Provoked with Darryl Cooper and Scott Horton - EP:7 Who Watches the Watchers? Intelligence Agency Overreach

Episode Date: August 9, 2025

The intelligence community's role in shaping American foreign policy and domestic politics takes center stage in this eye-opening conversation. Scott and Darryl begin by honoring Ron Paul's 90th birthday, reflecting on his unwavering commitment to non-interventionism and his prescient warnings about blowback from American military adventures abroad. As they discuss his consistent opposition to war—from Lebanon in the 1980s to his accurate COVID-19 predictions—they paint a portrait of a principled statesman whose views have been vindicated time and again. The conversation shifts to Syria, exploring how Western intelligence agencies orchestrated chaos by supporting jihadist groups against Assad's regime. Drawing parallels to William Van Wagenen's new book "Creative Chaos," they examine how the CIA's strategy wasn't simply regime change but the deliberate fragmentation of Syria into warring factions—creating permanent instability that serves regional interests while devastating civilian populations. The hosts don't hold back in describing the human cost of these policies, from displaced families to the rise of ISIS. Most provocatively, Scott and Darryl connect these foreign policy machinations to domestic politics through Russiagate. They meticulously deconstruct how intelligence agencies allegedly fabricated evidence against Trump campaign officials like Carter Page and George Papadopoulos, while destroying the lives of ordinary campaign volunteers through endless interrogations and legal expenses. What emerges is a troubling picture of unelected officials operating beyond democratic oversight to determine which leaders are acceptable both abroad and at home. Whether you're concerned about America's role in the Middle East or the integrity of our democratic institutions, this discussion raises profound questions about accountability in our intelligence services. When agencies that operate in shadows decide they know better than voters, what becomes of representative government? Listen now to explore what happens when the watchers themselves go unchecked. Chapters 0:32Episode Introduction 9:07Ron Paul's 90th Birthday Celebration 17:05Syria's Civil War and Western Intervention 37:26The Oded Yanon Plan and Regional Chaos 53:34Russiagate Origins and CIA Involvement 1:05:39The Framing of Trump Campaign Officials Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This is a lot of Hey, welcome the show. I'm Scott from The Things and he's Darryl from some other stuff. How you doing, man? Doing all right. I just got out of a three-hour visit with the dentist, but I'm not doing too bad. Dude, I got to say, like, I know your thing is anti-war and my thing's kind of become anti-war too. That intro makes me want to go start a war. What's that hell of war? Intro. Listen, I told my buddy Josh to write us a new song, which he did, but he's waiting on the guy to do the drums. So it'll be a little bit different. All right. Nothing wrong with one.

We'll see about the intro. I got a real good intro guy too or a couple of them. So we're going to see. We got a good start, but we're going to, I think we're going to end up changing it up a little bit. It's a little too intense for my tone. My idea of the show is really just more you and me shooting this shit a little less intense. Although, you know, the subject matters important stuff. but yeah speaking of

there reminds me more of like breaking news like man remember that one thing I'm still mad about yeah speaking of subject matter what are we talking about

well so first of all we got to talk about the great Ron Paul the greatest American who ever lived and is still alive and is turning 90 and we're celebrating his birthday this weekend in late Jackson and so me and Dave Smith and Keith Knight and Dan Sanchez

and of course Tom Woods and you know all kinds of great libertarians Josie the red-headed libertarian and I'm sure Clint Russell's going to be there Dan McNight from bring our troops home.us and you know a bunch of people are going to be there celebrating good old Ron and his birthday and eating barbecue like we like to do and it reminds me about how 20 years ago I caught the tail in just you know you picture that hurricane those those arms I caught the tail of one of those arms on the way home from Hurricane Katrina on the way home from Rock. on Paul's birthday and damn near drown in my little green truck man trying to make it home down 71

there um while then you know Katrina got hit hard and and that was uh right after you know the Cindy Sheehan Camp Casey thing was going on at that time and all that so finally confidence in bush broke after five days of not doing a damn thing to help the people in New Orleans and people like wait a minute this guy might not be the most competent administrator in world history after all that was kind of a big deal um but yeah so i love ron and uh he really is the very best of us and so we're all going to celebrate that and do some live stream podcasts and hang out and give a little five minutes speeches and have a good time so that sounds like a great true man yeah standing room only i guess if people want to show up and like look through the open doorway i think they're

sold out but um yeah that should be fun and then i'm so glad that somebody who like you know like you was like on the roll run paul train in 08 in 2012 like it's so it's so nice to see like kind of what he's become in the culture you know he definitely did not sort of show up and then fade away i mean you know he got older so his political courier came to an end but he's just universally admired now pretty much i mean they tried to dismiss him insult him everything they could and in the end i mean he's if you took a poll i'll bet you of even like maga people he'd probably stand up to Trump in terms of approval. I mean, he's just universally admired.

Even people on the left, Democrats and stuff, even they like him. Everybody likes him. And they should. And I'm glad he got to live long enough to kind of see that vindication in the culture. You know, it's awesome. Yeah, yeah. And look, I mean, anybody, oh, no, Daryl just turned into a JPEG again. Oh, there he is.

Hey, yeah, no, you're right. And look, I mean, there's a reason why. I mean, check, the archive, 555 articles or so there at Ann Arirley. anti-war.com slash Paul dating back to the 1990s talking about Mr. President Clinton, we should not be doing this. This is the kind of thing that's going to cause terrorism against the United States. Come home right now. You know, all this time his book of foreign policy of freedom is all like concerns his, or much of it concerns his first term in Congress or first terms in the 70s and 80s before he went back to be a baby doctor for a while and then finally came back in 97.

And there he is warning Reagan about going into Lebanon. Don't do this, Mr. President. And then now that we're there, get our Marines out of there before something bad happens, Mr. President. And then, see, I told you something bad was going to happen. Now get him out of there, Mr. President. And then congratulations, Mr. President. I'm finally doing the right thing and not doubling down on the war in Lebanon, but instead getting the hell out of there instead of making things much worse and all that. And that's the kind of guy Ron Paul is and dating back to those times.

And even when you could tell he's more right wing and more cold warrior when it comes to China and Russia back then, his prescription is always non-interventionism shore up freedom and prosperity here that'll show those commies and he's just man he's always so good i love him man and honestly like the only things were i ever disagreed with them things were like he was more conservative than me on immigration well yeah but that's because he was right and i was wrong of course you know he's absolutely you know a doctor not a lawyer great on covid from the very beginning what they say is the infection rate and the fatality rate and whatever let me set these statistics straight for you Okay. Let me tell you how a virus works. Okay. Blada, blah, blah, blah. Perfect. From the very beginning, you go check his record from the beginning of 20 with no flaws, right? With now error from the very beginning of that. On everything, on everything. Check his archives at Lou Rockwall.com. And of course, at the Ron Paul Institute for Peace and Prosperity. But, you know, the archives at LRC and at anti-war.com go way back to the 90s. And it's just, dude, you can't beat that. You absolutely cannot beat that. And by the way, on the personal level, like the reason the guy is charming is because,

Because he's not at all like a charming guy. He's like for real legitimately charming in his just decency. He's still married to his high school sweetheart since they were 16 years old. And with no scandal or hint of that whatsoever, deliver 4,000 babies. And just has, he's just a country doctor who understands Ludovamisa's economics. And, you know, his own, you know, Rothbardian foreign policy. and you know that anti-government spirit one of the first things i ever heard of him was on washington journal well the first thing i ever heard of him was him accused in george bush of selling

chemical weapons to saddam hussein big part the second thing i ever heard of him was on washington journal they said man guys like you blew up oklahoma or whatever people who were anti-government blew up oklahoma he goes uh my constituents are a lot more afraid of getting blown up by the government like what happened at waco and they freaked out but he and he wasn't being a tough guy he was just saying i have paintings of ron in the background i have a bust of i have two busts of dr paul on my bookshelf behind me um you know he you talk about him being right about all of these things from covid back to beirut and he's just a shining example of how you know if you start with the right first principles it's easy to be right on almost everything you know and he

and he and he's just he doesn't deviate and he you know he he sticks with that and you know i think also it's that just his, he's very gracious, you know, it would have been a different experience, maybe more satisfying to you and me and a lot of people, but I think probably would not have gotten a long-term traction than it did if he had come out in that 08 election in 2012 and was just breathing fire on Bush as a war criminal and we need just all that kind of stuff. It would not have, it really would not have resonated in that environment with the Republican audience or even conservative-leaning people who weren't necessarily Republican, but he wasn't that type. You know, like you said, like he might say, I told you so, but it's really to say, look, we knew this was going to happen.

We knew this was coming. It's not to be like, nah, yeah, I told you so. And it just doesn't do that. He's very gracious. And it's just, you know, you don't want to confuse the man in the message too much. But in this case, like, you know, the two, that both of them are just exemplary, really admire him. Exactly. Yeah, he does the message a lot of justice, you know what I mean, by being the leading guy standing behind it.

So anyway, that's great. And we've got to always mention, I mean, I would hasten to mention maybe people don't know this well enough. But, of course, you know, from the Liberty Report, everybody knows that Ron's co-host is the great Daniel McAdams, who's the director of the Ron Paul Institute for Peace and Prosperity. And he gets a lot of credit for being, you know, he was Ron Paul's foreign policy advisor from at least like 2000, maybe even 99. I'm not sure if it was after Kosovo or before. But he's been, you know, obviously extremely. reliable for Ron to work with on foreign policy this whole time. So if you ask him, I mean, read his articles at anti-war.com. It's all substantive stuff. This is not ideological,

like, you know, by the Austrian axiom deductive principle of praxeological, whatever, no, no, details about everything that's going on everywhere, whether we're talking about North Korea's nuclear program or the latest from Gaza or whatever it is. He's always 100% on it. And it's a really great example in that way, too. And Dan gets a lot of credit for that as well. Yeah, speaking of presidential candidate foreign policy advisors, I told you that, I don't think I told you who it was that invited me, but it was RFK Jr.'s foreign policy advisor invited me to go on a trip to Damascus and meet Alshara. Unbelievable.

And the, the funny thing is. universally my wife everybody that loves me i mean this is a guy former isis quote unquote former quote unquote former al qaeda and iraqaq now the president of syria overseeing butchery after butchery you know in that country that's been happening since the takeover and universally everybody that cares about me said no no no no no don't go and i said well i expected that because the israelis might kill you and they were dead serious dude i mean hell even if al qaeda kills you might because the israelis them to you know what i mean hey this guy he's not a friend of ours see if you can maybe you know sleep them with the fishes there yeah you know the serious situation like i i'm trying to be as

over that was just such horrible grammar there i apologize to go ahead i i don't want to suck us too much down this rabbitel i know we got a different topic in mind but um yeah the uh you know the serious situation like i'm trying to be as open-minded as possible in the sense of, you know, look, there's obviously like just the hardcore Zionist types who just want to see that country destroyed and in chaos so that they can't mount a threat to Israel and all that kind of stuff. I think there are well-intentioned, generally well-intentioned people in the U.S. government, certainly not all of them, but there are those people who they just look at the situation as, you know, that war, that civil war was never, ever going to, after

everything that had happened and all of the hatred that had built up against Assad over the course of that war, which, of course, we had a huge hand in prolonging and intensifying. Don't get me wrong on any of that. That there was just, there was never going to be peace in that country as long as Assad was there and Assad wasn't leaving voluntarily. And whether we like it or not or anybody likes it or not, this group of people is the only force around that had, the numbers, the military capability, everything else to go in and actually take the country. And then once that happened, you know, like the way that I've had it explained to me by people who are not necessarily sympathetic, but who are kind of taking this as facts on the

ground and that we just have to work with and deal with and they're trying to do that in good faith is that, you know, they tell me, they think, and they could be totally wrong about this, but they're not lying to me. I know these people pretty well. So they might be wrong. They're not lying. They think that Alshara is by no means a moderate, but a pragmatist. And he's somebody who wants to put Syria back together and be in charge of it.

But because of just the loose nature of the forces that he led and the outside interference by Turkey and everybody else with those forces, he does not have full control by barely has any control really over all the guys with guns in his country. And so he's walking this kind of tightrope where, you know, on one hand, look, you have to make certain compromises if you're going to figure out how to keep the trains running if they even have any of those left in Syria. But just get the water running, make the sewers work, collect the garbage, all that.

I mean, the daily tasks of governing, really the only people who do. know how to do any of that stuff, at least at a national level or a provincial level or probably former members of the Assad government. And so, you know, you have to like walk this sort of tight rope if you're, if you're him between seeming to compromise too much, maybe with the members of the former regime or officials or even employees of the former regime or being, you know, because you know that America could snap their fingers, like as a A lot of Israel could snap their fingers and you get vaporized in an instant if they, if they, you know, decide they don't like you anymore. So, you know, you have to kind of

reach out to the Alawite population, kind of reach out to the Drew's population and so forth. But then the other side of that, of that high rope, tight rope, is he's got these guys. He's got these like real deal, hardcore head chopping jihadists who have all the guns and who brought him to power. And if they think that, you know, he's being, he's being too accommodating or he's not going hard enough and not turning Syria into enough of an Islamic Republic, you know, he could end up in his own Gaddafi video, which given his past, you know, might be, you know, poetic justice. But, you know, in terms of like, I guess, I guess here's the thing, and I'll stop ranting, but, and again, don't get me wrong, you and I agree on this.

Most of the people out there who were listening, like, we all agree on this. situation. I'm just kind of playing around with the situation as it stands. You know, one thing I do see is that, and this is mostly with like left-wing anti-war people, although you see it on the right sometimes now too, is, you know, it's easy to be so against U.S. intervention and Israeli belligerents and all these things to the point that you're almost rooting for the axis of resistance, right? And I understand that. Like, I understand the desire. Like, it's just like with Russia and Ukraine right now. Like, you feel like the empire needs to get checked, you know? The empire needs to, like, know that there's a limit out there to what it can achieve and that it's going to hit its head against the wall if it goes too far. The problem is, like, that I see is like, you know, people, even if the regime that's in Syria right now, and I don't think this is, like, you know, people.

even if the regime that's in Syria right now, and I don't think this is going to happen by any means for a number of reasons, but even if it was the best chance for that country to be put back together and become a non-failed state, I think there's a lot of people to see out there who, like, they don't, they almost don't, it's not that they don't want that, but that's a secondary consideration to Israel getting theirs, you know, and the, resistance axis showing, you know, the empire that like they're not going to back down all that. And it's, you know, it's easy to get caught up in that. And I totally, I sympathize with that tendency. But we do have to kind of watch out for that because the goal should be that like all of

the normal people in Syria, which is most of the people there, can wake up tomorrow and not worry that their kids are going to get killed or raped or, you know, that a mob's going to come destroy their village. Like that's what we all want. That's the point, you know. And anyway, rant over i just uh yeah i've been thinking about it a lot lately so yeah well look um first of all this is our brand new book our 17th book just hit like within the last couple of hours here the libertarian institute 17th book it's by the absolutely heroic william van waganen who is an incredible investigative journalist he's been writing deep deep dives on obama's dirty war in for years for us at the Institute.

And his book, Long Promise, is finally Unleashed. And it's the CIA's covert war, creative chaos. The CIA's covert war to, I'm sorry, what was it, overthrow. God, I can't see it from here, my old eyes. The overthrow. Yeah, there you go. So it's just hit. It's on Amazon.com right now.

You'll be able to find a link from the Libertarian Institute very soon. and there's just nobody better on this than William Van Wagon and to explain and you know when you say the axis of resistance what that really is it's the Shiites plus Hamas right but that's what it is and the Alawites were very close to the

Shiites and some consider their group to be kind of an offshoot or like a combination of whatever but close enough and they were tied to Tehran that's the important part and now that's over forever Alawites aren't taken Damascus back

I mean, it's a super majority Sunni Arab country anyway. So the relative extremism of the dictator or president going forward remains to be determined. As you say, this guy is a bin Laden, leader of the suicide bomber brigades with John Brennan. Right. So we can expect the worst from him, or as you said, is what I've been saying since he took over. He's really going to kowtow to the U.S. and Israel that bad. His own guys are going to cut his head off and replace him sooner or later anyway. so they have really made a deal with the devil here i mean this guy

look he's clearly been to turkish intelligence finishing school so that he's not they told him stop cutting people's heads off and doing suicide attacks okay we can't spin that so just knock off that right so in other words don't throw gaze off the roof and don't look like bagdaddy and we'll let you live we'll let you take over and we'll even back you just don't be a sheite and that's the deal right and so they're willing to tolerate him but i mean to me it just portends chaos there's no way around it like we're just in the in-between time before things get much worse over there and it's of course already you've had all kinds of ala whites and christians being slaughtered as well as the drus which it gives the

israelis an excuse to intervene and take even more of the southern part of the country in the name of protecting the droos there and it's just a disaster you know um not that i care at all I don't sympathize at all with the axis of resistance. I don't, whatever. I'm against the U.S. government doing things, but that doesn't put me on the other side of the thing. But I'm saying it's a disaster just because these are guys who are sworn loyal to bin Laden and then Swahari, which means that sooner or later, potentially now later, because they seem to be so cooperative with American intelligence at this time. But they very well are likely to come back to Bidas.

We've seen this over and over again, just because Bill Clinton, backs jihadis in one place doesn't mean they won't turn around and hit us in another. And so, you know, these things happen. And it's just, and honestly, man, we're about to talk about Rushagate. And I am so upset about Russia Gate still. It's like the Waco fire. So I'm not over. I'm not going to be over it.

And yet, I want Tulsi Gabbard to simply turn over everything to justice and then get back to keeping bin Laden nights off of these shores. I want her and Joe Kent all day. I don't want them to wage war overseas and kill people. I am not saying that. I wrote a book about stop doing that. I'm not giving them that mandate. But keeping these guys off of our shores is the absolute highest responsibility.

There's just nothing that should be taking from their attention to that one and only goal. Because there's nobody else threatens us in this world. Then bin Laden night suicide bombers. That's the threat. Yeah. Well, they, you know, there's the threat of an attack. That's one threat. but in a way it's that's almost the minor threat you know just like with 9-11 as tragic as it was

you know 3,000 people killed it was horrible the real threat was our reaction to it you know our predictable and predicted reaction to it and for some you know for people who want to see an end to this to this style of foreign policy we've been we've been enacting for decades now another big terrorist attack it wouldn't it doesn't I mean you just you know how people are like when something like that happens. They can be people you were having a conversation with them yesterday and they totally get it. They're totally down. They're really reasonable. Live through this. And then it happens in the 90s. Some like real anti-government guys. Some like real anti-new world order guys. Sign their son up for the army. As soon as W. Bush got in there, even before 9-11. He's like,

oh, everything's okay now. What? It's just, man, it's amazing. And that's the real concern. You know, because I think I've always thought, or at least for many years, going back to maybe the early years of the Syrian Civil War, that, you know, the real goal was not regime change in the sense that we did it in Iraq or something like that. The real goal was just to reduce that territory to chaos and fluctuating governments and rival militias and sectarian factions, because that just gives you a permanent excuse to go in there and do whatever you want, like the Israelis have been doing. I mean, that's just like a, it's a perfect example. You have this guy who at least in his rhetoric, right, is talking about, and this is a remarkable thing when you really think about it, given his background and who supports him in that country and everything, but him going out publicly and saying he's willing to talk to the Israelis and all this, like you would think that they would really want to make sure that this guy is long, you know, if he changes his tune, you can take care of it, but at least for now, you'd think

they want to keep them around. But the first thing they do when they took power is just blew up his defense ministry, blew up all his military equipment. Sank his Navy. Sank his Navy, yeah. And like, you know, certain things, like if they think there's chemical weapons stores or if they're just heavy long-range missiles or something, you know, maybe that's fine, whatever.

But, you know, they were destroying APCs and things that you need if you have a jihadist uprising and then you're southwest of the country, south of the country or something. something. And so, like, you know, it kind of just shows you that the goal here is chaos. The same thing they want for Iran. They don't want M.E.K. to take over. They don't really think the Shah's going to go back and be welcomed with roses in the streets. They just want it to be a failed state with Persians fighting Baluchis, fighting Mazzaris and everybody else. Just, that's what they want. Darrell, remind me, I'm sorry, because I do a lot of shows and I can't keep track anymore, man. But forgive me, if I'm being redundant, I'll stop. But did we talk about the Odad Yan plan on the show last

week or in these recent times. Okay, so Oded Yanon, I brought this up. Did I tell you that I did a 10-hour interview with Lex Friedman? That's going to come out in a couple of weeks. He's got to edit some things together. But one thing is, I told him, well, look, and one thing he did was he stopped and pulled up everything that I mentioned and then would read a little like the AI summary on Google. What is the Odid Yanon plan?

It's O'D-E-D-Y-N-O-N. And it's essentially like an insane, paranoid, schizophrenic, lunatic, lacudnik, advisor to Ariel Sharon. And he wrote it in, I'm pretty sure, 81. And the first premise of the thing, he was defense minister at the time, Sharon. God, was he? Yeah. Okay. I had forgotten that it was that bad. I had trauma base blocked that out, I guess. Um, he says, listen, man, obviously the Soviet communists are about to conquer the entire world. And we have only one choice then, which is to secure our regional dominance by smashing every Arab state into as many pieces, the smallest pieces possible. And to just so complete chaos, that's the only way we'll be able to survive in the

new one world communism. And of course, the Soviet Union ceased to exist by the end of the decade. But whatever, man, still sounds good. Way better than making peace, as they put it, land for peace, like they're being forced somehow to give up their own land as the price of peace, rather than to stop stealing it, which is actually kind of different. But that was the way they looked at it was, hey, man, you know what I mean? It's like a cut in the in the national government. Well, we just meant a cut in the rate of future growth. Yeah, yeah.

You know. Or they say like, you know, they'll make an announcement that inflation has been cut in half and people say, great, prices are going down. No, no, no, no, no, no. The rate of rise has cut. Yeah, the rate of our expansion in the West Bank. sometimes varies but it never ends of course um anyway so um i think there's a lot of that going on and i need to go back actually darrell because i don't think i memorize this but there is at least one

sentence hanging and it's either in the clean break or in coping with crumbling states where worms or says something like well and if that doesn't work at least they'll be smaller broken pieces you know something like that um i need to get that exact quote. So that would be, you know, Yanon echoed later in the clean break policy, which the clean break policy was, it's going to be great. It's going to be easy. We're going to have our way, which. And then, I guess, chaos was plan B or C, which is what we're seeing now. But, I mean, we're seeing these last couple, really, I mean, this last year and a half, two years, we've really seen the culmination of kind of decades of events, you know, taking, that have been, I mean,

you go back to the 60s and 70s, you know, the bathist regimes, the Egyptians before they made peace with Israel. I mean, they were mortal enemies, not only of Israel, they were mortal enemies of all of the Gulf monarchies. You know, they saw a standing in the way of this pan-Arab dream that they have. Of course, they all wanted to be in charge of the big pan-Arab state, but they all shared that, at least ideologically. But not the monarchies, because the monarchies are like, my family literally owns all of this land. I joined some Arab super state now, you know, and one by one, I mean, every single one of those secular dictatorships has been picked off and destroyed. And one thing you've got to say, I mean, this is like a, this is a macabre sort of admission, I guess, but, you know, I was thinking

the other day about Obama back in, what, it was 2011, I guess, saying a couple times, Assad has to go. Assad must go. Yeah. And you go back to 2016, 2017, and it was looking like, wow, you know, I guess he's not going anywhere. The empire has to take a loss on that one, but she always got to remember, man, there's people here, like, behind the scenes who make a career out of this shit. And they do not go to sleep when it, you know, when it, when it fades from the news, they

keep on it. And, you know, it's one of those things that if you don't have a rope. bust counterintelligence defense and just military defense and a stable enough government and civil society to withstand that kind of pressure over the long term, you're just not going to make it once the iasauron turns on you, you know, and they thought they could do that to Russia, and it's looking like they're probably not going to be able to do that, which is not surprising to most of us. But, you know, that's how it goes. You know, you have, you know, we kind of, we kind of tell ourselves that, or we used to tell ourselves this, I guess. We came out of the Gulf

war, you know, like the first Gulf War. And I mean, if you ask, like, I was talking to somebody a couple weeks ago, it might have been in a, it might have been in an interview, actually, but he brought up the Gulf War and he was like, and what do we take, do we even take any casualties? And I was like, yeah, we took some, but that kind of, that's how people think about it. Like, it was like as if we took no casualties. And we just went in there, we saved the day. We don't even know if we killed any Iraqis. Like, you know, most people don't know.

It's just, we went in and just by our presence, like the whole thing kind of melted away. And we came away with this idea that like, wow, I guess the U.S. military with all their fancy new technology and, you know, smart guided bombs, everything else. We can just absolutely do anything with the U.S. military. It's this all-purpose tool that we can just apply at will anywhere in the world for any problem that we find. And we thought that, and we tried it, and it's failed for 25 years. And now I, what I really hate, we should get into this like another time because, like, you know, everybody kind of agrees now that nuclear weapons, like, you know, maybe it's not like a war crime on the level of biological and chemical weapons. just because if things go nuclear, then we're just in a whole new world like that day.

But like everybody kind of agrees chemical, biological weapons. That is just off limits. And if you do that, you are a rogue regime and you have no standing, no legitimacy, et cetera, et cetera. I really think we need to apply that same mentality to this, to what has really become like our chief foreign policy tool, it seems like, over the last several decades, which is, you know, think about,

I was listening to somebody. give an interview, I can't, somebody give an interview who, she lived in the United States, but her family lived in Aleppo when they were taken over by all the, like not this last time, but like when they were occupied by the jihadists for a while. And talking about how, you know, they would go outside and they can't read the spray paint writing on the walls because it's different languages, because the Chechens own those blocks and the Afghans own those blocks and the Syrians own those. And it's just, a bunch of gang territory, they would get into gang machine gun battles in the streets.

And these are all a bunch of, you know, 20-year-old psychopaths from the slums of Karachi or wherever, you know, from the slums of Brussels, just put out a call. Like, in the way they did it too, right? Think of how, I know we're probably not wanting to get like a rated R thing on this, but think about how fucking evil this is, dude, to put out the kind of ISIS propaganda that was coming out, I saw a video. I don't know how many of them you saw. I didn't see very many of them, but I saw a couple. And there was one where they had a bunch of prisoners chained up to broken down carnival rides. And they had kids executing them on the carnival rides, right? Just cartoonishly evil.

So you put those videos out as a recruiting tool. And who do you think you're going to get? You're going to get the craziest dudes in the world who are all going to come to participate in this. and so we we do that we like you know uh create this situation where that calls being put out and these people are flooding into the country with no like military leadership or discipline no no nothing it's just a bunch of crazy psychopaths with guns running around this country and like they would talk about how like you're imagine you're in Aleppo and you're in that situation and you're in there with your wife and your two daughters and there's just dudes you know uh hopped up on captagon just going by firing their guns in the air. You're just praying they don't come into your

house because you know what happens if they do. And your only option at that point is decide whether you're going to die over it or not, you know? And just an awful, disgusting thing to do to another country. I don't care what the government did or what the people did. To just take a bunch of undisciplined, no military governorship, just young psychos and give them guns and send them into a place and say go destroy that place and take down the government you know like i i heard somebody described syria this way i think it's a great way to describe it and then i'll stop um as they said imagine if like russia or china got together with like the kkk neo-nazi factions all the craziest hardcore right-wing people like in the u.s who you know or hiding in the shadows or whatever

and they just load them up with heavy weapons and provide intelligence and, you know, middle level leadership by bringing other people in from other places that have already kind of done this kind of thing before. And we say, and they were to say, go march on Washington and take down the U.S. government. And on their way to Washington, they just stopped by in every town and city and killed all the Jews and blacks and everything else. That's what we did to Syria. And it's crazy and it's evil. And I really hope that one day that tactic, that way of waging war against a country is really looked at the same way we look at biological weapons because it's just awful. Yeah. No, look, you couldn't be more right about it. Normally I would have just said, yeah, everybody get enough already, but even better. It just hit. I mean, today, this evening around dinnertime, it hit Creative Chaos by William Van Wagon and brand new hot out. He really deserves the recognition and the boost. for all you book readers out there is such an important book i'm the publisher of the thing so

i've read it and um and i've supported his work for a very long time he is such a great guy he's been kidnapped by al qaeda for real dude he has done long-term investigative journalism including in iraq and in syria camping out with the yzidis and getting the absolutely the real story on what happened here man and believe me i was good on syria years before they even launched the thing and I know what from who was good on it and who was not right and yeah man this is the best that you can get on the origins it's it's not the whole war but it's how it all started and how it was the U.S. government of course with our NATO allies Britain and especially France and then of course the GCC and Israel and Turkey and it was all about trying to

as I say every day of my life I guess W. Bush put the Ayatollah up to pegs in Baghdad. So now he had to take him down a peg in Damascus. That's what it was all about. That's what the redirection was all about. And that's the story I tell, you know, in the book and at the academy and all that. But, you know, even in my book, I'm the very first to give credit to William Van Wagonin for doing so much great research. And I cribbed from a lot of great journalists and I give them all credit too. I read a lot of books about it and I read a lot of journalism about it but he is absolutely five-star top-notch as good as you could possibly get and i guarantee that uh joshua landis and charmine narwhani and um moon of alabama bernard and max blumenthal and all

of the best guys on syria would tell you the very same thing that like this is as good as it gets is creative chaos brand new out but they've all read his stuff if you you know if you look him up at the libertarian institute you can read all this great writing there and when i say long form pieces i mean like 50,000 words. These are the kind of articles that he's been writing for me for years, dude. I mean, it's just incredible stuff. So, and I do have the short version in enough already, including a lot on Israel's role in the thing and all that.

So here's the segue, because we want to talk about Russiagate. We've been putting it off. I almost want to just put it off more and talk about other things because I'm going to have Matt Taibi on the show tomorrow, and he's just the best of the best. and I still have not had a chance I've read some articles about it but I've not had chance myself to do the deep dive on the annex

to the Durham report or even the declassified version of the house investigation of the... Yeah, let's do that next week. That's fine. I mean, I don't mind any way because there's stuff coming up.

I'm really good on the background, but I'm not very good on the new developments and it'd be better maybe to just really nail that down all the way, you know? Yeah, and you know, it's connected to this serious stuff

for sure. I mean, in the sense that, you know, if you think about it, like, there were, there were, I think probably, probably three real purposes to rush a gate, right, to that whole effort that was put out there. One, of course, like the initial one maybe was to muddy the waters with regard to the DNC emails and the Podesta emails because those were going to be so damning for Hillary Clinton. If people just focused on what they did to Bernie Sanders, that was going to be a huge problem. Then it was to just, you know, the Trump focus was, I don't, you know, they knew, we're kind of finding out now that they knew from the beginning that Trump was not colluding with Russia. They knew from the beginning that

Russia probably didn't even hack those emails. But if you can use that as an excuse to go through his whole life, talk to everybody he knows and everybody they know and put pressure on every single person that has the slightest little taxi cab medallion scandal or whatever else it is, threaten them all with prison, bankrupt them by bringing them in and making them pay hundreds of thousands of dollars to lawyers like they did with campaign volunteers, Michael Caputo. This dude was just a campaign volunteer. And they, I mean, he had to sell his house because they just, he had to pay lawyers, hundreds of thousands of dollars.

This was not some rich dude or anything. There were a ton of people in the administration who left the administration, not because, you know, they were getting all kind of fed up with things. They were like, dude, I can't keep getting pulled in for the. these DOJ interviews, you know, this is like costing me hundreds of thousands of dollars. I can't afford it. And so they would leave. And it kept a lot of people from even joining the administration. And so I think that, you know, the goal really with the investigation part of it was really just them thinking that Trump, this guy, the grabbing by the pussy dude, like this dude,

give us all of his email, give us all of his people around him. And like, dude, dude, dude, by the time we're done piling up dirt on this guy that we're going to find, people aren't going to remember Russia gate. Like, that's going to be like, it's just a long. And it's amazing to me, actually, that that turned out not to be the case. And I don't know if that's just because Trump's lived his life in the tabloids, so it's all in public anyway. But the fact that they didn't, I mean, imagine, like,

if they were to go through Hillary Clinton's whole life with the same fine tooth comb they did with Trump, dude, she'd be getting the electric chair. You know what I mean? And that's true of a lot of people. And so he's relatively clean in that sense. But then as it relates to this, you know, I think, and this is probably why a lot of the deep state kind of went along with it as long as they did and as hardcore as they did, is that,

because at first this was just a Clinton problem. Well, look, they said, NEPI, I told CNN, if we can't remove him through the 25th Amendment, at least we can rein him in with this special counsel investigation. And specifically, specifically rain him in on Syria and Ukraine. Those were the two things that they cared for implementing Minsk do, most of all. Now, hold on one second because two things.

First of all, I wrote 75 pages on Russian Gates. The longest chapter, kind of subchapter chapter type section thing in Provote that I did. And I debunked every single lie about Russian Gate that I could possibly remember because I was terrified. Someone would say, oh, yeah, but what about this one? And I'd miss it. But you just got me. And I realized this a couple of weeks ago, too.

I miss Caputo. I do not have a section on Caputo in my Rushagate section and curse me for that. Will you please tell us about him? I don't know a whole lot about him. I've talked to him a few times. I've mentioned him before in articles and interviews and his story and just in sympathizing with him. And he reached out and just because he saw or read something and said thanks. And we kind of corresponded a bit.

I don't know a lot about him. Just that he was a, I mean, there was never even an accusation against this guy. There was never even an implication that he was accused of anything. This was purely just lawfare. This was taking this dude who is a normal guy. This is not some rich dude. A lot of people, for some reason, think that like if you're working for a presidential campaign or something, you got money to breast, not the case with a lot of these people. And he was a volunteer.

And they just kept pulling them in. And every time you do it, I mean, you got to hire good lawyers to go in there with you because, you know, they're really, really good at manipulating people and getting you to trip up. contradict yourself. And if they're going for blood the way they were during the Russiagate thing, I mean, them tripping you up, that could be a jail sentence. I mean, that's where they're going. That's a perjury felony jail sentence. And so you've got to hire these lawyers. And it's just every time they call you in, it's $30,000, $50,000, do it again in three months, do it again three months later. And they're doing this to regular people, campaign volunteers, you know? And it's just, it's, it's,

One of those things that is just emblematic of how, you know, they are in their minds. And they, somebody as sanctimonious is coming, might even believe this about himself. Hillary doesn't believe it. But like, Comey might, that he's really the patriot here. He's the one who's trying to step in and save the Republic from itself. It's like, well, yeah, but you guys are going out and just destroying the lives of random campaign volunteers. American citizens, the people you're trying to protect, right? Yeah.

And there's just no concern for that. They didn't care. You're so right. And listen, as far as, I know I always sound like I'm probably spinning four of these guys, like rationalizing their behavior in a way. When I talk about how they rationalize their behavior, just what you just said, that they know that they're the Patriots here. So there's a great clip of John McLaughlin, who had been the acting director of the CIA.

And they asked him, oh, Trump says it was at some think tank event. Trump says it's the deep state acting against him. And he laughs and he says, thank God for the deep state. And the whole audience laughs and applauds. And he says, now let me tell you something. The problem is not at Langley. It's not at the Hoover Building here in D.C. And it's not at Fort Meade, his NSA headquarters.

The problem is at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. So you could see how, if Donald Trump, Trump was a Manchurian candidate blackmailed slave of Vladimir Putin, then John McLaughlin might have a point that these men are sworn to uphold the Constitution and protect it from all enemies, foreign and domestic. And so even though these are all three completely extra constitutional post-Republic national security, you know, agencies of the government, and they're coming at the president this way, maybe they'd be here. heroes if it was all true, right? But it wasn't at all. They were the ones framing them. It was all just a giant hoax. And they were punching far above their weight when in fact, he literally is the one and only elected member of the executive branch and the chief executive, the boss of those departments, the boss of them. And they just got no right whatsoever. And by, you know,

January 20th, they should have just been saying, oh, well, and that's the way it goes. The people did elect him and again they knew they were lines so let me go back because i wanted to clarify something that you said that because about covering up for hillary's emails a big part of what was going on there was it wasn't not covering up for the leaked emails that didn't come until later it was covering up for the missing emails um that they were already investigating the 30 000 emails that she had deleted from her own private server which were obviously regarding her corruption and taking millions of dollars from foreign governments while she was secretary of state and in the meantime in between the first Obama term after she resigned

and then the lead up to the election campaign of 15 and 16 where they were pouring all this money into her campaign and she had deleted all those emails and that was the big scam and it's so funny because if you think back to all the times that the liberal Democrat Russiagate believer said oh but her emails when like yeah no exactly

that's why they came up with the Russiagate thing in part was so that you would say that so that you go oh my God God, here's this true gigantic conspiracy about Trump and Russia, but Europe said that her emails are missing as like this tiny little thing. Well, that was the manipulation there and how successful that was. But stop and rewind because there's a very important story. In fact, I have it here.

Let me get the title right for everybody here. This is a story that came out last year, and it's by our heroes over at Rackett News, the great Matt Taiibi, who, as I said, is going to be on my show tomorrow. And God, dang me if I can't find. this oh no it wasn't him it was at oh it is him but it was at public because he wrote it with michael schellenberger okay so this is public dot news is their substack okay and the article is called what's a long headline FBI helped Clinton campaign this is not it is it wait

no this is not it I'm sorry I'm looking at the wrong way and I'm going to find it this is it CIA had foreign allies spy on Trump team triggering Russia collusion hoax okay now sources say so this part of it is not fully fully documented but I totally think that this is clear because there are many parts of it that are documented okay and that is that John Brennan the leader of Jabat al-Nusra suicide bomber brigades in Syria committer of high treason against the United States and his support for al-Qaeda they there, who framed Trump, that he started this in the end of 2015. And we have two different sources that say that it was GCHQ that started it. But I think it's pretty clear that he contacted them. And this is, I think, what the sources tell in Taeebee and Schellenberger here. He contacted them and said, listen, I need you guys to pretend that you had a reason that you tip me off that I need to do this, whatever. And then he went and he had like a whole swarm.

of informants bump, as they called it, into Trump campaign people in order to try to frame them. And I think that it's just perfectly, well, no, no, no, it's not perfectly clear, but it's in this article that this is what their source says. And I think it's very, very likely. And, you know, it is still in speculation, but it seems very clear to me, seems very likely to me that this is the origin of the actual framing of George Papadopoulos. when you had this so-called Russian spy,

who was actually a Maltese professor who was working for MI6, leave information with him. Is that Mifsud? Mifsud. Yeah, he actually had some kind of a tie to the State Department, I think, too. Yes, and M.I.6, and I show all this in the book thoroughly.

This guy had no ties to Russia whatsoever, said he had one friend at a think tank there, but that was meaningless. And he was palling around with MI6 and CIA and military officials all the time, and including at this spy training account, in Italy and all of these things. So it seems emphasis, but it seems as though he was meant to put something in Papadopoulos's

ear, and then Downer, the Australian diplomat was made to try to take the garbage out and get him to say something to him. Popdoplas sworese, he never even told that guy anything because he was such a jerk to him. He never said anything to him at all. And then Downer later backed down from the New York Times claims that he had said that Papadopoulos told him that the Russians told him they had all this. dirt on Clinton. It wasn't true. And in fact, they didn't even use that as an excuse to take it to the FISA court to try to get their FISA warrant against Trump or any of the team

because they just didn't even have the courage to take that lie. And in fact, McCabe, I believe it was the FBI official, said that there was just nothing enough to it to even pretend in, basically. Yeah, yeah. And that's when they switched over to Carter Page. Yeah. But see, also, there's this really important article by a guy named Stephen Schreveen age, S-C-H-R-A-G-E, and he wrote a thing, maybe not C-H, maybe it was just S-H-R-A-G-E, and he had been a foreign policy advisor to Mitt Romney. He's like a Heritage Foundation type, I think, and he was studying at Cambridge under Stefan Halper, the Walrus, they call them, who was this longtime Republican fixer.

He was the one who stole Jimmy Carter's debate talking points and gave him to the Reagan campaign back in 1980, was known as being very close to the Bush. and so forth. And we get paid for that good tank, right, that recently got disbanded. That's right. The Office of Net Assessment

in the Pentagon, which was previously known famous for Harold Road, the neocon coming in and firing everybody who knew anything about Iraq and the run up to that war. Anyway, that was like the cutout

where they would pay him $30,000 for an article, supposedly that was actually for dirty work he was doing. And so he had, Shrage was studying under him. And so he, was like eyeball witness to what he called the Cambridge 4, which was, and he took responsibility

in an accidental kind of a way for the framing of Carter Page because, so here's the Cambridge 4 was Christopher Steele from the Steele dossier, the former MI6 officer, Richard Dearlove, the former chief of MI6, who you might remember him from the Downing Street memo that said that the intelligence is being fixed around the policy to justify the war with Iraq from July. 2002. He was ahead of MI6 for Tony Blair at that time. Then there was a academic from Cambridge named Christopher Andrews, I believe was also former MI6 or MI5. And then was Halper. And Halper was there, had a visiting professorship of some kind or whatever at Cambridge as well. And these guys were all tight friends. And they got Shrage to like organize the event. And he is the one who

decided to invite Carter Page because they just want to have someone from the Trump campaign. and the way he described it was that Halper was really rude to Page and paid him no mind until Richard Dearloves showed up and whispered in his ear or took him aside and talked to him and then all of a sudden Halper wanted to be best friends with Paige and sidle up to him and offer to, you know, work with him and whatever. And it was after that that Page turned up in the steel dossier and that and Dan Chenko told the FBI, it was one of the sources for the steel dossier, he told the FBI that he got Page's name from Halper. And then he recycled the name and gave it to steel when steel was there anyway.

And so this was, you know, part of the thing where they framed Carter Page. Carter Page being a advisor to the Trump campaign, foreign policy advisor, who had some business ties to Russia, but was a loyal American patriot and a CIA informant. Whenever he went to Russia and did any business or met any man in business or politics over there, he would always come back and debrief the CIA about who he met and what he was doing. They knew him to be a loyal asset. And when the famously, now kind of infamously, the CIA sent a memo saying exactly that to the FBI. And the FBI censored that out of their submission to the FISA court asking for a warrant. against this American citizen no probable cause here now it's an objective reasonable belief that

this guy is a foreign agent so we get to go fishing on him all day and two hops from him anyone he calls and anyone they call we get to surveil all them too now because this guy we're accusing him being a foreign agent and um and he ended up being the lawyer kevin kleinsmith ended up is the only one convicted for russia gate so far who was sentenced to a slap on the wrist a year probation for doing that but they frame one of the their own loyal assets and went along and let him be framed. And even though he wrote a letter to the director of the FBI saying, please interview me,

I want you to interview me. And they refused to interview him for months and months and months because they knew how innocent he was. And when they finally did interview him after Trump took office, after the ICA of January 2017, where they made all these accusations and everything, they finally interviewed him. He went down there with a PowerPoint presentation.

He went down there and met him five times. And no lawyer, maybe he had a lawyer, but just spilled his guts the whole time. of course he had nothing to hide whatsoever it was a total frame-up job that they were doing there and then so this poor guy's christopher strange uh pardon me stephen schrage says ah jeez like i'm sorry carter page i think i got you into this right by inviting you to this thing and now i realized you were set up by my boss and his buddies and he rich for and that same guy shrage he says he recorded not he says he proved he recorded all of his conversations with stephen helper and so he

has and they published this at racket. News. They published the audio of Halper talking about how they were framing up Mike Flynn and how they were going to get him in so much trouble and then he's going to lose his temper and freak out. And that's what's going to get him fired. You watch, that's why he's so ill-suited to this job. And then what they do? This is right at the same time that Obama is ordering the intelligence community to explain how Russia did it, right? In other words, begging the question, assuming the conclusion, not find out if they did it and assess what they did, but how they did what they did. And right at that same time is when they're framing Flynn, they have Mike Flynn, who is a three-star general retired, former head of intelligence for J-Socke in

Iraq, former head of intelligence for, and right-hand man to General Stanley McChrystal in the Afghan surge, who then goes to be the head of DIA. He is now the designated, and by the way, why was he fired. He was fired, Darrell, because he was passing secret intelligence to the Germans as DIA director. He was heroically insubordinate, passing intelligence to the Germans to pass to Assad used to kill al-Qaeda in Syria. And there's a Seymourth article about this called military to military. And it's about that this heroic insubordination where the military is helping Assad kill the CIA suicide bomber squads. Tough, right? So that was a real bomb got rid of it. That whole crew are so nasty man. Didn't they? They invited Flynn to a dinner at one point that he attended. And there was a

woman there. I can't remember her name now. I would have known it back in 2016, 2017 when I was obsessed with this story. But La Cava La Cava was her name. And this is another thing. She trusted Halper. Like she knew him and trusted Halper. Right. She was the student of Christopher Andrews. And it was Christopher Andrews set up his own grad student who was, she was writing an essay. or a book about an previously unknown secret group of Soviet spies in the United States in the 1930s.

And they tried to pretend that she was a swallow and she was a new mother and a new wife and they smeared her as a spy and a horror and said that she had done all of this and had slept with Flynn. He had taken her back to his hotel and all this stuff. It was the same group. It was Christopher Andrews and Stefan Halper

and all them that did that to him. At the same time that the FBI had the intercepts of him on the phone with the Russian ambassador to the United States where he did absolutely nothing wrong whatsoever. We had every right to be on the phone with this guy, although he should have known better than to just set himself up to get screwed by the Obama people this way.

But he did not do anything wrong on that call other than ask the Russians to veto a UN Security Council resolution against Israel, which they declined to do for him. But he did not ask them or make any promises about lifting sanctions against Russia or anything like that. And they lied. I don't we don't know if they either won and and I'll tell you the one of the very best things on this is a documentary at Tucker Carlson's website that they did about Flynn they did such a good job of explaining this how they brought vice president Pence into the situation room and they either read him in on the lie and said we're going to pretend this says what it doesn't say or they gave him a fake transcript either way someone was lying and they said look you made all these promises to live. sanctions to the Russian ambassador and you lied to me about it, Mr. Flynn. And so and then he took

that to Trump and Trump fired the guy. It was one of the major successful things of the coup. All this is just completely made up. And I'm not a big fan of Mike Flynn. I wrote about him in fools Aaron and in enough already. And yet he was never a traitor for the Russians, for God's sake. And this poor woman, Lakova, never did anything improper. She says she could prove she didn't even sit next to him at that thing. And she sued and sued and sued until the British courts said, listen, ladies, stop suing. We already denied your standing for whatever loophole reasons. And so, but there's every, there's zero reason to believe the accusations against her and every reason to believe in her 100% innocence there. And it just goes to show the absolute depravity of these

people, what they will do. They're just this. Well, there was that other Russian woman, the one who was like a gun rights activist. Oh, Maria. Yeah, Maria Boutina. She did like in two months in solitary. And she did nothing wrong. She was, as you say, she was trying to get guns legalized in Russia. She wasn't trying to influence American policy in any way.

She was trying to get advice from American Republicans about how to handle the public relations for getting gun rights liberalized there in Russia. And then you're right, they just absolutely smeared her. See, there was this woman a couple years before. Chapman who also who actually was a Russian spy and they did not going to forget her name yeah and see she was a hot redhead well so was Maria Butina so they went oh look see get it hot redhead and then so that's all you need to know does somebody say sex and then so they just got to pretend that she had infiltrated the Republican party that she had this relationship with this American Republican activist

and how somehow any of this was nefarious and then you're right they locked her in solitary until she would plead guilty to a FARA violation, which 99% of Washington, D.C. is guilty of and is only very rarely and selectively enforced. And it's highly questionable whether she was not at all. She hadn't done anything to represent Russia's interests in this country. Exactly. He was trying to represent just freedom's interests in Russia, period. She was looking for, like, advice from people over here.

I'm like, how can I, yeah. There's a great article about her by James Bamford, the great intelligence beat reporter who wrote all the books about the NSA and everything and he wrote a piece about her for the new republic called you people shut the hell up you have no idea what you're talking about or something like that that's not the title but that's what the article is about i know this lady you can't push this crap it's not true you know and and finally some of them back and which by the way robert muller didn't get her robert muller passed and let some lower scum at justice go ahead and try to get what a couple of notches on his belt by taking this woman out by

by like chiming by like adding a couple of bits of loose change to the russia gate hoax you know just oh here's my two cents and by framing up some poor lady it's unreal man it's completely insane that would have changed nothing if like all it did for them all it added to the russia gate thing for them was it like provided content for one week's news cycle that's it and they just tried to destroy this woman's life locked her in prison i mean like you said just shows the depravity of it. You know, it's like you mentioned my origins. So we don't know whether John Brennan and Hillary Clinton went golfing or bowling or

smoke and crack together or where exactly and how this was hatched. But it looks to me. Oh, and see, one more thing. I said the Brits pretended that they handed this to him, but it doesn't look like there was anything that that was based on. Looks like he just asked them to do that. But then he also confirmed that to Frontline, that this begins in the end of 2015. well we know now because of all the newly released stuff and I'm sorry I'm not 100% on this stuff but I know a bit of it that it was at the very least in March that the Dutch dropped eaves dropped on the Russians eaves dropping in on the Democrats and they knew that the Clinton campaign is coming up with a story to smear Trump to distract attention from her missing emails and that FBI investigation into her.

scandal. So it's looking more and more like that was the origin, but I'm saying no, Brennan started it. He came first in 2015, potentially coordinated with her. But then she and the campaign were on it by at least March. They hired Perkins Cooey, the law firm on April the 1st. And those are the guys who hired Glenn Simpson from Fusion GPS, who hired Steele. And they also hired the Georgia Tech team that did the alpha bank hoax and helped with the fake attribution of the DNC and DCCC hack and leak and all of that as well as crowd strike and all that so um that's and then of course the FBI and we know for sure because the CIA covering their ass or at least you know it's it's I think what happens is it's compartmentalization different desks and different departments and different

dudes so we know somebody at the CIA and it couldn't have been Brennan. but somebody at CIA sent a criminal referral to the Department of Justice about the Hillary Clinton plan to frame Trump for treason in this way. And so the FBI got that and then quashed it. And we know that they knew all along that Hillary Clinton's team has this plan. I don't know if the FBI I'd have to go back or maybe look forward and more to find out if the FBI knew that the Democrats were working with the CIA at that point. but we know that they knew that the Democrats were cooking this whole thing up to pin on Trump,

which means that every bit of investigating that the FBI pretended to do was always a hoax and was always in furtherance of the real plot, which was the plot against Trump. And you can see how over and over, and this was already in the Durham report, it'll blow your mind. If you haven't read, I beg everybody, read the Durham report. There's the new declassified annex, but it is just amazing how many times, they pretended not to know things so that they could proceed even as everything is coming up debunk everything in the steel dossier is coming up debunk FBI doesn't believe a word of it. John Solomon reported they created a big spreadsheet of here's every claim in the steel dossier

here's everything that's true here's everything in it that's salacious and then you can see how everything in it that's true is just open source stuff and nothing that anyone is in trouble for and then everything that looks like it might be criminal is obviously completely made up and verified nowhere, right? And all of America's spies in Russia said, what? We never heard of any of this. Carter Page and getting some giant kickback for some giant oil deal with Rosneff or whatever, $700 million. Give me a break. This is all pathetic. They laughed it right out of the room. They all knew it was fake. The CIA dismissed the steel report as pure internet rumor. You know, the professionals doing their job just took one look at it and threw it right out. And yet they included it anyway.

And they say, oh, it was just an annex to the most highly classified version of the report for Obama only. But that's not true because if you look at the great substack undead foia, he has this great thing where he compares claims in the ICA with claims in the steel dossier. And you can see where they're just plagiarizing and rewriting like a junior high school student. But they're taking the conclusions out of the steel dossier, which is totally made up nonsense about Russia's determination to help Trump win and all that. And they're putting it right in there. um so you know and by the way one more thing people can check the record it was april glassby day july 25th 2016 that i interviewed geoffrey car the computer security expert on my show and he'd been writing about this for weeks i was late to the game before i finally got him on and i interviewed him

and he explained that any company or group of researchers or whoever who claims that they can tell you who hacked a server just by examining it is lying one organization in the world that can tell you what who really hacked that server and that's the NSA and they can tell you with 100% certainty because they can follow any packet anywhere in the world they can rewind the whole internet and watch whatever they want so if the NSA doesn't know who did it then it happened on site somebody went in there with a thumb drive or something like that what do we know about the NSA the NSA would do nothing but give low to moderate confidence behind all of these claims by the CIA and or FBI and the NSA wouldn't stand behind them

because they absolutely were not coming from the NSA. And that, my friend, is four days, five days before they ever launched Crossfire Hurricane. The core of the whole story was debunked on my show. I remember the, you know, I saw a lot of people, and to a certain extent, even myself, which I have no excuse for because I should have known better, but a lot of other people who were Trump supporters,

who at first they were like kind of worried, like, Man, they're going so hard on this on every channel and every agency. Like, maybe he didn't do what they're saying he did, but he had to have done something, right? Like, they wouldn't just do this. And as time went on, they start to realize that, like, oh, no, actually he's innocent. Oh, no, actually, he's being framed. And, you know, one of the mistakes that they made is that they really underestimated the level to which a huge mass of the MAGA people were very plugged into this. story. They were listening to Dan Bongino talk about it every day. They were listening to

podcast, everything. They were very plugged in. You talk about, forget Carter Page, talk about Igor Danchenko or Joseph Mifsoo. They knew all about them. They knew all that stuff. And so it made it. So when they came out with these like speak and spell like kindergarten level lies, it was just, it was doubly insulting because the people were like, because they knew. They were like, the lies weren't even meant to stand up to like basic scrutiny. Let a alone, you're throwing them out in front of people who are listening to Dan Bongino, tell you break every, like, single event down every day, or reading every John Solomon article, you know? And I remember myself, like, I was obsessed with this story in 2017, and then the Mueller

testimony happened, and it was such a total disaster that it was like, you know, it was like, it was the way we felt in 2008 and late 2007 into 2008, being in the space of people that really saw the housing crisis coming and saw the whole like subprime just disaster. I was reading blogs called like housing panic and housing bubble blog and stuff back in 2004. And so I'm watching this and you're kind of like wondering like, this is interesting. It all makes sense. It jives with the economics that I know and that I, you know, that I sort of get on with. But then when it starts to happen, you're still like, no way. You just get the popcorn. You're just watching it. And that's how the Mueller like testimony was. And it was crazy because,

like all the Democrats, not just your average like supporters out there, wine moms and blue-haired college students, but like you can tell like, you know, David Axelrod, like by the way he was talking about everything, they thought Mueller was going to come in there and just freaking light Trump on fire. Like they thought this is going to be the big show. This is it. And it was so bad that people like me who've been following this obsessively are like, all right, finally, here we go. Okay, they got caught. Now we're going to have a reckoning. And it became clear very quickly, just like with the financial crisis that, oh, nothing's going to happen. And I can't keep reading about this stuff where I'm going to like, you know what I mean? I'm going to start Fed posting somewhere if I keep reading this stuff because nothing's going to happen. So I just sort of backed away from it. Well, you know, what's cool now is you can just live all your vicarious rage through the Department of Justice. Let them get. Give John Brennan and Jim Comey fair trials and then lock them in the Supermax next to the other terrorists like Ramsey Youssef. They have to go hard on these people, dude. And I don't say that out of a sense of partisan revenge or anything like that.

This is like republic breaking stuff. This is the kind of thing. When the security services take an active role in our politics like that, when they decide that they're the Praetorian Guard that knows better and they're going to choose the emperor, what? that's the end of the republic. I mean, to the extent that, you know, one exists now, it's the end of whatever this thing is that we've got going. Once that starts happening and it works and they get away with it, it's never going to stop. And so we have one chance to make sure that every future FBI director knows, every future CIA director, they're not going to get Obama and they probably shouldn't. There's certain kinds of like, you know, presidential immunity stuff. I'm sure Trump doesn't want to mess around with. But they, you know, the president or the presidential candidate like Hillary Clinton can't do this on a room. She needed Comey. She needed Brown.

You know what? In the future, if you want to try something like that, they're going to need people like that then. And so those people need to know in the future when they think about doing this again, then when a new Hillary Clinton comes to him and says, hey, I got this idea to stop this monster from winning the election, that they think back and say, you know what, the old Hillary Clinton and everybody else skated Scott free while Jim Comey and John Brennan went off to prison. So I am not getting involved with that. That is what we have

to do. Yeah. Well, and look, I mean, what you say about the counterproductive of locking up Obama, I mean, when Ehud Olmert went to prison in Israel, everybody knew it was just because he was corrupt and it was the rule of law. It was the federal police who took him down or the shin bet,

whatever, but it wasn't a partisan thing. In this case, just Trump locks up Obama. We could very well continue to do that back and forth and make things really ugly around here. Lower down guys, yes, I think. At least it's within reason that you could do that. But is that really right that Comey's going to go to prison?

No. So I think here's what we should do. And this is what they really should have done with the torture thing, I guess, as well. Because they went back and forth. Maybe we should do a blue ribbon commission. Maybe we should do some indictments. And they end up doing neither.

right so but here's what you could do because you have bonjino and whoever and their men whatever the um the um the um pan bondies men i guess over justice convene grand juries oh did we lose our guy have them convene grand juries and issue essentially formal indictments and and not ones just full of assertions but full of documentation to support the claims and then just issue the full indictments, but then just don't press charges, don't actually lock them in prison as much one as I might have, you know, watching that. But instead, truly indict the hell out of them in the public where even Charlie Savage at the New York Times has to admit that, man, this is some pretty ugly stuff that I went along with here kind of thing and just, you know, make it the ultimate

truth and reconciliation thing. Well, Jim Comey certainly is guilty of felonies, you know, for political reasons we've decided maybe not to push to lock him in solitary confinement like he deserves but we all know he deserves it and go ahead and make that much clear at the very least because when you're talking about prosecuting people that powerful the reality is they don't get prosecuted it's not law it's it's policy it's politics

rather than the rule of law that applies at that level so in other words you can make your magic wish that these guys are going to go to prison which by the way they did try to put Trump in prison. So might he go that far? Like, yeah, we'll see who goes to prison. Like, you know what? I'm not against it. If he wants to go that far, I certainly wouldn't protest, but I guess I'm just saying maybe we get the most truth if they would just, you know, persecute them publicly, but without actually locking them up, that kind of deal.

It looks like Daryl's gone and we're over time anyway. So here's what we're going to do. I'm going to interview Matt Taibi tomorrow. And I'm also going to interview Anthony Aguilar, the Green Beret eyewitness to the war crimes in Gaza as well. And then I'm going to go celebrate Ron Paul's 90th birthday over the weekend with a bunch of good friends. And then we're going to be back here next week. And I will have done a very deep dive and all the newest developments in Russia Gate, which I have touched on at least some of that stuff here today. But we'll be able to really, I hope, tighten down the most important aspects of the latest developments

in some kind of organized fashion for you. And we're going to get Daryl an Ethernet cable. Thank you. Thank you.