For Pacifica Radio, September 1st, 2019.
I'm Scott Horton.
This is Anti-War Radio.
All right, you guys, welcome to the show.
It is Anti-War Radio.
I'm your host, Scott Horton.
I'm the author of the book, Fool's Errand, Time to End the War in Afghanistan, and I'm the editorial director of antiwar.com.
You can find my full interview archive at scotthorton.org.
More than 5,000 interviews for you now, going back to 2003.
All right, you guys, introducing John Kiriakou.
He is the only CIA officer to go to prison over the Bush-era torture scandal, of course, for confirming the names of a couple of CIA officers involved in it, not for torturing anybody.
He would have gotten out of jail free for that, no problem.
Anyway, here he is writing at consortiumnews.com, and the article is called In Search of a Russiagate Scalp, the Entrapment of Maria Butina.
Welcome back to the show.
How are you doing, John?
Thanks.
Good to be with you.
Very good to have you here.
Yeah, a Russiagate scalp, that's a good way to put it.
Maria Butina, she looks a lot like Anna Chapman, so you're trying to tell me that she's not a Russian spy after all?
What's the deal?
Imagine that.
The mainstream media, CNN, MSNBC, even Fox, when they refer to her, they always refer to her as either Russian spy or convicted Russian spy Maria Butina, and that's just simply factually wrong.
She's not a spy.
She was never accused of being a spy.
She was never charged with spying.
She was charged and convicted of conspiring to fail to fill out a form, literally.
That was the crime.
Well, and I think as you talk about in the article here, she may have forgotten to fill out the form, but there was never any evidence of a conspiracy to fail to fill out the form.
What's up with that?
No.
That's the funny part of this, too.
They so wanted to wrap her up in some kind of an espionage case that what the FBI did is they recruited a guy named Patrick Byrne.
In the interest of transparency, I know Patrick Byrne.
We're not friends, but we're acquaintances and we traveled together for several months during the Gary Johnson campaign in 2016.
I like Patrick.
He's a good guy.
I had no idea that he was secretly an FBI informant at the time.
But what they did was they recruited Patrick Byrne and they said.
This is the CEO of famously the former now CEO of Overstock.com, a zillionaire and a libertarian ish, as you say, there mentioned Gary Johnson, fellow traveler with libertarian party types.
Yeah.
And who famously was on TV in the last couple of weeks spilling his story.
And there was a conservative journalist who he had spoken to previous to those TV interviews.
I forget her name.
I'm sorry.
But who had done a big write up on his story about his involvement with Boutina?
That's right.
And why was he involved?
Why was he involved with the FBI?
Because he was a patriot.
He considered himself to be a patriot.
He said the FBI approached him because he had already done some work with them that he didn't want to talk about.
And they said, OK, here's what we want you to do.
We want you to approach this Russian woman, Maria Boutina, and we want you to strike up a friendship slash relationship with her.
So he did.
And then he reported back to the FBI and he said, yeah, she's just a grad student.
She's not a spy.
She's not trying to infiltrate the the Trump campaign or the government.
She's a gun nut and she's trying to broker good relations between the NRA and whatever the NRA equivalent is in Russia.
But she's not a spy.
And the FBI told him and this is according to his own interviews everywhere on CNN, on MSNBC, on Fox.
He says that James Comey and Peter Strzok and one other FBI official who he did not want to name told him they directed him to go back to Boutina and to initiate a sexual relationship with her, which he did.
He began having sex with her.
And then when she was arrested and charged with failing to fill out the Foreign Alien Registration Act form on the Internet, the prosecutors disingenuously, falsely went to the press and said she traded sexual favors in exchange for access.
That was a lie.
The truth was that the FBI told him to have sex with her.
Yeah.
And what boy, did they smear her as, you know, an attractive Russian woman.
So therefore this is a honeypot.
This is a trap.
This is how the she's an agent of Putin sent here to suborn the Republicans.
And of course, they all fell for it.
That is exactly what happened.
The fix was in from the beginning.
And let me tell you another thing.
And I do say this in the peace and consortium news.
I've become very well acquainted with the federal sentencing schedule.
This crime is one of the most minor felonies that a person can commit.
It ranks up there with the great crimes like making a false statement.
Okay.
So the federal sentencing guideline for a first time offender is zero to six months.
What most people get.
And actually, it was hard to find this because really nobody's ever prosecuted for failing to fill out this form.
Well, back up a minute.
Tell us this Foreign Agents Registration Act.
Explain because you have a paragraph in here about you one time represented a foreign government for a minute there.
Yes.
Yes.
The Foreign Affairs Registration Act was written in 1938.
What was happening in 1938 was that the federal government was afraid of German Americans representing German interests, later Nazi Party interests in the United States.
And they wanted to make it transparent.
So if you were taking money from the Nazi Party or from the Kaiser, you had to register.
And so the Justice Department would know that you were acting on behalf of the Kaiser or later on behalf of the Nazi Party.
And so the law has been on the books for a very long time, but it is almost never enforced.
The purpose of the law is, frankly, just to keep a list of lobbyists.
So if you're hired by the government of XYZ to do some work, whether it's to lobby Congress or lobby the media, write articles, whatever, that way the American people can go online and search the database and say, okay, Scott is lobbying for the government of Zimbabwe.
I say in the article that back in 2008, I was hired very briefly for a matter of a couple of months by the government of Abu Dhabi.
They hired me to write four op-eds in support of doing business in the United Arab Emirates, specifically in Abu Dhabi.
So I wrote the four op-eds.
They paid me a few grand.
I went to the FARA database and I said, I'm John Kiriakou.
I took five grand from the government of Abu Dhabi and I wrote these four op-eds and I put links and there I'm done.
I registered as a foreign agent.
By the way, anyone who's shocked that I would represent the government of Zimbabwe, let me tell you, they paid me a hundred trillion dollars.
How could I turn it down?
But the problem is, is it's in Zimbabwe's ZIMs. Yeah, it has been.
So anyway, people get tripped up over the word agent and all it means is that you're acting on behalf of that country.
So the feds, in the case of Bettina, alleged that she was acting on behalf of Russia, that she had been directed by the Russian government to try to create a relationship between Russian gun clubs and the NRA.
Well, she never admitted that, but the preponderance of the evidence, I suppose, showed that she was probably or may likely have acted on behalf of the Russian government, blah, blah, blah.
And so they got her for not filling out the form.
But when you don't fill out the form and you've never been convicted of a crime before, the normal sentence is 18 months of probation.
But she didn't get 18 months of probation.
She got 18 months in prison.
Now, the federal sentencing guideline for a maximum sentence is zero to six months.
She didn't get zero to six.
She got 18 months in a federal prison.
So that just goes to show you how political this whole thing was.
______________________________________________________________________________________________________ __________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ You know, we know from Jim Bamford's great work in The New Republic there, The Spy Who Wasn't, he wrote about her, that, as you say, she really was trying essentially to expand gun rights in Russia and was seeking the advice of American right-wingers for Helping to get that done and then secondary to that was just hoping to see like a great many private American citizens do better relations with Russia and yet just like in the Mueller report This supposedly is Itself Nefarious, why would you want to seek better ties so that Russia can control and destroy America more and better?
And it's all just question-begging crazy conspiracy nonsense where in fact what you have instead is American patriots who Recognized that the Soviet Union hasn't existed for quite some time now And that maybe we can figure out a way to as the president says get along with Russia And how crazy is it right or how crazy do our leaders have to be to want to use diplomacy to improve relations with our adversaries That's virtually treasonous.
If you listen to the to the Democratic National Committee these days, you know I used to complain about the George W Bush administration all the time I was still at the CIA during the George W Bush administration and I used to say that I had never seen an administration work So hard to not talk to our adversaries Well, there's been this weird role reversal now where anytime?the administration the current administration wants to talk to an adversary rather than to send troops or carrier battle groups The Democrats jump up and down like we can't have diplomacy with North Korea.
We can't have diplomacy with Russia or China That's treasonous, you know, that's diplomacy.
I mean listen even the Bush doctrine.
This is the Cheney Doctrine You know, that would be you know, distinguishing and granting Authority and stature and credibility to these terrible people were we to even share a room with them at any time So we'll just have to wait till the war comes Yeah, that's it.
That's it.
And what's happening is we're becoming Compartmentalized and and divided even more than we have in the past and we're getting to the point where we just We just don't trust anything we hear or see Yeah, but you know it should and that much is fair I mean they lie to us so much but it the default then should be Still regardless of which party we're talking about should always be Against war and for diplomacy and the fact that anyone could let partisanship Blind them to a truth like that Donald Trump crosses the DMZ and people complain about that but 100% unanimity by 320 million Americans that that's the best thing he's ever done in his entire stinking life It's bizarro world where everything is opposite like in this in the Superman comics We want the president to go to to the DMZ We want the president to negotiate with the leaders of countries with which we don't get along We want there to be new arms agreements that that limit the production the manufacturing of these dangerous weapons That's that's exactly what all Americans should be agreeing on.
That shouldn't be a Partisan, you know meme that ends up popping up on on Facebook.
Yeah All right now so back to Maria Butina here and you're the way you talk about it Shadow of a doubt forget about it She was never an agent of the Russian state sent here to do anything other than what was obviously above board But two things there First of all, didn't she have this powerful Russian patron who was a former central banker type guy wink-wink former and so isn't that relevant and does that have something to do really with the possibly a Actual, you know more real role that she was playing sort of behind the scenes in a way or you're certain that that's just a red Herring.
Yeah, I think it's a red herring And I'll tell you why because even in non-official cover cases and let's let's pretend that Maria Butina Was a Russian spy She would be what's called a knock a non-official cover agent And that means that she would not have been working out of the Russian Embassy with diplomatic immunity She would have been a private citizen without diplomatic immunity.
So let's pretend that that's all true Even if she were a non-official cover officer she would not have been reporting back through a banker or a so-called oligarch or An NGO or whatever She would have had a governmental handler And if the FBI is on every Russian in Washington like white on rice like they tell us that they are They would have been able to patch that together and they didn't not only did they not But she was never even accused of having been a non-official cover actor Not even accused.
So I think it's a red herring, you know, you see in the media all the time This is one of these things that drives me crazy.
You see that anytime Anybody falls under suspicion they have ties to fill in the blank And they have ties to somebody who's always and I use this in air quotes close to Putin What the heck does that mean?
Every Russian name that we read in every American newspaper or every news website Has ties to Putin.
What kind of ties to Putin?
Are you saying the person is a spy?
Well, he's the president of the country they live in.
So yeah, exactly exactly It's like your ties to Donald Trump and mine exactly correct Yes, and the thing is as Americans we don't ask those questions we read these articles we say oh well She's tied to you know, Boris and Natasha.
They have ties to Putin and We just accept it as fact Well and just like all good conspiracy theories each part of the conspiracy theory also is a conspiracy theory and they all rely on each other to be true and so Boutina we know she's a spy because of the rest of the Russiagate scandal going on and we know that the rest of the Russiagate scandal going on here is a thing because of Maria Boutina She's one of the pieces that make it all true There you go.
Yeah as George Tenet used to say it's the self-licking ice cream cone You can hear the Scott Horton show and anti-war radio on Pacifica 90.7 FM KPFK in LA KPFK org APS radio at APS radio calm the Libertarian Institute at Libertarian Institute org and of course check out the full archives more than 5,000 interviews now going back to 2003 and sign up for the podcast feed at Scott Horton org and Thanks It's anti-war radio.
I'm talking with John Kiriakou now So here's the real flip side of this is that the CIA and the FBI America's Secret Police They decided to do I don't know people are calling it a soft coup It seems like a pretty hard coup against the major party nominee for president United States Then the president-elect then the president himself and it happens to be a bunch of FBI counterintelligence officers That you are familiar with who did this to me?indeed When I was working for the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in 2011 I was approached by a Japanese diplomat who offered me money in exchange for trade secrets and I told him he should be ashamed of himself and I went directly to the office of the Senate Security Officer and I Reported that I had been pitched by a foreign intelligence officer So the Senate Security guy called the FBI the FBI sent two young agents up to interview me and they said here's what we want We want you to call the guy back We want you to take him to lunch and try to get him to tell you exactly what information he wants and how much money He's willing to pay for it.
I did that and I wrote them a memo with all the details and they asked me to do it a second time and a third time and a fourth time and I did because I'm a patriot a year later I'm called by the FBI.
Wait, so you just had lunch with him over and over again making promises But never actually finishing any kind of deal Correct.
Correct.
I just strung him along the whole time a Year later the FBI calls me and they said you remember that case you helped us with a year ago I said sure they said well something else came up and we need your help and I said and these were my exact words because I'm a fool.
I said anything for the FBI I went down to FBI Washington Field Office headquarters and I met by two FBI agents We went over this Japanese case and then they started asking me other questions It was an hour plus into the interview before I realized that they're investigating me And I said, wait a minute.
Wait a minute Am I under arrest and the guy says not yet?
But you should know that we're raiding your house right now as we speak.
I said, I want to see my attorney I got up.
I started to walk out and I'm blocked by a guy named Peter Strzok and Peter Strzok says to the two FBI agents.
Tell me he implicated himself and One of them says not really.
No, and I said again.
Am I under arrest?
Strzok says not today and I walked out Peter Strzok arrested me the following Monday.
That was a Thursday.
He arrested me on Monday Now the FBI likes to make its arrests on Thursdays Because federal prisoners are not arraigned in Washington on Fridays So you spend Thursday night Friday night Saturday night and Sunday night in the DC jail Getting the daylights beaten out of you and then finally you're arraigned on Monday morning Well after that arrest we got discovery and in discovery we learned that there never was any Japanese diplomat He was an FBI agent undercover trying to get me to commit espionage Because they had no espionage case against me and they had already made a political decision that they wanted to charge me with espionage That's what they've done with Maria Butina In other words, but you weren't even going to meet with this guy at all except on their Instruction in the first and not and not that they were stringing you along other than they were telling you That you were working for them investigating this guy Correct.
I only did it because they asked me to do it and it was so in other words This isn't like if you take the parallel with like one of these, you know, fake terrorism case entrapments They entrap the guy into agreeing to break the law and do something wrong I I don't know of any where they entrap the guy by making him think that he's acting as an undercover agent for them Helping enforce the law against another guy who also is working for the government No, no, not at all.
What so this is a real this is real real entrapment.
Oh, this was real entrapment What they wanted me to do was to lie in the memos that I was writing them and say yeah You know what in this in this meeting?
He didn't offer me any money when in fact he had offered me 5,000 10,000 and they wanted me to put it in my pocket So they could arrest me for espionage and for actually taking the money, but I didn't I kept reporting back Every detail of those meetings right back to the FBI and then there's a memo I found from one of the FBI agents to Peter Strzok We got this in discovery and the FBI agent says we should probably end this operation He's obviously not gonna take the bait and then they shut it down.
You have that in writing Oh, yeah, this Japanese diplomat told me in our last lunch that he had been promoted He got his dream job and he was gonna become the number two in the Japanese Embassy in Cairo.
I Congratulated him.
I shook his hand and I never saw him again Amazing so well go back then to 2016 and and I guess your view of his role with Jimmy and for that matter with John Brennan in getting this whole Russiagate hoax going in the first place.
Oh you bet so you remember back in 2017 the debate was Was there spying?against the Trump campaign and Peter Stroke et al Maintained that there wasn't spying There were inquiries because there were allegations that there was some kind of a connection between the Trump campaign and Russia That's nonsense whether there was Let's even pretend that there was a connection between the Trump campaign in Russia You don't then begin electronic surveillance against a major party presidential campaign what you do and this has happened in the past is the director of the FBI or the director of the FBI's Field office either in Washington or New York will go to the chairman of the campaign and say listen you guys have a problem There's somebody in your campaign who's talking to a foreign government That's what normally happens, but that's not what happened in 2016 and we're not talking about Jill Stein or Gary Johnson here We're talking about the Republican Party nominee who's got flip a coin Essentially a 50-50 chance of being the next president of the United States And this is something that David Stockman has said all along That that is all you need to know to know What a put on this whole thing is that if they thought for a moment that oh No, the Russians are attempting to make inroads into a campaign and they were not the ones setting it all up in the first place They would have ran straight to Trump to warn him.
That would have been their Obligation their overriding obligation.
Yes, that is unless they really thought he was leading it all But they had no reason to claim that based on them setting up Carter page and George Papadopoulos, I mean, come on and and you know, the the FBI owes an apology a public apology to Carter page at the very least I mean look at look at the the the wrongs that were committed here You've got Carter page who was utterly innocent of any wrongdoing and not only did they take out a FISA warrant against this guy?
To to intercept all of his electronics, but they renew it three Times Knowing that the evidence that they're using is specious Knowing that that report was no good that it was all hearsay.
So number one, they dropped the ball there number two Don't forget that Peter Strzok wasn't just some FBI agent who hated Trump Peter Strzok was the director of the FBI's division for counter-intelligence This guy wielded incredible authority.
He was the FBI's mole hunter Well, if the mole hunter is telling his adulterous girlfriend that he's gonna take down this president if he wins You've got another problem So, you know, it seems to me that we're not talking here about just bad form on the part of Peter Strzok We're talking about potential criminal activity or even if it doesn't meet the threshold of criminal activity We're talking about conspiracy to commit criminal activity.
I think we need to look at him So, let's get back to her now so Bob Mueller did not prosecute her someone must have brought him this case and he said no I don't or whoever was running his so-called investigation over there said yeah No, I don't think we're gonna go with this.
This is You know too low to even I mean, these are the same people who prosecuted Mike Flynn But they didn't go for this and they let some other loser attorney at the DOJ do it instead It still made a great talking point on TV though.
Oh Yes.
Yeah, well, you know, this is the sad truth.
That is that the fix is in And and there are so many different people so many different layers of bureaucracy that are involved the fix is in I've been I've been repeating in interviews this past week something that one of my attorneys told me and it bears repeating here.
I Had received an offer from the Justice Department This was their best and final offer for two and a half years in prison I do 23 months and I make the whole thing go away and this isn't for the entrapment This is for the leaking of the CIA names, right?
Correct one name the leaking and I didn't even leak it.
I confirmed it and it was never made public, right?
But like I say the fix was in so I thought about it literally all night long My wife and I stayed up all night long and I decided the next morning.
I was gonna turn the deal down I hadn't done anything wrong There was no harm to the national security.
I had no criminal intent.
I was gonna turn it down and One of my lawyers got very angry at me and he said to me, you know what?
Your problem is your problem is you think this is about justice and it's not about justice it's about mitigating damage take the deal and I came to realize That all of these cases are about mitigating damage they're not about justice nobody cares if you're innocent Nobody cares about the degrees of guilt.
Nobody cares about criminal intent What happens is people at the Justice Department get promoted people at the FBI get promoted Only when you are successfully prosecuted So you're going to jail, you know the the the Justice Department According to ProPublica wins 98.2 percent of its cases That's not an accident.
That's a result of plea bargains because they heap so many charges on you They threaten you with so many years behind bars I was looking at 45 years in prison and they offered me 23 months So what are you gonna do you're gonna roll the dice knowing that you have a 1.8 percent chance of winning Are you just gonna take the deal and make the thing go away?
Yeah, it's no accident that most of these cases are heard in the Eastern District of Virginia, which is in Alexandria That's the home of the CIA.
It's the home of the Pentagon I hired OJ Simpson's jury consultant and he flew up from Dallas and he said look if we were in any other District in America, I'd say let's go for it.
We're gonna win this thing.
But the Eastern District of Virginia He said your jury is gonna be made up of people from the CIA the FBI Department of Homeland Security Department of Defense intelligence community contractors.
You don't have a prayer He told me take the deal Yeah We saw the way they did Jeffrey Sterling where exactly didn't even really attempt to demonstrate that he had passed these secrets to James Risen of the New York Times instead They just said well, it seems as though I'm not sure they prove it seems as though they had called each other But they only know connections of numbers.
I don't really know who was on the line They don't you know, and they had no more information than that other than on on Sometimes it seems as though they may have talked on the phone and that was enough to get a conviction beyond a reasonable doubt So yeah, they called it Prosecution by metadata.
Yeah, that's all they had was the metadata and in fact in the Sterling case at the same time Sterling had filed a racial discrimination lawsuit against the CIA that that Risen was covering for the New York Times Right, so, of course, they were talking.
So in other words, they had a perfectly plausible Explanation for why they were on the phone other than passing secrets.
Yes, exactly exactly Sounds like reasonable doubt, but I'm from Texas.
That's what I would call.
Thank you so much for your time on the show today John really my pleasure.
Thanks for having me.
Good to talk to you.
All right, you guys that's John Kiriakou He wrote this for Consortium news.com in search of a Russiagate scalp the entrapment of Maria Boutina Of course a former CIA officer and author of the reluctant spy I'll write you guys and that has been anti-war radio for this morning I'm your host Scott Horton the author of fools Aaron time to end the war in Afghanistan an editorial director of Anti-war comm you can find my full interview archive at Scott Horton org more than 5,000 interviews for you now going back to 2003 I'm here every Sunday morning from 830 to 9 on KPFK 90.7 FM in LA.
See you next week
