Scott Horton Show - Just the Interviews - 4/22/22 Peter Van Buren on the Elections of Post-Constitutional America

Episode Date: April 27, 2022

Peter Van Buren is back on the show to discuss a number of articles he published about Russiagate and the Hunter Biden Laptop coverup. He and Scott run through the history of the coordinated effort to keep Trump out of the White House in 2016, and detail how the effort shifted to removing him from office after he won before finally settling on an attempt to “rein him in” that proved successful. That brings them to the 2020 election where the shadowy tactics used to propel Biden to victory over Trump were clear to see and even bragged about in a Time Magazine article. Van Buren warns that the story is not over. And that unless the American public shows uncharacteristic concern about intelligence bureaucrats working to sway elections, the process is bound to repeat in 2024.  Discussed on the show: “The Russiagate Hoax Goes Deeper Than We Thought” (Libertarian Institute) “Thoughts For The Dead” (The American Conservative)  “Revisiting Hunter Biden’s Laptop” (The American Conservative)  “The Secret History of the Shadow Campaign That Saved the 2020 Election” (Time) “The Hunter Biden disinformation campaign” (Spectator World) Peter Van Buren’s Soho Forum Debate on Taiwan 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; Free Range Feeder; Thc Hemp Spot; Green Mill Supercritical; Bug-A-Salt and Listen and Think Audio. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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almost all on foreign policy and all available for you at scott horton dot for you can sign up the podcast feed there and the full interview archive is also available at youtube dot com slash scott horton's show guys on the line i got peter van buren hell yeah welcome back to the show peter how you doing always happy to be back scott good you wrote all this cool stuff man at tack thoughts for the dead oh i haven't read that one yet i bet that's really good revisiting Hunter Biden's laptop. That's very important. But first, we got to talk about your first original piece that you wrote for the Libertarian Institute. The Rushagate Hokes goes deeper than we thought. That's right, everybody. Me and Peter Van Buren, we still got chips on our shoulders about the

Russiagate hoax. So tell us what we've learned recently, Peter. Well, you know, I want to comment about that chip on my shoulder. I don't think I'm quite in that mode. What I think we have here is an issue that A, has historically not been explored because it affected, it was the first clear, unambiguous example of the intelligence services interfering in an American presidential election. And yeah, I know about Dili Plaza. But that, but because this is going to affect the next presidential election in 2024, there's enough hangover from what happened with Russia Gate that we still need to talk about it. because it's going to be a factor in the 2024 election.

I believe Donald Trump is going to run, and I believe that many of these unresolved issues are going to be dragged forward. And so for those who say, well, this is just, you know, Peter and Scott working out their anxieties. Well, no, not quite. We're talking about the future here. We're talking also about whether or not we as a nation are ready to give our tacit permission to the intelligence agencies to play in politics. And that's what we're really talking about.

And what we're learning... I agree with that, by the way. And sorry for some of so flip about it, but that's why I still got a chip on my shoulder about it is because the outrage that they would have dared to go as far as they did here. And, in fact, as far as they went in 2020, with the suppression of the laptop on the CIA's part

and the building up of the fake kidnapping plot on the FBI's part as they're doing. October surprise and counter October surprise. So this is a huge deal for whether, you know, it's just like when the CIA was spying on Diane Feinstein's staff on the Senate Intelligence Committee and then trying to refer them to the Justice Department for prosecution for doing their job of investigating CIA torture. And it raises the whole question here of just how post-constitutional are we now in this country and how are we going to survive this?

I'm deeply sorry. I actually had most of a book draft written called Post-Constitutional America that I had written before Trump's election, talking about drones and talking about surveillance and talking about the loss of privacy. And I never finished it because once Trump was elected, he took all of the political air out of the room. And everything was being blamed on him.

and there was absolutely no interest left in discussing the sins of Obama, the sins of Bush torture and the NSA and all that. It just simply left the building. And unfortunately, that draft now is so aged. It's almost quaint to look back when we were kind of worried that the NSA might be listening in on our emails or things like that. Now, we simply take it for granted. I notice that particularly among younger people who simply assume

that everything they do is being monitored. And since they live online, their lives are essentially an open book as far as the government is concerned. So I feel bad about never getting that all out in print, though I feel that I got most of it in columns and articles. But nonetheless, coming back, we're in a new era now, new post-constitutional era, part two.

The first part was the loss of our basic freedoms, the ability of the government to, if they want to, monitor basically everything there is about you. Because every electronic device that you touch or come near, and trust me, you're touching one or near one at any given moment in time, is retrievable. Some of them are easier than others, but it's retrievable and it's storable. We see this happen. As your listeners know, I used to live in New York City. and New York, along with London, is one of the most surveilled cities in the world. I was assuming my apartment was not monitored in some way.

I was overtly monitored as soon as I stepped out of the apartment door. There were cameras, visible cameras in the hallway, visible cameras in the elevator, of course, for my protection, in the lobby of the building. And as soon as I walked out on the street, I was subject to multiple cameras monitoring me. either private cameras that were installed on doorbells, courtesy of Amazon and available to the police, or on light poles here and there that kept a good eye. And basically, every step of my day was visible on camera somewhere, somehow.

And if you've got a camera, you can have a microphone. And that tied in with the ability to see where I use my credit card. And that's not hard. I mean, I can go online and monitor myself. When my kids were younger and were using my credit card, I could monitor their use in real time and know where they were and make a good guess who they were with. In fact, I could phone up one of the other parents and say, my daughter just spent 20 bucks at the so-and-so movie theater.

What is your daughter's show? Hey, they're supposed to be together and my daughter's spending money someplace else. Hmm, big brother comes down. So I got used to post-constitutional America part one, as we all have. But now we're in post-constitutional part two, and that is where the intelligence community, particularly the FBI, is playing a very active role in who we will vote for and in influencing the elections, particularly the presidential elections. There's simply not enough time and bandwidth to scrutinize the local elections, though

it's hard to imagine they wouldn't be active there as well. But certainly the large-scale political events such as the presidential election are being dramatically influenced by the intelligence services. You mentioned Hunter Biden's laptop, and I'll be happy to go through that in more detail a little bit later, if you like, but essentially when the details of Hunter's laptop came out, which showed that at the very minimum, he was pretending to sell influence for money if he didn't actually sell influence to his dad for money, and exposing himself as an intelligence target. In other words, if you wanted to blackmail someone, how about a guy who

photographed himself with hookers and meth pipes whose dad was vice president and who's used dad's credit card and dad's insurance along the way? Boy, what a target that is. You wouldn't even need to have your A team on that one. The Chinese could probably have the equivalent of their intel services interns working that case. Nonetheless, 51 supposed senior members of the community, including your best friends, John Brennan and John Clapper, came out and said, well, the Hunter Biden thing has all the hallmarks of a Russian disinformation operation, so please don't pay any attention to it. And the complacent media, if they're not directly influenced by the intelligence services,

by planting people, as they did during the 1950s, 60s, and 70s. And that's obviously past speculation into fact. If they don't have active people influencing them, then they complacent. enough that they just went along for the ride. And they basically said to America, you will not have access to this information unless you're willing to look around the internet for sources like the Libertarian Institute, like the American conservative, like the New York Post, that are willing to stick their necks out and do stories on this.

We'll discredit those stories, of course, and call you a rube for actually believing that stuff. Well, it turned out to be true. But what mattered was holding off America from understanding that truth long enough to get Joe Biden elected. But now we're learning that the intelligence services played a very significant role in the 2016 election, and those same tools are going to be available to them to play in 2024. There's enough blowback that there's already influence on 2024 before they even start up Operation No. 3 here. But let's go into it in some detail.

What we know about 2016 is based on two broad streams. One is perhaps unreliable. It's a series of unconfirmed reports from organizations like veterans of intelligence personnel, former NSA, CIA, FBI, and State Department people who have turned a little bit and realized that they had been used in their professional careers and now try to expose gnautiness on parts of the three-letter agencies. And they get it right most of the time, but they get it wrong once in a while.

And oftentimes their informed speculation takes a while to actually confirm. But luckily, we've got something even better. And that is Special Counsel John Durham, who is investigating Russia Gate and its connections to the Hillary campaign. And Durham is doing it the old-fashioned way. He is filing indictments. and he is planning to take people to court. He's going to be taking someone named Michael Sussman to court in about three weeks here.

Michael Sussman was all of the above here. He was, A, an attorney for the DNC for the server hack incident. He was, B, an attorney for the Hillary Clinton campaign simultaneously, and C, simultaneously. He was an unnamed source known to the. FBI, but not known to the public, an anonymous source that was pedaling data to the FBI and CIA claiming that Alpha Bank and Trump Tower were in electronic communication and that Russian-made smartphones made by the Yalta Corporation were following Trump around the country and logging onto the same Wi-Fi systems that he and his campaign were logged onto, including Wi-Fi in

the Oval Office and the executive office building. Now, that's an interesting set of jobs that Michael Sussman had simultaneously, and you would think that there would be, at minimum, some sense of overlap of interest, if not conflict of interest, and that lies at the heart of Special Counsel John Durham's case against Michael Sussman. The current charge, the only actual legal charge, is that Michael Sussman lied to the FBI. In July of 2016, in the midst of the campaign, Michael Sussman went to the FBI and later CIA and said, I have information from an anonymous benefactor who says that he can prove that the

Alpha Bank, the Russian Alpha Bank with, quote, ties to Putin, unquote, has been communicating regularly backchannel with a server in Trump Tower, and it may be. be the way that Trump's Russian handlers are contacting him. And simultaneously, I have information that this Russian-made smartphone, which we've narrowed down to an individual handset device, has been following Trump around the country, logging onto the same Wi-Fi he's been logging into, and obviously would be serving as an electronic conduit into Trump's communications. When he went to the FBI and CIA with this information, he told them emphatically that he was a private citizen, a guy who's just out to do the right thing for his country. He did not reveal that he was working directly for the Clinton campaign, and that material misrepresentation, that little bit of fraud, is what the criminal case against him hinges on.

The value for us, Scott, is that in the little bits of drips and drabs of the criminal case that have been coming out of John Durham's office, we've been able to see some of the cards that Durham holds and some of the background behind this case. all right so we got the uh the kind of the major threads of the origin of the thing the steel dossier the um the god dang uh um crowd strike identifying the russians as the hackers and then i'm spacing out the third thing that also traces back straight to this same uh alpha bank alpha bank exactly the uh with the uh in the russian smart phone as number four. Oh, right. And the smartphone is number four there. So now, and now we're just, was the smartphone thing part of the story all along? Or that was, they were pushing that sort of in tandem with the Alpha Bank thing, but that never really got picked up until, really, until the

Durham investigation started talking about it. Is that right? That's right. That's right. Because what happened was the election. And all of this stuff became kind of a moot point for the American public and the American media once the presidential election occurred and Trump was defeated. Initially, all of this, all of these dirty tricks were designed to defeat Trump in the election and allow Hillary Clinton to win in 2016. Now, I may have said Biden a moment before, excuse my old age, memory is the second thing to go often. But the idea was that all of this stuff was being thrown at the wall.

in an attempt to defeat Trump in 2016 and elect Hillary Clinton. Once Trump was elected, there was a pause, and the Hillary people, the Democratic National Committee and the Hillary people paused and said, are we done? We lost the election. And after a very brief interval, they said to themselves, apparently, because they went back right at it, they said, no, we're not done at all. Trump doesn't have to stay in office just because he was elected legitimately by the American people. That doesn't mean he needs to serve four years.

We may be able to impeach him and drive him out of office. And that's when all of these entities, the dossier, the cell phone, the Alpha Bank, Chris Steele, Michael Sussman, the same characters that were active during the game of the election, all of them jump back. into the game in January of 2017 in an attempt to drive Trump from office. The first shots were fired by James Comey and John Brennan, who went to Trump very early in January of 2017 before he actually had been inaugurated and said, pretended to be informing him that the steel dossier was in existence, was out there and might contain derogatory information. What they were actually doing was taking a chance that the information was accurate and or would scare Trump enough that he would resign ahead of his inauguration.

In other words, let's focus on the pea tape. That was the juiciest part of the steel dossier. Imagine, Scott, you've just been elected president of the United States. and the two smartest men in the intelligence business come in and say, hey, sir, just between us friends, we know about the P-Tape and we know it's going to be made public soon. Now, if that thing was real or if there was a hint that it was real or if there was something similar to the P-Tape that was real,

if you were Trump, you might easily have bailed out at that point and gone running away before you were made an international, embarrassment. That was Bremen and Comey's thing. And in fact, Comey has admitted that he first wanted to wear a wire to that meeting, decided not to, instead had one of his FBI agents waiting for him with a classified laptop in a car downstairs where they took the meeting. I believe it was in Trump Tower. And as soon as Comey came out of the meeting, he recorded his contemporous notes of what Trump said, including comments about how he felt Trump reacted. In other words, he was trying to see if Trump was going to, you know, his eyes were going to pop

open, or he was going to start to perspire or do any of the things that supposedly indicate guilt when the dossier, when the Russia ties were all brought up in this meeting. And that formed a big part of Comey's initial attempt to get Trump to resign later became fuel for the Mueller investigation, which as we, know, dragged on for several years. Hang on just one second. Hey, y'all, they've got great deals on weed at the Hempspot.com. The Hemp spot specializes in Delta 8 tetrahydrocanabinol instead of Delta 9,

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You guys, my friend Mike Swanson has written such a great revisionist take on the early history of the post-World War II national security state and military industrial complex in the Truman Eisenhower and Kennedy years. It's called the war state. I have to say, it's the most. convincing case I've read that Kennedy had truly decided to end the Cold War before he was killed. In any case, I know you'll love it. The War State by Mike Swanson. Some of y'all have a problem. You've got chickens, but you don't want to stand around throwing food at them all day

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Yeah, as they told CNN, well, if we can't get rid of them through the 25th Amendment, at least we can rein him in. with the special counsel investigation. It was the end in itself. And that was basically right out of the FBI's playbook from the 1950s and 60s. Jay Edgar Hoover famously kept files on everybody. And he knew all your dirt and everything that was hidden in your closets. And he would often come to the office of important people and say,

you know, we have this file that suggests you prefer to do perverted activities, A, B, and C. it's going to remain locked up in my safe, as long as you stay a friend of the FBI. And that proved to be an extremely effective strategy. Hoover would also do favors for people. If you were on his side and a good friend of the FBI, he might let you know a little dirt on one of your enemies so that you could go out there and raise the speculative question about whether your opponent, it enjoys perverted activities

D-E-N-F. This is how Japanese gangsters work. If anybody's been watching Tokyo Vice, it's not a bad movie. But Japanese gangsters would often talk about the bullet or the bends. And if they

needed to get someone to cooperate with them, they would drop by their office with a bullet in one hand and the keys to a Mercedes-Benz and the other. And they say, you know, one way or the other, you need to stop talking about x y and z which way would you prefer and oftentimes they'd hand over the keys to the new car and silence would be purchased and if you weren't going to buy it one way the bullet would take

care of uh ensure your silence in another and so Comey and Brennan basically went on what they hoped was a blackmail mission with Donald Trump in January of 2017 yeah um all right now so one One thing that's a little funny to me is that these Democrats' lawyers keep going to the FBI and the CIA trying to get them to believe in all this. When the FBI and the CIA, I mean, the FBI, I have every reason to believe, sent Papadopoulos in the first place, set him up back in the spring of 2016, just to give him something to talk about in the beginning. And it looks like the FBI, like Comey's FBI and Brennan's CIA were involved in this all along. Now, I know that there's compartmentalization, and one part of the CIA, for example, debunked the lies against Carter Page, but then again, they let those lies stand in the public for years without defending their guy either. That's correct. And so help me understand, you know, this is not just formalities in checking boxes, that the Democrats are saying, if not to their, what, one pet FBI agent, they're dealing with a separate FBI agent.

So they got to actually fool this one into buying it? Is that it or what? Well, there's a couple of things playing here. First of all, just back to the idea that they let Carter Page dangle there. That's a big deal. Sources are gold. That's how you learn things if you're an intelligence agent. And one of the things they teach intelligence agents, like in the 101 part of the course,

is you don't lose an agent. You do everything you can to protect your. are agents. You're their mother, father, priest, rabbi, and bodyguard. Because if a source gets burned, we call them agents. The idea is you're the officer, they're the agent. You know, the idea would be that if you lose a source, you're losing your whole point in existing. So burning a source, even if it's a kind of a low life like Carter Page, is a big deal. And so it's not with a light touch, CIA let him go. Now, let's go back to your question. Why are the Democrats shopping this information around?

By the way, the information we know now, in retrospect, is all false. But I don't know if Michael Sussman knew it was false at the time he was shopping it around. It works better if he didn't know it was false. And the same thing for Chris Steele, who did know it was false. But Chris was a professional intelligence officer, and he knows how to tell a lie better than your teenage daughter. So nonetheless, why are the Democrats going around and doing this? And there's a couple of things. First, it's possible that the Democrats did not know what FBI and CIA were already doing.

Hillary may have known, but down at the working level in the DNC, they may not have known that the FBI was already ginning up this thing that became crossfire hurricane, the investigation. So that's number one. Number two, you always want to provide your sort of, and your investigation with as much top cover as possible. So rather than saying we're leaning on Carter Page, we're leaning on George Papadopoulos, we're leaning on some other minor players, instead, if you can say, well, we're embarking

on this investigation because we've got a confidential informant who's telling us that the Alpha Bank is secretly communicating instructions to Comrade Trump. that just buries everything one more level. The third thing is, again, Sussman, more than steel, Sussman may have actually believed that he had legitimate information about Alpha Bank and the cell phones and may have wanted to put himself in the hero role by being the one who brought it to the FBI's attention and the CIA's attention.

And he'd come out of this, you know, in a pretty good spot in the Hillary administration, and the guy who was able to do that was going to be well rewarded. So there's a number of reasons why even if the CIA had already tagged Carter Page, and we have to acknowledge there's some speculation there. It's not a clarified fact. But even if they had tagged Carter Page, they had a lot of good reasons to keep the investigation open. Plus, throw in, as you put it, the compartmentalization, the bureaucratic screw-ups, the fact that left-hand doesn't always talk.

to right hand, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And it all seems perfectly, perfectly in line with the naughtiness that was being perpetrated here. Yeah. Man, what a thing. I just love this story. You know, it's, um, it doesn't have all the death of the Waco massacre or a wreck war to or, we're not done yet.

Back in suicide bombers in Syria. But yeah, but it is actually, there's a potential here for a real war. And this is something that I may have said this to you or somebody else, I think probably to you, that something I have not done well enough over these past years is put myself in the shoes of a Rachel Maddow watcher and someone who really believes this stuff. And how absolutely terrifying this must have been to them and still is, right, that Putin was able to overthrow our government and put the white supremacist Nazi Donald Trump in there or whatever it is or their thing. that, I mean, man, that really must have terrified them absolutely out of their wits. And it has so much to do with their perception of the Vladimir Putin that is at war in Ukraine right now. As bad as that is, they're living in a different world than you and me with the Vladimir Putin that they imagine here, you know? And right now, what those people are trying to do, of course, is they're trying to deny the facts that John Durham is unearthing.

They're trying to deny the conclusions that you and I are able to reach here, as well as other sources. I have to say Matt Tabibi, as always is on this. Glenn Greenwald, as always is on this. The New York Post is doing a very good job with it. So this is not unique to you and I, but we certainly have been keeping up with the big guys on it. They must terrify them in those little dark moments when they realize that, maybe everything they know is wrong and that the intelligence operation that was run against our election did not originate in Moscow but actually in DNC headquarters and that they have

been manipulated nobody likes to wake up and realize that they're the ones who were the pawn in the game it's like that you know I've made that that joke about where you give the guy money and he's going to go around the corner and bring back your real Rolex for only $300 and after you know an hour or so of waiting there and he doesn't come back you come to realize wait a minute I've been had and nobody likes that feeling and I think a lot of the Rachel Maddow fan boys and girls are going to be having those epiphanous moments and realizing that wait we've been had this is all bunk along the way and we've been not only party to it, we were influenced to vote in a certain way because of it.

Now, one thing I want to stress in terms of the disbelievers out there is to, if in any way you know someone who's been in the intelligence community or you have access to some good books that talk about how these things work. And they don't have to be contemporary books. We don't need something that's talking about what's happening in Langley, you know, last week, read stuff from World War II, read stuff from the Cold War. This operation is textbook stuff, the idea that you use cutouts who are immune-immunized. For example, in America, lawyers are allowed to get away with lying in different ways than private

citizens are if they are, you know, hired by a client and things like that. You know, go ahead and take a look at this, and it's a textbook operation. The money started with the DNC Hillary campaign, but it goes through, first of all, the DNC laundering process. Then it gets handed off to Perkins & Coy, the law firm. And, of course, in America, you have to be very delicate law enforcement-wise when you're asking questions about relations between a client and a law firm. Then Perkins and Coy, the law firm that all these people work for, then they hand it off to a contractor called Fusion GPS. Fusion GPS later hands it off to Christopher Steele and Michael Sussman, who themselves pay subsources on another level below them.

So by the time the money is reaching people like the researchers at Georgia Tech who supplied some of the background information that Michael Sussman believed implicated the Alpha Bank, those guys are innocent in the sense of they don't have any idea in the world who they're working for or who they're actually responsible for empowering. And that's what the point of this is. You know, this is something the CIA was particularly effective in the 1960s doing as funding research at American universities. And a lot of researchers were opposed to the idea of working for the government at all

and working for the CIA in general. If somebody comes in and says, gee we'd like you to figure out how to make napalm more effective a lot of people a lot of researchers would have said no but if you go through a series of cutouts and the last guy in the line is a clean guy who works for a dry cleaning company who wants to know how to make something less sticky and by converse more sticky well then the application to napalm which sticks to skin famously becomes clear but you the researcher don't know in fact the guy who you who you you're meeting with from the Dry Cleaners Association. He doesn't know who he's working for.

And then at that point, the research is clean, the money is clean. Now, I did as part of the article that ran exclusively on the Libertarian Institute.org, and it's still up there if people haven't had a chance to read it, I did get a chance to speak to a former colleague of mine who does work in the intelligence community on the administrative side. And few people understand how small the covert community is and how large the administrative side of spying actually is. Think about what would be involved. Like a public high school, I bet, right? It's like a public high school, right? The boss is outnumber the kids. Yeah, you've got, you've got three assistant principals and only one janitor, right? You know, the idea would be that, for example, think about

if you're going to create a fake identity for somebody. In the old, days, all you did was print up a driver's license and off you go. But now you've got to have social media, you've got to be able to Google that person. And the idea that you come up with nothing on Google is no longer a very convincing argument. That rings a whole lot of bells if there's just literally nothing on available publicly about a human being who's in a government job or in a high corporate job or something like that. So think about the amount of work that's involved in creating a covert personality. Well, the same thing goes for money.

Money is something that everyone wants. And when you're dealing in the covert world, like when you're trying to hide the connection between Hillary Clinton and the graduate students at Georgia Tech who are doing the actual research, that money's in cash, baby. And handfuls of cash have a tendency to disappear if you don't keep track of them. And so elaborate accounting systems are set up in the, the spy world to make sure that the money gets where it needs to go, that it isn't skimmed

along the way, and that the people who get it, get it clean so that they can legitimately say, I had no idea I was involved in this. And to their credit, some of the researchers at Georgia Tech have publicly written that they were not involved in any of this, that they don't, they didn't know they were involved in what they were involved in, let's put it that way. And I do believe them when they make those claims. because that's how the game is played. Anyway, my point is that this person who did the administrative work in the intel community

said to me that this is, in her opinion, a very large operation. It's larger than, say, typical, even a good-sized CIA station overseas would be able to handle that the coordination elements between the media and the FBI and the CIA would require whole sub-handlers. of their own. The money alone would be a full-time job for at least one person. So she basically said in the intel world, something like this would be run out of Washington and would be, involve a lot of people. And so we've got to assume that the DNC are not particularly better at this than the CIA and that there were a large number of people and that there was a hierarchy of decision-making.

I can assure you that decision-making didn't go to Hillary Clinton, But the question really is, who, Jake Sullivan in their organization would have been the top guy running this operation? Because it screams centralized authority and coordination. Yeah. You know, I just remember thinking back in 2016 that, first of all, this is completely stupid. I had that computer security expert Jeffrey Carr who said, you cannot tell from examining a server who broke into it. The NSA can tell who broke into it because they can look at the entire global electronic communications infrastructure like God and tell you where every packet went and came from. They can rewind the thing and rewatch what happened, whatever they want.

And we know that is true based on the information that Edward Snowden has leaked. That's not Scott Horton on a bender here. Right. But we know that only they can tell you with certainty and nobody else can tell you with any certainty at all. Because it's just not how it works and how, and we know from the Vault 7 thing, they even have. had this thing called Marble Cake that was all about how to frame somebody and make it look like somebody else had broken into a thing and that kind of deal. So we know all that from the beginning.

But just to me, and I remember mused about this. parentheses, isn't it interesting that the guy who allegedly leaked Vault 7 is in jail right now because large amounts of child pornography were found on his computer, which he claims that he never accessed, looked at, saved, or added to his computer, closed parentheses? Yeah. And in fact, you know, I read a really good article about where the journalist was trying to be pretty skeptical and ended up saying, yeah, he makes a pretty good case here that this was fake. And I don't remember exactly how it was, but he seemed to be able to demonstrate how it had been placed on there. And I forget now exactly. But he cast real doubt, not just how anybody would use that excuse or something, but that he seemed to cast real doubt on the origin of that stuff. And yeah, I presume him innocent. as far as that goes, for sure. Yeah, just bringing that up here, but I didn't mean... No, I'm glad you did.

I should do a whole interview. I should find that article again, because there was one real good piece of journalism about it. I know that I read a few years ago. I don't ever think I did an interview about it, though. But, anywho's... Oh, the whole thing about... Like, you know, I agree with you.

It was Jake Sullivan and his people. Those people came up with this whole thing, clearly. But what a weird scam that... Donald Trump, who even then, certainly now, but even then, was probably the most famous man who ever lived, who, you know, had cameos and movies and was the subject to rap songs and all these things. He's just a huge, he's like Americana, right? He's like, when you go to some chinty restaurant and they have like old license plates and baseball bats and crap all over the walls, like he's one of those, right? He's Donald Trump, you know? And no, what we'll do is we'll make him Alger his?

and we'll make him a stooge of the Kremlin? And you could see how it took almost a year to get, it was like, not quite a year, about two-thirds of a year or so, before anybody could get warmed up to the idea that this was even really possible at all, right? Like in the summer, it just didn't take. It was just too far-fetched of a stupid thing. Because even though the Kremlin isn't Kami anymore,

it's still, you're like rehashing the old Kami, like, loyal to the, the Soviet Union type of a canard here. And so, but it's Donald Trump, the real estate tycoon and the TV actor. Like, we already know where he got his money. The Russians didn't make him rich getting secrets or something. Like, he's a, what are you talking about, right? The whole thing was so stupid. You got two things in there.

One, of course, is the old Joseph Goebbels line, that the bigger the lie, the easier it is for people to take it, accept it. So, I mean, why not go big on Trump? But I think, second, by accusing the Russians, you're guaranteeing that there's not going to be much of an opposition. In other words, if you accused whatever, let's pick on somebody we don't like here today, Al Sharpton of paying off Donald Trump, Al Sharpton's going to be on the news saying, I didn't do it. Well, the Russians are not going to be on the news saying we didn't do it. And even if they were who believes them. The third thing, though, and I think this was the most significant factor.

They could have said Donald Trump, you know, has a thing for ponies. And the media would have blasted that thing into the American brainstem long enough, loud enough, and hard enough that you couldn't help but starting to believe it. And the Democrats were very skillful, and the people they employed as intelligence operatives, my hat's off to them. They ran a near-perfect textbook information op against the American people. They were brilliant. They used leaks to the right people. They used public announcements alongside secret leaks. They planted documents all over the place, eventually used BuzzFeed to leak their primary document at just the right time. They ran a brilliant information op. Trust me,

This one is going into the textbooks at the farm, and everybody in Langley is going to be studying this one. Of course, they'll change the names, but everybody's going to be studying this one for a very long time. It could not have been done better. The fact that the media was so compliant made it easy, but that doesn't take away from its evil brilliance. It was really, really, really done well. Give me just a minute here. Listen, I don't know about you guys, but part of running the Libertarian Institute is sending out tons of books and other things to our don't. and who wants to stand in line all day at the post office.

But stamps.com? Sorry, but their website is a total disaster. I couldn't spend another minute on it. But I don't have to either, because there's easyship.com. Easyship.com is like stamps.com, but their website isn't terrible. Go to scotthorton.org slash easy ship. Hey, y'all, Scott here. You know, the Libertarian Institute has published a few great books.

mine fools errand enough already and the great rom paul to by our executive editor sheldon richmond coming to Palestine and what social animals owe to each other and of course no quarter the ravings of william norman grigg our late great co-founder and managing editor at the institute coming very soon in the new year will be the excellent voluntarious handbook edited by keith knight a new collection of my interviews about nuclear weapons one more collection of essays by Will Grigg and two new books about Syria by the great William Van Wagonen and Brad Hoff and his co-author Zachary Wingard. That's Libertarian Institute.org slash books. What did your ancestors really do all day? Beyond names, what were their lives like? With

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details. Terms apply. Yeah, man. All right, which brings us to our second and same subject, which is the piece about Hunter Biden's laptop revisited here. And the context there. Speaking of information ops, I mean, I've heard people

say that when you look at 2020 you have what's very close to a color-coded revolution that and you know maybe because the Rushgate story was over people sort of missed it in a way but we mentioned before we had the CIA

you know completely crushed the story of the laptop and you had the FBI promote this story of a bunch of Trumpians were going to kidnap and murder the governor of Michigan also came out in October. That was a huge October surprise there but then you know the people who

really strongly favor the election was rigged against Trump phenomenon, like to point to this story in, I'm pretty sure it's Time magazine, not Newsweek, about how, yeah, well, we did kind of rig it, but it was only for your own good. We were actually, we were fortifying the election is what we were doing, preventing Trump from rigging it is what it was about, see? But then, so, and, you know, there's some honest truth in that. If you look at it from their point of view, like, that's fine, because Trump was clearly determined to try to get away with winning no matter what from his own point of view, not that he was very good at it. But part of it in there was how whichever these dark money liberal groups were paying the leftist protesters to stay out there in the streets

in that summer of riots and all of that. And how part of that story too was how they were able to turn them on and off like a light switch too. And that, in other words, like one example I know was keeping them away from January 6th, where were all the leftists. They had been ordered by the Central Committee to not show up. So they didn't. And so this is exactly, this is what Ramando would have said. Look, it's the Ukrainian template. This is how they did the Orange Revolution in 2004, this kind of thing. It's, you know, it's very obvious sometimes. And that's part of it. You know, and people go back and this is, this is alert, alert. This is not a Nazi era analogy, alert, alert, because I hate those kind of things.

But, I mean, you go back and you look at Germany in the 1930s, an awful lot of people went along with things because they wanted the outcome that they saw was being manipulated to. In other words, what was done in 2016 and what was done in 2020 to manipulate our elections by the intelligence services was not done. against the will of 99% of the American people. If you said to the American people, do you want the FBI to influence the election? Americans are going to say, no, we're a free country. But if you said, gee, wouldn't it be nice if there were some kind of advantages granted to Biden

to help him beat that son of a bitch Trump before fascism takes over in America, I think an awful lot of Americans would quietly nod their heads and say, you know, I just don't want to know too much about it, But if it happens, it's probably for the better. And so you're dealing with a very willing audience. It's kind of like magicians. You know, they go out and they do their magic tricks.

If you really, really, really want to see if you can check them out, you know, unless they're really, really good, if you sit off to the side and watch real closely and don't get fooled by the distractions and stuff, you know, you might be able to figure out the sleight of hand because you know the ball can't go through the cup, right? The ball's got to be in his hand. and it's got to get out of his hand and under the cup at some point. So if you logically watch with that in mind, then maybe you're going to catch him in the act.

But I think so many Americans were so beaten about the head and shoulders on this, anybody but Trump's stuff. And given enough, you know, they were good. They put enough doubt into people's minds. You know, well, maybe Trump would enact some kind of fascism if he was really. elected. Maybe we would be looking at awful things. And certainly with groups that generally automatically consider themselves victims and vulnerable, they were ready to believe all that stuff. The sleight of hand doesn't have to be that good. It just has to be good enough that everybody has

deniability to say, hey, you know, 51 people from the intelligence community said the Hunter Biden laptop was probably Russian disinformation. Well, good enough for me, Fran. I don't know about you. And it doesn't have to be great. It just has to be good enough to limp across the finish line. And that's, I think, what we saw with the Hunter Biden laptop. I did an article for The Spectator where I also write once at a while right now. I write for the American version called Spectator World. And, you know, I said, these are all the reasons we should have known that that announcement by 51 intelligence professionals was a bunch of BS and just dissected it. And it's not real hard to figure out unless, you know, you wanted to believe.

Yeah. Well, and there are enough of them who do want to believe. You know what? That's my first interview with Alan Bach 19 years ago. He said to me, he goes, people do like to believe. Scott, I'll always love you. I'll always care for you I'll never

never never do that to you again I know you want to believe me because we've got something special here it's not hard it does work very easily and you know what there's that great quote from Carol Quigley about the only reason we let there be two parties

is so we can switch them off back and forth every four or every eight or even four years if necessary without ever leading to a substantial shift in policy so half the time people feel like they're on the outs and they're upset but then half the time they kind of feel all right again like their teams in power and everything's probably going to be more or less all right and then they switch back and forth and you know those of us looking for the magician's slide a hand are just sitting here you know we have to grumble through all

this as they switch back and forth while most people go for the scam you know it's just like professional wrestling there's a good guy and a bad guy and the good guy gets his allies and the bad guy gets It's his allies, but in the end, the game is rigged, and somebody, not you, knows in advance who's going to win. With the Hunter laptop, it was obvious to me, and I was privileged enough to be able to see the Hunter Biden emails. And God help me, I'll never unsee a few of the pictures of Hunter with his hookers and half-naked doing blow and whatever else he was up to. and it was so obvious that this was not Russian disinformation. And Brenner and Brennan and Clapper and all these guys, they knew. They're smarter than me on how these things work.

So you start with the idea that there was just so much of it. The laptop was jammed with garbage. All sorts of irrelevant stuff. Hunters, he had scanned receipts for Turnpike fees that, you know, he was going to probably try to claim. some kind of business expense he had all sorts of junk on there that had nothing to do with anything um there was an enormous amount of information that while it wasn't expository it certainly wasn't derogatory and creating all of that and making it real and verifiable would be an

enormous task why would you bother to create all that fake stuff that doesn't have anything to do with your your goal which is to convince people that hunter is an internet Rogue. Third, and this is probably the most telling thing, there are almost no names in there that you can contact to confirm a lot of what happened, especially the juicy stuff, the money transfers in and out of Ukraine and in and out of China. You know, those guys are not going to talk, and if they do issue a statement, it's not going to be very credible. And so the idea that Hunter says, well, I never received $200,000. thousand dollars from vladimir so and so and you contact vladimir and vladimir says oh i'm a good man

i don't send money to hunter biden for anything that's all fake you know you don't have anybody in there that's really as verifiable as you would if it was it was real you make sure it's hard to verify which means your disinformation campaign is that much stronger so the whole thing was obviously bunk from top to bottom. And Clapper and his buddies, his 50 buddies knew that. They would never allow a statement to be in a case file claiming such and such was disinformation based on that week, a set of evidence. They would send that junior officer back out in the field and say, try again, buddy, or we're transferring you to the motor pool. And yet the American public wanted to believe it and they had such a help from the American media who as one including social

media simply rose up and announced we're sending this down Orwell's memory hole this information does not exist this story will not reach your news feeds and if it does you know in advance it's bunk thank you have a nice day everyone yeah it's amazing they got away with that it's quite amazing but it at the same time like I said it it'd be like in the old Soviet Union when you want to plant a story, well, it sure helps that the media is owned by the state and you work for the state. And, you know, it's kind of intermural at that point. And I think at this point, the relationship between the mainstream media and the intelligence services and the Democratic Party, there's, we're really only talking about

one functional entity there. There's, it has three heads. But MSNBC and the Maddow show and CNN and all these other people have so little separation from the intelligence community who has so little separation from the Democratic National Committee that they're basically working for the same company and they hoped that they were going to be working for the same boss. Don't forget Peter Strozak and Lisa, whatever her, I can't remember her name, his squeeze inside the FBI reminded one another why they were, one of the reasons why they were giving Hillary a break on her deposition and it was

hey pretty soon she's going to be our boss so they all understood that they worked for the same organization just different departments if you will yep yeah that was what Comey said was we were all operating under the atmosphere

where Hillary Clinton was going to win the election and this was all going to go away they didn't think they were going to have to frame the guy for three years they were just you know on the rushing gate thing they were just framing them up until November. Ronald Jaffee, who was one of the senior researchers that provided the data, in the end, created

the data, the false data on Alpha Bank and Yoda cell phone. Jaffy actually wrote an email to a friend saying that he had been promised a senior cybersecurity job in the Hillary administration if this thing succeeded. So these guys all knew what they were doing. They were all auditioning for jobs in the Clinton administration that they were helping to put into power. Yeah. Well, I sure is something else. Now, just real quick here, without giving away the whole game, can you tell us a little bit about your great debate at the Soho Forum?

Absolutely. First of all, a shout out to Gene Epstein, who organized the Soho Forum, Connor Freeman, who was one of the people who handled the technical thing. I understand he helps edit your podcast as well. Wait, no, there's two different Conner. So it's Connor O'Keefe is the guy that you're talking about. And he edits my show, but Connor Freeman is one of my guys at the Institute. Well, I'm glad for both of their participation.

But for your editor, he mentioned that occasionally when I use profanity, it means that it's a little bit of extra work for him. So I'm just going to say, you, so that he doesn't have to actually edit that one. It's all prearranged for him. And yes, I have been practicing that in front of the mirror. I was lucky enough, again, partially through the recommendation of the Scott Horton show here in anti-war.com, to participate in a debate last week in New York City, where we were debating whether or not U.S. military deterrence is required in order to prevent China from invading Taiwan. And interestingly, while the debate was scheduled several months in advance, we did not know the Russians were planning to invade Ukraine. And so while our initial debate was scheduled kind of in the pure snow, the debate took place under the shadow of what had happened in the Ukraine.

And that obviously influenced things quite a bit. My opponent from the Brookings Institute was very skillful about trying to tie what happened in Ukraine to what might happen in the Taiwan Strait. My efforts to disassemble that, to explain that China, Taiwan had. absolutely nothing to do with Russia, Ukraine, were a tough sell, given the weight of the media who were pressing much of the same story. There was quite a bit of things in the media, if you read about Taiwan issues, talking about how the Ukraine example is going to play out and things like that. So he did score some points on there, but in the end of the day, I think I was able to

make clear to the audience that there is exactly no chance that China will ever. invade or attack Taiwan and the reasons for this I've detailed I've got coming out in an article in the American Conservative probably on in the very near future so keep an eye on that website and things like that so I think I was able to score some points there but more broadly I think I was able to to help them understand that American deterrence and yes there's quote marks around that word since World War II has probably spawned more conflict than it's ever stopped, that we set up this massive ring of 750 military bases around the world in order to counter the Soviet Union.

When the Soviet Union and communism went up and died, we did the logical thing, which was to maintain all 750 of those bases as if nothing had ever happened. And it revealed very clearly that the whole argument that we were there to deter the Soviet Union was just a bunch of bunk, and that these 750 military bases, never mind the number of aircraft carriers and submarines, which are the virtual equivalent of a movable, hideable military base, are there to maintain American hijaminy in Europe, in Africa, in the Middle East, in the Pacific Ocean, and have absolutely nothing to do with deterring our enemies except to the extent of telling them to leave our gold and our oil and our precious everything

else alone while we alone maintain the ability to influence events in foreign countries and they just better watch their backs because we may just deter something right up their ass, put a boot where we want to put it when it's time to go. Yeah, a little bit of work for you to do there, Connor.

But anyway, yes, everybody can check that out at Reeson Magazine and it's on the YouTube's there and see the great debate and, of course, you know, Peter's hilarious throughout the whole thing and everything. Worth a watch. You'll all have fun. And thanks for doing the show again, man.

Have a great afternoon. It's always a pleasure. Whatever time it is in Hawaii right now. It's heading towards afternoon. It's almost my tie o'clock. All right. Yeah. Go swimming with the dolphins, man.

Go surfing for me and do a front side air. Done. All right. Thanks, bud. The Scott Horton show, Anti-War Radio, can be heard on KPFK 90.7 FM in L.A. APSRadio.com. Anti-war.com.

Scott Horton.org and Libertarian Institute.org.