Scott Horton Show - Just the Interviews - 5/25/22 Peter Van Buren on Michael Sussmann and the Unraveling of Russiagate

Episode Date: May 30, 2022

Scott interviews Peter Van Buren about his most recent article at the Libertarian Institute. They discuss the developments with Michael Sussmann who Special Counsel John Durham brought to trial for allegedly lying to the FBI. Their conversation examines details and the broader effect Russiagate has had on the government and media.   Discussed on the show: “Truth, Lies and Sussmann” (Libertarian Institute) What Scott thinks about Hillary Clinton “Not Another Cold War” (The American Conservative) 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. Shop Libertarian Institute merch or donate to the show through Patreon, PayPal or Bitcoin: 1DZBZNJrxUhQhEzgDh7k8JXHXRjYu5tZiG. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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 Scott Horton.4. You can sign up the podcast feed there, and the full interview archive is also available at YouTube.com slash Scott Horton's show. All right, you guys, check it out on the line. I got Peter Van Buren.

He used to be a State Department weenie, but now he writes for the Libertarian Institute. This one is called Truth, Lies, and Susman. Is that an Oxford comma? damn it de Rensis Is in Oxford Do we not like them anymore? Never did hate those

Don't worry I'll fix it right now Truth lies and Sussman by Peter Van Buren May 25th 22 You just did that I've got the article up

You literally just took the comma away Well still there I'm about to fix it Okay Wait It disappeared in front of your eyes Is Hunter listening? Wait a minute

this isn't live no it's still there still there no I was looking at waiting I was looking I imagine there was a comma between the word and and Sussman oh that would have been way worse yeah that's a Cambridge comma I think

that's a official typo that's a that's a university of Indiana comma yeah yeah we don't do that no no no no one does that but no even the one after lies that doesn't belong there that's like saying and and it's it's fun to see how people take this seriously. I just got into a big back and forth with an editor over whether

internet should be capitalized. And he informed me that the AP style manual, which many people memorize and live by, recently said we no longer are going to capitalize internet. Now, I don't know if that means there's another one of them or we're just not giving it, you know, like full status anymore. Yeah. I think at anti-war.com, we quit capitalizing it about 10 years ago, but we used to that was our convention for you know when i first started there i know yeah well that's how i met you is because of you were you were not the scott horton i was trying to get in touch with the scott horton who was writing i think for atlantic magazine at that time or harpers yeah and instead i got in touch with us scott horton that's so i didn't remember you laugh at these things you laugh

at these things but they carry power it happens from time to time uh usually the convention is that he gets blamed for my stuff and I get credit for his but then he became a Russiagate truth or so that makes me... Yeah, he's a nut now. I still am friends with him and I love the way that word has become so flexible on Facebook and he's a nut now. He writes all these crazy conspiracies. He always hated Rush. He was always

a Rushahawk. Yeah. There's a certain brand of he's actually even sort of like a pseudo-libertarian Hayekian sort of guy. There's a certain brand of guys who right after the wall came down, they went to the eastern European countries to spread the word of Mises and Hayek and this is what everybody needs.

But while doing that, I think they gained like a real antipathy for Russia. Tom Palmer from Cato, who's, I think, I don't know if he's CIA or not, but he's certainly very closely tied to the State Department and the NED and all that, this Atlas network where they're really kind of

I mean, after all, Not many very, you know, minarchist libertarian states in the world. So there's always something about any national government that a libertarian can complain about, unless you're really a non-interventionist first in the Ron Paul model. You could see how some libertarians get caught up and stuff like that. And in fact, he even told me that he was the professor for Mikhail Shakashvili at Columbia. And then Shakashvili really took this Hayek stuff. seriously and the first thing he did when he took over in the coup d'etat of 2003 was he really arrested a lot of people for corruption and he was really determined to have a real free market

that would work but that includes arresting people for fraud when you have to you know things like that and that he was really committed to that and that it was working for a while and then of course yeah things got a little out of control there of course he kind of Shakashvili himself like personally was a maniac but um yeah anyway He's a good man, that other Scott Horton, and he did a lot of great work on torture when it really mattered, too. So I still like him, but you're right that he's a nut on Russia issues for sure. Yeah, he's kind of gone the wrong way. This is one of the worst things, and I realize you have an interview to do, but this is one of the worst things about the whole situation.

This is the interview, man. Whoa. Whoa, dude. And, you know, one of the worst things about Ukraine is that it's brought back all the Russiaologists. from the, I don't know, from the 70s, you know, the guys who used to make a, who actually made a living out of looking at photos of who was standing next to whom on platforms and pronouncing things, they're back now. And they've just all come out of the woodwork of this guy, Tom Nichols. I don't know if you know him. He's, uh, yeah, I see him from time to time. He's big on Twitter.

And, but he was one of these guys who, like in the 80s made a career out of divining information about Russia by saying who was standing next to whom and whether the missiles were rotated to the left or to the right slightly and he would write important ponderous books about all this and most of these guys were so full of themselves it was just unbelievable but the lack of information coming out of Russia made created a gap that allowed you to kind of fill it in any way that you wanted and if you had if you wore a nice blazer and you know had had connections to the right instance

institutions, you too could tell the truth about Russia when you knew nothing about what was going on. The only real secret to it was you had to know about 10 or 12 Russian words that you could pepper your articles with so that everybody thought that you really were plugged in on all this. Yeah, spell your R's backwards. Yeah, and do some of that, that Cyrillic Jim Jam stuff. But I mean, basically you had to know how to say, Tesvaric, which means comrade, of course. And, you know, and throw that in once in a while when you're criticizing your people who don't believe what you believe. And then, of course, you make, then you could all, you also had to make the joke, which is still has such, such legs, you know, like, oh, I see.

Are you paid in roubles for that opinion? You know, it's just hilarious. It just doesn't end. It's like being stuck, you know, playing monopoly with your parents on Thanksgiving. It's like, this game will never end, will it? Yeah. I guess not I mean look

As you say There's a lot of money There's a headline at TAC today I'm not familiar with this guy New Managing Editor I don't know how new And he's got a piece This is

Well Henry Kissinger recommends Negotiations In the Ukraine war There's 54 billion reasons Why that ain't gonna happen And like just boy Is he right about that You talk about a self-licking ice cream cone

The You know It's sent in the third infantry division into Iraq, that's one thing. But a whole new Cold War with the major powers. I mean, that's aircraft carriers, long-range bombers, fifth-generation fighters, and hypersonics and missile defense systems

and trillions and trillions of dollars worth. Well, not that the terror war was cheap. They wasted $10 trillion on that. I guess we're talking tens of trillions of dollars worth of, you know, bankruptcy on this next generation. So, but I don't know how to stop that in terms of like a dirty snowball rolling downhill or however you call it, you know.

True story. One of my daughters worked briefly as an intern at a very well-known think tank, which shall not be named. And one of her duties was to keep Henry Kissinger company. He had arrived early for some event, and they had him seated in a waiting room. And, of course, important people can't be left alone. And so they figured, well, she'd go there and he would, you know, impart knowledge or or whatever old guys like to do.

And instead, he just kept falling asleep. And she'd say, Dr. Kissinger, five minutes to your, to your on, sir. And he'd fall back asleep. And finally, though, when they blew the whistle and said, you know, go talk about the Cold War, man, she said he was up and out of the chair and just a whole new man. It was like they gave him like, they did the heart paddles. Just hearing the words, time to talk about the Cold War, was like, hitting him with the heart paddles.

Van Buren, I was afraid of what you were going to say, but that went pretty well. It did go pretty well, and I want to point out, I'm talking about my own family members here at this point, so, you know, one one treads carefully. Yeah, no, you're... It's like if it was Kissinger. It wasn't like it was Lindsey Graham or

something. Yeah. Well, listen, Henry Kissinger, it's funny, I don't know if you saw this. Just a silly little aside about politics, but I know you like goofy stuff. this guy Matt Duss who used to be more of a leftist type and became Bernie Sanders campaign advisor

he's now saying hey if your foreign policy agrees with Henry Kissinger you might want to check your premises in other words because Kissinger's saying we should try to negotiate an end to the war rather than take Bernie Sanders position which is let's pour tens of billions of dollars more arms into that war to make it worse and try to bleed and destroy Russia

yeah this is causing me to take yet another look at my one support for Bernie Sanders. It's like, this is not what we would have elected you for, Bernie, if you had been president and, you know, you're all ahead of behind drunk dumping $40 billion in unsecured weaponry, including Stinger missiles, which shoot down all kinds of planes. Did you really support him? I did against Hillary, because I would have supported Satan himself running against Hillary. I could see the Hillary opposition in you, but I didn't know it went as far as actual Bernie support. But I hear you, though. Yeah, it did. It did. And I kind of, I was very into the concept

of economic inequality without realizing now that it's kind of the basis of our whole economy. It'd be like taking the Legos off the bottom of the building you just built. You know, it's not going to stand up well if you take away economic inequality. It's the basis of the whole damn system, but I didn't really understand that completely at the time. And so that and the fact that he was someone who wasn't Hillary were very attractive to me. We all make our mistakes. That's true. And I just interviewed Mark Thornton right before this, so I'm absolved of any accusations of being soft on communism or anything like that.

Okay. I'm good to hear that. I have a reputation as well. Yeah, good. All right, listen. So you wrote this thing, and it's about the rest of it. And I'm glad that you also got a grudge about this and are not over it because it shouldn't be. And look, you know what? They didn't march the third infantry division into Virginia or whatever, like equal crisis since everything's got to be compared to Bush's fiasco in Iraq War II there.

But it seems to me that the FBI and the CIA framing the president for treason is kind of a big deal. Even when he was merely the nominated presidential candidate of one of the two major parties in the United States. States of America. That's, you know, lowercase tea treason, not legal treason, but it sure is a hell of a betrayal of the American people by our secret police that they would do that, even against Donald Trump, who is kind of a low life and helped commit a genocide in Yemen for four years, for example. That's probably the one thing they liked about him. But regardless of him, they had no right to do what they did. And we're finding out more and more all the time now about the real origins of at least, you know, some major facets of the smear campaign about Trump's supposed

support nation to Russia back then. And your piece at the Institute also gets into one of the sequels to Russia Gate, which was the lie about Hunter Biden's laptop as well. Sure. First of all, please update us because John Durham has finally taken somebody to criminal court first of all is it just the one guy or he's this is the first of many or what is going on here and tell us everything that you've learned about the trial so far please there's a couple of things the couple of starting points here and the first is of course we're using the word russia gate as a convenient catch-all term um to describe all of the dirty tricks that were run against the trump campaign by hillary clinton the fbi and the mass media um oftentimes acting as a single

entity, sometimes acting individually. So we're using it as a catch-all term. So anyone who wants to argue about the meaning of Russiagate, you lose automatically because it means everything that we want it to mean. Second, talking about Russiagate in this way and blaming Hillary Clinton for lying as part of the process of running for president does not make us Trump supporters. It doesn't make us not Trump supporters. It means that we're talking about a discrete political event that actually happened and we're going to be talking about it as objectively as possible. Anybody who's sitting out there, you know, with their, with their fingers counting off, ooh, that's a point for Trump. Ooh, two points for Trump. Peter Van Buren is a Trump supporter. Scott Horton supports

Trump supporters is not getting what we're actually doing here. We're actually cataloging a series of historical facts, a series of historical events that adds up to an insurrection. That word is tossed about very casually. You know, you can describe anything from a bunch of cosplayers visiting the Capitol building to the perinistas running up with weapons against the State House. But nonetheless, this was an insurrection, an attempt to remove a sitting, later remove a sitting president from his position. And there's no doubt about that it happened. And now we have testimony, which in America, in the American system, is the most reliable, considered. the gold standard testimony under oath that supports information that has come to us in a number of

ways. So those are all the beginning positions here. Basically, what you've got is at the end of the Trump administration, before he left the job, Attorney General Bill Barr pointed John Durham as a special counsel whose job it was to look into the origins of Russia Gate. Now, special councils are interesting beasts. They have enormous power. And one of the things, that gives them that enormous power is their infinite longevity. In other words, there's no limits to what a special counsel can do or how long it takes him to do that. And that makes them really kind of tricky beasts in the world of Washington because unlike

most things, you can't wait them out. You can't wait for the midterm elections when the Democrats are going to be washed out of the House and the Republicans are going to be washed in and we'll never hear of January 6th again. or you can't wait for the Democrats to assume power at some point in the future when we're going to start hearing about January 6th again. That doesn't work with special prosecutors. They live on through administrations, as had John Durham. The other interesting thing about Durham is unlike his most famous predecessor in the job

of special prosecutor, Robert Mueller, he actually is prosecuting. It's right there in the job title, special prosecutor, meaning that your job. job is to bring people to trial or through a negotiation, get them to admit to guilt without having to go to trial, to settle outside of court, if you will, plead outside of court, if you will. And Durham right now is up one, one on the on the chopping block and some more to go. What he's already gotten is a confession out of one of the FBI's lawyers that he lied, the lawyer lied in order to obtain two of the four FISA warrants against Carter Page. Carter Page was a no-nothing, do-nothing bottom feeder in the early days of the Trump campaign.

He was one of these young opportunists who was hoping to attach himself to a candidate he thought might win at an early stage and then pop up again later in the campaign in a more significant role. It turns out that Carter Page really was a no-nothing because even though, though the FBI lied in order to get Carter Page under FISA surveillance, he didn't really know anything, and the people he knew didn't really seem to know anything. And the FBI lied to get Carter Page under FISA surveillance, specifically lied about Carter being also an agent, meaning a source for the CIA on Russian oil production. Page had this little job as a quote consultant, unquote consultant, that gave him access to some limited information, kind of more gossipy stuff. And he was feeding this to a CIA handler.

The FBI purposely deleted that information from their FISA warrant to hide the fact that Carter might actually be a reputable person. They wanted him to be disreputable so that it would be easier for the FISA court to approve the warrant. warrant, which they did. John Durnum got a guilty plea out of that case without having to go to court. The second thing he's taken to court is a guy named Michael Sussman. Now, those of you who really enjoy the idea of playing that game five degrees of Kevin Bacon, you know, where you try to figure out how many people away from Kevin Bacon you actually are. Yeah, that's how Stanley McChrystal kills people in Afghanistan. Is Kevin Bacon dead? He probably has a couple near misses at this point. But that's exactly what they do. This guy called this guy's phone, called this

guy's phone, called this guy's phone, call this guy's phone, let's kill them all. Wow, I have got to read the news more often. That is shocking to me. Well, nonetheless, there's this guy named Michael Susman who enters the Kevin Bacon Challenge. We're going to play five degrees of Hillary Clinton here, enters the thing as the lawyer for the Democratic National Committee when it was trying to hide the fact that its server wasn't hacked by Russia during the summer of 2016. So Sussman is the attorney for the Demp of the DNC. He then drops off the books for a little bit of time and is hired by Perkins Coy, which is the law firm that represents all interests Hillary Clinton, and particularly was her law firm during the campaign. He gets hired by them

and he gets handed a pile of data that purports to show, we can get into where that data came from and how it was collected a little bit later, but he gets handed this pile of data and told to go fishing around the FBI. And the data purports to show that Russian-made cell phones were accessing Trump's Wi-Fi network, and it purports to show that a server owned by the Trump Corporation was in contact with a server run by the Alpha Bank in Moscow. out. Now, just to juice it up, I will do what the media does, which was to say the Alpha Bank had connections to Vladimir Putin. You talk about official Russia and money Russia, it's not that

big a place. Most of Russia doesn't count in these regards. And so, yeah, just about everybody has connections to Putin, if you're willing to be generous enough about it. It's not a good place to play five degrees of Vladimir Putin. But nonetheless, Sussman gets out there and he is told to lie about the fact that he works for the Clinton campaign and go to the FBI using his contacts and drop this knowledge on the FBI in the hopes that the FBI will pick up the information and launch an investigation. Now, there's two reasons to launch an investigation, and which one Hillary was favoring, I think, is alluded to by the way this whole thing was handled. The first reason to to try to get the FBI to investigate was more applicable to the steel dossier,

which is you think that the FBI with their resources might be able to find something that you, without those resources, particularly wiretapping, couldn't find. In other words, you think you smell smoke, and if you put that smoke in front of the FBI and they turn loose all of the big ears, then in the end, they're going to find the fire that eluded you. But in the case of the Alpha Bank, I think it was pretty clear to everybody that they had very limited information that was hardly even qualifying as smoke. And so the purpose was not to get the FBI to gin up a full-on investigation and find the truth per se, but rather to be able to claim publicly that the FBI has everyone has this thing under

investigation and let the American people, the sleazy scumbags that most of us are, fill in the blanks. Well, if the FBI is investigating them, honey, there must be something there. You don't have smoke without fire, you know, those kind of dad explanations why you're getting lost on the way to Wally World. And so what goes on here is Sussman approaches the FBI without saying he works for anybody. In fact, he sends a text the night before his meeting with a guy named God help him, James Comey, who's not really. related to the James Comey in any way. He just happens to work for the FBI as an attorney. His name is James Comey. Think about the hilarity at the old lunchroom over that one. He works for the

FBI. Sussman sends an email a text the night before and says, I'm not representing anybody. I'm simply a loyal citizen looking out for the interests of the Bureau. And he drops all this information in the Bureau's lap about how Russian cell phones are pinging Trump's. servers and how the Alpha Bank and Trump are in close communication, and he tries to get the FBI to investigate it. That's called perjury in most people's definition, where you don't tell the truth on a material matter. Now, Sussman's trial, which is ongoing, in fact, as we speak, the prosecution has rested its case, and the defense is going to pick up the story with their attempt to claim that none of this is true. Not the board over is their only hope at this point.

Oh, the pieces are on the floor. We'll never know who would have won. The idea here is that Sussman lied materially. Now, materially means it would have mattered. You can tell lies that wouldn't, that don't matter, and they're not perjury because they're not material. So if I say that I met Scott Horton in June of a certain year rather than Joe, eye, and we're not contesting an issue that has to do with that time frame, it's not material. It doesn't matter that I actually met you in August or something like that. It's irrelevant. The whole point is just to say by the time 22 rolled around, we knew each other.

So it's a non-material lie and therefore not perjury. In Sussman's case, he tried to hide the fact that the dirt was coming from the Clinton campaign. The Clinton campaign shopping dirt around would have automatically raised suspicion. among any loyal members of the FBI and would have automatically dropped all pretense of objectivity among the non-loyal members of the FBI, the ones who wanted to work with Hillary to defeat Donald Trump, Peter Strasnack, and James Comey, and their crowd. So the idea that this was not material is absolutely silly. It absolutely ignores the fact that the FBI was a partisan institution during the 2016,

I'm sorry, the 2020 elections. And it's a lie because it wasn't true. And there's plenty of evidence. Sussman himself texted, I'm not representing anyone. Sussman told the attorney James Comey that he was not representing anyone, though the defense is trying to weaken Comey's impact. Sussman, on the other hand, build the Hillary campaign, A, for the hours he spent meeting with the FBI,

and B, for the two memory sticks. that he used to put the information in front of the FBI. Now, how much do memory sticks cost? They're like three bucks or something at CVS, you know, these little, little thumb drives. So he billed them for two memory sticks, which is just classic lawyer stuff right there. And his trial is going on. There's a third case that Sussman will be bringing. And then we'll see if you're still awake or have any questions.

And there's a third case that Sussman will be bringing in the fall. And that's the answer. Durham, I'm away. Durham, I'm sorry. Durham, Sussman should be in jail by then, hopefully. Durham will be bringing a third case, and that's against a Russian immigrant friend of Fiona Hill's small world, five degrees of Kevin Bacon, who Fiona Hill introduced to Michael Steele, who supposedly was the key source behind the dossier, who knew nothing and was basically making stuff up to feed Steele's need to have dirt on Donald Trump. That third case will come in the fall. let's take a break there and see where where your head is at well i was going to say sunny here and you yeah well no i was listening intently sorry hang on just one second hey guys anybody who signs

up to listen to this show by way of patreon will be invited to join the reddit group and i'm going to start posting stuff over there more that's patreon.com slash scott horton show thanks hey y'all libertosbella dot 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 Libertasbella.com. You guys check it out. This is so cool.

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proving that marriage isn't always a bed of roses. The Roses, only in theaters, August 29th. Get tickets now. Very interesting stuff. Listen, I read a thing in the National Review of all places, Andrew McCarthy, who is a horrible person, but is a lawyer and a former prosecutor and knows about stuff like this a lot. But so he was writing about how they,

there was kind of some madcap behavior here where they tried to plant this story with Eric Lickblow in the New York Times. Yes. But that ended up backfiring because Lick Blow went to the FBI and they made an arrangement where they would basically let him know what was what their side of the story was, what they thought so far, in order to, as a tradeoff for their request, that he would withhold the story for now. And so then that ended up being, I think, the same time that they debuted the lie in Slate, the new. York Times. That was the same day, I guess, that the New York Times published that. No, the FBI's not looking at Trump for treason with Russia, which you might think that was the end of it right there, because that goes to show then that it wasn't just the Alpha Bank. It was the FBI had

already concluded not just about the server, but about the rest of this, that there's nothing there. And this is before the election. This is still in October, right? Yeah, now, four things happen simultaneously on October 31st, 2016. The first was, Jake Sullivan issued a public statement saying that Trump's server and alpha bank server were in contact and that this may have been the way that Trump was secretly communicating with his handlers in Moscow center. That's the first thing. Second thing, Hillary Clinton immediately retweeted that with her own comment that Trump is

involved with Russia. The third thing that happened was the Likblow article, which said there's nothing to this. But the fourth thing that happened was an article by a little piece of pus named Franklin Foyer who writes for the magazine slate, the online magazine slate, that went on for about 5,000 words explaining how the Trump server and the Alpha Server were in communication, and that this is very strong evidence that Trump has handlers at Moscow Center. Now, why did everybody jump on, did not jump on the lickblow story? is a question of two things.

The first is when the FBI offered to help Lik Blow in return for him sitting on the story, that's known in the intelligence world, and my apologies to any woke folk out there as queering the source. And basically, by tying the source too closely to the intelligence agency, by making it look like he's really got inside into the intelligence agency, agency, you queer it. You make it so that people won't trust him. It's like, oh, this guy's working with the FBI. Lick Blow sat on his story at the request of the FBI. Why should we trust him now? At Lickblow's information is coming from the FBI. Why should we trust him?

And so it's a very clever move. It can backfire on you here and there. But when it's done well, and the FBI did it well, and the New York Times played right into it, they basically made made Lik Blow's source and made his story look like he basically got manipulated, especially when you set it up so that the slate story, which is full of details, all of which are false, by the way, but full of details, when that story comes out on the same day and is reinforced by Jake Sullivan and then by Hillary herself, when it's three against one, basically in the world of the media, three wins, and one loses. The fact that the New York Times never really followed up on its story, never really stood behind it, never put its people out there to do the interviews that Franklin Foyer did, and of course, Hillary, that just makes it that much icing on the cake. But the FBI played that one very, very smartly, expertly, I would say, I would give them 100 full points to Slytherin on that one. I mean, that was just right where it needed to be, and they negated it.

The Hillary Clinton campaign, of course, coordinating the release of their own information with the Slate article was just pretty much standard politics. Yeah. But so then this also goes to show the perjury on the part of the FBI, so to speak, or even pretending to believe that this was a story when they already debunked it in, obviously in the summer, but certainly by the fall of 2016, before the president was ever elected. From what we know now, according to that's come out in the court. course of the Sussman trial, the FBI almost in real time debunked the story. They took a look at the data on these two apparently very expensive. I love to know how much he billed the Hillary campaign for the memory sticks. I bet it wasn't $3.99 from CVS. I bet it was like some kind of, you know, techno device. He probably took his kids' hello kitty memory stick and built the Clinton campaign.

Nonetheless, the idea here is you've got to think at all times when you're looking at Russia Gate, you've got to think like an intelligence officer. Don't think like a journalist. Don't think like a media person. Don't think like a politician. Because this was, as far as the FBI was concerned, an intelligence operation that was run against a target, the Trump campaign. And there was a friendly, foreign, cooperative organization, which is an intelligence firm,

which was the Clinton campaign. campaign. But basically, the whole thing was run like an operation, the same way you would run one of these things overseas to try to get the Russians to believe X, Y, or Z is true when it's not and it's detrimental to them to believe that it's true. And so you queer the source at the New York Times, you leave the Times there holding its butt out in the middle of nowhere, and you stand up Hillary's gunghoness against the New York Times. You stand up her credibility and Jake Sullivan. credibility against this. And then you let the FBI just kind of noodle around saying, well, we haven't concluded anything, yada, yada, yada. I want to point out that not only did the FBI conclude that all this data was bogus very early on, but the CIA did as well. And the CIA almost instantly realized that there was absolutely nothing in these memory sticks that required investigation, and certainly nothing that suggested there was secret communications going on. Sure. Hey, listen, remember on January 17th, three days before he was inaugurated, and they put out that

intelligence dossier, the whole thing was a joke. I probably interviewed you that day about it. It was all lies. Twelve pages of it was saying, oh, they have RT on the air, and that's an op against us, which was just fluff, right? Then all that was left was about four pages of nothing, and there was nothing to it at all. No, it was a great, it was a great big disdenunciation of RT.com. All that mattered really was the title, right? Oh, my God, the intelligence agencies have put out a thing saying that Russia helped Trump win.

And then it didn't matter that it didn't have any evidence or even any specific claims, much less evidence in it. All that matter was the headline there. And for all you budding spies out there, here's a pro tip. If you're going to set up illegal communications or secret communications, one end does not start at a server that's licensed to the Trump people. and the other end does not end at a bank that has ties to Vladimir Putin, okay? It's Pepsi communicating with Coke is the way that you actually do this, not Trump communicating with a Russian bank. I mean, let's assume the other side are not complete bloody amateurs at this.

But again, when your point is to fool the American media and they fool the American people, you don't want to be very subtle about this. You want to be real, real heavy-handed about it, so you make it the Trump's server and the alpha bank server. And you collect all this bogus data. But like I said, both the FBI and the CIA said this was garbage. And this is what makes the Sussman, his attempt to run this information into the FBI and get them to open an investigation, why it failed so miserably, was because it was

so transparently bad information that the only people who would take it and run with it were sleazy, credulous journalists who were willing to believe absolutely anything that was told to them. And the fact that the FBI went to Lichblow and said, we are investigating it, gave it credibility in the minds of the New York Times, who were not thinking like intelligence agencies. They were thinking the FBI might actually be a legitimate partner preserving freedom and democracy. Well, listen, now, you're talking about a couple of these lawyers that they hired going to jail, but what about some people on the campaign? Never mind the lady herself.

You're going to have a hard, hard time there because the only thing that you can do is look at defamation. Any trial that would bring some of the people in the campaign, John Podesta, Robbie Mook, for example, Jennifer Pallamary, any of people that would bring any of those actually try to bring any of them into court would run head on into the idea that politicians and political, campaigns are often made up of half-truths and falsehoods and incomplete stuff. And, you know, to sit there and listen to Robbie Mook, tell a court about all the lies that he's known about in his political career working through various Democratic candidates, all they'd have to do is, you know, bring back Lee Atwater's autobiography where he talks about all the lies that he got

away with pumping into the media. You wouldn't get anywhere. You'd have to do a defamation suit. As far as I can tell, and the argument would be, the argument would be, everybody does it. We hire some lawyers to do some dirty tricks and some this and that. And it's not our fault that the FBI believed it and ran off with it from there. Because that would be the issue, right?

Yeah, in the process of trying to walk this all back, I think Robbie Mook made a mistake when he testified to this in his testimony. I think he slipped because the Hillary people have been walking. it back quietly. And, you know, they're saying the usual things that you say in these cases. Well, somebody claiming to represent the campaign made these statements, but the candidate herself was unaware of the exact statements. You can't blame her for this guy deciding to freelance a few lies out there. He was thinking he was going to do his best to further the cause. Of course, if we knew one of somebody representing us was going to be, you know, pimping lies to

the media, we would have stepped in immediately. You know, that's the way you hide behind these things. This is called the corporate veil. It's the same thing that goes on about trying to sue the president of a company for the evil things that the company does. Well, show me a document where the president himself signed off on all this. We don't have one of those. Here's the board approving a motion.

You want to go after 12 people? Great. Pick one of them and see if they have any culpability in it. Yeah. So there's a lot going on here, but I think a couple of takeaways real quick are A, Hillary lied, her own person, campaign manager, Robbie Mook, testified in court that Hillary agreed to promote false information, dubious information was the most that he claimed, dubious information to journalists and hope that it would smear Trump. We know that to be true. B, we know that the FBI was early days a player in an intelligence opt to smear Trump. And C, we know that. that John Durham has been one busy little beaver. Unlike other special prosecutors, he actually has brought cases up to court or to the lip of court and gotten convictions on substantive matters. But Robert Mueller's convictions were all on process crimes, things that didn't really matter real much, but were accidentally illegal. In this case, he's got the FBI attorney saying he absolutely

lied to get a false FISA warrant, knowing if he told the truth, he probably wouldn't have gotten a warrant. And here we have, we're very close to a jury decision that says that Sussman materially lied in order to try to get this information into the hands of the FBI and kind of fluff it up so the FBI would take the bait where the CIA would not. Yeah. All right, well, may the bad guys I'll go to prison. I'm surprised that the guy who let the CIA get away with torture during W. Bush, including torture people at death, is the guy who's actually doing somewhat of the right thing here. So

that's good. You want to get into the laptop here? Because it seems pretty important. Absolutely. Everybody gets a second chance, even John Durham. So, you know, we'll give him a break. That's how much I just like Hillary Clinton.

So there you go. Hey, listen, man, I got you beat by a long shot there. Forget about it. With Hillary Clinton? You want to go? What do you got? I'm kidding. You know what? Just put my name and Hillary Clinton into the YouTube, and then I'll see whatever you got and raise you that. Okay, because what I've got, what I'm showing are five kings, because our queens, I guess, in this. You've written a lot of really great articles. Well, I don't even have to cite any of my articles.

All I can say is Hillary Clinton and her people got me fired, basically, from a job of 24 years that I was actually reasonably good at, all because they were pissed off that I wrote a book saying that they had done the wrong. wrong things in Iraq. I'm still just got a chip on my shoulder over Waco, but it's all right. Okay. All right. Fair enough. We're even. We're tied for first place. We'll agree to agree. So one time I was

interviewed on the Tom Woods show and it was going to be about how Donald Trump is a bum. I'm sorry. And his foreign policy is terrible. But I began it with a disclaimer because Tom's audience can lean a little right. And I just wanted them to not understand. so I wanted to make myself clear that I wasn't a Hillary Clinton supporter

but this is what we should really expect from Donald Trump and so I explained what I really thought about Hillary Clinton and I think I covered my base there pretty well and then somebody made an excerpt out of that I can... Okay, all right, well I'm going to look into it after this is over. Let's talk about Hunter Biden's laptop. I got that.

So listen, here's the thing. There's two things going on here. The FBI in October of last year Well, they were busy framing up a bunch of nut jobs on a bogus plot to kidnap a Democrat lady governor and murder her, which is a pretty big October surprise for them to come out with. At the same time, the CIA was repressing and suppressing with a lot of assistance from, again, the major media here, the Republicans' October surprise, which was, hey, check out these pictures of the president's son, smoking. can crack with hookers and check out all of these shady business transactions and all of this very newsworthy stuff that in any kind of honest major media here existed could have taken up all the time between the time that Giuliani and them released it and the time of the election

as you wrote an in-depth stuff about the laptop itself and all of the stuff in there. There's plenty to investigate and they just completely smothered it in a way that I'm pretty sure it's unprecedented, you know, well, I don't know about that, but it was a hell of a thing, though. Well, let me, let me just start with the end here, because there's somebody out there saying, well, sure, Hunter Biden's a scumbag, but so's Don Jr. and so's Jared and Ivanka and, you know, all the other Trump people. They're all scumbags. So scumbag cancans out scumbag, and none of this had anything to do with Joe Biden, who was the guy we were actually voting for. Well, let me

start by saying what a bunch of horse hockey that all is. First of all, there's no such thing as one bad action or bad person canceling out the other. Two wrongs don't make a right was something we all learned in kindergarten. So if Hunter Biden did something bad and Don Jr. did something bad, we don't call it even at that point and ignore both of them. We can prosecute everyone if they deserve to be prosecuted. So let's put the what aboutism to side. as a very, very poor rhetorical device that somehow has gained pro-amateur status in the last few years. So put that aside. Second of all, the real question is, what does this have to do with Joe Biden? It has a lot to do with Joe Biden in the sense that the Hunter laptop is evidence.

It's evidence that Hunter was deeply involved with entities in the Ukraine and in China who were willing to pay him massive sums of money. We're talking about $11 million. Massive sums of money. massive sums of money to do no work, simply to exist in the world as Hunter Biden. Now, that is indicative of influence purchasing. That's why you get, that's why you want to buy Hunter Biden's attention and influence because Joe is his father. You don't give him $11 million because he's your, because he's a crackhead. You don't give him $11 million because his taste in escorts runs to high end.

You give him $11 million because you believe. it buys access to Joe. So the laptop is evidence that entities in the Ukraine and in China were trying to buy access to Joe Biden. That's a fact. That's a non-questionable issue. The question is, did they get any access? And the only way you're going to know that is if you take the evidence in the laptop and you run it to ground. That requires resources far beyond what I have available to me or any other individual journalist that requires national intelligence stuff where you're going to go back and look at wire transfers and bank money moving around and things like that. But the idea that you can simply dismiss Hunter's laptop because

a control F search only shows one reference to Joe Biden or something like that is absolute BS. It's just not how life is done that way. You've got to go through that. It's just like trying to think about key words. You know, back in the earliest days of intelligence gathering, you had key words. And so you'd have a computer listening into a conversation between two Chinese generals. And unless they said the word, Tibet, you threw the whole thing away. Well, that kind of ignores the reality that oftentimes people talk about subjects without using a specific word, you know, the place we need to be next week or the guy that, you know,

like in the old gangster movies, you know, our friend from Yonkers is. going to run into a little bit of a heavy shoe problem, if you know what I mean. You know, nobody said we're going to murder Joe Galliano, but there it is. It's as plain as anything. So now that we're more sophisticated than just listening for the fact that the word Joe doesn't appear very often in Hunter's communications, that's irrelevant. Nobody gives a near-to-do-well son $11 million just because they thought he was a nice guy. He didn't do anything for the money. In fact, what he was doing, and by the way, for your listeners that are not aware, I have read through most of the laptop.

It's come out now that there were a section of text messages, which had been encrypted that I did not, when I read through it, I did not have access to the text messages. Some of the people who have done more reading, particularly the New York Post, have had access. They were able to break the encryption, again, resources that are not available to everyone. But it hasn't changed anything. made it worse. Basically, you've got Hunter Biden laundering money for the Ukrainians and laundering money for the Chinese. They give him $11 million. He skims off a fee. Well, they gave him $20 million. He skims off $11 million as his fee, puts the other $10 million in a bank account that's controlled

by the same people who gave him the money in the first place. Only now the money is legit, and it's in the United States. That was the only, quote, legitimate service he was performing. and it's not even clear that that was fully legal. There's all sorts of questions about him acting illegally as an undeclared foreign agent, as well as whether he actually had possession of that extra money long enough that it qualifies his income and he owe taxes on it, yada, yada, yada. The point is the laptop is a source of investigation. It's a mountain of stinky but raw material, raw data that needs to be looked into

by a special prosecutor with the full resources of the intelligence community. back and sniff this stuff out because it was all happening overseas. Hunter was just the U.S. entity. He was the endpoint for a lot of activity that was happening in Ukraine while his father was vice president and happening in China while his father was vice president. Hunter himself made trips to Ukraine and China. In the case of China, he famously traveled on Air Force 2 with Joe and actually introduced Joe to some of his contacts while they were in China. So if you want Joe's name on something, it's in there. It's there for you to pick out.

But this is not something to be discarded. That's what the mainstream media did. NBC News has admitted this week, or I guess it was last week now, that he admitted that it spiked the story on the advice of the intelligence services, particularly the FBI. They had the whole story. They were offered the laptop as same as anyone else. I know who had the laptop and who was shipping it, who was shopping it around. And that person offered it to every major news agency.

You can tell how successful he was by the fact that I got a copy of it, you know, because it was only after all the major news agencies refused to even take a look at it. They didn't even want to touch it that it kind of worked its way. down, you know, through the lava rock down to my level. So the idea is, is that this information was purposely put aside by NBC News, and they've admitted it. They put out two pieces last week. One was their own take on what's in the laptop, which is a very generous view of what I just said. And they did an article, and note who wrote it, Ken Dillingham, who's one of the NBC reporters who's most closely tied to the CIA to the point where he's got to have his own

parking space over there by now, if not his own seat in the cafeteria, saying that, well, you know, they were told to sit on this because it wasn't, it wasn't relevant, it was national security. They thought the Russians might have been involved in it. It was all created by the Russians as a plant. If anyone believes all that, they're welcome to Google me and take a look at an article where I go through it line by line and basically say no intelligence agent would have ignored the following stuff and no intelligent agent would have been fooled that this was Russian disinformation because it was provable. It was easily provable. And in that case, the Russians weren't disinforming anything. They would have nothing to do with all this. So there's a lot going on here.

And NBC basically admitted that they played along with the intel community doing something that they knew was going to dramatically benefit Joe Biden's chances of being elected. The rest of the swarming mass, particularly Twitter, which actually cut off the account of the New York Post, the newspaper that first broke the story and originally had the laptop. My goodness, that was Alexander Hamilton's newspaper. He founded the New York Post as the first full-spectrum, full-time newspaper in the United States, and Twitter decided that it was disinformation and didn't deserve to be granted. the rights to tweet.

That kind of stuff was just disgusting, and it's so obvious that nobody was even pretending to hide it. Elon Musk, who has yet to purchase Twitter, but has become one of Twitter's main critics, has cited this and has demanded that Twitter answered the question of why did they believe this was disinformation, who was telling them what to do, and they haven't replied to him. Parenthetically, he's also asked why Twitter hasn't yet removed some of Hillary, Clinton's tweets about Russiagate, which we now know our disinformation, but remain up online. I'm a big fan of not deleting a lot of historical documents, but the question, at least rhetorically

to Twitter, deserves an answer. We'll see if we get one. Yeah. Hang on just one second. Hey, guys, I had some wasps in my house. So I shot them to death with my trusty bug assault 3.0 model with the improved salt reservoir and bar safety. I don't have a deal with them, but the show does earn a kickback every time you get a bug of salt or anything else you buy from amazon.com by way of the link in the right-hand margin on the front page at scott horton dot org so keep that in mind and don't worry about the mess your wife will clean it up green mill supercritical is the award winning leader in cannabis oil extraction their machines are absolute top of the line they simply work better and accomplish more for less than any competitor in the world we are talking anywhere from a

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and it's all very reasonably priced. Just make sure you click through from the link in the right margin at Scott Horton.org. Tom Woods' Liberty Classroom, Real history, real economics, real education. Well, you know what always comes up, it's sort of how I measure everything. When they murder the branch of idiots, they said, oh, yeah, no, so that was a suicide. Yeah, those people, they poured gasoline all over their own kids and set them on fire. Right when we were attacking them, I know, isn't that a coincidence? And they bought that, and then they said, Oklahoma bombing.

Oh, yeah, one guy did that. His closest accomplice was 600 miles away at the time or something. Don't worry about that. John Doe, too. Never was a John Doe, too. And then, of course, they lied us in every war for, you know, 20 years, going back to Kosovo as well. And they lie about everything. They lie about everything.

But this one seems kind of special and unique in the sense of, I'm not exactly sure, but maybe just how completely stupid it was. The idea that, yeah, the Russians came and planted this laptop at a repair shop in Delaware was how they like funneled it into the American intelligence stream for their dirty. trick and then they just let the natural course of events take its way from there. That's much more plausible than a crackhead forgot where he dropped off his laptop. Yeah, because they play chess. The whole thing, yeah.

Just the whole thing was completely stupid. They had to know, sort of like with McVey acted alone, they had to just known they were lying and they're willing. But it seems, and this is why in the 1990s I was a bit more of a conspiracy cook, because the question was, by what black magic

do you get every newspaper editor in America to go along with this. Did you get every, you know, major TV network, every producer at every TV network, it's just going to go, wow, James Clapper said it's Russian, huh? But he won't explain why in the world I should believe that in any detail at all. But wowie, the same guy that said that Saddam, that Vladimir Putin helps Saddam move his chemical weapons to Syria is why we couldn't find him in Iraq War II to cover up why he, lied of what he was looking at, his group was looking at on their satellite intelligence in 2002

when they were pretending that, you know, horse stables were chemical weapons facilities. Now, keep in mind about the longevity of these lies. In other words, if you're talking about lying about Branch Davidians or Kennedy assassination, you've got to come up with a lie that withstands the tests of time. But in the case of Hunter's laptop, All you've got to do is delay the truth for about three weeks. And that's not particularly hard to do. Same thing with these rumors or these falsehoods that begin wars. You only have to go ahead and delay things long enough for the first shells to start falling.

And then the American people will reliably get all gung-ho about it and jump in and say, well, troops are in contact. We can't talk about this anymore. You know, we just have to, it doesn't matter what happened. We're in it now. Things like that. So in case of Hunter's laptop, first of all, keep in mind that the only reason we know anything at all about Hunter's laptop is because Hunter the crackhead dropped it off, not just at a Delaware repair shop, but at a Delaware repair shop of a guy who didn't really care for the Biden family and was willing to take another look at this, realized what he had, and was willing to pass the information on to the right people, people who would get it disseminated. You remove any tiny fleck of evidence from that chain. If Hunter was having

a pretty decent day and dropped it at the Apple store instead, and the person who reviewed the data was not politically savvy, but was some 26-year-old who said, no child porn, I guess it doesn't matter to us. Or if the person who did receive it didn't understand how to get it to people who could disseminate the information. You would not know that the Hunter Biden laptop even exists. Their cover up would have been perfect in that there would have been no information out anywhere. And if one of his crack hoes or something would have said something, she would have just been, of course, written off as just another crack hoe. And Hunter Biden would be living his sordid life. And Joe Biden would be pretending he's just the nair to do well, son, not like the good one who died in Iraq. Right. And the proof of

That is the way they've unpersoned the grandson, the Biden grandson that Hunter had with a stripper from Alabama. Yep. And the way they've unpersoned the clerk who got the damaged laptop, right? He was written off as a Trump supporter, as a right winger. Every time they show a picture of him, he's wearing some goofy beret or something. Well, and a Russian dupe. I mean, he's a traitor to America, this guy, they said. And possibly a traitor to America.

Yeah. And so, you know, you throw the full court press, you've only got to hold this thing. You said, well, how do 200 newspapers all say the same thing? Well, you throw everything at the wall and you hope something sticks long enough that the election can transpire. And then it doesn't matter. You might as well give everyone in America a free copy of. And it took like a year before the Post and the Times admitted that, oh, geez, actually, it turns out there's a federal grand jury looking at this stuff. NBC admitted it last week.

So that's a year and a half. after everybody else had come out with the story. Amazing. Since the story originally came out. And they admitted it basically, you know, kind of a throwaway piece on their, on their website,

sandwiched in between two stories of the Ukrainians being raped by Russian mattresses or something. You know, it just is mind-boggling how obvious these folks are. When you go back and look at the lies that you were sharing earlier about people throwing gasoline on their own children and things like that, I mean, those are atrocious lies, yet people are so willing to just say, well, of course, that's the kind of people, those people are, honey. And it's staggering to me what people are willing to ignore.

Going back to some of my favorite things, for example, with the Kennedy administration people, or Kennedy assassination, people will always fall back on the, well, no one could have kept the secret for all these years. You're right. Lots of people haven't. of people have come out and told things that they saw second shooters, that they saw people on the grassy knoll, that they were involved in government cover-ups. Lots of people have not kept the secrets, but what happens is, each time one of them pops up, we find a way to make them look like a silly old fool, and now we kind of use the fact that it took us so long to notice it against them.

Well, it's been 50 years. I mean, who the hell's memory is sharp after 50 years? You know what I'm saying? Yeah. It's almost ironic. So the same thing with the Biden laptop, but it was a throwaway. It only had to be fooled for three weeks. The election happened.

Now we see surveys that say one-sixth of people who voted for Biden would not have voted for him. Had they known about the laptop at the time they cast their votes? That might be price inflation talking, but I'll take it. Okay, some percentage. Pick, pick a number. Sure. But, you know, given how. Maybe the margin, yeah.

some of the more voting margins were in some of the the real tight races like in Pennsylvania or whatever how tight these things were in Georgia you know you're not talking about needing to you know to have 20 states change you just need a couple of thousand votes properly distributed and how many is of course just pure speculation but boy they were some yeah and that's enough to say that the election was manipulated yeah well and you know as you say you know you know you you bring up Kennedy, people have their different examples. I think Waco is a good one for the right, and certainly this stuff has been, you know, Russia Gate and Laptop Gate has been a big

red pill, they say, for the right. Yeah, no, they'll lie about anything. And it's, it's not about, oh, you know how those people are, the branch of idiots, it's, you know how those people are, the cops and their spokesmen and the mainstream media people who take everything they say as gospel and turn it around and call it news and it's just there's such a bias in there it's just the same as you know intelligence claims are always labeled intelligence as though it's never stupidity it's always this brilliant take on whatever is happening here because trust us we would only hire really bright guys to run this department or whatever you know well it's also it's also a matter of bias you know the it's very very hard to be the lone voice

I, for better or worse, or for good or for better, I was writing that Russia Gate was complete garbage back quite a while ago. I think my first articles about it were in January of 2017 saying, I don't think this is what you think it is. I think it's an information operation because I recognize the hallmarks of an intelligence agency's information operation. Because at the State Department, I had been trained to recognize these things so that they couldn't, weren't going to be used against me, against the United States. You know, you have to know what these things look like. And by the time Trump took office and the dossier was published, I remember looking at it and thinking, boy, does this look exactly like what, you know, the materials I had been shown in classes of what disinformation really looks like. you don't know how hard it was to get some of those original articles published and what places turn and I'm not going to list them up here because people make mistakes and editors move around and I got to earn a living but I mean which people really said look I don't think we can be out in front on this and they didn't say I was a liar they didn't call they didn't say I was wrong they just said that as a relatively small time in the in the in the in the in the in the world of the mass media we have a hard time being too

out front on some of these issues um luckily places like the american conservative like aniwar dot com chose to publish them early on and that meant that you were in front of everybody else but i took a lot of guff personally and i'm sure the editors who who did that did that out of acts of individual almost bravery because i'm sure they're boss as we're saying to them, are you sure we want to be out front on this? Well, not at anti-war.com. I mean, me and Justin essentially decide him, him more than me, and now me, instead of him, because he's dead. And look, I mean, I went back and checked. My first interview debunking Russia Gate was of Jeffrey Carr, the computer security expert, still in July of 2016, when they're debunking the very first lies about the DNC hack from the very beginning. And we're never intimidated by that.

I mean, that's our whole juice. These guys lie about everything. Look, and then we debunk what they say, because it's never true. I know. But if you get on to NBC Nightly News, you can talk to 7 million people at one time. I'm not sure how many folks listen to this. That's part of it. But that's also part of the answer of how 200 newspapers all end up saying the same thing,

is you've got some small town, to the extent that those newspapers are edited anymore, They're not just collections of wire stories, but that's which is another reason all 200 say the same thing at the same time. They're all getting it from the AP anyway. But, I mean, to the extent that somebody in Podunk is saying, wait a minute, the Podunk Times is not going to be breaking the story that the FBI through the election to try to throw the election to Hillary Clinton.

We're going to have to wait for the New York Times or ABC or CNN or even Pravda to come up with something first. We can't be there. This is the classic thing that happens, for example, in Japan with the imperial family. The local, the Japanese newspapers are not allowed to report bad news about the imperial family. They have to wait for a foreign newspaper to report it first. When the old emperor passed away, there was this great story about how the Japanese media, who knew he had died, was we're begging the Washington Post

foreign correspondent to please publish something as soon as possible because they had to hold a story until it showed up in some foreign media. Yeah. And then they could quote the foreign media. America really is that ridiculous. You know, I hope I'm not boring people with this one because I've mentioned this before, but I like it. And that's right before Iraq War II,

the space shuttle exploded over Palestine, Texas, with an Israeli on board, too. It's a very symbolic thing. Gore Vidal said it was like a sign from the gods and stuff. And anyways, the thing blew up. And there was footage of burning debris falling out of the sky. And furthermore, the space shuttle never showed up where it was supposed to land on time. And it was gone. It blew up. And everybody knew it. It blew up. But all they would say in the media was, apparently there has been some kind of malfunction and it seems as though maybe something is wrong

and always with the weasel words for hours this went on for about three hours that it seems as though maybe possibly but we're waiting for confirmation and then after three hours finally W. Bush came out and said yeah the thing blew up and then finally they could say okay it blew up but man we saw people picking up debris

on the news. And it was being, you know, from the local news channels, we're spreading it to the cable networks. I was like, this is apparently wreckage from the space shuttle this guy's holding in his hand right now. They still could not say it in definitive terms until W. Bush, the dumbest

son of a bitch on the continent said it was true. Well, there you go. That's who we are, man. Still. Always will be, I guess. And McVeigh did it all by himself. I remember the day they executed him. Oh, what's her name?

Goofball. Currick. Katie Couric goes, oh, that's weird. He had his head shaved all the way to the skin. Oh, is that weird, huh? Yeah, good job. Good job, you know, investigating this case.

They called every right-winger a Nazi, but they let the actual Nazis get away with killing 170 people, man. You know, these guys. Yep. And the only thing you have to do, it's very simple, friends. the only thing you have to do is ask questions. How do you know that? Why do you believe that's true?

What's the evidence for that? Is there any evidence that goes the other direction? How did they know that? And if you ask those simple questions, you know, the answers or the non-ansors are actually very, very instructive. I mean, just the simple question of how did that person know that piece of information? For example, you brought up the one about Hunter Biden's laptop. 50 member, former members of the intelligence community wrote a letter saying they believed based on their experience that this was Russian disinformation. All the media needed to do, all you needed to do at home, was to say, what leads them to that conclusion?

How do they know that? If, you know, your cheating spouse came home with a line that week, you wouldn't let them get away with. it. How did that lipstick get on your collar? I don't know. It has the hallmarks of disinformation. Yeah. Is that where we're leaving this, honey? You're just going to say, I don't know. And by the way, for people who aren't familiar, they had no narrative whatsoever. They had no particular accusation, just like in the intelligence briefing of 2017. There was no specific accusation at all. Well, we think a KGB mole must have planted this at the computer repair shop or even a single declarative sentence like that with any detail at all?

After the fact that there was so much information on that laptop, which was immediately verifiable, there were, because there were dozens of wire transfer receipts that the intelligence agencies could have verified in a heartbeat. They have access to that information. And they could go back and find out that, yes, indeed, a million dollars was transferred from a Ukrainian company through a Cypriot bank to an account controlled by Hunter Biden. That thing happened. If the Russians are creating disinformation, they created an awful lot of actual information in the process. And if you don't ask those why questions or how do they know that or how would such a person know that,

the same thing goes, by the way, if you're reading an article that is sourced to anonymous sources, you stop and say to yourself, how would anyone know that, especially when they're talking about things like Putin's state of mind. Oh, yeah, I love that. Oh, they, Putin was promised that he'd be drinking blood out of Zelensky's skull in two days. Yeah. Oh, really, huh? And people just, I hear people repeat that over and over again, like they know it's true themselves. Well, the most famous one now has been the idea that the Russians are always behind schedule. It's like, okay, how many people, let's just start off from the broadest, how many human beings in the entire world, have access to the actual Russian war plan, you know, the schedule, the order of battle,

the thing that says we hope to be at this line on this date and that line on the next date. I mean, it's a tiny number, and how many of them would be leaking that information to ABC News? You know, zero would be a good answer. Second, how many plans, orders of battle actually are implemented precisely the way that they were designed? The answer to that one is easy. none of them. Nothing ever happens the way it's supposed to be in a planning document, and that's why the planning documents are constantly revised. We thought we'd be at this line on this date, and instead we're at this line on this date, whether that's forward or backward. It doesn't matter. We're going to

have to amend the plan. But yet Americans just sit there and just absorb this, like SpongeBob, where it's like, okay, I guess where the Russians are behind schedule, because ABC says they're behind schedule. They never even think to ask the next question. The reporters don't ask that next question. Nobody ever says, how do you know that? How would anyone know what Putin was actually thinking? How would anyone have this? You know, the Ukrainians keep talking about all this data that they keep intercepting from the Russians, but they don't publish any of it. And when they do, we don't get access to the raw material at all. We get clips and things like that. Give me the whole hour of Russian kid, of a Russian troop talking to his mom. Give me the whole hour

properly translated and then I'll take your one sentence pulled out of context more seriously. But they don't, you know, of course they never do that because it's propaganda. It's not information. Yeah. I think Noam Chomsky said a long time ago that if the government published all of this stuff themselves, it would be so much less credible and it would be taken so much less seriously. But the fact that you have this pretended market of competition in the media means that when they're all in agreement, that consensus stands for the truth. It's as close as you can get.

It's when, look, the posts, the Times, the journal, and the Dallas Morning News and everybody know that we got to go take on Saddam. I mean, how could you know better than that? Why would they all be that wrong if they're all the people who are in charge of what we know what we think about the most important things all day. It just comes, you know, built in. We make great drama out of that, you know, the purpose of a free press is to keep the government honest and all this other good stuff, you know, and we get all, all dramatic

and over-emphasize that. That's, it's true. It should be that way, but it's not true because it doesn't work that way in reality. And in fact, the media has become so partisan since I think Donald Trump's rise was really the final trigger on this. They always chose to lie for the government, but I think becoming so politically partisan, in other words, they lied for the government

whether the government was Democratic or Republican. I mean, they lied, for example, through the Vietnam War consistently, whether it was Kennedy in charge or Johnson or Nixon or Nixon or whatever. They kept the lies alive for us. But they've become so partisan since the rise of Trump

that it's like a double set of lies. We're lying on behalf of the government and we're skewing our own lies so that they favor the Democrats at this point. If you don't like this, you can switch over to a different channel where they may be skewing things Republican-wise. So you get a different set of lies,

and we'll call it fair and balanced. Yeah, good enough. All right. Well, listen, man, thanks for coming on my show. I don't want to keep you too long where people don't want to listen because we're already over time. Anytime.

All right. Thank you very much, man. appreciate it. You guys, that's Peter Van Buren, and you can find them at we meantwell.com. And this one is for the Institute. Truth, Lies, and Assessment, Libertarian Institute.org. The Scott Horton Show, Anti-War Radio, can be heard on KPFK, 90.7 FM in L.A. APSRadio.com, anti-war.com, ScottHorton.org, and Libertarian Institute.org. Thank you.