All right, y'all, welcome to the Scott Horton Show.
I am the Director of the Libertarian Institute, Editorial Director of Antiwar.com, author of the book Fool's Errand, Time to End the War in Afghanistan, and I've recorded more than 5,000 interviews going back to 2003, all of which are available at scotthorton.org.
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All right, you guys, introducing Aaron Maté again from the Gray Zone.
He hosts the show Push Back, and of course he writes great articles for Real Clear Investigations and all different things, the great debunker of the Russiagate hoax.
Welcome back to the show.
How are you doing?
Hi, Scott.
I'm good.
How are you?
I'm doing great.
Really appreciate you joining us on the show today.
And if it's okay, we're going to go in order of things I'm curious about rather than the biggest news headlines.
There was a tweet of yours, a tweet of somebody else's tweet about Misfood and Misfood's 302 from the FBI and what all it reveals and what all dogs aren't barking in there and all of these things.
And I think this might be the key to something really important.
So I was wondering, first of all, you could remind us who this guy is, generally speaking, what we've been told about him and what's the news in this newly released document here.
So Joseph Misfood, according to the official story of Russiagate, is the predicate for the entire Trump-Russia probe because it's supposedly his conversation with George Papadopoulos, this low-level Trump campaign volunteer, that becomes the predicate for the FBI opening its investigation because after the stolen Democratic Party emails are released in the summer of 2016, the FBI gets this tip from Australia via one of its diplomats, Alexander Downer, that Papadopoulos had told him, Downer, that he'd had a conversation with someone who told Papadopoulos that the Russians could help the Trump campaign with the anonymous release of information that could be damaging to Hillary.
And this conversation supposedly happens before the stolen emails are released.
And so the FBI thinks, well, oh, this could mean that the Trump campaign was given a heads-up.
About the Russian operation.
There are many reasons to doubt that hypothesis, but that's what the FBI says was their predicate.
So let's take them at their word that at least they thought this was plausible.
And then it later emerges that the person who Papadopoulos heard this from was a guy named Joseph Misfood.
At least that's what Papadopoulos told the FBI.
And that was the predicate for this entire thing.
So we just recently got, for the first time, the FBI's only known interview notes with Misfood, because shortly after Papadopoulos tells the FBI about Misfood in January of 2017, Misfood happens to be in Washington, D.C. for a State Department conference, which is interesting.
And it was always a mystery what happened in that interview.
The Mueller report says that Misfood even misled, or actually made false statements to the FBI during that interview, but yet the Mueller team, even though they indicted people like Michael Flynn for making false statements to the FBI, the FBI and Mueller never indicted Misfood, which is a strange mystery.
Now we've just got, finally, the actual notes from the interview, the 302, which is the document the FBI makes to record its notes about the conversation.
And incredibly, the document is only two pages long, and it contains no follow-up questions, or at least there's no hint of any follow-up questions.
Basically, Misfood denies to the FBI having any foreknowledge of this alleged Russian email hack.
And that's it.
They don't really press him.
It just runs two pages.
By contrast, the 302, for example, of Michael Flynn, who was indicted for making false statements, the same thing that they claim Misfood did, although again, it didn't indict him.
The 302 for Michael Flynn is five pages.
So why are you spending more time and more energy and more effort questioning Michael Flynn than you are the supposed predicate of your entire investigation?
It just, it's very puzzling.
Well, I mean, and so they said publicly in different statements, including I think Comey and the rest, that yeah, this guy's a Russian agent.
That's why it's such a concern, because we know that that is true about him, right?
Well, see, they're very slick.
When FBI officials or CIA officials leave their jobs, they have a habit of saying, especially when they have books to sell, like Comey or Peter Strzok now, the FBI agent who has a new book out, they have a habit of making claims that they never made and that their agency's never made in court or in any other documents.
So for example, with Misfood, they never say officially that he is a Russian agent.
They just disingenuously suggest it.
If you read the Mueller report, they talk about Misfood's connections to Russia and they try to draw some tie between him and the Russian government.
Even though there's nothing there.
It basically amounts to him knowing some people who know some people who are Russian and speaking at a couple of conferences inside of Russia, whereas Misfood has far more actually extensive Western intelligence ties, if you want to try to like, you know, connect dots.
And so Comey, when he writes an op-ed in the Washington Post defending his conduct, this was I think last year, he called Misfood a Russian agent.
But the FBI has never said that because of course they have no evidence of it and he's not.
There's no indication to suggest that he is.
But basically Comey, because he's not saying this in an official capacity, he's just writing this in a, in an op-ed defending himself, that's when they start throwing around names like Russian agent.
It's to basically justify their investigation, justify their conduct by making false statements like the fact that Misfood is a Russian agent because they, because they know for a fact that that's not true.
Peter Strzok just did the same thing where in his book, he's trying to justify the, the conspiracy theory that Paul Manafort worked with a Russian intelligence officer, this guy, Konstantin Kalinic.
The FBI never called him a Russian intelligence officer, but the Senate report that recently came out, they do, which we can get into.
But Peter Strzok writes that it, you know, that Manafort gave Kalinic some polling data during the 2016 campaign.
And that is fed into this conspiracy theory that that polling data was used for the Russian government's interference operation and the 2016 campaign and like the GRU got this polling data and used it to like micro-target its social media ads at, you know, at certain, at certain key states based on what the polling data says.
And that's literally what Peter Strzok says in his book, that this polling data would have been of use to the Russian intelligence officers who bought posts on social media to fool U.S. voters.
The problem with that is that that didn't happen.
The Mueller team never said that this Russian troll farm that put out, by the way, stupid memes that weren't even about the election and that nobody saw, the Mueller team has never even claimed that that troll farm was connected to the Russian government.
So Peter Strzok is just straight up lying and saying he's inventing the fact that this thing that these were, these troll farm employees were all really the GRU.
And they can say that because now they're out of government and they've booked this up.
But so, and I do want to talk more about that.
In fact, I have a guest, Paul Robinson, coming on later on the show today to talk a little bit more about Kalinic and that whole angle.
Going back to the early summer of 2016 here, we have this whole chain here where Alexander Downer, this Australian diplomat says that Papadopoulos told him, that Misfud told him that, hey, the Russians have this stuff.
And yet when the FBI questions him, where exactly does that conversation go?
As brief as it is, can you describe it to us?
And where it is they stop?
They don't really press him at all on any of this, right?
You know where they have the conversation?
It's in a hotel lobby, it's in a hotel lobby.
That's how casual it is.
Here you have the person who supposedly sparked your entire investigation.
He happens to be in Washington, D.C.
They don't bring him into like some kind of secure room, you know, where they can have cameras and whatever else, have a bunch of agents.
They talk to him in a hotel lobby.
And again, literally the 302 is two pages long and there's no indication of any kind of follow up.
So, you know, it's obvious that they interrogated all these innocuous players like George Papadopoulos, Rick Gates, Paul Manafort's deputy, Michael Flynn.
They interrogated all these people far more rigorously than they did the guy who, according to, you know, their own, their own investigation was the predicate.
It doesn't, it doesn't make any, it doesn't make any sense.
Why were they so, why did they have such a lack of curiosity about the predicate for their entire investigation?
And it's, you know, and by the way, you know, George Papadopoulos is the only person who mentions Mifsud is George Papadopoulos.
There's no record that George Papadopoulos mentioned Mifsud to Downer.
According to Downer, Papadopoulos made some kind of vague suggestion about a suggestion that Russia can maybe help.
And that was this really vague tip the FBI used to open its investigation.
But Papadopoulos doesn't tell anyone about Mifsud until he's interrogated by the FBI in January 2017.
And that raises questions or not, whether or not Papadopoulos embellished some of his story.
And in fact, that Mifsud, it's quite possible that Mifsud really told him nothing, but that Papadopoulos feeling the pressure from the Mueller team who really went after him.
They like, they threatened him with all kinds of charges.
They talked to, they talked to him about going to jail for a long time.
And he was just a kid.
He's a young guy.
They arrested him at an airport.
They put a lot of pressure on him.
And it's possible that he, he himself embellished what Mifsud told him in order to get the Mueller team off its back.
Well, and now we only just recently learned, despite what we had all heard in the media for years here, that the FBI did not even use the Papadopoulos information to get a FISA warrant or to continue their investigation.
They dropped that and switched to Page and switched to having to lie by omission about Page and refuse to tell the court the truth that he was an asset of the CIA and was loyally reporting all of his interactions with, you know, any Russian that might be of interest to them.
But so am I right then that that means that if they had dismissed Papadopoulos, that they right there, they were dismissing Mifsud too, even though they spent the next, I'm sorry, I always pronounce the name wrong, but even though they spent the next two or three years telling us that this is the core of the treason right here.
Exactly.
There's even a, we even, you know, a few months ago we got the, we got a bunch of transcripts released from the House Intelligence Committee for a bunch of interviews, a lot of them that were done in 2017.
So a long time ago now, very early on in the investigation.
And so we've talked, I think, about one of those transcripts was with Sean Henry of CrowdStrike informing the House Intelligence Committee that, oh yeah, we didn't have any actual evidence that these alleged Russian hackers actually exfiltrated any emails from the server.
So in other words, we didn't have any evidence of the core allegations at the heart of this entire thing and the allegation that we, CrowdStrike, made, which helped kick this whole thing off.
So that was one of the things we only learned recently.
Another thing we learned pertaining to Papadopoulos is that Andrew McCabe, who was then the, you know, acting head of the FBI for a while after, after Comey was fired, and before that was Comey's deputy.
Andrew McCabe said that, oh yeah, we never thought that it was Papadopoulos who was talking to the Russians.
But Papadopoulos was literally, if you look at the, you know, opening document, the electronic communication that opens Crossfire Hurricane, it's based on a tip about Papadopoulos.
So if you don't think that the predicate for your investigation was talking to the Russians and possibly coordinating with the Russians, on what basis are you continuing this investigation?
How did it drag on for so long?
Yeah.
You know?
And you know what?
I'm sorry.
I don't know if you've ever written about this, but do you happen to know, what was the timeline of when the FBI agents did their bulletin board and string and, you know, spreadsheet where they went through the different assertions of the Steele dossier and either debunked them or showed how this was a twist on open source information and all that?
Was that in the summer, in the fall, in the winter of 2016?
Can you tell me?
Do you know?
I believe that was in the, you know, shortly after the election.
And then certainly the early parts of 2017, when they finally spoke to Steele's primary subsource who told them that the whole thing was junk and that a lot of it was based on...
But they had their hands on a lot earlier than that, right?
They had it in July, right?
It's not clear.
You see, they deny knowing about it.
You know, Comey says he didn't know about it.
So it's, you know, it's not clear.
What is clear is that Steele was talking to Bruce Ohr, who was at the Justice Department in the summer of 2016.
And people like Harry Reid in August 2016 were making allegations about Carter Page that were only contained in the Steele dossier.
And he got those allegations from John Brennan, who briefed a bunch of members of Congress in August 2016.
And you know, we can only speculate, but if I had to bet, I would say it's quite likely that John Brennan told Harry Reid about what it said about Carter Page in the Steele dossier.
We just, we can't prove that yet.
Because see, and this is off of hard reporting here too, I don't know if you'd call exactly speculation, but it's sort of a characterization of the thing.
It seems like this is the key to explaining the hoax right here, is that these men are pretending to believe that there is a problem here, right?
That they have enough scraps of things that they can put together, as you always correctly characterize it as essentially a goofball conspiracy theory, but they have their little pieces of it.
And one of the things obviously that jumps out of the Steele dossier is that the Russians have promised Carter who?
A 20% ownership stake in Rosneft, the Russian state, you know, government, national government owned oil company.
If only he would seize total control of America's sanctions policy from the Congress and lift all the sanctions on Russia and completely change American foreign policy for them.
And that's completely stupid.
And any FBI agent or say, director or deputy director of the FBI or say, director of the Central Intelligence Agency, who's pretending to believe that that is a real concern that needs investigating, well, they're lying and they're winking and nudging with each other that this is how we're going to attack Trump, is we're going to pretend to think that there's something here, even though from their own point of view, by the summer of 2016, what are we talking about?
Papadopoulos plus page plus what sessions shaking hands with Kislyak and a couple of other zeros that all adds up to zero plus the Steele dossier.
They had to have known spreadsheet or not.
They had to have known that they just had a pile of garbage that they were sort of make and work out of by that time.
Right.
I mean, yes.
I mean, you have to assume that.
And you have to assume that they were compromised by their own bias, their own bias against Trump and also their own insane Russophobia.
There was a text message from Peter Strzok, the head agent who opened up the Trump Russia investigation.
He wrote something like, you know, I swear on the show, Scott, or should I center myself?
Oh, go ahead.
We'll meet.
Yeah.
Part of it.
He he writes.
He writes something like the motherfucking Russians, the cheating savages.
I'm glad I'm on Team USA.
You know, this was one of his text messages that he wrote to Lisa Page in the summer of 2016.
So these guys hate Russia, you know, and none of them hide their contempt for it.
They all they all they all have instances of of comments like this.
So these were like these are cold warriors who I think couldn't process the fact that Trump was his was calling on the campaign for better relations with Russia.
And that to them must have meant that he was compromised by Russia somehow.
They couldn't understand how someone could just be saying, yeah, I think we'd be fine if we got along with Russia, that that just they couldn't process that notion.
And so they were compromised by their own biases, I think, in more ways than one.
And it led them to, yeah, rely on things like the Steele dossier.
One of the crazy things of the Steele dossier, I mean, putting aside the just how dumb the theories are, the P-Tape, you know, Carter Page getting promised billions of dollars in the Russian state oil company, there's also a glaring pattern where basically so much of what Steele writes is only written because he wrote them, you know, on a series of dates.
It wasn't just all at once.
Every time he writes something, a lot of it only happens after there's some public report about it earlier.
So, for example, Carter Page went to Moscow and that was reported in the media.
And then after that, that's when Steele comes out with this theory about Carter Page.
The Ukraine amendment, there was like a proposal to have language in a meaningless Republican Party platform at the convention in the summer.
And then the people in the Trump campaign rejected that language and made it a bit less hawkish.
That was reported as some huge scandal, even though it was just basically rejecting some language to an amendment.
After that, Steele comes out with this theory that this was done as a quid pro quo with Russia, that like if the Trump campaign changed its platform, then the Russian government would help it win.
You know, just like basically Steele and whoever his sources were, quote unquote, read the newspaper and then invented some fanciful story based on that.
And a strong indication of that is that basically all these key things that were not public at the time are not in the Steele dossier.
So, for example, George Papadopoulos, who was the supposed predicate of the Trump Russia probe, Steele never mentions him.
And why is that?
Because George Papadopoulos, his name was not public and was not, his involvement in this whole thing was not public until a long time after Steele wrote his last report.
So simply, Steele's source really was the newspaper and George Papadopoulos' name hadn't appeared there yet.
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So let me ask you about Downer, the guy that reported on Papadopoulos.
I guess I want to phrase it as broadly as I can.
What do you think about his role in this and what we should make of it?
Well, you know, look, there are theories that he was involved in some kind of op to entrap the Trump campaign, you know, and anything is possible.
I, you know, it's not a theory that I can embrace because it's just, there's no hard evidence for it.
But certainly he does have ties to the Clinton Foundation.
He doesn't have a very good reputation in Australia.
He's known for being shady.
So anything is possible.
But look, I mean, even taking his so-called tip at face value, you know, assuming that he was acting in good faith, it's a very bland tip.
And timeline-wise, it doesn't even make sense because all that Downer reported, and it's in the Horowitz report about what he actually said.
He says, Downer wrote that Papadopoulos, quote, suggested the Trump team had received some kind of suggestion from Russia that it could assist this process with the anonymous release of information during the campaign that will be damaging to Mrs. Clinton and President Obama.
So even taking that tip at face value, it's incredibly vague.
It doesn't mention stolen emails.
It doesn't mention hacking the DNC.
And it's not even a concrete assertion.
It's a suggestion that the Trump team had, quote, received some kind of suggestion.
So it's incredibly vague.
So to me, the thing with Downer is no matter what his motives were, no matter who he is, whether he was acting in good faith or not, he still gave the FBI a incredibly vague tip that they then used as a predicate to open up an unprecedented counterintelligence investigation of a presidential campaign.
So to me, the scandal there is really just the fact that the FBI used this ridiculous tip to open up this investigation because it didn't even mention the stolen emails.
It didn't, you know, there was nothing in there.
And even there, the theory that Massoud would have given Papadopoulos advance notice doesn't make sense because their conversation happens in early April 2016.
Well, the emails that were released by WikiLeaks, they hadn't even been stolen yet.
You know, the final emails that were sent, and the actual was May 25th or around then, May 25th or May 26th.
And so basically, Massoud would have been telling Papadopoulos about emails that hadn't even been stolen yet, if that, if that theory of the case was to make sense.
So it was a ridiculous basis to open up an investigation to begin with.
And the question, and maybe this is something that John Durham will answer, is whether or not, you know, it was actually a part of a setup.
You know, if I had to guess, I think actually Papadopoulos embellished a little bit under pressure from the Mueller team and made even whatever he told Downer to be more than it actually is.
Or alternatively, you know, maybe we'll find out that Downer, you know, maybe it was that Downer was part of some kind of setup.
Downer and maybe Massoud were part of some kind of setup, but I, I've seen no evidence for that yet.
So it's not a theory that I can embrace.
Yeah.
All right.
Well, let me say this real quick, that if people look at your recent debate with the New York Times reporter at Pushback, then they can see, as you guys talk a bit about Kalemnick and his role here and working for the Republicans and all of this stuff.
But I'm actually already over time, but I got to get at least a quick minute with you here of just, other than the Kalemnick thing, I got a whole other interview on that coming up in a second, but was there anything else that actually really mattered in the recently released Senate Intelligence Committee report that changed anything?
All I saw was references to Kalemnick and to Roger Stone.
See, Roger Stone had this back channel, the same thing that I've heard you debunk a hundred times.
Is there anything else there?
No, there's nothing.
It's nearly a thousand pages and it's, you know, for all the spin and attempts to portray this as something new and something groundbreaking, they're basically taking everything that was revealed by the Mueller team and just putting their own spin on it.
Like asserting that Konstantin Kalemnick is a Russian intelligence officer, which, whether that's true or not, I mean, you know, again, it's hard to prove a negative, but all the evidence that they present for it is ridiculous.
And all the available evidence we have raises serious doubts about that assertion.
But yet it's, you know, because there's such an attachment to this Russiagate thing.
But maybe I framed it wrong by asking you to cite something substantive, since none of it is substantive.
But in terms of the bogus claims, was there any new supposed important revelations other than Kalemnick and Stone?
That was it?
Those two duds?
That's it.
And by the way, even with Stone, they don't even assert that definitively that he had a backchannel to WikiLeaks.
They just try to disingenuously suggest it in the same way that the Mueller team did.
The Mueller team tried to make people think that Stone had some backchannel to WikiLeaks, even though they never actually asserted that he did, because they can't.
Because his only supposed intermediaries were Randy Credico, a left-wing comedian, and Jerome Corsi, a far-right conspiracy theorist.
Oh, you mean the FSB weren't the middlemen between Roger Stone and WikiLeaks?
Oh, yeah.
So in other words, even if he was best friends with Julian Assange, that still doesn't have anything to do with Russia anyway, does it?
No, exactly.
I mean, the whole thing is farcical, and it's just incredible.
And it's a real commentary on the state of our media that all of this is still taken seriously.
Yeah, absolutely.
Still going on.
I used to say, you know, for three years, and now here we are.
Yeah, for four years.
They're still going with this stuff.
Well, listen, I'm so sorry that we're out of time, but great interview, and I really appreciate all your great work on this subject, sir.
Thank you, Scott.
I appreciate it.
All right, you guys.
That is the great Aaron Maté.
He hosts Pushback at The Gray Zone, thegrayzone.com, and also writes for Real Clear Investigations.
Follow him on Twitter.
He's causing a ruckus over there all the time.
The Scott Horton Show, anti-war radio, can be heard on KPFK 90.7 FM.in LA, APSradio.com, antiwar.com, scotthorton.org, and libertarianinstitute.org.
