector general of the Department of Justice, seems to be a pretty straight-up guy.
It was he that insisted on releasing the texts of those texts between Peter Strzok and Lisa Page.
They had an affair going.
They had hundreds of texts each day, and they kept business intermingled with their affair in these texts.
Well, that was December of 2017.
We've known about it since then, as Strzok said all kinds of things like, we can stop her, she won't win.
Most revealingly, when Lisa Page asked Strzok, now bear in mind, Strzok had been investigating whether the Russians and Trump were plotting something for seven months at this point.
Lisa Page asks him, now, Peter, are you going to join Mueller's team?
I mean, are you tired of this?
And this is what he says.
You know, Lisa, I'm reluctant because there's no there there.
There's no there there.
In other words, he'd been looking at it for seven months.
Well, he does end up joining the Mueller team.
Wait, in other words, this thing that they built up, that he's been such an integral part of building up, what he's really saying is he wants to bail out before it really comes to anything, so that it's not on him when it all falls flat.
Well, yeah, and yet he persuaded himself to go ahead and join Mueller.
And it was when Horowitz released the email exchange that Mueller said, oh, does this guy work for me?
He said, yeah, he's one of your team.
Oh, better get rid of him.
He's too obvious.
So Horowitz is going to report.
Latest reports are that he's just about ready to report.
Now, he was supposed to report back in June.
Why the delay?
Well, the delay can be looked on as a salutary thing, because there were people who previously were reluctant witnesses.
Among them, this fellow from British intelligence, Steele, Christopher Steele.
Now, after refusing to be interviewed, he finally said, oh, OK, OK, I'll be interviewed.
So Horowitz's folks from DOJ have had access to Christopher Steele, who knows where the bodies are buried.
And he probably, to get off himself for perjury, may identify those bodies.
I mean, they're not hard to identify.
I'll do it right now.
It's John Brennan.
It's James Clapper.
It's James Comey.
It's Admiral Rogers from the NSA.
And it's Loretta Lynch, the attorney general, for God's sake, and her deputies, sweet-looking, what's-her-name, and other deputies, who documentary evidence shows played fast and loose with the FISA law and other laws to make sure that Hillary would win and that Trump would lose.
Now, I have to say what my wife always says.
For God's sake, don't forget to mention what you think about Trump.
I think about Trump as this.
He's the worst president the United States ever had.
Now, what does that mean?
Well, that means that he should be impeached.
Now, are there not enough reasons to impeach this president?
This is a guy who says he can make war on Iran without so much as saying hi to Congress to get authority.
This is a fellow who has ruined the air and water for my grandchildren, and that's no joke.
This is a fellow who couldn't get appropriations to build a stupid wall.
He went around and got some money from the Defense Department.
This is a president who plays fast and loose with big issues, constitutional issues, issues that he should be impeached for.
So you don't need to run around trying to impeach a president for obstructing an investigation of which he has already been proven not guilty by this fellow, Robert Mueller, who couldn't find enough evidence to say that there's any evidence that he and the Russians plotted this thing together.
So what are you going to say?
You're going to say, well, yeah, he didn't plot with the Russians, but he tried to prevent the investigation, so now we're going to ...
That's so stupid.
I can't believe how stupid.
Not only Schumer, but who was it, Jerry Nadler and Devin Nunes.
I don't think more proof is needed.
These guys don't know politics, much less the substance of things.
It's a gift that keeps giving to the Republicans.
I fear that we're going to have four more years of Trump because of this misfeasance, this malfeasance, this stupidity on the part of these Democrats.
Hey, y'all, here's the thing.
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Well, I mean, this is the thing, too, is they came up with such an implausible conspiracy theory about him.
I mean, even though the Soviet Union is gone, claiming that someone is a secret agent of the Kremlin, that's an old thing from back in the first and the second Red Scare days and really throughout the Cold War, and so essentially they're calling him a commie, but he's a real estate tycoon from New York City.
And he literally wraps himself around the flag because he doesn't even get the metaphor right.
He's a caricature of at least a wannabe super patriot, not that he would really understand what that means, but the idea that he would sell out to the Russians and be some secret agent come to take over our country like in that movie America with a K with Kris Kristofferson where they're all KGB running for president and no one can stop them, that's completely ridiculous.
It's the most ridiculous thing.
But you know what, you left off the biggest thing on the list, and I'm sure it was no particular reason for it, but really the worst thing about Donald Trump is his completely illegal, unauthorized war against the civilian population of Yemen.
And the thing of it is too, and this goes to really the heart of it, if they really wanted to go after the guy, they would have to go after him for the very worst thing that he's doing, but they can't do that without bringing up the fact that Barack Obama started the war two years before Donald Trump inherited it from him.
And so really the only way to, if Democrats really, really think that Donald Trump must be removed from power now and not wait for an election and come up with any excuse, including even falsely accuse him of treason in order to try to drive him out of power, if they really believe that's necessary, there's only one way to get it done.
They're going to have to indict and prosecute Barack Obama for starting an illegal war of genocide in Yemen, and then they can impeach and remove Donald Trump and put him in the dock right next to Obama, and they can both go to the Supermax together, and that will show that Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer aren't being partisans about this.
They're just doing what's right because of the rule of law and justice and democracy and stuff like that, which is the most far-fetched, ridiculous thing in the whole world.
It'll never happen in a million years because genocide is fine.
Genocide is absolutely within the purview of Article 2 of the American presidency.
Nobody questions that.
The question is about this hush money to this lady that he supposedly cheated on his wife with back in 1994.
This kind of thing, now that we can impeach him over.
Obstruction in an investigation when he's being falsely framed for treason by the FBI and the CIA and trying to obstruct that.
Now, there's a high crime and a misdemeanor, but deliberately killing babies every single day just like Barack Obama absolutely has to get a pass on that.
And, of course, it's the CIA and the military who are helping him do it, so they all get the same pass.
Yeah, I'm glad you mentioned Yemen because it is the most atrocious thing going on right now.
The reason I didn't mention it was because it started under Obama, and if that's the case, there isn't a Democrat in the world that would support trying to pin that on Trump.
Let me just take a couple of steps back here.
First off, Scott, how many Americans do you think are watching the TV, quote, news, end quote, compared to people listening to this program right now?
If you take one American listening to this, how many for one American are watching the TV news?
Millions and millions and millions.
In other words, this isn't even a ripple in the pond, friend.
We both know that.
That explains why they can get away with this.
I mean, this is the cardinal change.
I've watched all kinds of change in my 50 years in Washington, and by far the most consequential change is the fact that we don't have free media anymore, and so that has to remain in our sight as we discuss these matters.
Now, how do you explain what they're doing?
You said, well, it's hard to think they could get away with it.
The media is one.
Now, look, you have to look at it this way, in my view.
This legend that was developed, and it was developed even before the election, Hillary thought that people would really care that Trump wanted to have a decent relationship with Russia, and, of course, she blamed the tapes or the emails that were revealed by WikiLeaks on Russia.
Well, what about them after she lost, mounting what everyone knows is the best defense, and that's a really good offense?
What about Comey saying, hmm, yeah, I think I'll write a book about this, and what about McCabe and all the others saying, man, now we're in deep kimchi.
Now we've got to go full force forward and make sure, number one, that nobody finds out what we did.
Let's put all the onus, all the focus on the president, and, number two, we can get lots of support from the mainstream media because, as most people know, the mainstream media is owned by six corporations, many of whom profiteer on war.
They don't want a decent relationship with Russia.
That's more than just a twofer.
That's a controlling thing.
They will give all kinds of publicity and all kinds of money and everything else to me, James Comey, and Brennan to protect us because, hey, you know, otherwise, if Trump is vindicated and he says, well, now, is it okay now?
Mother, may I have a more decent relationship with Russia?
Well, that's when the mickey mat takes the dagger.
Okay, what's the mickey mat?
Well, we used to talk about the mix, the military-industrial complex.
For those of you who have a pencil, take this down.
The military-industrial-congressional-intelligence-media-academe-think-tank complex.
Why did I say media?
That's funny.
Media because that's the lynchpin.
That's the sine qua non.
They can't do it without the media.
And that is the big new factoid in my experience in Washington.
The media is bought.
And so unless we can get people like you, Scott, and others to get access to the American people and tell them what's really going on, look at the media now.
What are they going to do?
I mean, Russiagate is falling apart.
Are they giving up?
No, they're not giving up.
Look what they're saying.
They're saying, well, Mueller wasn't the best actor on the scene, but man, he really, he got it.
You know, let me just, at least one more thing on this because it's amusing.
I wrote this article that you referred to with respect to the appointment of Radcliffe and what that might mean.
And in the comment section under ConsortiumNews.com, I have to say, I learned so much from the very intelligent people who comment on our articles.
This one was amusing.
He said, now, look, Ray, please, don't get your hopes up that it will change the minds of people who are devoted and who have been really educated for three years about Russiagate.
He said, if God himself was interviewed and said Russia had nothing to do with what happened in 2016, the response would be, oh, no, God's in on it too, end quote.
Right.
That's about right.
That's how bad it is.
So with the media going, we have to keep slogging away.
And there is some hope now because Trump's got very, very powerful guys appointed.
But in the end, he's got to show more courage than he has so far.
And the proof will be in the pudding if Horowitz adjusts this, if the fellow out there in Connecticut.
Durham.
Durham.
And if Barr himself, you know.
Now, let's talk about how Durham helped George Bush and his CIA, his cabinet, his principals committee and his CIA get away with torture and murder.
He was definitely the cover up investigator on that one.
Yeah, he was.
And that's really, really sad.
You know, I had to put that in there so people don't get their hopes too far up.
But when there was abundant evidence that CIA staff people, as well as agents like Gina Haspel.
And, of course, she was cashiered right away when it was learned in documents that she oversaw the waterboarding of a couple people out there in Thailand.
No.
She's now the director of the CIA.
And I'm very proud to have been carried out of the hearing in which I said, look, you guys, you all know, you all know who she is.
And the reason you can't find out on paper is because she won't declassify the information.
Anyhow, Gina Haspel is the head of CIA now.
So what happened?
At first I thought, oh, no, Ray's getting old and senile here.
He thinks that she didn't get the job.
And then, oh, you're just jerking my chain.
Of course, there's no accountability for torturers.
Sorry, go ahead.
Well, the point was they knew them well.
They had the evidence.
They had it in secret documents.
And when I spoke out, I was hoping there'd be at least one Democratic senator who would say, well, what about?
And actually what happened was this.
The ranking member, the senator from Feinstein from California, said, now, Ms. Haspel, what about that?
Were you in charge of the Thailand black site where these people were waterboarded?
Answer, oh, Senator, I would love to answer that question.
But it's classified.
Now, if I were Feinstein, I would say, now, Ms. Haspel, could you tell me who classified that information?
And Ms. Haspel would have to say, me.
Well, Senator, I did.
It was such a force.
I'm glad I got it.
I wasn't glad I ended up in a really bad place that night.
So what I'm saying here is that these guys were all exposed by documentary evidence far, far earlier.
And what happened was they were all being let off, being let off by Mukasey, who was attorney general in the Bush.
And this guy, Eric Holder, comes in under Barack Obama.
So the first time Durham was employed by an attorney general, it was Mukasey, OK, working for Bush.
And the issue then was the destruction of the videotapes that recorded the gory details about the waterboarding and other torture techniques used where Gina Haspel was running the black site, namely Thailand.
OK, they were destroyed.
Who helped destroy them?
Gina Haspel and her boss.
So they looked into that and Durham said, well, there's probably not enough evidence to, you know, we'll let her off.
OK.
Whoa.
OK, so then it comes up to the Obama administration and we have the attorney general Holder.
And here we have evidence that two people died.
OK, one in Afghanistan and one in Iraq.
We have photos of the guy packed in ice who died under torture in Iraq.
And we had abundant evidence of what happened in that salt pit in Afghanistan.
So there were a couple of people left over.
And the political pressures were, well, of course you're going to indict these guys, right?
Well, they gave the case to Durham.
And Durham waited a long time.
And I forget how long.
It seemed like an hour, seemed like a year and a half.
He came back and no, no, there's not sufficient evidence for these guys either.
End of case.
No more even talk about indicting or bringing to justice the CIA people who were involved in torture.
Now, neither Mukasey nor Holder wanted anything to happen here.
They go by Schumer's dictum.
You don't cross the intelligence community because they have six ways from Sunday to get back at you.
Right.
OK.
So they didn't want it.
So the question really is now whether Bill Barr wants it.
Whether he wants it badly enough to really lean on a very, very kind of deep state fearing president named Trump.
Whether Barr and Durham and the the inspector general of the FBI and Lindsey Graham and others who really think that this whole charade should be exposed to have been deep state gate and not Russia gate.
Whether to be able to prevail on the president who has pretty much chickened out at this point when Devin Nunes, the ranking member of the House Intelligence Committee, had a case against these people and wanted to put criminal referrals in the Justice Department.
So it's an open question.
Deep state almost always wins.
But this time they have a new player.
His name is John Ratcliffe.
He has a lot of prosecutorial experience.
He seems to be devoted to Bill Barr, whose praises he sounds whenever he gets a chance.
And most important, last Sunday, even before Trump announced that Ratcliffe was his pick to be the director of national intelligence, this is what he said on Fox News.
What I know as a former federal prosecutor, it does appear that there were crimes committed during the Obama administration.
He said, you know, Democrats, quote, accused Donald Trump of a crime and then tried to reverse engineer a process to justify that accusation, period, end quote.
Well, you know, I don't like Ratcliffe.
I don't like Barr.
I don't like any of those creeps.
But he happens to be telling the truth here.
And my, you know, my quaint or obsolete notion is that the truth is always better to have than not to have.
If they want to get rid of Trump, they ought to use up some of the kind of upcharge of which there are copious, very, very large, huge crimes and misdemeanors.
And they don't do this one because if they continue on this path, not only are they truly indoctrinated, going to keep pushing this, this fable, but they're going to lose in 2020.
And that will be probably the end of our republic because Trump is so bad that if we give him another term, it will be the Democrats fault for showing themselves to be completely feckless, completely politically naive and supported only by the major media.
That's still a problem.
But, you know, it's going to be a big problem for the rest of us if they keep giving this gift that keeps giving to Trump and his assorted, what you call them, people.
Yeah.
Well, you know, it's funny, like you say, back to the level of commitment to the narrative on the part of this very small group of Democrats where the rest of the country doesn't believe it at all.
You know, all the polls say it doesn't even make the list.
I don't know if you read the new Matt Taibbi piece where he cited these polls about what you're concerned about and Russia wasn't even on the list at all.
Nobody brought up the Russia thing at all.
But you do have, on one hand, this just completely ridiculous religious level of commitment to the belief in this whole thing still.
Why didn't you read the Mueller report?
It says that it's all true or whatever is their narrative coming out of this.
You know, I saw a piece this morning about Tulsi Gabbard blasts Kamala Harris about deliberately trying to keep an innocent man on death row.
And then all the comments were she's a Russian agent.
And it's like, you know what?
I don't know.
I guess for there's as George W. Bush would say, you can fool some of the people all the time.
Right.
There's this faction.
He said those are the ones you want to concentrate on.
So there's this faction.
I'm sorry.
I'm trying to quote the W. Fool me once and don't fool me again.
But so anyway, I just there's just such a huge gap like you're talking about between the reality and even the American people's perception of that reality.
Broadly speaking, I think is being accurate versus the center establishment with all their CIA delivered talking points about how essentially anyone outside of the absolute, you know, cookie cutter Hillary Clinton centrist status quo is an agent of the Russians.
And I mean, imagine living in a world where you really thought that the representative from Hawaii who's running for president of the United States right now was an agent of the Russians and Trump's FBI counterintelligence division isn't doing anything to stop her.
And what a crisis, right?
The KGB takeover of America.
And once you're out on that limb, there is no climbing down from that.
There's no admitting that like, oh, my God, I'm stupid.
And this whole thing is a hoax after you're that that into it.
So it's just funny to see like how that's going to have to remain the narrative.
That's going to be the best they're going to ever do against Tulsi Gabbard is she went to Syria and that makes her agent of the Russians.
But what are the people going to make of that?
Are people really going to buy that other than the most committed Twitter kooks out in the out in the real world, though?
Is that going to feel real, seem real to people?
I don't think so.
You know, just like I guess the whole Russiagate thing never has this whole time again, because Trump is a real estate tycoon.
How could he be a commie?
You know, which the Kremlin still stands for the Reds, you know.
You know, I guess it was Mark Twain said, you know, it's far easier to fool people than it is to convince them that they've been fooled.
That's a psychological truism.
And this little quip by the commenter under my article saying, you know, if God said Russia had nothing to do with any of this, the reaction would be, oh, no.
God's in on it, too.
So let me just say a couple of things here.
I think you have a bunch of lawyers.
And, you know, one of my daughters is a lawyer and my father and two brothers.
There are good lawyers.
But I think that Shakespeare was right.
Merchant of Venice, where he said, well, first you get rid of the lawyers.
He said it more distinctly.
These guys, if you look at Jerry Nadler, all five foot three of them, you know, he's a tough guy.
And he he knows and I've had progressive lawyers tell me this.
He knows that you don't have to commit a crime to be prosecuted for covering it up, for obstructing the investigation of that crime that you didn't commit.
He knows that's the law.
So these progressive lawyers say to me, Ray, are you against impeaching Trump for obstructing justice?
It's the law.
You can still do it, even though he didn't commit the crime.
Are you against that?
And I say, yeah, I'm really against that.
Impeach him for these five things, for God's sake.
No American is going to be able to relate to the legal possibility of prosecuting someone for hindering an investigation of a crime that it's proven he did not commit.
So what we have is a bunch of small lawyers that, you know, can't see outside their little legal framework.
And then you have the real hardcore supporters of Trump.
But, you know, what do they amount to?
They amount to about 1 percent, 2 percent, 3 percent.
Nobody else gives a rat's patootie about all this stuff.
And why Nadler and Schumer and Pelosi can't get that through their heads is really a mystery.
Now, I want to say a word about Pelosi.
This all happened before.
When the Democrats re-won the House, control of the House, in 2006, well, all the usual suspects came back as chairs of the committees, including John Conyers, chair of judiciary.
Now, we gave him a decent interval.
He didn't say anything about impeaching a president who was obviously a war criminal, having violated all strictures of the law, as well as the Nuremberg principles.
So we waited several months.
And then Cindy Sheehan, who had a special relationship with John Conyers, got me in with her to see him.
And we said, now, he says, well, how can I help you?
And Cindy said, well, we're hoping that you, now that you're chair again of the judiciary, that you will move toward impeaching George W. Bush.
And he said, oh, but Cindy, I'm not going to do that.
And so I said, well, why not?
Well, the first thing he thought of was, well, we can't get the votes.
We need, what is it, 218 votes.
We couldn't get the votes.
And I said, come on, if you try.
I mean, I said, well, how do you know, Mr. Intelligent Person?
How do you know all this?
But then he relented and he said, OK, the real reason is this.
Nancy won't let us do it.
And the reason she won't let us do it is because she's, this is the exact words, she's afraid of what Fox News would do in making us Democrats look very divisive.
And then we won't win as big in the next election.
End quote.
Now, I said to myself, my God, here's a guy like me who swore to support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic.
And he's telling me he can't do it because Nancy Pelosi won't let him.
And what's her reasons?
Political reasons.
She wants to win bigger in the next election and put on on the stain of America, the W, George W. Bush, who had done these things.
Now, I thought that was bad enough, Scott.
Bear with me for one more more minute.
I talked about this with my NSA colleagues.
OK, the people in in veteran intelligence professionals for sanity, retired NSA people have been around very, very senior positions.
And they said, Ray, my God, so you don't know the half of it.
I said, what do you mean?
Well, it's not just politics.
It's personal embarrassment.
You know that Nancy Pelosi was briefed on the torture.
She was briefed on the blanket dragnet surveillance in violation of the Fourth Amendment.
She was briefed on all these things.
We know we know the dates when she was briefed on all these things.
Not only that, but as you know, the CIA sends their people down to talk to people like Pelosi.
And she had a very long tenure on the House Intelligence Committee.
They talk to them and then they go back and they write a memo and say, we briefed Nancy Pelosi on this date with respect to the waterboarding.
And she said, fine, no problem.
OK, so what are we saying to you, Ray?
And I said, you know, I think I get it.
I think I get it.
They got the goods on her.
They can prove they can destroy her career.
So it was politics and they did win big in the next election, of course.
But at the sacrifice of violating the Constitution, which was very, very clear on what should be done with a president like Bush.
And now what should be done with a president like Trump.
So it all happened before.
And guess what?
The same player is running the House, Nancy Pelosi.
Yeah, well, you know, what's funny, too, is if the Democrats had just impeached and removed Bill, well, they did impeach or I guess it couldn't stop the impeachment.
But if they'd supported the removal of Bill Clinton from office in 1999 when he was on trial for lying in front of a federal grand jury, which would get anyone else in America thrown right in the penitentiary by Bill Clinton and his Justice Department.
Then Al Gore would have been the president because he would have been the incumbent, essentially, coming in in 2000.
And he would have stomped Bush by an extra six or ten points there.
And then, well, I don't know.
A lot of horrible things would have happened.
But not like this.
You wouldn't have Paul Wolfowitz for deputy secretary of defense, I don't think.
He might have been an advisor in the Lieberman office for the vice president's office.
I think a whole lot of things.
And that ain't no endorsement of Al Gore.
That's only an indictment specifically of Bush Cheney and their neocon cabal and the direction that they took everything at the dawn of this century that was very particular to them and their agenda.
It did not have to be this way whatsoever.
So, yeah, same thing going all the way back.
In fact, if Gerald Ford hadn't pardoned Richard Nixon, then we would have really seen what it's like to have a rule of law in America.
A president in the dock in a federal court with a jury full of citizens sitting in judgment.
That's how you do it in a constitutional republic.
But, yeah, right.
Well, yeah, I've thought of this often.
You know, there's a lot of cowardice at the very top.
Clinton, you know, if Al Gore had the courage to distance himself from Bill Clinton, whether or not the impeachment or conviction happened, he would have been hands down the winner in the next election, in my view.
I mean, that's all he needed to do.
I mean, he was much more respected in the body politic than W.
So when you have cowardice, when you have people who are blinded by false loyalty to the party, which is, you know, what John Kinears and what I dare say Vice President Gore was, then you get all these kinds of things.
Where are the people of principle?
Where are the people of the caliber of the ones that framed our constitution?
You know, it wasn't by chance that they put impeachment in there.
They argued endlessly about it.
They put it in there four times.
OK, why?
Well, because as one of them said, we fully expect that we're giving the president so much power that every generation, we expect one to start acting like a king.
And we know what that's like.
And so we want to create an orderly political process.
You know, revolutions are not so much fun.
We know that.
We want to create an orderly political process where our representatives, the representatives of people, can remove a president when he starts acting like a king.
Now, that was really important to them.
That's why they put it in the Constitution, to make us different from other countries.
And now we have such a politicized environment that people like Pelosi won't do her duty because she sees politics and protecting her own derriere, I would add, as more important than following the Constitution, living up to her oath, which is a solemn oath.
It's the only oath I ever swore.
And that's why I'm doing what I'm doing.
Here's the thing, though, too.
I mean, and I know that you're citing all these very real crimes.
And, of course, I'm with you, especially on the Yemen thing.
I think you've got to lead with the very worst thing.
Of course, you're right that they'll never do that because of Obama and his administration's culpability in it and all of that kind of thing.
But at this point, even if he killed a guy, you know, in the White House, in the Oval Office with his bare hands, and they try to impeach him for that, it's still just going to look like the Democrats are still just cheating.
You know, to them, democracy means when the Democrats win an election.
And if they lose an election, then they'll sic the secret police on you and they'll try to frame you for high treason and pretend that they can invoke the 25th Amendment to do a coup d'etat to cancel the election just because they don't like it.
And if that fails, then they'll go, oh yeah, well, but he's under arrest for resisting arrest because he tried to obstruct the investigation into our frame up of him for treason, which is an obvious hoax the whole time, which he had every right to do.
If he had taken John Mueller and John Brennan and blasted them off into the sun, that would have been just the right amount of obstruction.
It would have been great.
And so they just look like they're whining and that they're desperate to come up with anything to try to remove a guy that they can't beat in an election.
And how in the world are they not just asking themselves instead, how can we not beat this guy in an election?
We have to resort to try to cheat.
And the thing is, again, I agree with you.
There are plenty of impeachable crimes here.
But after they've blown their entire wad on this Russia thing, there's no way they could make any charge stick at this point.
It would look simply like the Democrats are going to war with democracy itself, with the Constitution and our process of regular bloodless elections itself in order to rig everything for them.
And if they do that, if they really did try to impeach Trump right now on obstruction or whatever trumped up thing, sorry, whatever bogus thing that they tried to do, then they'd probably start a war.
Well, that's what I should get to here in the last.
Let me just say one thing that we've got to mention.
Most people have a little pity for children, you know, even the most incorrigible people.
I mean, Hitler loved children.
Well, it seems that he did anyway.
But we're killing children on our southern border.
We're isolating children.
We're taking babies away from their mothers when they're nursing.
I mean, for God's sake, what has become of us?
What we have is a parade of politicians going down.
Oh, it's awful.
No one blocks the entrance to these places.
No one insists on getting access to see what's inside.
So there's a modicum of courage that ain't enough in this day and age.
So I would focus on the children.
Now, the other thing I'd say is this, that there's a very big price to pay in all this.
And that is the relationship with Russia has been never so bad since the Cuban Missile Crisis.
The time that strategic planners have to react on either side is down half.
It used to be about 30 minutes.
Now it's down to 15 at the best, probably 10.
Now, wait a minute.
Stop on the details.
Rewind back to the theme there.
You were the CIA briefer in the White House in the first Reagan administration, correct?
That's correct.
So it's really in the second administration he starts up this friendship with Gorbachev and they start ending the Cold War and start signing treaties and driving Norman Pothor.
It's crazy.
Munich.
But in the first administration, we almost had a nuclear war in 1983 over Abel Archer.
We had all of this massive buildup in intercontinental ballistic missiles and mid-range missiles in Europe on both sides.
And you're telling me that now is worse than that, Ray McGovern?
Again, as introduced, you were the head of the Soviet division of the analysts at the CIA here.
That's not an amateur opinion that we're talking about.
And I don't think that you're trying to be hyperbolic here, but I mean, is it really that bad?
I'm not even exaggerating.
Hyperbolic.
Okay.
Well, yeah.
Look, I know about Abel Archer.
It was a good friend of mine who was an analyst working for me in the 70s named Mel Goodman, who stormed Director Casey's office after he couldn't get by Bobby Gates, the deputy to Casey, and said, look, the Russians think we're about to attack them, for God's sake.
We can see that.
We can see that in all manner of sources.
Go down and tell the national security assistant, for God's sake, don't let the vice president, don't let the secretary of defense participate in this exercise because they think it's for real.
And for once, Casey listened.
He went down to the NSA.
He got them to trim down the exercise.
We were very close then.
You're right.
But when I talk about now, I'm talking about these new weapons that have no warning time at all.
I'm talking about 1987, which was four years later than this very big scare, when a miracle happened.
I couldn't believe it.
I mean, I was there and I watched it.
Gorbachev and Reagan concluded what they call the Intermediate Nuclear Treaty, the INF Treaty, which banned and had destroyed under supervision SS-20 missiles that had European targets under, had no European targets, and the Pershing II missiles, which were in place.
These things were operational.
These things were ready.
And they agreed to destroy a whole class of medium range nuclear weapons.
Now, right now, yesterday, I think, the Russians of the U.S. and the Russians have decided to destroy that treaty.
John Bolton likes to destroy treaties, and that's pretty much the sum and substance of it.
Yes, today.
Today is the day it's officially canceled, right?
Yeah.
So, you know, there you go.
What the heck is going on?
People don't realize that.
Here, I'll put it this way.
When Putin won the election last time around, I guess it was March, they asked him, they said, look, Mr. Putin, the balance of strategic power is very labile, very, very dicey.
Now, people think that if the Americans shut off their intercontinental ballistic missiles, that you might say, well, you know, no sense in destroying the whole world.
We'll just take it and we won't retaliate.
What do you think about that?
And Putin said, what would the whole world be like without Russia?
We certainly would retaliate at the first suggestion.
Now, that's where we stand.
And with this hatred built up against the Russians and a complete ignorance of how our relations with Russia got more acerbic, now think about when we mounted a coup on their doorstep in Kiev.
How the Russians reacted?
Well, if the U.S. didn't know that the Russians would let NATO take over their sole warm water naval port, well, they don't know anything.
So the way that things have evolved since that time, so 2014, has been downhill.
And now it's reached very dangerous proportions.
Because if I'm Putin, right, and I'm watching what's going on, and I know I only have 10, at most 15 minutes to react, the possibility of a miscalculation, the possibility of a provocation, or just a mistake, or somebody who wanted to end the world is so much liver, so much more prominent than it was even during the Cuban Missile Crisis when I first entered service in 1962.
Hang on just one second.
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You know, so a couple of things here.
First of all, I interviewed this guy, Lyle Goldstein.
I don't know if you've been reading him, but he writes for the National Interest.
And he's currently, you know, he identified himself as, you know, he had a disclaimer.
I am a U.S. government official.
He's like the director of some naval academy, something or something, I forget exactly, but pretty influential guy up there.
And we had this talk about Russia, and he sounded just like you.
And in fact, I even said to him, I said, Hey, you know what, here's my completely bent-out-of-shape anti-war.com narrative of how the new Cold War is all America's fault, from Bill Clinton through George Bush and Barack Obama and all the color-coded revolutions and two coups in Ukraine in 10 years, and trying to break off the Sevastopol base and kick them out of it, and supporting al-Qaeda in Syria and leading to this crisis.
And he's like, yep, that's pretty much exactly right, and had no beef with any of that.
And I even set it up like, listen, I'm really biased and bent out of shape, and I have a point of view and a chip on my shoulder, so tell me where I go off the story here.
And he's like, yeah, no, that's pretty much it.
And he was saying and emphasizing that nuclear war is an option on the table.
You know, people think that it's not.
People think somehow, nah, these things always just stay locked down in some locker somewhere, and no one ever has to really worry about it.
But that no, I mean, to the military, this is just another kind of bomb.
It's another size of bomb in their inventory.
If there's a war with Russia, it's, you know, almost certain that nukes are going to go off.
And if they start going off, even small A-bombs start going off at some military locations here or there, it's almost impossible to stop it at that point from escalating to the strategic H-bombs going and erasing cities from the entire northern hemisphere of the planet.
I mean, and this is, yeah.
Oh, yeah, no, that's in the plans.
All right.
That's how we do business every day.
We train on it every day.
Essentially, the Cold War never ended when the Soviet Union fell apart 25 years ago, right?
Yeah, well, you know, this is all very, very relevant.
And painting Putin as the devil's incarnate is part of the problem.
And that's largely the Democrats and the Russiagate aficionados' fault.
But what nobody seems to realize is any sense of history, even modern history.
You know, we celebrate D-Day, the invasion of Normandy.
In World War II, we lost about 410,000 troops.
What Americans would be shocked to find out is that Russia lost 26 million.
I say again, 26 million people because they fought off the Nazis for four years before we ever got in.
They lost 400,000 just defending Crimea from the Nazis.
So, look, when you look at that, what do you deduce?
You deduce that the Russians know what war is like, and we don't.
None of those 410,000 perished, well, a small amount perished in the United States.
And so the Russians have two things.
One is they're not going to allow anybody to come across their border as Napoleon and as Hitler did.
But number two, they're going to retaliate if anybody's using rockets or missiles against them.
And they will feel completely vindicated in doing that because they know that we don't know what war is like.
And so that we are very capricious and very easy off the hand.
We have these plans for these mini-nukes and we might use them.
So that is a big factor because if I were Putin, I would say, well, I know what war is like.
My big brother died in the siege of Leningrad.
I've been in Russia on the anniversaries of these war victories, particularly in Crimea.
And, you know, they feel very strongly about this, both ways.
No more war.
And that's why, in my view, Putin has been very, very patient, almost statesmanlike, I will say, unabashedly.
Because he doesn't want to tweak Trump.
And also why they are damned, damn sure to defend themselves if some crazy Estonian or Lithuanian or Pole tries to start an infringement on their border.
So that's where we are.
It's right.
The Germans have a word, labil.
It means very dicey, very icky, very, very much like the Cuban Missile Crisis.
The problem is there ain't no Llewellyn Thompson in the White House to reassure John Kennedy that he's doing the right thing.
All Trump has is a bunch of people like John Bolton, my God, and Pompeo and other people like that.
So, yeah.
Well, you know, one way I like to illustrate this, because I think it just helps people visualize if you just picture the map of Europe.
And this is quoting Pat Buchanan and paraphrasing Pat Buchanan, that we used to draw the line at the Elbe River halfway across Germany.
And we said, look, if you Uruskis come across this line into Western Germany, try to invade, I don't know, Denmark and the Netherlands and France, then we will fight your asses then.
But if you crush rebellions in Hungary and Czechoslovakia and Poland, sorry, Charlie, that's sort of kind of outside of our sphere of influence, and we're not going to fight the Russians over that.
I'm sorry, we're just not going to do it.
But now, we've moved that line all the way to Russia's border.
And now, there's no reason to think, and I'm not trying to add weight to the bogus argument that Russia is an offensive threat against the Baltics or Poland or any part of Eastern Europe.
I don't think that they have any intention of biting off a giant problem and trying to reoccupy those lands, whether America's there or not.
But we are essentially giving license to whichever hawks in any of those countries.
I mean, who knows what group of people will be in charge of Poland from now on and what they will do and what kind of trouble that we are giving them license to get us into, for one example.
But it's just thoughtless.
Of course, they act like NATO is just a social club where the leaders of NATO get together and drink at night, as though it's not a military alliance and not to be perceived by the other side as a knife at their throat.
When, of course, Moscow is, what, 200 or 300 miles from Russia's western border.
It's right there.
And as I understand, which I don't very much, but from what I heard, I guess it's more fair to say they have no natural boundaries there to protect them at all, not even hills.
It's essentially you walk right there other than firepower stopping you.
Well, this time they've got the firepower and you're right.
They're going to use it.
And you're also right to point out that the Poles hate the Russians.
Now, is this abnormal?
No.
They've got lots of reasons to hate the Russians.
And the Russians hate the Poles and the people who divided Poland, always to Russia's disadvantage, except the last time when Russia thought it could do it with the Nazis.
So there's a deep, deep hatred that's innate in these situations.
And who's to say that some crazy Pole might take it into his head to start shooting up people on the border with Russia?
And it could be very hard to back down from that and cool heads, especially when there are very few cool heads, at least in the White House.
Yep.
All right.
With that, I'll let you go.
Thank you so much for staying on a little over time here with us too, Ray.
Appreciate it a lot.
Thank you, Scott.
All right, you guys.
That's the great Ray McGovern.
What do we ever do without Ray McGovern, man?
DNI nominee intent on getting to bottom of Russiagate.
That's at ConsortiumNews.com and Antiwar.com.
Update.
Well, this interview is kind of moot because right after we were done recording it on Friday afternoon, the news broke that John Ratcliffe has had to rescind his nomination for Director of National Intelligence.
Boy, they got to him quick.
And Eric Garris at Antiwar.com was telling me that a former CIA analyst expert on CNN was explaining whoever is going to be the new DNI has got to be bad on Russia.
So there you go.
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.
