Scott Horton Show - Just the Interviews - 2/16/24 Matt Taibbi: New Revelations on the Origin of Russiagate

Episode Date: February 20, 2024

Scott talks with Matt Taibbi about a new series of articles he published on the origins of Russiagate. Specifically, Taibbi has been working with journalists Michael Shellenberger and Alex Gutentag to report on the role of Western intelligence agencies in spying on Trump’s team and constructing the narrative that the former president was compromised by the Russian government. Discussed on the show: “CIA Had Foreign Allies Spy On Trump Team, Triggering Russia Collusion Hoax, Sources Say” (Public) “Our Man in Cambridge” (Racket) “The press versus the president” (Columbia Journalism Review) Spooked: The Trump Dossier, Black Cube, and the Rise of Private Spies by Barry Meier  “Why Even Democrats Should Care About the ‘Cooked Intelligence’ Russiagate Scandal” (Racket) Matt Taibbi is a journalist, author and political commentator. Subscribe to his Substack publication: Racket News and follow him on Twitter @mtaibbi. This episode of the Scott Horton Show is sponsored by: Moon Does Artisan Coffee; Roberts and Robers Brokerage Incorporated; Tom Woods’ Liberty Classroom; Libertas Bella; ExpandDesigns.com/Scott. Get Scott’s interviews before anyone else! Subscribe to the Substack. Shop Libertarian Institute merch or donate to the show through Patreon, PayPal or Bitcoin: 1DZBZNJrxUhQhEzgDh7k8JXHXRjY Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

All right, y'all, welcome to the Scott Horton Show. I'm the director of the Libertarian Institute, editorial director of anti-war.com, author of the book, Fool's Aaron, Time to End the War in Afghanistan, and The Brand New, Enough Already, Time to End the War on Terrorism. And I've recorded more than 5,500 interviews since 2004. almost all on foreign policy and all available for you at scothorton dot for you can sign up the podcast feed there and the full interview archive is also available at youtube.com slash scott horton's show okay guys on the line i've got matt taibi again thank goodness he is at racket dot news and um he's also at public dot well what the hell is it they're going to call it public dot substack.com um For a couple of the important pieces we're going to be discussing today,

he is, of course, formerly at Rolling Stone Magazine and wrote a whole bunch of great books, including Hate, Inc., all about the media that I know you'll really like. And he's been doing some campaign coverage lately, but, boy, he's got a big one on Rushagate here. Welcome back to the show. Matt, how you doing? I'm doing great. How are you doing, Scott? I'm doing great, and by one, I meant series on Rushagate here,

and you're sharing a byline, introduce us to your byline, shares if you would please sure it's michael schellenberger from public uh and his partner alexander gruten tag his writing partner that is um you know michael is one of the twitter files reporter reporters and we uh testified together on the hill right okay great and now i love the headline i knew you were going to get to this eventually untitled gate i says Matt, get back to work on that untitled gate, man. I need to know what happened at the beginning of this thing here. And, of course, you're the one who's going to tell me.

I knew it was true. And now here it's the future and it came true. CIA had foreign, wait, what? I forgot all about that. But yeah. Yeah. No, this is like the most important thing that never happened. Only now it did.

CIA had foreign allies spy on Trump team, triggering Russia collusion hoax. sources say, and there's a couple more that we're going to talk about too, but this gets right to it. John Brennan, the leader of Jabhat al-Nusra, he's the one who got this whole ball rolling in the year 2015. Is that correct? Yes, well, we've been told a couple of different versions of this story, so I should just give the background on what the story is. In 2017 and 2018, the House Intelligence Committee was run by a Republican. Is this okay if I do this? Because it's not going to make sense of course. The floor is yours. Absolutely. Yeah. So, you know,

it's early 2017. Trump has just become president. The world's losing its mind over Russia Gate, if you remember. And the, um, the House Intelligence Committee at the time, uh, the Republicans were in control of the house. And it was the chairman was a California. congressman named devon nunes and he started a an investigation in the permanent select committee on investigations which in dc is nicknamed hipsy um and they they worked on this for two solid years and only a portion of that research ever got out uh you might be familiar with the noon's memo or the Nune's memo, which alleged abuses of the FISA intelligence process. There was a lot of controversy, and then finally it turned out to be true after an Inspector

General report. So the story that we got, a lot of people heard the same basic story six years ago that what that team had was evidence of a kind of a broad espionage campaign. among other things and it's sort of a manufactured intelligence story similar to the WMD scandal and but we just couldn't report it because we didn't it's all classified and it's been blocked and finally some of it trickled out so we had enough sources who could only from recollections recall the research and reports that that were done but when we finally got enough to coincide we were able to report certain things, like, for instance, that there were 26 Trump associates who were placed under surveillance beginning either in late 2015 or early 2016, depending on who you talk to. Certainly by March of 2016, it was starting. And then, but in other words, then it's completely clear now, as although anyone could have assumed, that Miss Foote and the entire Papadopoulos thing, that setup originated with this same operation, for one.

Is that correct? Yes, yes. And one of the things that was told to us kind of offhandedly, and this is one of the things that happens in journalism every now and then where somebody's talking to you and they think they're telling you something really important about one thing and they kind of casually drop. something else that blows your mind they were talking about how basically they couldn't find anything that was like concrete evidence of real interactions with Russians between you know with Trump's team and they and they casually dropped the news that yeah we find that they were talking to this Maltese professor who turned out to be an MI6 agent and so that there They're referring, obviously, to Joseph Mifsa, the Maltese professor, who ostensibly is the beginning of this whole story.

But, you know, it's been speculated that he's been a foreign agent and we still can't prove it. But that's something that's in a report somewhere in a vault in Langley. Let's just put it that way. Well, yeah, that's one more source for sure. And, you know, in my book, I say, well, if anything, the guy must be MI6. if you look at how close he is to these various people and the various things he was involved in um right right i mean and he's disappeared since that time um although we you know we have we have some interesting information about where he might be um but uh yeah the idea that he was

you know some kind of a russian cut out was never terribly meaningful uh or you know convincing Okay, but so to rewind a step here, you're saying that this House committee had all this information, and you've known a bit of this, but now you've got enough of it that you can stand on it and really report it out, that before, say, for example, the Guardian story says that, oh, GCHQ overheard something in 2015, that this was before that, that even that would have been probably like parallel construction or at least maybe kind of a limited hangout explanation. nation leaked to the Guardian after the fact, but still saying that this thing began not with misfoot the spy blabbing to Papadopoulos who then blabbed to Downer the Australian diplomat and that got around to the FBI in July, but that this started way before that and they were the ones who had sick misfoot on poor Papadopoulos in the first place. And then I guess that raised all kinds of questions about how he was sent there by his. his friends in the first place to go to Rome to this Italian spy training school, cut out

weird thing, where he was where they had this conversation in the first place, right? Right. And then he was offered, you know, some money to write a paper and all this other crazy stuff. But I think what you, when you described, you know, the situation with that explanation about GCHQ, you know, the stories that came out in The Guardian and the New Yorker, I tend toward the second explanation that this is kind of an after-the-fact reconstruction, like a pre-bunking type of situation, because we were told sort of the exact opposite, that instead of what those stories say, which is that the British intercepted what they called a stream of illicit communications um and you know notified us uh that it was actually the

other way around that you know we contacted them and and and that was the predicate for this whole thing we you mean CIA contacted the CIA exactly the CIA it was at the behest of the CIA and the American intelligence community at requests went out we were told to multiple foreign allies to engage in various types of surveillance and what they call bumping right so that's when you have an informant kind of run into somebody like literally in the it can happen in a stairwell you bump into somebody or you set up a meeting of some kind you offer something or brother, you know, a job. And, you know, that describes what happened to Papadopoulos pretty well.

And all of that stuff started to take place well before the FBI investigation. So this kind of explains, you know, certain things. Like, you know, why was George Papadopoulos already wrapped up in all this bizarre activity having come from the Ben Carson campaign? Way before the FBI started, it's an investigation. It doesn't make sense unless they were looking, somebody was looking at him beforehand. And that's what we were told. And now 26 targets. So beyond Papadopoulos, we can presume or you know for sure that that does mean Carter Page and or Mike Flynn as well?

Yeah, well, so the people that we can confirm absolutely are the, you know, the five FBI targets. So that's Carter Page, Papadopoulos, Michael Flynn, Paul, Manafort and this gentleman named Walid Fares, who his FBI code name was Crossfire Wind. There's also Sam Clovis. We know that he was approached by the informant Stefan Halper. And there's a few others who are a little bit surprising who are on this list. Chris Christie was actually monitored, I think, kind of accidentally. But it happened.

There was a briefing of the Trump campaign. We didn't even put this in the story. But there was a briefing of the Trump campaign where normally, you know, a major party candidate is sort of briefed on possible national security issues before the election just so they can hit the ground running. Instead of doing that normal briefing, they had an FBI agent sit in and spy on the three members of the Trump team and record their observations and comments. in case any of them said anything incriminating about Russia.

And it was Trump, Flynn, and Chris Christie. So we know they were also part of the surveillance. Wow. And, you know, I guess we could go back to something that you point out in paragraph two, y'all's piece here, that this is completely illegal. Who the hell that they think they are? framing up bumping into a major

party candidate for president of the United States he was by then by far the presumed front runner might as well have already been the nominee by then they're the secret police with no authority to do such a thing whatsoever absolutely I mean the implications of this are

completely crazy they've always justified this in the grounds that well they had some something. They had something to go on. They had a reasonable suspicion. All those stories you mentioned, right? One of them, I think, was called, you know, the British had the story for, oh, the British spies were first to spot Trump's team, Trump team's links with Russia. They all suggested that there was, you know, they were capturing something nefarious that justified all this activity. But they never told us what the nefarious thing was, which should have been a huge red flag for all the reporters, cover this and now it turns out that there was no national security justification we were told point blank by the investigators or by the people are sort of around this team that there there was no national security reason this had nothing to do with our relationship with russia this was

all about just taking advantage of politically inexperienced quote unquote rookie uh trump team because these were people who might not have seen this kind of thing coming. And I think that was one of the major things that we got was this whole idea that this was not, you know, a failed, mishandled national security investigation. It was something that was political from the start. Yeah, absolutely. All right. So let me change the subject a little bit back to some previous journalism that you published at your site. It's the story of this guy, Stephen Strange, or Shepard.

Strange, sorry. True. Yeah. And so he told the story that now, you know, is consistent with this and fits a little better about how he had invited Page. No hard feelings, no ill intent implied or intended there. But then what happened was Richard Deerlove of the Downing Street memo showed up and talked with Halper. and all of a sudden, Halper went over and started talking to Page. So the implication being that Deerlove had told Halper,

hey, that Page guy works for Trump. You should go and nail him. And so then that's exactly what he did. And this was the beginning, you know, the beginning of the framing of Carter Page. And so then does that fit with the rest of what you've learned here, too? Absolutely, yeah. I mean, I think that story that we did, I think it was in 2019. 20 steig did he worked he was in cambridge uh stephen halper was a cambridge uh professor

and shrague sort of worked worked under him and uh yeah he he listened to to helper talk constantly he eventually got him on tape saying all kinds of crazy things but the the key thing that you're talking about is that help or ran into page at a conference in July of 2016 this is before the FBI the start of the FBI investigation and that scene that you describe you know where dear love is sort of pointing out page it it strongly suggests that something was up before July 31st right like all the paper on helper is kind of putting out page it it strongly suggests that something was up before July 31st right like all the paper on helper is kind of post July 31st. It's kind of front dated. But that story by Shrague definitely suggests that something was up before then. And that fits with all the other stuff that we know about, you know, Papadopoulos being run into, you know, by various characters. So absolutely. Hey, y'all, I got a new coffee sponsor, Moondos Artisan Coffee at Moondosartisan Coffee.com. When I wake up in the morning, I feel like my brain is all dried out. I need to pour a hot mug of

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Get tickets now. And, yeah, it's funny because I got two windows open. One of them to your great new journalism. And then the other to my book that has all this stuff I've collected, including a lot of your great journalism over the years on this subject. And so I got on my footnotes here and everything I'm paging around. What was that guy's last name again? But, um, so you're completely, you're obsessed with this thing too, right? Oh, yeah. No, I'm out of my mind. I mean, I don't know what I'd do without you, pal, but yeah. I mean, it's, it's a, to me, it's like Waco or something. I'm not getting over it. Uh, it's like lying us into a Rock War II. It's, it's unbelievable what they did. And I'm not a Trump guy. I've never been any more

than you are, but just I don't care if they had done this to Hillary Clinton. I would have took her side against the secret police. You know what I mean? This whole thing is completely crazy. And so speaking of which I was going to say I have here in front of me was Steele's main source, Igor Danchenko

later told the FBI that he got Carter Page's name from Halper. So Halper then, after framing the guy up, then went and told the source for the steel dossier, hey, he got got some stuff on this page guy in there. wow and that's that's fascinating right yeah and that's from the FBI interview

of Danchenko hmm I'm gonna look that up right now okay excellent yeah no because that the that's another thing we had it we had a little bit of you know back and forth about what the relationship was between all this surveillance and the steel dossier and you you know they were sort of suggesting as opposed to the campaign driving the surveillance which is what i think a lot of us thought um it might have been the other way around uh the the cia did not have this direction about russia initially um they were looking in all directions they were monitoring conversations between uh trump officials and people all over the world including people like mohammed bin solomon uh and you you see that reflected in the

steel reports like the early ones um you know they're not about russia they're about like central asia and hotels and stuff like that and then then they coalesce around the russia theme uh later and so it's it'd be interesting to know exactly you know when that decision was made but and who did it but uh the idea that they were communicating like that is fascinating Yeah, absolutely. Now, so you have a sort of a side piece here about the CIA is hiding these documents. This is a side story to the story. How you know all this stuff is because the CIA, they implicate themselves in these giant reports like they did with their own secret side torture report that accidentally, possibly accidentally on purpose got leaked to the Senate Intelligence Committee before. They have the truth. And so somebody got a hold of it or at least knows. that it exists and they thought they could hold onto it so oops but it I guess it got out and disappeared again or some kind of complicated thing help me out so this story is this is hard okay so here's the the one thing that we know

absolutely for sure is that there is a short completed finished report about the origins of the intelligence community assessment that is done it's about somewhere between 17 and 20 pages along and it's supposedly on the grounds of Langley has never left and is in a vault. There are more materials that they've been characterized as one binder or three binders. My suspicion is from talking to all these different people is that we're talking about three different packets that collectively are 10 inches thick because we had somebody describe a 10 inch binder and it's just hard to imagine that actually existing i don't think they even make those so um but

the idea behind this is that uh donald trump absolutely for for sure ordered a huge stack of materials declassified in the waning hours of his presidency uh this order was then sent to the intelligence community to do basically sort of a logistical process of redaction and there's a check they have to go through and they never approved it. And so even though legally the stuff is the classified when the president orders it, it remains secret. There is a small packet of about 46 pages that did get out and that stuff is really interesting. I'm sure you've seen it. but there's a gigantic you know sort of mound of stuff uh that is still out there and still and still declassified and i'm sorry i'm still classified and we we need to see what's in that

stuff yeah for sure okay and now um well i'm afraid to move on to this other piece if there's anything left on the original story here about the start of this thing and brandon's role in getting this thing going in 2015 or early 2016 that i miss should ask you about anything on your mind there before you move on um well i mean we can we can come back to it let's let's go let's go to the other thing i'll let me i'll me call up the original interviews and make sure that i've got everything because yeah i mean we this next piece is the one that i spent the most time on if you're going to if you're going to talk about the iCA yeah so i mean this is huge so for people to remember back, Trump's

president-elect and it's January. He's about to be sworn it's what remind me, was it January 17th that they put it out, three days before the inauguration? It was January 6th, believe it or not. Oh, okay, I'm sorry. Yeah, it was the same day, coincidentally the same date as the Capitol riots just earlier, right?

So this is January 6th, 2017. and they put out this thing, this intelligence community assessment, and it was, you know, I think a game-changing document that the main conclusion of it was that Vladimir Putin had ordered a what they call an influence campaign in order to denigrate Hillary, Clinton and help president-elect Trump's electoral chances and the thing about this is that without this ICA and if you've read this thing right um it's if you actually read the document most people will read it and say wow i'm there must have been something else right because

yeah it's just a gigantic catalog of like well we watched r t and there were these reports that were kind of like unflattering to the United States. Well, and in fact, I think what they did was they took a 12-page report about, yeah, essentially whining about RT from years before and just stapled it on to the end like a high school kid would do to just pad the thing. And then, but meanwhile, there's actually nothing of substance in there. Yeah, exactly. And isn't that funny?

Because that's exactly what happened with the WMD thing. And they actually did take a kid's college report, the British did, and turn that into one of their intelligence assessments, the so-called dodgy dossier back then. But this one, they wrote this really oft-quoted sentence, we assess Putin and the Russian government aspired to help President-elect Trump's election chances when possible by discrediting Secretary Clinton. Russia's goals were to undermine faith in the U.S. democratic process, denigrate Secretary Clinton and harm her electability. We further assess that Putin and the Russian government developed a clear preference for President-elect Trump. Now, the reason this is important is because this is,

it ends up kind of serving as the trigger for a whole series of events that come afterwards, including the opening of you know, the Mueller investigation. The Mueller investigation technically was the continuation of the crossfire hurricane probe, but that had basically already wrapped up by this point.

It was just the public furor that ensued after the release of this report which also contained an annex that was not visible to the public with the steel dossier stuff in there that leaked out.

And so this report was critical and the idea that Russia conducted an influence campaign, I keep having to say that because they never use the word interfere. This is an important detail. The interference, the National Intelligence Council later defined it as meddling with the technical aspects of voting. So ballot boxes, voter registration, stuff like that. they couldn't say interference all they could talk about was an influence campaign but journalists added that word themselves right and even the even the influence campaign was made up but still and look at the time we covered it on the show and uh this jumped right out at us we were making

fun of this at the time it says right in the iCA it says judgments are not intended to imply that we have proof that shows something to be a fact right okay exactly so we might be bluffing says right there in the thing so okay yeah good enough for me to not believe any of it right there you know and tell you themselves not to believe it how how embarrassing is that right i mean you know these are people who lie for a living and they can't even um you know they they they can't even come up with something uh better than that seriously but look and by the way i saw that today you put out a thing where you gave credit to a bunch of people who got things right and first on your list was Ray McGovern, who's the former chief of the chief analyst of the CIA Soviet division back in the Cold War days, well, the last Cold War days.

And he was very good on this very point in real time back then, because he is one of my go-to guys. I have him on the show all the time back then. And he said, listen, I guarantee you that the Russians would prefer Hillary Clinton because Trump is a wing nut and is hard to quantify. is she is completely predictable and they value that above anything else that they know exactly how to measure what she will do

whereas with Trump he's kind of a loose canon and nobody really knows he could flip flop back and forth and leave them stuck in a tougher situation whatever whatever he just surmised that way back then from the very beginning you know as soon as this story came out he's like let me tell you something guarantee you they prefer

Hillary to this guy well that is fascinating because that's the most word for word what we got you know from from this from these sources they were looking at this and i'm just going to read this to you this is a quote they cook the intelligence to make it look like putton supported trump the evidence points the other way they saw hillary as a manageable as manageable and reflecting continuity it was a relationship they were comfortable with all of those leaks from that brennon report and the i see conclusion were false uh the key were the things they did to cook the intelligence and to build a false narrative and it talked

about how they left out lots of negative information that they had about Russia's attitude towards Trump that they thought he was unreliable mercurial not steady I'm sure there were things worse than that in there but but you know at least at least those details were out there so that that's exactly what Ray was saying right yep that's exactly right and so you're telling me though that when Brennan took his hand-picked team, that they just buried all of that and trumped up what? The rest saying, what do they even have saying that Russia supported Trump to bump up? I think there's a quote in there somewhere where the House investigators say that they tried to find what the CIA team was citing in order to support their claims and then they just couldn't find.

evidence to support it at all it's sort of like it was for the rest of us i mean they they had access to much better uh information but they never found the source of the nile there um we know a little bit right like there there was a there's a fascinating thing that they told us about where they talk about how there were three or four instances in the in the report where they looked to see if there was a credible reporting line for the source and they couldn't find any history at all. So, you know, which, which suggests that there may have been just straight up invented material in the, in the report. But all the same, it comes down to, and you talked about the handpicked nature of the team that wrote this report.

That's different from Iraq in a couple of ways, right? Iraq was a national intelligence estimate, which is a formal thing where every single intelligence agency gets a hand in having an opinion. What they did with Iraq is they just classified all the negative information, right, where people said things like there's no operational tie between Saddam and al-Qaeda. They just hid that from the public. It's in the report, but they hit it. Here, what they did is they just kept everybody who had a different opinion out of the analytic process your friend ray you know he's the one he's one of the people who talked about um how the state department had had a different opinion and so the state department's

intelligence service the ianr was just kept out uh so um when you get down to it brandon even overruled a couple of his own russia experts uh that he had brought in to do this work and ultimately it was publicly reported and there were a number of stories that kind of talked about this is a big dramatic spy escapade but there was a single human source who was apparently quote unquote instrumental in this conclusion uh and that was this alleged exfultrated spy uh about whom there was a big you know brouha a couple of years ago guy's name was alex smolinkov he was a mid-level diplomat who was supposedly he supposedly had access to the desk of Vladimir Putin but you know there have been subsequent events that suggest that this guy is not any kind of spy at all and you know it's clearly the FBI the NSA and at least a couple of Brennan's own CIA experts were not convinced by this intelligence so you know what we were told which is a that they upgraded unreliable sources and downgraded reliable ones, that fits with the public story that we've learned over the years. Yep. And in fact, it was a big fake talking point that, hey, all 17 intelligence agencies, meaning

the National Intelligence Council, they all are unanimous in this. And they pushed that, even though it was known from the beginning, as we just talked about, they published this dang thing in January. Anyone could read it. They didn't pretend in the document that it was a national intelligence estimate. It was just that was what Hillary Clinton kept saying, and the rest of the media kept repeating about it. But it was important, I forgot my source for this, but it's probably easy to find somewhere. It might even be you, that there's a thing in the CIA called Russia House, which is all their Russia experts.

That's all they do is sit around and reading things and it's a relic all damn day. And they weren't included. They had nothing to do with this thing at all. That ought to tell you everything you need to know if the fact that it was John Brennan, the leader of Jabhat al-Nusra in Syria, you know, involved wasn't enough. But no, right. In fact, the story that you just described is like one of the most amazing media stories of recent memory. The 17 agencies thing, it came out, it first came out in the debate. with Donald Trump. Hillary brought it up. She talked about all 17 agencies and say that Russia's

interfering with the election. Then about a year later, maybe eight, nine months later, there were corrections by the AP and the New York Times. And they quietly said, yeah, it wasn't 17 agencies. It was actually four. Then it turned, then there was some testimony by James Clapper, who was the head of the um you know he was the director of national intelligence and he said it was three and him right the the director of national intelligence is an umbrella agency so he wasn't counting his own agency because they didn't do any analytic work um but what was fascinating was that when fact checkers looked back at that like politifact has a thing that says this wasn't a mistake Because the ODNI speaks for all 17 agencies.

Therefore, if James Clapper is involved, it's not wrong to say that all 17 agencies contributed to the report. And that's actually still out there. So that's why there's so many of these stories out there that are not corrected because they've used this ridiculous explanation. Yeah. Hey, it's like the due process for killing Alaki and his boy. Well, we talked about it in the White House. that's a due process doesn't have to involve

an idea of the defendant right or you know a judiciary or even an administrative court what the hell we just we're sitting on the couch shooting the shit also important poor reality winner got herself sent to prison well

with the help of Matthew Cole the great betrayer of sources and all to leak a document that said that the NSA didn't really stand by the CIA and FBI's claims here. They give it a green line, but

NSA only gives it a yellow, which means this doesn't come from us, who are, you know, the knowers of all things digital on the planet, the omniscient god of the fiber optic cable, national security agency. This ain't coming from us, but we don't want to be rude

and contradict the CIA and the FBI if they say they're sure. So here's our yellow line. That should have told everybody all you need to know right there you know right the fact that the nsa wouldn't sign off is a big deal brennan talked about it in his book um there's a passage in there in his book undaunted i mean god it's a horrible it's a horrible book but but uh he talks about being disappointed in admiral mike rogers who ran the nsa back then uh that rogers and then he had two russia experts from the cia

who wouldn't go along and his his decision was to overrule because they hadn't seen all the intelligence. But not just the NSA, there's another subplot involving the FBI. The reporter Jeff Girth, who wrote the Columbia Journalism Review opus about all the reporting errors in Russiagate, he's the only person, I think, who noticed this. But the FBI publicly changed their mind on this issue right before the election. They said that, you know, the hack of the DNC, was not done specifically to help Trump and that whatever Russia was doing was just to

sow discord, not for any particular candidate. And then in the middle of December, they came out publicly and said, yeah, we're now going to back the CIA's position on this. And Comey, when he testified, said that we didn't come to that conclusion until December. So up until the election, they didn't believe it either, which should tell you something. Yeah. And they were the ones doing the line. Sometimes it's hard to send the memo around when everybody's just whispering what we're supposed to believe here. Right. Right. Exactly. It's just crazy. It is. Hey, y'all, Scott here. Let me tell you about Roberts and Roberts Brokerage, Inc. Who knew? Artificial bank credit expansion leads to price inflation and terribly distorted markets. If you've got any savings left at all,

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Hey, y'all, you should sign up for my substack. It's Scott Hortonshow.substack.com. And if you do that, you'll get the interviews a day before everybody else. But not only that, they'll be free of commercials. How do you like that? Pretty good, huh? Scotthortonshow.substack.com. Hey, y'all, libertosbella.com is where you get Scott Horton Show and Libertarian Institute,

shirts, sweatshirts, mugs, and stickers and things, including the great top lobstas designs as well. See, that way it says on your shirt, why you're so smart. Libertas Bella, from the same great folks who bring you ammo.com for all your ammunition needs, too. That's libretasbella.com. You know, we got to bring up here, I think, and talk about the role of Gina Haspel here. Because, one, I don't know that much about it, but two, also I like to just clown on Trump that, how lazy is this guy, that he's the President of United States of America, and he's appointing his deadly enemy to be the head of the CIA in the middle of all of this going on, and he has no

idea who she is or why there might be a conflict of interest here at all. I guess it didn't occur to him at all to try to find a loyalist somewhere with the credentials to put in place there, but no. Well, right. Yeah. I mean, Gina Haspel is smack dab in the middle of this whole story. She was stationed chief of the CIA in London when this was all happening. which means that this whole thing couldn't have happened without her say so. Because when the FBI wanted to go to England and launch their crossfire hurricane investigation, they needed the permission of the British government. You have to make overtures to the intelligence community.

That has to be done from another intelligence agency, which means that the CIA station chief in England had to negotiate that deal. So she was in the middle of this. She was also in the middle of the moment. when an Australian diplomat named Alexander Downer allegedly walked in off the street with information about George Popatopoulos talking about the Russians having dirt on Hillary Clinton.

You know, that's highly malodorous story. So she's a character in this story. And yet when this House Intelligence Committee group put together this report, she continually blocked its release. And, you know, that's one consistent thing we heard from multiple sources around, around this whole thing, which is that Gina wouldn't let it out. And, you know, Trump was trying to declassify this in his own handpicked CIA head is the one that didn't let it happen. Also, I just wanted, I'm not sure if you remember the story, but do you remember after the Sergei Skripal thing took place?

There was a crazy story in the New York Times about how Gina. Haspel was showing Donald Trump pictures of dead ducks implying that Russian poison was killing all these animals in the area in England and they were

fake. The pictures were fake. And they didn't show that even to you know they didn't have Bellingcat put that out on Twitter and they only used that on Trump like he's the biggest sucker of all just show him some dead ducks. Right. Yeah. It was it was fake news just for him.

right and it was done by his own cia head and that came out publicly uh and and he's you know look i think there's a lot of there's a lot of evidence that the trump team for all uh whatever else is going on they just were blindsided by this whole thing they they weren't experienced they hesitated to strike back quickly at the beginning because i think they were unsure you know I had one person say to me, like, we didn't know. Maybe somebody had a meeting somewhere, right? So. Well, you know, I don't know if you remember this footnote, but you need it just in case somewhere.

I think it's really important. I got it from Bob Woodward's book and nowhere else. And we only found it out years later. And I'm sorry, I forget which book. They all have one word titles, you know, but I'm sure everybody can find it. Right. But what it is is it's Trump's lawyer, Dowd. As soon as Trump becomes president, Dowd says to Trump.

Trump, listen, man, come on. It's me. I'm your lawyer. It's just us here. Tell me, did you do this? And Trump says, hell, no, I didn't do a thing, blah, blah, blah. And he goes, all right, well, here's what I want to do. I want to take every scrap of paper from the campaign. I want to turn it all over the special counsel right now. So I guess this would have been right after Mueller was named. And then Mueller's right-hand guy is this guy, is it Andrew Feinberg? Weissman. Weissman, sorry. And he says, Trump says, go ahead. So they take every scrap of paper. They don't sift anything. They just take the whole pile. And they give it to Mueller's aid. And he says, and Dowd says, listen, we're being decent and fair and up front with you.

We hope that you'll treat us with mutual respect here and we'll, like, you know, do this thing fairly. So come on. This is a gesture of goodwill on our. part here's everything we got because we know how innocent we are and then they just continue to screw him for another two years straight after that you know pretend to investigate for another two years straight after that well and that's that's a crazy story and you know what's frustrating about that is that there there are all these legends about Donald Trump the anti-democratic menace and you know he's going to do all these terrible

things it would have been probably legal for him to send you know SWAT teams rappelling through the windows of all the people involved in this whole thing um and have and have them whisked away to you know supermax prisons in Florence Colorado or whatever it is and at the very least you know when the the first stories about the pee tape leaked out he should have hauled those four intelligence chiefs in for a meeting and said you know you guys have 20 minutes to explain this or else you're all gone but they didn't do that you know um because they they just didn't know what to do i mean i i this is they're not experienced at this game i mean of course i'm not either but uh i think a lot of

uh you know george h w bush wouldn't have been fooled by this thing right i mean yeah the head of the former head of the cia so yeah that there's an element of not knowing what these people are capable of which is important here yeah well and look i mean out here in the peanut gallery, we knew what to do, which was, at the very least, they should have been keeping up to date on Taibi and Mate, right? Because. And you, of course. And look, I mean, whatever. They didn't get a list of my show, but I mean, hey, David Stockman, he's a good capitalist, former Reagan advisor. He was killing it on this day in and day out for years. Oh, I didn't realize that. Oh, yeah. And best to the best. Sheldon Richmond at the Libertarian Institute. And, and,

of people. But the real thing is, more important than that, and the most important, probably for Trump's purposes, would have been to highlight Aaron Matey in the Nation magazine. That should have been all capital letters on his Twitter feed, hey, everybody, look, even the liberals admit that I'm not guilty. And then, but he didn't even have the wherewith all to do that. To keep up with, there's a group of, and throwing Gareth Porter, and of course, Ray McGovern and others. All these people who are on the left who do not favor Trump

but they also do not favor lies coming out of the FBI and the CIA either and they're just debunking this story because it's not true. That should have been the Trump people's highest priority at the very least would have been to trumpet all of the work

proving their innocence coming from the left and they didn't even do that once and they didn't have the wherewithal to even do that at all. You would think think that that guy Stephen Miller, somebody would have come up, someone would have had an intern, collect all the best. I mean, hell, never remind Chuck Ross and all the guys on the right doing great work, right? But like from a culture jamming point of view, you want to cite the liberals, that's even better, right? But like, they didn't even cite Chuck Ross. They just

weren't even on it at all. Well, I mean, you make a really good point. And I think, by the way, that's probably the reason that, you know, Aaron was squeezed out of the nation and democracy see now and Glenn ended up Glenn Greenwald ended up kind of squeezed out of the intercept even which he had found it I you know I wasn't fired but it was uncomfortable and you know the writing was on the wall at Rolling Stone I think because all these organizations knew that it was political you know it was radioactive to have anybody in a mainstream organization talking about how how phony this whole thing was, which is why you see what's happened to people like Barry Meyer, right, who is a,

you know, very respected New York Times reporter. He wrote a book about steel and now he's persona non grata in that world. So I didn't know that one. Yeah. No, I mean, it's, it's, it's, it's not an accident that there's nobody left in mainstream media who, who talks about this. Yeah. Hey, and as long as we're daydreaming about how this could have gone different, another one, is and this is something that Ray suggested right away to is that Trump should have given a speech on the order of like the Saturday night massacre situation and said look the special counsel and all of his men

and the top 25 guys at the FBI and the Department of Justice you're all fired all of you and you're gone and security get them out the door right now but but but I also hereby declassify everything that justice and FBI and NSA and CIA have on me and my team and I hereby order it to be copied in quadruplicate and delivered to the Washington Post and the New York Times and National Public Radio and the Wall Street Journal and you sons of bitches do your worst and so you can't impeach me until the reporting is done but you go ahead and see what's there because I know how innocent I am but I'm not going to let you ruin the whole damn president. this way by bogging me down on these lies. Forget it. And that probably would have worked, because what could they have said to that? Well, he did order the government to turn every scrap

of paper over to us. Maybe we should take a look at it. I don't know. Yeah, what were they going? What would they say? No? Right. Yeah, exactly. Samar Eliasson and her team, they'll find the treason in that stack of papers. Lena, let them go. Exactly. Exactly. That makes a lot of sense. They should have than that. And McGovern recommended that in real time. You know what I mean? It would have been outrageous but then also would have been like,

then again, that makes sense. At the same time too, you know what I mean? Right, right, right, right. Anyway, all right. So one last thing before I let you go here, because I do have a minute before I have to, this is a really important story that you wrote too. Why even Democrats

should care about the cooked intelligence Russia gay scandal. In other words, all the reasons that you cared even at the time not that you're a democrat you're a journalist obviously first but you also wrote the book insane clown president about who Donald trump is to you which says a lot right there so you know what's the larger principle of stake here that matters so much you think that you know both the iraq episode uh with the national intelligence estimate when we didn't hear the truth for 12 years i mean they told us

the parts that they wanted us to hear and then they left out all the derogatory information and it wasn't declassified for 12 years you know that that's basically what's happening now if you know they put out something phony and then it leaks out four or five eight years later whatever it is it's too late at that point um you know manufacturer intelligence no matter what the subject is it has a profound impact on politics because they can argue for almost any kind of action and the public's attention span just isn't equal to the level of trickery that they're able to to bring out with this stuff so i think people just need to bring a level of skepticism that's even degrees higher than you know it's been since 9-11 and the

wmd fiasco because now we know that they're you know they'll lie openly in these things and We just got to be on the lookout for it. Yeah. Well, I mean, it's such an important cultural phenomenon in the way that the left kind of joined forces with the liberals in rallying around the national security establishment because it's not even the FBI. We're talking about the national or the FBI's counterintelligence division and the CIA here. They're the ones kind of generating this thing. And then, but since Trump is the infection, then they're the antibodies. And so the left sides with the national security state against the elected president in such a harsh way.

And now it's taken, I guess, finally the war in Israel, Palestine to split the left away from the liberals again on, you know, whose side are you want on these things. But now here we go again. It's election years we're talking about right now. And, you know, we skipped, you know, we haven't talked about the, you know, laptop gate, you know, crisis there. Everybody listens to this, knows that story anyway. So we have the national security state, the FBI and CIA intervene in the last two elections against Donald Trump. And they're virtually certain to this time. And then there's a real question then about what's this left and liberal sometimes alliance going to do with each other and with the rest of us in reaction to that, you know?

Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Yeah. No, absolutely. Absolutely. That's true. we'll find out what they have in store for us this year. But thanks a lot

for your time, man. Really appreciate it, Matt. All right. Thanks a lot, Scott. I hope to talk to you soon. Yep. All right you guys. That's great. Matt Taibi. He's at racket.com. This series is also at public.substack.com. The Scott Horton show

and anti-war radio can be heard on KPFK 90.7 FM in LA. APSRadio.com. Anti-war.com. Scott Horton.org, and Libertarian Institute.org.