Scott Horton Show - Just the Interviews - 11/19/21 Peter Van Buren on Why China’s Not Invading Taiwan and How Absurd the Russiagate Story Was From the Beginning

Episode Date: November 24, 2021

On Antiwar Radio this past Sunday, Scott interviewed Peter Van Buren about two articles he wrote on Taiwan. Van Buren laid out the reasons he believes a Chinese invasion of Taiwan is unlikely. Scott��s slot of airtime only runs 30 minutes. But they ended up talking for an additional hour about the absurdity of Russiagate. The entire interview is presented here in full.  Discussed on the show: “Taiwan Is Not About China” (The American Conservative) “Taiwan Means War Only If We Want It To” (The American Conservative) “Durham Indicts Danchenko” (The American Conservative) Fear by Bob Woodward The Manchurian Candidate IMDb “The US makes the rules, and Syria massacre was no exception” (Responsible Statecraft) Peter Van Buren worked for 24 years at the Department of State including a year in Iraq. He is the author of We Meant Well: How I Helped Lose the Battle for the Hearts and Minds of the Iraqi People and the novel Hooper’s War. He is now a contributing editor at The American Conservative magazine. This episode of the Scott Horton Show is sponsored by: The War State and Why The Vietnam War?, by Mike Swanson; Tom Woods’ Liberty Classroom; ExpandDesigns.com/Scott; EasyShip; Dröm; Free Range Feeder; Thc Hemp Spot; Green Mill Supercritical; Bug-A-Salt; Lorenzotti Coffee and Listen and Think Audio. Shop Libertarian Institute merch or donate to the show through Patreon, PayPal or Bitcoin: 1DZBZNJrxUhQhEzgDh7k8JXHXRjYu5tZiG. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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For Pacifica Radio, November 21st, 2021, I'm Scott Horton. This is Anti-War Radio. All right, y'all welcome the show. It is Anti-War Radio. I'm your host, Scott Horton. I'm the editorial director of anti-war.com, and I'm the author of the book's Fool's Air. and time to end the war in Afghanistan. And enough already. Time to end the war on terrorism. You can find my full interview archive. More than 5,600 of them now, going back to 2003

at Scott Horton.org and at YouTube.com slash Scott Horton Show. And you can follow me on Twitter at Scott Horton Show. All right, introducing Peter Van Buren. He used to work in the State Department for a very long time, and he writes great books and writes great articles, and we sure appreciate him. Welcome back to the show. How are you doing?

Pleasure to be here, Scott. Okay. Now, listen, so you wrote these important articles in the American Conservative magazine. Taiwan is not about China. And Taiwan means war only if we want it to. And these ran in late October and on November the 1st here. So I will begin with the obvious question. What does that mean? Taiwan is not about China.

The headline is a tad misleading, and I'm going to wimp out and hide behind the fact that the editor wrote it, the headline and not me. But what the article focuses on is explaining in fair detail why there will not be a war among the United States, China and Taiwan, why China will not invade Taiwan. There is a drumbeat starting out there, and it reminds me very much of the drumbeat. I heard the neocons beating around before the invasion of Afghanistan and then Iraq. It's this preparation, this early pre-propaganda, getting people ready for what they're going to spring on us when the opportunity arises. And that is conflict with China. The people who are writing these articles, and I don't really even know what to call them, we'll just call them war mongers, for lack of a term here, are attempting to establish a propaganda base.

that China is going to invade Taiwan sometime soon. They vary between claiming this is imminent and claiming it's within the next decade. They're creating a propaganda base that says China is going to invade Taiwan, and the United States, depending on what they're trying to score with their article, either needs to get started preparing with a massive military buildup, or that the United States needs to philosophically determine that it will defend Taiwan to the death and kind of mentally begin preparing for this. My answer to all of those is no one has been able to articulate a reasonable explanation of why China would possibly want to invade Taiwan.

And what my articles did is articulate in as much detail as fit in the space, why it would be ridiculous to think China would invade Taiwan. Okay, a couple things. First of all, I mentioned that you were a Foreign Service officer, but I'd like you to go over your experience in the East a little bit here before you continue

on. I usually prefer, I dislike articles that are, you know, appeals to credentials. I dislike people who do that because I prefer to let an argument stand on its own, but here I think my experience is relevant. The State Department trained me

to speak Mandarin at one point reasonably well. I had actual State Department assignments in Taiwan, in Hong Kong, and in Beijing. I've dealt with all of the forms of Chinese government at different levels. My other assignments included Tokyo and also in Seoul, where the topic of China was very much on our agenda as a bilateral issue between the U.S. and the Japanese or the U.S. and the Koreans. And so, though I kind of made an infamous name for myself writing a book about my one year in Iraq, it was the other 23 years of my career that was spent in Asia, where arguably I have some actual expertise. And so I don't want to brag and I don't want to say, believe me, because I did all these things. But I want to say that when you hear me speak about these topics, it is coming from a very

informed position. And it is coming from a position of some longevity. 24 years of professional experience interacting with Asia at a diplomatic level and an awful lot of education prior to that. So if you want to decide to give me an ear or listen here because I may know what I'm talking about, you won't be in bad company doing that. Yeah. And look, it's not like you're sitting up here saying, oh, this is why to be very afraid. You're not. But I'd like to kind of throw in here that I interviewed this guy, Lyle Goldstein. I've interviewed him before. I'm sure you've read him at the national interest and so forth. And he's now at defense priorities, but he was at the Naval War College. I just interviewed him last week. And

his position is, oh, he thinks China's going to take Taiwan. And he thinks also that we should not do the first thing about it, nor can we. And that the Navy better know that and he thinks they do. And so he's not saying spend a lot of money on more ships. He's saying forget all that. This thing's a fate accompli anyway. By all means defend Japan, but China's not coming to Tokyo anyway. Yeah. That is not an uncommon point of view. Danny Davis, who writes for responsible statecraft and former military, has become kind of a spokesperson for that point of view that we will not slash should not defend Taiwan. Let's take both of those points. The first point is this idea that there's any reason to suspect China is going to invade Taiwan. May I ask what Lionel,

I haven't read his most recent stuff. What did he say? Why is China going to do this in a nutshell? He's just been saying he's judging that based on the fact that they've been building up the capability to do so. And he thinks they've been ready for a while, but he thinks that they are preparing for that. Did he, okay, so let's let's go, let's start with the idea that Taiwan split off, and there's a lot of history here for listeners that are not up on their China reading. But basically, after a civil war interrupted by World War II, when the communists and the nationalist joined forces against the Japanese, when World War II ended, then the communists

and the nationalists went back at each other, and the communists won in 1949, the nationalists decamped to the little island of Taiwan, which otherwise was historically insignificant in Chinese history, and arguably wasn't really part of China for a large part of Chinese history. The nationalists were quickly adopted by the United States in the anti-communist thing, and the United States recognized Taiwan as the legitimate government of China until 1979, when the United States changed its relationship and recognized Beijing and basically put Taiwan into this amorphous diplomatic category where we don't officially recognize them as a country. That was all created through a series of communiques known as the Taiwan Relations Act and the equivalent

of in the Chinese mainland. And that's the sort of framework that governs all that. Now, for 70 years since all that happened, since 1949, China has not invaded Taiwan. And that is a significant thing because it requires you to come up with a change event. A change event is everybody who writes bad fiction knows. A change event is when mild-mannered anti-war Scott Horton becomes a vigilante superhero because one of his children is kidnapped by a cartel and you go on a killing spree. That's the change event.

And so when you're going to say 70 years of motion in one direction is suddenly going to go in a different direction, you need a change event. And it has to be significant enough to actually motivate the change. Hold that thought. Back up into history. The Chinese historically, and boy, do the Chinese love their own history. It is a rare interaction with a Chinese diplomat where they don't sneak in a little Chinese history lecture. It is simply the way that they think. And it doesn't matter whether it was 50 years ago or 3,000 years ago, it's a lesson learned. And it's a lesson learned. and they will teach it to you, whether they know you know it or not. They just love to do this thing.

The Chinese waited 300 years before they overthrew the foreign Qing dynasty. They waited from 1840 to 1997 before they peacefully had Hong Kong returned to them. They could have invaded Hong Kong at any moment. The British had essentially a police force there and nothing more. They waited since 1543 for the Portuguese to hand Macau back to them. And so historically, they've got a track record of wading out these issues here. And they talk about cycles of history as if they were as real as looking out the window and saying it's a sunny day. So you're going to say the last shots fired over Taiwan were back in 1953, and it was an artillery exchange over a couple of islands in the straits.

that aren't even Taiwan proper. And since then, not a single shot has been fired. Instead, China is now Taiwan's largest trading partner. It's a trade in billions and billions of dollars, actually exceeding how much money gets passed between China and the United States. There are 11 airlines that have direct air routes across the straight back and forth. There's constant traffic. There are Chinese goods in every Taiwan store and vice versa.

They are intimately tied together economically, culturally. They speak the same language. The majority people now on Taiwan identify as Han Chinese. The indigenous people that were originally there have kind of been pushed aside. These are two organizations, two countrylets, I don't want to get into nomenclature here, that are infinitely connected to one another and whose ties to one another continue to to increase on a day-by-day basis. In terms of provocations, there's been quite a few, for example.

When I served in Taiwan was the beginning of a free or open society in Taiwan for the first time. Taiwan had been an authoritarian government for 40-some years. People were standing up on street corners and shouting about independence. The Taiwan Independence Party was very successful in the first open elections. there was provocation dripping from the ceiling, and the response from Beijing was to open the floodgates and push Chinese products into Taiwan markets and open up the gates of commerce. After the 1989 Tiananun incident, a number of the student leaders escaped China through Taiwan, and there was nothing done about it. Some nasty exchanges occurred over the phones and a couple of, we're going to remember this one next time you need something, Taiwan.

But the idea is that no shots were fired, nothing happened. So to say that because China is building up its armed forces, they're going to use them against Taiwan, flies in the face of all history. In addition, it flies in the face of prudency. Why would you drop bombs on one of your best customers? It just doesn't make any sense. It also flies in the face of Chinese philosophy. The Chinese believe that in something called the mandate of heaven.

And I know for a lot of listeners, they're rolling their eyes and saying, Peter's probably wearing his Mao T-shirt and pulling his gray hair into a ponytail while he's speaking. And the answer, of course, is not. But if you've worked with the Chinese diplomatically, as I have, I don't want to brag, you get to know how they think. and the way they think is they look back at their history and the mandate of heaven says you only serve in power as long as you don't mess with the things that are important and Taiwan invasion of Taiwan would be Chinese killing other Chinese and I'm afraid that is not something that is easily done and purposefully done in addition this vaunted military that the Chinese have and I grant you that it is growing you know look what it's got They have three type 75 amphibious assault ships. They carry 1,000 men each.

They've got three of them. Estimates are that an invasion would need a million men landed. How many men were landed on D-Day in Normandy, 156,000? The Chinese need to build 153 more of these ships in order to reach the D-Day, 1944 levels of beach landings. It's just beyond practicality. Taiwan currently fields the harpoon by itself. Never mind the United States.

We'll get to the United States. Taiwan fields the harpoon missile. It has a range of about 60 to 80 miles officially classified. The Taiwan straight at its widest point is 110 miles. That means Chinese ships would be under harpoon attack almost as they leave port. Taiwan is getting ready to field a locally made 200-mile anti-ship missile, which means that it would be able to hit the Chinese ships in harbor before. they even set sail. Taiwan flies the F-16 V, which is unofficially nuclear capable and the most modern electronics. They have the ability to launch a formidable defense in a highly confined

area against a land invasion that hasn't been done at scale since 1944. And then we introduced the United States. We're all aware of the United States' amazing military capabilities. The United States has at least two carrier groups at all times. The Chinese have a single aircraft carrier that they just launched. Has at least two groups in the Pacific at any one time. We have recently agreed with the British that they will station two super carriers, and we're selling nuclear submarines to the Australians to complement our own and the British in the area. The United States can fly combat missions against China out of Guam, out of Korea,

out of Japan, practically out of Hawaii with refueling. and this enormous military power can be flipped on with a switch. It's practiced all the time. Now, the question that people like Lionel and Danny Davis raises, you know, would the United States do it? I'm not going to answer. I'm not going to argue the should question. A should question is an editorial.

I'm trying to predict the future here. The should question, would the United States intervene, is fairly straightforward. The Taiwan Relations Act explicitly says that the United States would take with I believe the word is gravest sincerity or something along those lines, any threats to Taiwan, including blockades. In 1979, this language had to be worked out in a way that was appealing to the Chinese, the Taiwan people, and the United States. It had to be clear without being provocative enough to require a response.

If I say, you know, Scott, you better watch your step around me. That does not necessarily require a response. If I say, Scott, I'm going to break your nose in this. the next five minutes. Well, that provocation really does require some response on your part. And so the language was purposely written. The term that was used at the time was strategic ambiguity, was purposely written to make clear the point that the United States will come to Taiwan's defense without actually saying those words, which would have required a response. Two weeks ago, Joe Biden, who, by the way, is still president of the United States, did you know

he was not president for 85 minutes, they were doing this recording, he had a colonoscopy, and Kamala Harris was actually running the United States for 85 minutes. Heaven for fans. Shiver down your spine. Joe Biden, about a week or so ago, blurted out that the United States will absolutely defend Taiwan. And his handlers quickly mentioned that this was another of his goofy gaffs and that they said, quote, no change is, there's no change in policy. Biden's gaff was the most honest statement he's ever made as a politician, and the White House is walking it back by saying there's no change in policy was actually one of the more clever things they've said, because the policy is and always has been that the United States is going to defend Taiwan. We sell them modern weapons.

We have our entire Pacific forces posture towards the defense of Taiwan. We do constant freedom of navigation movements. we have a constant aerial presence, we constantly spy on China. All of this stuff only points one direction that the United States would in fact step in. Now, other than that, why would the United States be bound to step in? And the answer is that the entire Asian alliance that the United States, for better or worse, created after World War II, depends on the belief in Japan and Korea and other places, but those countries in particular, that the United States will step up to their defense.

And if the United States were not to defend Taiwan, then Korea and Japan would go nuclear the same week because they would no longer be able to rely on the United States as the guaranteeer of peace in Asia to a certain extent. The other thing, of course, would be that the world economy would be sent into a tailspin by the invasion of Taiwan. the dollar would crash. You think you're having shipping supply problems right now? Imagine war there. Last but not least, China would never take the risk of invading Taiwan because the United States has 10 nuclear weapons to every one China has. And we could probably successfully deliver nine out of those 10 into China's territory, unlike the Chinese who kind of hope they'd lob one across the Pacific somewhere. nobody does a risk versus gain calculation with nuclear weapons in the mix and comes out saying, you know what we've got to do?

We've got to invade this island for no real purpose other than some propaganda statements our leaders have made talking about eventual unification. So if I say that the United States will intervene, that's the reasons why. I'm not saying it's the good thing, bad thing. I'm saying it is the thing that will happen. Every single player in the story, and when you sit in a room with the PLA and the American military, as I have, everybody in that room is working from the premonition that we are prepared to fight each other, and if it happens, here's how we're going to do that, and here's what's going to happen. There's nobody in that room raising the open, the question of, you know, do you think you guys are really going to come fight if we do something naughty over here in Asia? It isn't on the table. People would laugh at you if you brought it up.

As far as invading Taiwan, no one has been able to answer for me the question of why a Chinese leader would risk as much as he would risk, including his own time on the throne, if you will, because if the invasion doesn't work, he's history as well as probably the whole power structure in time. Why? What's to gain? I've cataloged what's to lose in fairly good detail here. no one has been able to say anything about what's to gain yeah well okay so there's so much there it's peter van buren former state department officially wrote these things here in the american conservative magazine that's the american conservative dot com Taiwan is not about china and Taiwan means war only if we want it to and uh you somewhat disavowed that headline of the first one there but that did come out of something that you wrote in there that

essentially this war is posture this whole thing is not really about Taiwan and China at all in other words yeah the U.S. establishment the military establishment and the rest they recognize the truth of what you've just been saying about there's not going to be a fight over Taiwan this is just a pretext to sell ships is that it to sell the cell to sell weapons some of our listeners are old enough to remember the missile gap of the 1960s and the idea is is that if you're going to justify massive military spending, especially after the cluster futs in Afghanistan and Iraq, you need a big enemy. And China is the guy who's been elected to play that role for us. China, in fear of China, is going to justify massive military spending over the next decade. And the concern is always

that we will, some naughty people will find themselves at a WMD moment under a different president um and say you know we've got all these guns maybe we should think about uh restructuring asia the way uh we almost got right in the middle east almost um that's that's the concern is that we will start listening to our own propaganda at some point um and begin to take action against it but for now take hard america it's just another scam to increase defense spending well i really hope that's right but you know something that i've noticed a lot is that when you read you know the brand corporation or uh well i shouldn't pick on them specifically i know they have a new report out i don't know what it says but uh i've read a lot of these things in the past where they talk

about what it would be like to have a naval showdown with china yeah over Taiwan or over you know disputed islands with japan or whatever it is and they'll really talk you know the whole way through you can listen to them interviewed on npr news or something and they'll do the whole interview and then but nobody says the word H-bomb at all. And they just go unmentioned. And I wonder how many of those type things in a row that these people can read without really just starting to operate in that way

and thinking that we could have, it'd be like who sank my battleship and all that. It would be kind of a reenactment of our war with the Japanese, our valorous war with the Japanese and World War II out there in our giant steel ships in the Pacific, you know? You know, the war games that we play play. And I've, one of my jobs with the State Department in Japan and Korea was to look at the

question of how can we safely evacuate Americans if there's, if there's some kind of crisis like this. Parentheses, nobody called me in retirement to help out with Afghanistan. How'd that work out, guys? But, you know, we, so I would be this tangential part of these war games. I would come in, the U.S. military would sit down and they'd be divided into red and blue teams. And, you know, I'd be the guy over in the corner and I would stand up on behalf of the State Department and say, gentlemen, diplomacy has broken down. It's up to you now. And then I would go sit back down for the next three days because they really didn't want me there.

But I had to sort of titually be there. And the thing is, is that most of the, almost all of these war games had bumpers on them. and the bumpers said no nukes, no chemical weapons, and they'd have other things, no strikes against civilian cities, you know, things like this. And they were all designed to basically let the boys play with the toys and not bring up these game-ending events, like nuclear weapons, even on the battlefield or chemical weapons or, you know, COVID-19 seeded into the clouds over Houston or something. So the idea was that that's exactly how they think. And it's exciting because, well, we've got the new upgrade on the Apache versus the new upgrade that we think the Chinese have on their anti-helicopter rockets. So let's roll the ice and see who wins here.

And, you know, it's just great fun, actually. It's very exciting to see it play out. But in fact, it is a very inaccurate representation. It's a good way to practice certain things if you wanted to take the, the practical view, but from a large, the view from 40,000 feet, it's really scary because it begins to create this atmosphere that says, maybe we could do this. Maybe we could keep the bumpers in place in real life as well. And that tempts people to do things that you don't want to tempt people to do. So I'm hoping that the nuclear weapons, in fact, stay in the

scenario. I don't know how to process the following statement, but deterrence actually sort of worked during the Cold War. I don't know if those are the right words for me to be saying or how to think about it. But in the end, when you look back at how it all worked, deterrence seemed to play a role in everybody chilling out at times when it really looked bad. Yeah. Well, I got to say there's got to be a better way, but you're right that when the politicians are afraid of losing their own capital city with them in it, then it's a whole different question than sending some young man out to patrol a poshune in his neighborhood somewhere. Yeah, exactly. You're going to have a little skin in the game, guys. And that is very much a factor. If President Xi is presented with a decision memo that says, should we invade Taiwan next week? And one of the, cons on on the list in front of him is by the way if this doesn't go well you're going to be imprisoned in a labor camp uh at best and you may take down the whole communist party structure

with you um that's a big thinking point on the list and uh you know but what about and i'm sorry because we're almost out of time here peter but at the end here uh what about the self-fulfilling kind of prophecy here where america decides to pivot to asia so strongly with this new alliance system and build up the Taiwanese forces to such a degree that the Chinese then consider it an intolerable provocation, something like that? You know, we've done sarcastically pretty well with that strategy. We surrounded the Soviet Union with hostile forces, and we managed not to go to war. We currently have Iran surrounded with hostile forces, and we haven't started a war off there.

We have China pretty well, at least the good part of China, the coastal region where some 80% of the population is basically ringed with American bases. We control the Pacific Ocean with our Navy and our air and our space assets. So we have a pattern of surrounding our enemies and shaking our sabers in their faces. But fingers crossed, it's a line that has held through some difficulty. times and some very active people. A lot of war talk over the last couple of years about Iran, but it hasn't happened. And one hopes that the Chinese will feel comfortable enough in their skin. By the way, if you were looking for an explanation of why they are growing their military forces

other than in preparation for invading Taiwan, you might take a look at what the United States currently has a raid against them. and what would you do if you were facing all those American guns? You might pick up a few weapons of your own at the next quickie-mart visit. One last point, and it's not hard to remember that the only two times that China has actually faced the United States in combat in Vietnam and in Korea, when the United States basically put China into a difficult defensive position threatening to cross the Yalu River into Chinese territory, only when the United States did that, did China actually strike. Hang on just one second.

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Drink less, smoke more pot. Get your Delta 8 cannabis at the Hempspot.com, but spell the THC. Hey guys, Scott Horton here from Mike Swanson's great book, The War State. It's about the rise of the military industrial complex and the power elite after World War II during the administrations of Harry Truman, Dwight Eisenhower, and Jack Kennedy. It's a very enlightening take on this day. definitive era on America's Road to World Empire.

The War State by Mike Swanson. Find it in the right-hand margin at Scott Horton.org. All right. And then I say we keep going because you know what I hate? Russiagate. And I like how much you hate it too. And I love your great article. Durham indicts Denchenko.

The unraveling of the steel dossier shows the only campaign that colluded with Russia was Hillary Clinton's. Ah, you don't say. So go ahead and talk about all what we've learned that's new. We already knew all along it wasn't true, but what is true

that we're just finding out, Peter? First of all, I'm sorry I'm a human being. I've got to say just one time, I told you so. I've been telling you so for a very long time. And you know what? I'm glad you said that. I'm so glad you said that. You don't have to regret

that. You sure did. You know who else did? Sheldon Richmond and Justin Romando and David Stockman and of course everybody always says Taibi and Greenwald which is true but you know that Joanne Leon and you know there are a whole bunch of great I'm leaving out a bunch I feel bad yeah but a whole bunch of people were great on this from the very beginning debunking all this you know I interviewed it was April Glasby Day July 25th I celebrate every year you know July 25th I understood Of 2016, and I interviewed Jeffrey Carr, the computer security expert, who said, you cannot say who hacked into a server based on a forensic examination of it. Period. End of argument. So the idea that this CrowdStrike group did that is not true. End of argument from the very get-go. you know each of i don't put myself in the same classes as some of those writers but

the interesting thing is each of us saw through this in in different ways um in the case you just mentioned it was it was straight up technical um others uh immediately saw the the the clinton's behind the dirty tricks for me it was a textbook covert information up. This is the kind of thing that even low-level people like me in the State Department were trained about. We didn't do these things. But we were trained to recognize them so that when some foreign country was trying to set us up, we would see what it was happening. And we'd go tell the, we wouldn't, we'd react accordingly. And so with the steel dossier, what I saw from the beginning was the way that he was feeding this. Well,

At first, I didn't know it was him, but the way that this was being created, fed into the media, and then Steele would reappear to vet stuff that was leaked to the media without exposing that the stuff that had been leaked was his stuff. And so what he was doing was he was confirming, he was a confirming source on his own material. and it's called an information loop and at the beginning it just looks suspicious but as we learned more and more about it and when the dossier was finally published online by BuzzFeed may they rot in hell you know it was obvious that the stuff that was being fed to Newsweek and some of the other people who published it without any any thought was the stuff that Steele had stuck in the dossier himself and then Steele would come up and not say, hey, that's my stuff, it was true.

He would come up and say, as a lifetime Russia expert, you know, that, that rings true to me and pretend that he was a third party when, in fact, he was the only party. That's called an information loop. And that's one of the ways you feed bogus information to a foreign intelligence service is you get yourself or one of your own sources to confirm the false information and pretend like it's an inter-independent third party when in fact everybody's playing on the same team here. And so I saw it through it from the very beginning

as an information op, and everything that came out kept confirming all that. So what do we know here? There are three players, large group players, and they worked interactively. One of the great things that I hope to live long enough to fully understand is how coordinated their actions were or were they just three independent players who were chasing the same goal, which was to destroy Donald Trump?

And they just kind of took advantage of each other. The first, of course, were it was the Democrats and the Clinton campaign. They paid for, they initiated the whole dossier, the stuff of the BS about the Republicans hiring GPS to do this. They hired GPS before Clinton started paying for it to do some basic background research on all the, all the, candidates. What Steel did was paid for by the Clinton campaign through the Democratic Party, through the Perkins & Coy law firm, which was Hillary Clinton's law firm. There's no doubt about that. The Clintons paid for the dossier. They've got their scam running. And it was the same law firm that hired the computer fraudsters who claimed to have discovered the, I'm sorry, I just said their name

and now it escapes me. Perkins and Coy. No, no, no. The group they hired. Oh, Counterstrike, was it? Counterstrike, yeah. Yeah. And so the Clinton's money was what set this whole thing in motion.

The prime mover in the entire thing was the Clinton's money. And what I wouldn't give to see the instructions or hear the instructions that were given to Christopher Steele. Basically, if you can't find it, make it up. I want everything. I want this to look as bad as possible for, Donald Trump. Steele, who's, I'm going to put him in the Clinton camp, then goes out and doesn't contact a single source in Russia, doesn't even go to Russia. They probably would have arrested him because he had been an MI6 intelligence officer for a very, very long time. He doesn't even go to

Russia. What he does is he gets introduced to this guy Danchenko, who is a Russian emigre who was working at the Brookings Institute, and he gets introduced to him by Fiona Hill. Now, who's Fiona Hill? Of course. She's an old Clinton lover. She's friends with Victoria Newland, and she is also one of the prime movers behind the Trump impeachment over Ukraine. So we'll be standing by to hear more about her role in all this. Fiona Hill introduces Steele to Danchenko, and DeCenko basically starts making, literally making things up. And that's where the charges, the indictments against him for lying to the FBI come from, in that Danchenko has said publicly now that a lot of this stuff simply wasn't true. He's trying to fuzz it up a little by claiming it was an, you know, he exaggerated things or he tried to label it as gossip, but Castile took it down his fact.

He's trying to weasel his way around it. But the indictments are pretty straightforward. He didn't tell the truth. And Steele didn't ask for the truth. He didn't want to handle the truth. And Danchenko fed him a bunch of garbage. When Danchenko ran out of garbage, not being a creative guy, someone, and we believe it to be Fiona Hill, introduce Chris Dolan to Danchenko. Chris Dolan is a Clintonite going all the way back to Bill's first presidential campaign.

He is one of the old guard of the Clinton extended family. He works in a PR firm that by, by its coincidence, was actually a registered foreign Asian for the Russian government and did PR work propaganda for Gazprom here in the United States. So he has his share of Russian dirt on his hands. Nonetheless, Chris Dolan starts making things up, including the infamous peatap and feeding them to Danchenko, who feeds them to Chris Steele. And so all of these people directly connected to the Clintons in Dolan's case and connected through an intermediary Danchenko through Fiona Hill at Brookings are feeding garbage to Chris Steele. Chris embellishes it, Chris makes it sound good, he starts using all those super sexy intelligence officer terms, and that is the first group that play here. The second group is the media, who were very much a part of Chris Steele. information off. They're a critical part because, sure, any idiot can get a story planted in, you know,

the house organ, if you will. But if you want to really make this work, you've got to find a way to get those stories into the mainstream media, the credible media, such as it is. And so Chris Steele starts distributing the dossier to places so that they will feed it into the media. John McCain plays a big role in all this. He puts his credibility on the line. And then someone, maybe not steal himself, someone starts leaking the dossier to places like Newsweek and Mother Jones in particular. Oh, this guy, David, David Jones, David Corn at Mother Jones, starts getting these leaks. Oh, Trump has the, there's the P tape, and Trump is done this in Russia, and Trump and Putin are like this. And Steele then would conveniently pop up and call David Corn and say, you know, hey man, off the record, but that's all true.

I worked in MI6 for many, many years. And did you hear this one? And basically confirm his own dossier without admitting it was his dossier, and suddenly this stuff gets into the media. The next player, and whether the media, how much they understood, how much they played along, whether they were active participants in the information op, you know, any means necessary to defeat Trump, I don't know we'll ever really know the answers, but I've got my suspicions, at least some of the people in the media, who were known, what's the guy,

shoot, I can't remember his name now. He worked for the CIA, and he's already admitted, not Russiagate stuff, but he clears stuff with the CIA before he. Uh, Denillion from NBC? Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes. I didn't know that he ever worked for them, but I knew he definitely was caught red-handed clearing his articles. Well, he didn't work for them in the sense that he had a blue badge and went out to

Langley, he worked for them in the sense that he did what he was told by them. Oh, yeah. Yeah. He was clearly an asset of theirs. Yeah. Yeah. In that sense, worked for them. So that's the media side of it. And they played an important role by keeping this alive, by dribbling it out to the public, by stimulating the system. Washington is a big system. It's got all these little ants walking around that bump into each other and they rub their feelers against each other. And they rub their feelers against each other, like, what's going on over at your place? Oh, what's going on over at your place? And by constantly feeding this stuff into the media, and then, of course, dropping rumors like, you know, that thing you read in the Washington Post today, I heard from my

sources that came straight from McCain's office. You build credibility in the, the feelers rubbing against each other to the point where everybody in Washington starts buzzing about the dossier. Then comes the FBI. We know from the text between Pete Strozac and I'm sorry. Let me stop you just for one second. I'm sorry, just because there's no convenient place to do this. So I just have to put in brackets. My correction, it's crowd strike. I don't know what I called it a minute ago, but I got it wrong. I think we said counter strike. Yeah, I said counter strike. And then I screwed you up to. It's my fault. It's crowd strike is what we all meant, of course. I'm sorry, now to the FBI and the evil FBI. Headline is

Scott Horton lies his way through discussion of Russian dossier issues, you know, retraction. That's the headlines. Everyone should start wondering now who I really work for, you know? Exactly. It's very suspicious. So then you get the FBI. Now the FBI, the text we've seen between Peter Strozak and his love gun Lisa something, Andrew McCabe, we understand that the FBI and John Brennan, who's over at CIA at this point in time, are worried about Donald Trump winning the election. They are going to influence this election. They tried to do that with their buddy James Comey, deep-sixing the whole Clinton email thing,

and then Comey screws that up in some way because he's not very smart. So they're getting down to now fall of 2016, watching the polls, they're seeing Hillary in trouble, and they go to work. they actually initiated crossfire hurricane, their so-called investigation, which actually was not an investigation, it was an attempt to manipulate the election. They initiate that in the end of July, but it really kicks into high gear in the fall.

It's all there. False FISA applications, the use of the dossier as a confirmed source to convince the FISA court, they find out that one of the guys they've been surveilling Carter Page actually is an agent being run by the CIA against the Russians, but they tell the FISA court, Carter Page actually works for the Russians. That was another indictment, by the way, by a special prosecutor Durham against the FBI lawyer who lied about Carter Page being a Russian agent. That's a second indictment that's out there. And the FBI begins to build, go for a full-on dragnet fishing expedition to find something, something they can use against Trump.

So they get all these FISA warrants and they get them against low-level slugs like Carter Page and George Papadopoulos because they don't care. They've got the two-hop rule. Two-hop rules says if they're surveilling Carter Page, they can surveil everyone that Carter Page talks to and everyone that those people talk to. So if Carter Page calls Michael Cohen and Michael Cohen calls Trump, they can legally surveil Trump under those rules. And look, when you talk about Carter Page and Papadopoulos, and all of this it's important in the record too and I don't know how well I think pretty well you can do this off the top of your head at what point is it in the record that we know the FBI knew that this was BS in other words it's on the record that they said oh this guy Papadopoulos this isn't anything he doesn't know anything and his connection isn't a connection to anything forget that they weren't telling us that but they had that in their own paperwork and then as you said they had to knowingly outright lie and pretend the CIA asses said page was in fact working for the Kremlin. So we know they knew they were lying before they said that when they said that. Exactly. Off top my head, I can't, I can't tell you exactly with

Papadopoulos, but I can tell you with Carter Page, they knew he was not a Russian asset and was not working on behalf of the Trump campaign to lies with the Kremlin before they filed the first FISA application because they purposely lie. When they sent his name over for vetting to the CIA, which is a standard process. You know, the idea is that if the FBI thinks, hey, this guy, Joe Smith, we think he might be working for the Russians, what you do is you do a whole of government name check. You want to make sure that you don't start from the ground on somebody, the CIA has been watching for a year already. And so when they say, okay, we're going to look for a FISA warrant against Carter Page. You send his name to the State Department. You send his name to the CIA, the NSA. And

And these people come back and usually say, we don't know nothing about this guy, or they come back and say, yeah, Carter Page, he's been working for us. He's been on our payroll for a long time. He's provided decent information. Just thought you want to know. So that's why he's paying up. I think it was in the spring or the early summer. I think it must have been, you know, by May or June that they had discounted Papadopoulos, but certainly, provably, they didn't include him in the FISA application stuff at all. No, because they tried to run a different op against him. And this is one of the reasons why you'll see if this gets any wind in any of the press, you're going to see the government, the deep state defending itself by focusing more on Papadopoulos. Because with Papadopoulos, what they did is they ran a separate op. If you remember, Papadopoulos, by accident, got to know the Australian ambassador in London, who, by the way, in private life has been a great donor, was a great donor to the Clinton Foundation, small world.

Anyway, the Ambassador Downey runs into Papadopoulos, who's like 300 levels below him in the diplomatic picking, perking order, and goes out for drinks with him, the same way that, you know, Mick Jagger, you know, always calls me up when he's in town, you know, because we're so close. And he goes out for drinks, and what do you know, Papadopoulos, who denies this, starts dropping hints that he's plugged into the Trump-Russian campaign lies on secret squirrel stuff, which is, you know, what every person doing intelligence work does with complete strangers is, you know, blow the whole op in one, one bar. Anyway, then Downey, of course, tips off MI6, who calls the FBI, and suddenly it becomes the Australian ambassador, protect that source, you know, confirmed by MI6, and you've got your hook.

That's what you need. And the next thing that happens is a person who allegedly works for the Israeli embassy. And I want to just put a parentheses here, because I know some listeners just hear the word Israel and they're now, you know, frothing. If you had a dollar for every time a false flag op was run pretending to be the Israelis, never mind what they might do on their own, you'd be a rich person. I mean, that's kind of the go-to if you want to pretend to be a secret squirrel, but don't want to give away who you really work for. You claim to work for the Israelis.

So I wouldn't necessarily put money on the fact that this person was an Israeli operative, but they were somebody. They introduced Papandopoulos to this woman who happens to think he is the hottest thing ever on earth. We know now she was an FBI agent sent over there to run the classic honey trap. You know, she throws herself at him, tries to get him romantically entangled, so he'll whisper all his secrets. And guess what? It doesn't work. He doesn't know any secrets. And that's where the FBI drops him is somewhere in there. And I don't know the time frame on it. He's got nothing. They try him another way, too, with this guy Milford. Milford is a professor of dubious

academic qualifications, who offers Poppandopoulos a ton of money to write a very simple opinion paper on, I don't know, Russian oil or something very vague. Milford has been on the U.S. government payroll. He's worked distributing money overseas through these academic grants. He's done it for the Pentagon. He's done it for the CIA. He's done it for the FBI. He's kind of a known quantity, not known to George Poppandopoulos, but if you look him up,

You'll see he has quite a long record of handing out money to foreign academics to write things. Many of those academics find themselves suddenly, you know, defecting to the United States or what have you. He played a role. They tried him with Poppandopoulos as well. So the point is, is that the FBI knows they've got nothing, yet they do have permission to surveil and they go at it with great gusto. We don't even know the beginning of what they listened in. to in the fall and early spring of 2016 and then after Trump elected, 2017, but it almost certainly would include surveillance of Trump and his inner circle. It has to. That's where the two-hop rule

comes into play. If you get permission to hack into the Trump servers to see if they're connecting to the Alpha Bank in Russia, then you're inside the Trump servers. And who's to know what you bump into? You're supposed to be looking only for information about one topic, but golly, you know, it's just like when the cops pull you over for going through a red light. Do I see a joint in your, in your ashtray there, young man? Out of the car. So the FBI has a full intelligence op running against that, and then they go for the juggler. The juggler takes place very early in January where Brennan and Comey meet with Trump,

the president-elect and reveal the dossier to him. Rumor has it that Comey was wired for this meeting. He does not admit that. He claims he does admit that he sat down and wrote immediate contemporary notes following the meeting. This was framed with Trump as a defensive briefing, and I'll define that for you in a second, but in reality, Comey has explained in his own words that he was. confronting Trump with this dossier to see what Trump's reaction was. They were hoping to get a reaction out of Trump that would confirm they were going in the right

direction and possibly scare the hell out of Donald Trump before he even took office, maybe to the point where he found an excuse not to take office. A defensive briefing, by the way, is when the intelligence services learn that you are the target of a foreign op and tell you about it so you get yourself the hell out of trouble. I have experienced them in my own career. I went to dinner with a Chinese business person that I met at an embassy reception of all places. And I got a defensive briefing the next morning saying, you need to not have any further relationships with that guy. We brought him to the embassy reception to watch him because we believe he's an intelligence agent.

So don't answer his phone calls. Save your ass. That's a defensive briefing. What they did with Trump, however, was try to set him up. They wanted to see if he would overreact. They wanted to see if they could scare him the way Jay Edgar Hoover had used the FBI blackmail to scare people, you know, walking into their office, showing them pictures from a compromising situation and mentioning as long as Senator, you cooperated with the FBI, these would never need to leave my office. It was a pretty old game, and it worked for Jay Edgar, and they tried it again. for whatever reason

Trump wasn't moved and somewhere along the way they basically found nothing and stopped looking and turned it into Mueller to go off and try to see if he could find anything at all indictable in this giant steaming pile

of nothing. Now look I mean what you're talking about at one point you said that you know too vague in too much of a hurry but wait you're talking about first of all the major party candidate already nominated candidate for president of the United States of America

and then you're talking about the president-elect of the United States of America and then he was inaugurated three days after that briefing and then as you say they continued this on don't skip a few too fast

because in there is very serious discussions about whether they could get Rex Tillerson and the rest of the cabinet to overthrow Trump in the name of the 25th Amendment and say that he was unfit to serve in office because it was under the control of Vladimir Putin. Scott, this was a coup attempt from the very, very beginning. From the day that they opened the crossfire hurricane investigation,

this was an attempted defensive coup until the election took place and then became a proper coup by the intelligence services of the United States to destroy the seated president of the United States. when they couldn't find enough real stuff to destroy him, they basically resorted to Cold War commie tactics of trying to destroy him through innuendo and rumor and gossip. And they tried to recruit Tillison and others, Pompeo, into a formal coup through the using,

misusing the 25th Amendment and remove Donald Trump from office. there is no other way to define it there is no other way to add this all up i am of the belief that they came extraordinarily close and i believe this is just a kind of a gut thing that robert muller is the he is a hidden hero in all this i was just going to say wait hold that thought because i want to hear it but i was just going to say he seems to me like the real villain and the key to all of this that goes to show just what an op it is, that after the almost entire year that you just described of this pile of BS adding up, now he comes in in what, March, April, and begins another two years of pretending

to investigate this and not telling the people right away that, look, we're investigating some obstruction charges and things, but we do not believe that the president is under the control the Russians, and the American people can sleep easy tonight knowing that that is actually not true. He never said that. He pretended to investigate whether that very well might be true for two years, which to me is that's the coup of it all, even though, of course, they couldn't get rid of them, as the FBI put it to CNN in their own words, I think it was, or the CNN very carefully paraphrasing them, that they just wanted, if they couldn't overthrow him with the 25th Amendment, well, they wanted to rein him in and prevent him from.

for example, entering into a decent relationship with the Russians or any other objectionable policy like that that they had decided against? Well, here's my pull-it-off-the-wall thoughts on Robert Mueller. And again, this is one of those things that I'm afraid we're never going to live long enough to know what really happened. I mean, the Kennedy assassination is going to be fully resolved with, you know, secret photos before we know the truth about this. I think that the FBI and the CIA and the whole cabal that was involved,

and it was primarily the FBI. I don't know there's a lot of dirt on the CIA other than John Brennan personally, but I haven't seen a lot out of the CIA as an institution on this, but they may just be better at hiding things. I don't know. But the FBI was clearly the leader on all this. You know, they took it as far as they could, and they could not find enough there to either indict Trump directly on treason or espionage

or convince enough of the players to push the 25th Amendment through. And at that point, they said to Mueller, you know, why don't you go at it from this hyper-legalistic point of view and, you know, the technicalities of obstructing justice and, you know, the little teeny stuff that is so, that lawyers fight over all the time about whether this particular act rose to the level of perjury or is just an untruth. And see Mueller, you know, go fishing and see if there's anything at all, because all they needed was one solid indictment against Trump personally. And they probably could have impeached him. They probably could have convinced enough Republicans to not attach themselves to a losing battle. And my theory,

and it's just that. It's got nothing but just kind of speculation behind it is that Mueller started off with kind of on the team, got into it, realized what his beloved FBI had done, basically executed poorly, a coup, and at the end, couldn't bring himself to be the Colin Powell of his generation and substantiate, use his reputation to substantiate something that he knew was guard. He at the same time wasn't going to exonerate Trump and walk away. And so he decided to keep his mouth shut about what he found in the FBI's work, and he decided to basically leave Trump's fate to politics where it probably belonged, and just say, I'm not going to be your bad boy on this, but I'm certainly not going to destroy my beloved FBI either. Mueller out well that's true that it sure could have been worse that he could have come out and said oh yeah no we know that Kalimnik is a

Russian spy when that's just not true he could have come out and done worse than he did but carrying it on for two years I mean this is really just one step short of shooting the guy in Dallas or something man it's crazy this is the modern

version of that there's absolutely no question and I When I was writing about so-called Russia Gate back in the day, one of my articles did make a rather unpleasant joke about Dealey Plaza and things like that, because it essentially was a coup. And, you know, you can do coups in a number of ways, and one of them is a bullet through the head, and the other is a political assassination, which is what was attempted against Donald Trump. And by the way, had Trump been a regular kind of politician, it probably would have worked. he probably would have made some deal to save himself.

Now, regular politician, I mean, somebody who knows that the money flow and the power flow don't end when you leave office. In fact, in many ways, Obama, they just start when you leave office. And, you know, because Trump was such a loose cannon or whatever you want to call it, you know, he didn't really care about what was going to happen when he left office. And he relied on his arrogance.

and his charisma and his base to see him through this. Somebody else, a weaker politician or a more standard-level politician, would have given in and said, you know, you keep those photos of me and that child prostitute in your office, J. Edgar Hoover, and you'll never hear a word out of me. Or whatever they wanted Trump to do or not do, he would have been looking for a deal. But he wasn't that kind of guy.

He was going to come out there. And if you look back at his statements, he was actually telling us the truth all along. He told us the truth, first of all, that he had no collusion with the Russians. He told us the truth that he was being spied on by the FBI. He told us that none of this dossier was true. He was right. He was actually telling us the truth at every step along the way.

And he obviously knew something of what the FBI was doing. And he decided, and I'd love to know the answer to this question as well, why didn't Trump blow the whole operation wide open? Hey, y'all check out our great stuff at Libertarian Institute.org slash books. First of all, we've published no quarter the ravings of William Norman Grigg, our institute's late and great co-founder. He was the very best one of us, our whole movement, I mean. And no quarter will leave his mark on you, no question.

Which brings us to the works of our other co-founder. the legendary libertarian thinker and writer Sheldon Richmond. We've published two collections of his great essays, Coming to Palestine, and what social animals owe to each other. Both are instant classics. I'm proud to say that coming to Palestine is surely the definitive libertarian take

on Israel's occupation of the Palestinians, and social animals certainly ranks with the very best writings on libertarian ethics, economics, and everything else. you'll absolutely love it. Then there's me. I've written two books. Fools Arrind. Time to end the war in Afghanistan.

And enough already. Time to end the war on terrorism. And I've also published a collection of the transcripts of all of my interviews of the heroic Dr. Ron Paul, 29 of them, plus a speech by me about how much I love the guy. It's called the Great Ron Paul.

You can find all of these at Libertarian Institute.org slash books. well i mean that's the whole irony of all of this is he makes such a poor uh you know figure to sympathize with it's not like you know if ron paul had been elected and they did this to him and be like man just give me my brass knuckles i'm going to go out there and fight like hell for this one every day right but instead it's donald god damn trump who is just at best settling for and thank God that he stopped

Jeb Bush and Hillary Clinton from becoming President of the United States. In one year it's a miracle and humanity will always owe him a debt of gratitude for that but man this guy was so damned dim I mean think of all the times that Aaron Mote wrote

a special for the Nation magazine acquitting him of this nonsense and he didn't have the wherewithal to even know somebody or have someone on his staff with the wherewithal to know about that

and give it to him and say, tweet this say, even the Liberal Democrat Nation magazine proves I'm innocent. Just say that. He couldn't even have the savvy to even put two and two together half the time. I mean, oh and I neglected my list earlier

they should have been right at the top of my list. Of course is Gareth Porter and Ray McGovern and Robert Perry and Ray McGovern said God bless him. Yeah, yeah. And And Ray said that, listen, he ought to declassify all of this stuff. He ought to fire the leaders of the FBI and the CIA and the Justice Department, promote people from within, but fire all the top people,

and then insist and see it through that everything on Russia be declassified and handed over to the Wall Street Journal and NPR News and the Washington Post and have at it, you sons of bitches. There's nothing in there. And we know from the Bob Woodward book that he told his lawyer Dowd to give every scrap of paper from the campaign over to Mueller and the investigators. Because there ain't nothing in there you can have it. He should have done the same thing. He was the President of the United States.

He could have done that. It didn't even occur to him to try to do that. He just sat there and took it. I don't understand that. That would be on the list of like if I could get Donald Trump under sodium. Penethol and the list of questions would absolutely, you know, you were the president. You could call those FISA documents into your office. You could declassify them yourself and you could go on national TV that same evening

and say Carter Page, CIA asset, the FBI freaking lied on the FISA thing. Here it is, step by step by step. He could have done that and he didn't. I don't understand it. I do not understand it. There's so many things that went on here that remain as many questions as there are about the Kennedy assassination times 10. Because I don't think the people who killed Kennedy were that overly concerned about hiding who did it. They just didn't want to have enough evidence that somebody was going to be a trial or an investigation.

But otherwise, they weren't particularly that ingenious about keeping things secret. They just wanted to make sure there wasn't enough court evidence. Whereas, you know, I just don't understand these things except to say there's no doubt the FBI attempted a coup against the president of the United States, abetted by John Brennan and possibly others, that the coup, the raw material of the coup was paid for and created purposely by Hillary Clinton, who used her own assets to drive this story. including men calling Trump a Russian spy on, you know, during one of the debates, national television. And she used all of her tools to do that. For the few people that are still out there that think she would have made a great president,

I'll ask you, just think about that. That kind of raw power in the hands of someone who also controls the White House, that is a very, very dangerous woman. Yeah. Well, and that kind of bad judgment, too. I mean, she's the author or her people at least. I'm sure she approved the Pied Piper strategy. We want to promote Carson and Trump and I think Cruz because they're the wingers.

So they'd be the easiest to beat in the general election, especially that goofball Trump. And then she's the one who thought, okay, or at least approved, here's going to be our great op. We're going to red bait. I mean, it's not exactly communism anymore. I get that. But we are still talking about the Kremlin. we're going to make Donald Trump the most famous capitalist real estate tycoon from Manhattan into Alger Hiss. And I remember saying in the summer of 2016 that what a stupid pile of false accusations this is.

The Russians, really, that's what you're going to do, is you're going to red bait the guy when the Russians ain't even red anymore? and he's Donald Trump. He's the most transparent person in the world. We all know everything there is to know about Donald Trump. And none of it has anything to do with being a foreign asset of anybody. Give me a break. This whole thing is stupid. And that's the other thing.

You know, you talk about, we talk about how different people came to the same conclusion that the whole Russia gay thing was a load of garbage. They came at it from different perspectives and all ended up in the same place. But I think one of the biggest tells, if you will, was how absurd the whole thing was from the ground up, as you just described. Donald Trump, this is the person that the vaunted KGB identified in the 1980s to be president of the United States and manipulable to their will. You know, what? You know, we had actual communists running for president at different points in time. No, no, not them.

We're going to go after Donald Trump, and we're going to groom him for 40 years before, you know, the Manchurian candidate is released. And the way that these kind of silly memes would kind of flood into the public consciousness, Manchurian candidate, go look that one up, kids, watch it on Netflix. So you know what we're talking about next. And the uttered soaredness of these things where we had to hear about Donald Trump's penis shape from Stormy Daniels. And the way that one goofball after another got promoted to first place, like Michael. Avinati for a while and all these other kind of hangers on to the whole thing. I mean, the thing was so absurd.

It was political satire. And if the sniff test didn't tell you early on that none of this made any sense, then you didn't want it to make sense to you. You didn't want to sniff it. And that, I think, is the best we can say, for example, about the media in that the best of them simply chose not to think too hard about any of this. The worst of them, as I said, were probably paid assets of the operation itself, or at least willing assets, if not directly paid. Well, once that dirty snowball is rolling downhill, then everybody wants in on it, too.

And there are people made their whole careers on this. Famously, that one lady, I'm sorry, I forget her name, got promoted from Politico to CNN, you know, I'm sorry, Natasha, something, right? yeah yeah she's she's something with the biden administration bertrard or bernard uh yeah yeah bertrand natasha bertran yeah yeah she all got promoted through this thing she was you know one of those steel dossier's biggest promoters and and only failed up for this whole time corn and isikov and all these guys none of them got fired madhouse not fired nobody's there's no trouble here the uh you know matt tyibi had a great piece where he cataloged a bunch of the bad ones in the washington post and glen kessler's like yes so he was still working for the there was still a big russian op that he was cooperating with

anyway it's still true anyway because kalimnik which is completely stupid and they just cite the senate report that doesn't cite any evidence of that it just says that when we already know it's not true he worked for john mccain not for vladimir putt he was at the national republican institute you know and the true believers are still out there you know the washington post new york times have run these sort of you know not really retraction, but maybe, you know, the passive voice, mistakes were made. But, you know, in the rush to report, we may have, you know, rushed too much. We may have been too quick. But, you know, the true believers, the Maddows, the empty wheels, they're still out there flogging this stuff.

I read an empty wheel, and I pick on her only because she had done such brilliant work during the Snowden time and with Manning and those things and then just completely suffered the trump derangements and you know she's still out there writing these nearly incomprehensible screeds I mean I try to even read them

and I can't even understand them so many times because they're so tangled up and you know this guy didn't really talk to this guy and they may have talked but it was by phone so you can't say it was for sure the right person and you know under the articles of confederation perjury is not when you do it a Tuesday or so, you know, this just nutty stuff, they're still desperately trying to fill in and

say, well, you know, we weren't really wrong. And Trump did go to Russia and try to make a hotel deal. And therefore, this isn't all not true. It's like the fact checking that isn't really fact checking anymore. And it's very disappointing. You know, when you get beat, you throw up your hands and say, I got beat. And if you're smart, you try to figure out why you got beat so you don't do it again. But what happened is that the newspapers, the media outlets that flogged the WMD story, turned around a couple of years later and flogged the Russiagate story like nothing had ever happened. They were never going to do it again, and then they did it again.

Well, hey, and don't forget Syria and Libya in the meantime, too. I mean, the way that they, the lies surrounding the Syria campaign make Russia look like the gossip that russia gate looked like the gospel truth man so let me ask let me ask you a question do you know did you know do you know and do your listeners know that right now there are 900 american troops still on the ground in syria well i do know that but you knew that okay actually my audience probably knows that too but that's not fair i don't remember who i'm talking to but i will admit i did a story um read antiwar dot com every day everyone i probably probably should drop in more often. I read, I did an article about the New York Times investigation

of an airstrike in Syria two years ago that killed 80 women and children. And in the course of researching what was going on, I came upon the fact that the United States is still involved in a ground war in Syria. And I will admit I did not know that. And I think of myself is well read and I try to stay well informed, but honest to goodness, I was stunned. Then I go back and there's Tim Kane, who was Hillary Clinton's vice presidential person, Tim Kane making a speech saying with, you know, with the Afghan war over for the first time in 20 years, America is not at war anywhere. And it's like, wow, which part of ignorance versus complete BS are you going to lay claim to?

because it's one or the other folks. I was absolutely stunned by it and just shocked to hear about it and dismayed as well. One last thing on Rushagate, I've got to ask you here. Go ahead, please. And this goes for the whole audience out there too. I know I'm right about this. There's no way in the world I'm wrong about this, but I can't find it. And I was wondering if you know what my footnote is.

And what it is is, and you'll find a lot of stories, a lot of stories that say that there was a group of people who are like the Lincoln Republican guys were pushing for the CIA to brief the electoral college that Russia had stolen the election from Hillary Clinton so they could give it to Hillary Clinton or so that they could give it to John Kasich or Mitt Romney. if they wouldn't give it to Hillary Clinton. But what I remember was, very specifically, there was one where it was Hillary's people. It was a woman spokesman type person. I forgot exactly the name or the position. Speaking for the Hillary Clinton campaign, who on the record told one of these very major publications, that yes, they supported that effort. And they wanted the CIA.

And I forget if that same article named Michael Morel, the acting CIA director at the time that they wanted him to brief the electoral college that Russia had stolen the election and to give it to her and barring that if that wouldn't work to at least deadlock

and throw it to the House of Representatives so that the House of Representatives could give it to a responsible Republican like Colin Powell or Paul Ryan and that's what I can't find. I can find plenty of references for having the electoral college give it to case it or romney a couple references to that but what i need

is the one where they wanted it to go to the house and go to powell or ryan and there's no way i could have screwed this up i read it and it's still stuck in my brain that way and i googled the hell out of it man and i can't find anywhere it's not on the top of my head but it tracks with with everything that was being said at that time, there was learned piece after learned peace explaining why electors did not have to follow the will of the people. And they was talk about the so-called Hamilton electors who could follow their conscience. I mean, there was certainly the groundwork being laid for that. And I see if I'll take a shot at looking for it as well.

But I think you're on the right track. I think it's the information is. there, but I can't pinpoint a source. Clearly, things were being discussed openly that had never, ever been talked about outside of the most private of back rooms in an American election, where simply the will of the people, if we have to destroy the system to save it, then that's what we're going to do. If we have to do away with democracy, to so-called save democracy, that's what we're going to do. And there were people barking at every tree, whether that was going to be messing with

the vote count, messing with the electoral representatives, finding an excuse to throw it to the House, or literally trying to politically assassinate and destroy Trump in some way, or just arrange a coup. You know, hey, Mike Pompeo, how'd you like to be president, buddy? you know, no messy campaigning, no need to spend money on TV commercials, just sign here. There were terrible, terrible things being talked about and proposed that embarrass me as someone who believes in a free system. For someone who watches the United States constantly criticize people abroad for their elections and unfairness and campaigns on this myth of the U.S. as the shiny. beacon on a hill. And when it's that ugly and that in your face, it just is disgusting.

And to think that the people who were doing this were very, very close to winning the White House. I just remain in fear of what a Democratic administration, a Clinton administration in particular, would have done to what was left to the United States after that process had run its course. We dodged a bullet, and I don't know the American people really understand that yet. I would hope that they come to read more and understand more, and particularly if the next election features Donald Trump as a Republican candidate. I really, really don't know if I have the stomach to see all this dredged back up. And it will be.

It'll all be rerun as if the Denchenko and the indictments never happened. Um, and we're going to be talking about the P tape, uh, in the next election. I, I hope not, but I'm certain that we will. Oh, man. Um, yep. And, you know, I think people maybe who thought that there must be something to this narrative. Yeah. We should really look at just how many good progressive and liberal and leftist writers who are some of them avowed Trump haters, but absolutely not right-wing partisans in any way who are just saying that, look, the truth of this is that there is no truth here. This is not right. This is essentially an op by these unelected secret police, frankly, against the elected president of the United States. And that's the facts.

And that's also really bad that they should be allowed to get away with that. And it's not like Taibi and Greenwald and Mante are closet right-wingers. They're not. It's just that. It happens to be a right-wing victim of the CIA this time. And so when they tell that true story, that's the side that their truth favors in a sense. But tough. You know, that's just the way it is. And, you know, it's sort of like, look at how many Jews are totally against American support for Israel's policy.

in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. Well, why would they take the Palestinian side? Well, for good reason, because they're being treated so unfairly. That's why, you know what I mean? Same thing. Why would the Nation magazine be running articles debunking Russiagate other than because it's just not true? And they've got people who are not partisan except for the truth enough to just tell

the truth. That's the answer. You know, I got called out in a public speaking thing fairly recently for being quote a conservative why why do you support conservatives views or whatever and i said i really don't i hopefully i try very hard to take on each issue look at what i can assemble in terms of facts and come to a conclusion and if those conclusions fall into whatever you're defining conservatism as or libertarianism or or or you know whatever hamburgerism, then that's where they fall.

And I don't, the difference between someone who works that way, Aaron Matee, Glenn Greenwald, and modestly, hopefully, myself, is you don't start from a conclusion. You know, when you're the conservative op-ed guy at the New York Times, you are being paid and you're stating up front. I'm going to write about this topic from a, quote, conservative point of view. not going to attempt to parse out the ground truth. I'm going to present the conservative

viewpoint. And my colleague across the newsroom is going to present the liberal point. And as long as you kind of start labeling yourself that way. But if you want to have credibility, then you can't do that. And you shouldn't do that. And you should instead say, well, let's start with the facts as we can determine them and see where that puts us. And at the end, if someone wants to judge that conclusion through a political lens, you know, knock yourself out. But for all those who dismiss whole bodies of work, such as Glenn Greenwald's, simply because you've labeled him something, you're really intellectually, very dishonest.

And you're also missing out. You sound stupid, actually, when you get on Facebook and post some dumb meme or something. because anybody who has applied a couple of brain cells understands that, you know, Greenwald at times, many times, in my opinion, you know, does the hard right instead of the wrong, easy. And that's to be celebrated, not mocked. Yeah. I'm with you on that.

And by the way, one more thing on my footnote here. I did find a reference to some of them want votes to go to Powell in the Electoral College in Salon.com, and there's a few different stories, including in Reuters, that there were three electoral college votes for Powell that were by these Hamilton electors, which included Nancy Pelosi's daughter was one of the ones who was asking for the intelligence briefing. Don't forget that part of it. But so I do have that part. What I still don't have is this part that I remember, I could have sworn it was the New York Times, but I don't want to prejudice anybody's, anybody else's memory but i swore it was the new york times where that was the deal hillary if they could in the

electoral college but if they go to the house they wanted to go to powell or ryan because i remember saying colin powell paul paul ryan i just know it was that so if anybody can find me that i'll give you my kingdom i need that footnote damn it because i claimed it was true in public and then i couldn't back it up and i feel stupid but i know i'm right still it makes sense paul was the wet dream all along. He was going to be the first black president. He was going to be the savior. He was the Democrat who was so loved by Republicans that everybody was going to vote for him. And let history show, let the record show that Colin Powell threw all of that away to help make George Bush look good and kill off a couple of thousand American troops in

the Iraqi desert. Thanks, Colin. Yep. What a legacy. All right, we should wrap now. Thank you, sir. Appreciate it. Always a pleasure, and I look forward to talking to you again. Take care. All right, you guys. That is Peter Van Buren, formerly with the U.S. State Department and author of a couple of books here. We meant well. That's also the name of his website. And most recently is Hooper's War, a novel of moral injury in World War II, Japan. And check out these very important articles.

in the American Conservative, Durham indicts Denchenko about Russiagate and Taiwan is not about China and Taiwan means war only if we want it to. The Scott Horton Show, Anti-War Radio, can be heard on KPFK, 90.7 FM in L.A. APSRadio.com, anti-war.com, ScottHorton.org, and Libertarian Institute.org.