Scott Horton Show - Just the Interviews - 7/18/24 Matt Taibbi on the RNC, the Trump Assassination Attempt and Biden’s Likely Replacements

Episode Date: July 22, 2024

Matt Taibbi returns to the show in an interview recorded while he was at the Republican National Convention. He and Scott talk about the Trump assassination attempt, likely replacements for Joe Biden (the interview was recorded before Biden officially announced he is stepping down from the race), how the media’s coverage of Donald Trump has evolved and more. Discussed on the show: “Illa in Manila: Will History Demand Trump-Hillary II?” (Racket News) “The Surrender” (Racket News) Matt Taibbi is a journalist, author and political commentator. Subscribe to his Substack publication: Racket News and follow him on Twitter @mtaibbi. This episode of the Scott Horton Show is sponsored by: Roberts and Robers Brokerage Incorporated; Tom Woods’ Liberty Classroom; Libertas Bella; ExpandDesigns.com/Scott. Get Scott’s interviews before anyone else! Subscribe to the Substack. Shop Libertarian Institute merch or donate to the show through Patreon, PayPal or Bitcoin: 1DZBZNJrxUhQhEzgDh7k8JXHXRjY Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

All right, y'all, welcome to the Scott Horton Show. I'm the director of the Libertarian Institute, editorial director of anti-war.com, author of the book, Fool's Aaron, Time to End the War in Afghanistan, and The Brand New, Enough Already, Time to End the War on Terrorism. And I've recorded more than 5,500 interviews since 2004. almost all on foreign policy and all available for you at scothorton dot for you can sign up the podcast feed there and the full interview archive is also available at youtube.com slash scott horton's show hey guys i got matt taibi otherwise known as the greatest guy on substack on the phone right now and he's at the republican convention up there in uh what's a call i knew it the other day milwaukee right hey matt how you doing I'm doing great. How are you doing? Oh, I'm doing good, man. Uh, very happy to have you here. Um, as I always say, I stop whatever I'm doing and I read whatever you send me when I get a substack in my email. And I get quite a few substacks in my email. I apologize. I haven't been sent me. But yeah, man, you do, uh, such compelling writing all the time. I love reading it. And, uh, and, uh, and you know, you're always focused on not exactly what I'm focused on, but always something I'm very interested in. Like, for example, in policy.

Um, and especially right now, what I'm enjoying so much is the backstabbing of Joe Biden by all the Democrats. And you've been, you've been writing about this quite a bit. It's amazing, isn't it? It's just incredible. There's a bunch of Trump news to cover. Of course, we've got to talk a little bit about that later and whatever, but the, uh, the overthrow of Joe Biden from inside the Democratic Party seems to be making headwave, got Obama came out against. him now, although not officially and apparently not to his face? What do you know about that? Well, it's been kind of apparent that Barack Obama has been the source of a lot of the sort of public campaigning against Biden or public campaigns to get him to leave the race

since the debates. I think you're seeing kind of a fissure within the Democratic Party. We're there's one camp that's loyal to Biden that's mostly confined to people in the White House, it sounds like. And then it seems like there are an awful lot of people with ties to either Chicago politics or to the last Democratic administration who are coming out now and calling for Biden to drop out. Yeah, obviously had big news yesterday that Adam Schiff and 21 other members of Congress called for Biden to step down. You know, if Obama himself is getting into that, too, it's not at all surprising at this point. Yeah.

Well, and now, so there's a couple of things at issue here. One is, which the guy's completely crazy, but he has been for so long. He's not that much crazy of them before. I don't know if he saw the latest one where he called his Secretary of Defense, the black man, because he couldn't remember Lloyd Austin's name. But, you know, okay, maybe he's like marginally worse. but I don't know. And then I thought I had seen, and I do not check real clear politics, you know, polls every morning, and I really should.

But I had read a couple of things that said that actually the debate didn't truly hurt Biden that bad in the polls. It was a PR disaster, and maybe a lot of people panicked and people who were seeking advantage against Biden inside the Democratic Party took advantage. And yet, isn't it the case that Biden has some kind of claim that? look, he's only behind by a couple of points. He was up by two. Now he's down by two. But so what? He can fight back?

Or is that not right? So I think it's probably right that it's still competitive. The poll they were actually showing as recently as last week. They were talking to one that showed Biden actually up after the debate, 50 to 48. And there were a few headlines out there that said that Biden was actually now back in the lead. So I have trouble believing that. I've had steadily more and more trouble believing polls in the last eight years. If there was actually polling out there that showed that Biden was anywhere within striking distance of Trump,

or if it was, let's just say, closer than four points, I don't think there would be this huge hue and cry. to get rid of him, you know, given all of that, that would imply for the party, if they actually had polls showing him ahead, there's no way that that would be happening. So we just had, you know, the former head of the Intelligence Committee come out and say that Biden has to get out because he can't win, you know, up two points or down two points. that doesn't that's hard to accept uh you know even before this episode i used to always look at polls in the aggregate you know using tools like the real clear politics uh averages right like i have a really great site that sort of looks at all the polls about a certain topic over um a time period and i always thought even those you had to kind of just draw maybe like one general conclusion um but but now i don't know i don't know that even that can be trusted anymore

it's difficult yeah okay so underlying this whole crisis on the democrat side is that the fact that they've been lying to us this whole time and pretending that everything was fine now their back is up against the wall i guess they were betting on that him doing really good in that debate but that didn't work out so now they suspended the primaries and that whole season is over so how are they going to pick the new nominee if they do in fact succeed in overthrowing them which i guess by the way i forgot if either of us had mentioned this so far, but they do have what purports to be a leak from Biden insider saying, at least he's listening now and saying, well, maybe Kamala Harris could win and this kind of things. That seemed to be like the first little trial balloon

that Biden is softening. But how are they going to replace it? They're just going to let Barack Obama decide? Well, Biden himself came out on there. He gave an interview to BET last night saying that he would consider stepping aside if there was a medical event. So that was a considerable softening of his position. But so just to answer all this things in order, yeah, they, they're suddenly pretending that this is the first time that they've noticed a problem with Biden, whereas it was pretty obvious, even the people who covered Biden on the campaign trail in 2019 and 2020, as I did, that he was having a real problem.

And they tried to call it just a speech problem. It really wasn't. The real problem was that he would forget where he was in the middle of speeches. And then more important than that, his emotions were all off. He had problems with controlling his anger. He would sometimes sort of react.

He would massively overreact to pretty of dying questions um and but but we were told no this isn't a problem there's nothing wrong it's just a speech impediment uh don't worry about it and now they're all pretending that they didn't see anything all that time yeah how can you pick on a guy for his childhood stutter well right exactly exactly but i i think you kind of you hit on the the worst thing of all which is that they, they completely gutted the primary system. You know, they had opponents removed from the ballot in states like Florida, Tennessee, Massachusetts, you know, and they, even worse, in New Hampshire, they had a situation where they, they actually had a primary, and then they replaced the results of that primary with a second thing that they called a nominating event that was like held in a Saturday night, an undisclosed location with a few party officials, and they apparently were choosing from a ballot that only had one name on it.

And those are the delegates that are going to be sent to the Democratic convention, not the actual votes, which is amazing. So they went through this whole non-democratic process. Now they're talking about doing this thing called a blitz primary, where the delegates would get to choose. and it's very complicated it's never really well it's sort of been done in 1968 it's complicated but it

I just don't know how people are going to look at that and say that this nominee is going to come from any kind of democratic process yeah and then so help me go down the list because I admit this is not my speciality but as far as I know

their best guy is Gavin Newsom just because he's got hair, I guess, still. Although he does have a bit of that Horton pattern baldness. So I don't know, like, if he's really got an advantage there or not. But he's also the guy that ran California into the ground. Do they have anyone who's even close to him as far as fundraising ability, TV respectability, whatever that they could try to build a campaign around?

It's funny. Everybody just skips over Kamala Harris. I didn't even mean to. Sorry, lady. no it's uh it's it's it's interesting because they brought up a bunch of names um you know the there there was a leak in well isn't a leak it was a story done in semaphore which uh talked about um there was a georgetown law professor named rosa brooks who proposed his thing called a a blitz primary and the idea was they would um have somebody's in some cases it's been the idea is that's been the idea is

that former presidents like Barack Obama and Bill Clinton would choose like the top six nominees. And then they would have like a little mini campaign for a few weeks. And then the delegates would vote among those candidates. So they bring up names like Gretchen Whitmer, Amy Klobuchar, Newsom obviously is one of them. But what's really interesting is that there is one poll

that shows that the best, the candidate who polls is actually Hillary Clinton out of all those folks which is shocking but also not because a lot of this is about name recognition so I you know I wrote a column about this I wouldn't be I wouldn't be shocked if it turned out to be her but but I think they can kind they'd have to be able to find somebody who's better I think almost anything anybody if they just sort of pick somebody out of the phone book would do better than Gavin Newsom or

Amy Klobuchar or Kamala these people are all unelectable I think It's just amazing yeah I imagine running Klobuchar against Trump It's so funny You know when you said Hillary Clinton there I immediately thought of Bill Hicks

Talking about he's complaining about Reagan Being the president but still I just thought about the way you said God please reach down from the clouds And pinch my butt and make sure I'm not dreaming I might die laughing if they run Hillary again oh man I hope because I know he'd just crush her again

and I'd just it'd be the best andeurism I ever had it would be it would be a laugh riot although you know I wouldn't after all the things that have happened in the last eight years I wouldn't shock me if

the joke was on us in the end and she ends up winning so but it would be funny I think Yeah Well and you know what Speaking of which We gotta talk about this

I don't think it's crazy town I think it's only like Crazy Town adjacent But it's worth discussing You think there's a possibility That someone made sure That he had pretty thin security And his ass is hanging out this time

And he's the same people Who framed him for Russia Gate I used to joke that that's just a Hair away from Riding him through Dallas With his bubble top off you know i you know what um previously i would have said something like that is impossible uh but you know i if my podcast co-host walter kern brought up if this were any other

country and they looked at the situation that we're in where it it just happened that uh you know that the democratic candidate proved to be non-huh viable and it's on the eve of Trump becoming the nominee and um and then there was a you know an assassination attempt and the the assassins killed so there's no questions can be answered really um i don't know i lived in russia for a long time there were a lot of political assassinations while i was there nobody thought twice about ascribing those to the government It's hard on an evidentiary basis to go there except to say that a lot of the things that have been put out in response to this crisis are plainly unbelievable. Like, you know, the head of the Secret Service saying they didn't have anybody on that roof because there was a safety issue with the slope of that roof.

It's completely crazy. Which is just a terribly ridiculous story, you know? So and then, you know, for the for now to come out that there was a. chase involving this person beforehand, that the person actually turned around and aimed a gun at local police well before the shooting, that this was broadcast over an open security channel. So everybody was aware of a suspect on that roof well before it happened. I mean, a lot of these details, it's either extreme incompetence or something's off about the whole thing. Yeah. Now, I mean, you'd have to come up with a hell of a story for how someone was controlling this kid and doing it or anything like that or really influencing the local cops to do anything but just be themselves. It seems like, I mean, as far as my imagination stretches, the worst real accusation here would be that they just didn't give him enough men.

and maybe we're sort of crossing their fingers that something bad would happen and lightning would strike you know well for them to come out and give bobby kennedy secret service uh protection the day after or the or a couple of days after is it admission that they were not doing it for political reasons beforehand right so we know you know in that case they were certainly doing something with trump you know he's a former president and he's he did have secret service they they claimed afterwards that he actually had heightened secret service protection because of a threat from iran uh which i don't know that seems odd to me um because there were also news reports that they had to rely on local police

and that's how this thing got happened but uh yeah i don't know i mean there's there been some contradictory reports about why though these security failures happen. But, yeah, it's, I know a lot of people who are here in Milwaukee right now who are absolutely convinced that there was something like to untoward about it, but there's nothing concrete that you can point to. Yeah. Yeah, it sure doesn't seem like it. But like you say with Bobby Kennedy there, that, you know, like just.

To rephrase it, in other words, is they didn't want to protect him because they thought that they'd be better off without him, man. You know, like not to be too blunt about it, but otherwise, what does it cost Biden to order the president or order the government to protect a candidate? It doesn't cost him anything to do that. No. No. Yeah. And they also wanted, I think there might have been a messaging aspect to that, too, though. I mean, I think they wanted the public to get the idea that Kennedy wasn't a real candidate.

No, that makes sense, I guess. But still, pretty high-risk way to send that message. Yeah. Yeah. It's beyond obnoxious. It's ridiculous. All right. Now, something important you said there was the name Rosa Brooks.

Who's Rosa Brooks, Matt? Rosa Brooks is a Georgetown law professor who was a former department of defense official, and I'm guessing that you know her name because of the transition integrity project. Am I right? Is that we talked about this before? Yeah, in fact, I hope, I bet we probably talked about it before the election of 2020, that these people had leaked to the Atlantic and the Washington Post about their crazy plans to prevent Trump from winning. Yep, they had, and they conducted war games where they had various people playing the roles of Joe Biden and Donald Trump in the event of a contested election scenario. If I remember correctly, it was John Podesta

who played Biden. And so they had different scenarios where it was like a close race, but Trump won, close race for Biden won, and then the other candidate doesn't concede. And then, you know, So they were looking at scenarios that might come about, and there were crazy things in there. Like, you know, Podesta as Biden in that war game, which they called the Transition Integrity Project, there was one scenario where Trump won legally, but he decided not to concede as Biden and had basically the entire West Coast secede from the United States. and there's all kinds of crazy stuff in these documents which they leaked to the they leaked to the media kind of proudly that they did that they did this and then what happened was the journalist ben smith from the new york times got the actual report the full-blown records of of the simulation and published it and it was so embarrassing that they they kind of tiptoed away from it and actually by the time i do

did the Twitter files, they were, they were de-amplifying it as disinformation. So, yeah, that was a remarkable little, little scene. So, yes, it's the same person, and she was now involved in promoting this idea of a blitz primary. Yeah. I mean, seriously, as a nonpartisan type, I was pretty astounded that Trump was going to lengths of trying to get alternative slates of electors submitted and all these kinds of. of things. It seems like, you know, like Nixon in 1960. Once they steal it from you, fair and

square, then you shut up about it because otherwise it's just too much trouble for everybody else to put them through it, that kind of thing. And yet, it's very clear, as you say, these leaks that they put in the media first, that if it had been the other way around and Trump had won the election, as they put it in anything but an absolute landslide, then they were prepared. to do the same thing. Nominate alternative slates of electors, as you say, even threatened secession of the West Coast states, anything they could to overthrow the election the other way.

So it's like watching Hamid Karzai versus Abdullah Abdullah, you know? Right, exactly. Yeah, they even had contingency plans for having crisis actors, create street disruptions and riots and things like that, you know, which speaks directly. There was actually even a section in there about disturbance at the Capitol, although that in that simulation, I believe, I forget who exactly created the disturbance in the simulation. So I don't want to speak out of turn there. But there was definitely before January 6th happened in this transition integrity report, a

a predict a kind of a prediction that the that under some scenarios there would be a disturbance at the capital which is which is sort of amazing yeah hey y'all let me tell you about roberts and roberts brokerage ink nobody trusts the u.s dollar anymore foreign governments are stocking up on gold instead of hundred dollar bills one they know they need to and two that means you need to too interest rates are up but for some reason not much for savings accounts park your money there and watch Uncle Joe Biden just counterfeit its value away. You can see how the Fed is afraid to raise rates to beat inflation for fear of popping the current bubbles, at least before the election. So more inflation it will continue to be. Gold is your shield against monetary and price inflation,

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The Surrender, which is, it's really about there's this big shift. It's come with Biden's senility breaking through at the debate and then now, especially with the failed assassination attempt, that they're just throwing their hands up. I mean, the fact is, they're up against probably the most famous man who ever lived, right?

He's worth a couple of Michael Jackson's or whatever at his height. Right, Ali, yeah. Right, yeah. is he's what they call a megastar right he's just and in in all different areas of life um and so like we're joking oh they're going to throw clobachar up against her or buttojug or one of these guys this never going to work right like what are they going to do so axios had a quote and i don't know if that's the israelis or not i don't necessarily trust it there's obviously

some agenda behind that site but they at least claim to have senior house democratic leadership sources saying that I think it was a direct quote that they had reconciled themselves to another Trump term and in a way I think what I'm trying to get out here is if there's a question in it Matt it's have they kind of finally unstigmatized Trump in a way or they've like normalized him in a way that they probably could have accepted all along that like well he's a little bit of a winger but he's an elected president and are they sort of adjusting? Like, they're not going to call him a Russian agent anymore.

They stop trying that. Yeah, I think that's, they've left themselves in a place where that's the only play they have left, which is what they should have done in the beginning, is just accept that he's a legitimately elected president and then criticize him as that, right? You know, go after his policies, go after things that he actually does. you know, the strategy that they pursued of claiming from the very start before he even was inaugurated that he was, you know, an agent of foreign influence, you know, under the control, the Russians and creating this political emergency that lasts for years and years and years.

And then when that one, you know, sort of ended up a dud, Trump himself had a hand in creating the second legend, which was that he was, you know, an existence. potential threat to democracy, who, you know, who was going to be the next Hitler and he had to be stopped at all costs. Now, after that assassination attempt, you can't see that there was a direct cause and effect because we don't know why the assassination attempt happened, but certainly they had raised the temperature on emotional temperature around Trump. And you can see that they recognize that by you know moves like morning joe deciding not to air on monday um which is a kind of i thought an extraordinary admission by msnbc to say well we have to we haven't our our lead morning

news program isn't really a news program so you have to take it off the air now um is so yeah they're going to have to go back to just treating them like a regular candidate who has a you know the support of half the country. And I think if they do that, they'll actually end up having a better chance of beating them. But they're just too dumb to do it. It's my guess. Yeah. Well, and when the Republicans fully embrace protectionism, it's going to not make sense to their audience for the Democrats to argue for free markets and low tariffs and this kind of thing in a kind of Bill Clinton third way argument. They're going to have to try to match Trump with Bernieism. which, I mean, after all, Biden has kept all the Trump's tariffs from before.

Yeah, I was going to say, like, they can't make that argument because they kept them all, right? So, you know, and this is funny. I talked to some pretty influential Republicans last night. And there, you know, there was one who was saying the thing that we're really, really worried about is, was replacing sort of the nanny state leftism with a nanny state. you know right-wing government um and they were there were there were some there are there are definitely concerns within the party there's a little bit of a schism within the republicans about whether or not they're going to be leaning too much on tariffs protectionism uh muscular you know intervention domestically um but you know there's

that's kind of the formula for trump's sort of populist thing uh he appears to both the free market libertarian side but also this other thing and but the democrats have to come up with an argument for it they just don't have any way of because they crushed bernie so hard they have no organic policy connection to ordinary people who you know aren't doing so well and i just don't i don't know what they're going to do to fix that then i i always thought they should have had gone with kind of an FDR type idea last time around, but they didn't do it. And so they're, as you say, they're going to have to make that turn back towards Bernie after crushing the actual Bernie. Yeah. Yeah, it's amazing. Just thinking back over the last few years of, you know, like we're talking about the way

that they just completely delegitimized him and turned his, not to be a supporter because I'm not. I know you're not either. but the way that they turned it into such a controversy, and really it all just came back to Hillary Clinton's temper tantrum that she couldn't just accept that it didn't work. She cheated. She played her Pied Piper strategy,

and it blew up in her face instead of just being embarrassed and going home and losing again, she insisted her and all of her partisans insisted on pushing forward with the Russiagate thing, and pretending this guy was as she put it, a million times, an illegitimate president, which usually people who lose elections don't do that. You know what I mean? In fact, it's crazy when Trump was talking about, well, Biden should have to step down and let me back in there now because they stole it.

People were like, what? That sounds crazy. But that was only like one shade crazier than what Hillary did and what the Democrats did to him. They really have just turned everything into such a nutty deal. It would have been kind of crazy having a Trump presidency anyway. just because what a character he is. But what they have put the country through over their refusal to just accept our rejection of them is pretty extraordinary. They deserve to lose really bad now, for sure.

Definitely. And I think my whole vision of how American politics works has changed because of exactly what you're talking about. But, you know, I'll come around to the idea that the distance between traditional Republicans and traditional Democrats was narrow enough that the kind of permanent national security state always felt comfortable that whoever won, there would be continuity of some sort, right? They were leaving some things to chance, but not much. And then Trump comes along and he sort of busts through all the different gatekeeping mechanisms to keep. the rabble out. He didn't come from any of the traditional sort of political dynastic forces in this country. He didn't have to rely on the press. It was his own social media account that got through. And you're right, it was Hillary Clinton's temper tantrum, but it also became a temper tantrum

of the national security state. They just were so furious that this had happened, that somebody who didn't have permission had gotten in. the way I look at it. And that to me is really scary, right? Because now it's not just spite. It's this grotesque institutional reaction to loss of control, which is, I think it's the only way you can square the intensity of the campaign, which is now basically failed. I mean, I think with the assassination attempt, it's, yeah, never say never, but I think it's impossible that they can revive it in earnest, but who knows? Yeah.

What do you think? Do you think it's over, by the way? I'm curious. Do you know what you think? Well, like, they're going to give up on trying to stop Trump, like, through extra, you know, kind of dirty tricks. Yeah. No, I don't know.

I mean, I was just going to say, like, yeah, you're so right. I mean, you're reminding me that, of course, is your great reporting above and beyond everybody else's shows that it wasn't Hillary and Perkins Coy. It was John Brennan, the director of the Central Intelligence Agency, who kicked this thing off back at the end of 2015, and we knew it had started at the end of 2015, and we knew there were British connections at the end of 2015 because of that Cooke and the Guardian, but still Luke Harding.

Oh, yeah. But now, you showed, you and your sources have now showed, and if you remember the name of the article off the top of your head, please do say it, where you showed. This is really the origin of the... setting up of Papadopoulos and the attempted entrapment of Page and this kind of thing, it really all did start with Brennan going to the Brits and the Australians for help, setting up these Americans to frame Trump for treason of all things.

Yeah, I think it was called like WMD Redux or something like that. I forget exactly what it was, but this was based on the fact that we had gotten, Michael Schellenberger and I had gotten access to, you know, people who had conducted the House Intelligence Committee investigation of Russiagate, and there is a report that's still not released that's like 22 pages long sitting in the CIA somewhere that has a bunch of these details. But essentially 23, oh, I'm sorry, it was other 23 or 26 members of the Trump campaign. were placed under surveillance by the FBI in 2015, 2016, and also that they sort of cooked the intelligence in the 2017 intelligence community assessment. They kind of kicked off Russiagate, led to the Mueller investigation, and yeah, it was people like Brennan. Brennan was a huge part of this whole thing because. Of the NSA, FBI, and CIA, who were the three major partners at intelligence community assessment, only the CIA felt that the Russians had intervened in favor of Donald Trump.

The NSA kind of never did. They only eventually, and the FBI moved from moderate to strong. like the last month before that report came out after some arm twisting so it was really Brennan Brennan overruled people within his own team on that assessment too so they he had dissenters even within the CIA but yeah it's the intelligence community kicked off that thing and they kept pursuing it and you know I think they revealed themselves in domestic politics in the way they haven't probably since the 60s or 70s. Yeah.

And, you know, to read the Durham report, it's just shocking as far as, you know, you have to read between the lines a little bit, but not that much, where it's just clear that James Comey and all of the top executives of the FBI were deliberately conspiring to push this investigation forward long after they knew that there was nothing to it. All their informants were coming back empty-handed. They're like in the timeline deliberately, withholding, you know, disconfirming material from investigators who were still going down

fake rabbit trails and so forth. Comey, if you remember, he had that famous testimony in the House in March of 2017 when he said, you know, I can confirm, I've been authorized to confirm that there is a Justice Department an investigation of administration or something like that. I forget the exact quote, but he was in the hearings that were conducted by Adam Schiff and he confirmed the existence of an investigation and everybody instantly cooked up special sets to cover the next Watergate. They had John Dean on his guests on TV, right?

This was Watergate all over again. When Comey did that testimony, he already knew that all the investigative. into all the other Trump associates like Papadopoulos and Page. And I forget who, there were, there were Flynn, they had recommended the end of the Flynn, yeah, sessions, right? And there was one more. I always forget this guy. But they had all kind of led to nothing.

Comey also knew already by then that the steel dossier. Clovis, is that the name you're looking for? Clovis was that he, but he didn't have a crossfire, an official crossfire designation. They had tried to set him up. They had tried to set him up, but it just didn't take, right? Because he was just uncooperative with their suggestions. Yeah, but basically the point is that Comey knew that none of that stuff had gone anywhere. They had nothing at that point.

And, you know, that's why shortly afterwards, were they, you know, the big news that propelled this story to the stratosphere, it came a couple of weeks after that when they leaked that there had been, you know, the FISA Warren had been approved for Carter Page, which had to mean that he had been judged by a court to be an agent of a foreign power. And, you know, nobody did the math and said, what if that warrant application was, was faked, which it was. So, yeah, they were, they were all lying through their teeth and it's to this day it's amazing to me that that's not a bigger story as it's still amazing to me that the FBI was briefing the house in the senate about uh you know the hunter

biden laptop story is going to be russian disinformation when it comes out uh they did that um so yeah they were behaving in ways that kind of make watergate look like a small story i think and and And yet we still haven't talked about it that way. Right. Yeah, because it wasn't a Republican doing it. It was a Republican who was the victim of it. So the media is just not as interested. And not just a Republican, but an outsider.

Not George W. Bush, but somebody who doesn't belong there. So it's got a different set of incentives. But, yeah, I mean, to compare it to Russiagate, it blows, I mean, to Watergate, it blows. Watergate right out of the water that they would dare take on the American people's elected president this way. It's just incredible that they would do it. Yeah. So anyway, I don't know. It's probably going to be a while before we reconcile that, but yeah. I know. Well, and that's true because, yeah, again, the incentives still aren't there for a real reckoning, although I guess we'll see once Trump's sworn in, whether he appoints a new prosecutor himself on that or has

as Attorney General, launch another Russiagate probe or something, but it's very interesting. But now, so to answer your question to me, if so. Yeah, I would say I am waiting for the next thing for them to do to him. You know what I mean? Like, maybe they won't kill him, but frame him for something else, try to

indict him for something else, or I don't know, maybe run his car off the road. I don't know. Why not? At this point, and by they, I mean the FBI and the CIA. I mean, you know, official power. Would, would they go to extraordinary lengths to stop them at this point? I mean, maybe.

You know? Yeah, I don't know. It's so weird to think of your own government in that way. I just never, I never thought about the United States in this way. I feel like I've become so cynical about, you know. Were you in Russia in 93? Yeah. Oh, okay.

Yep, during the coup. Oh, yeah. See, I was here in 93 and they burned all the branched of idiots to death right at the street from my house. So I've been cured since then. Wow. You were just too far away. Oh, I see. Yeah, you're right.

Yeah. Yeah. I guess that was close, close to where you were, huh? Well, 100 miles in Texas is not that far. Right. Right. That's right. Yes.

Yeah. Right. Yeah, I missed all that. So that's on me, I guess. But, yeah, it's been a shock this last period. And, you know, we'll see what happens. Yeah. Okay.

So one more thing before I let you go, which is, just in case you run into this guy, Vance, you could, like, frame it in the form of a journalist question, like, hey, have you ever read J.J. Goldberg's articles in the forward about how badly Netanyahu wanted America to attack Iraq back in 2002? Because, you know, him and Sharon weren't twins and didn't agree on everything, because I don't know if you saw this where Vance's text messages were leaked, where he's saying, if America had only listened to Israel,

we would have never attacked Iraq. and I just want to pull what's left of my hair out, but I don't want to do that. I had to resist. Did he really say that? He really said that. And it is true that Sharon, at least at first, had said, geez, you really ought to go to Tehran first.

But once it was clear Bush was going to Baghdad, Sharon got on board for that, but it was clearly Netanyahu's preference, and all the neocons were Netanyahu's men. And I just hate to see an Iraq war veteran talking about, yeah, if only we defer to Israel more, then we'd stay out of Middle East wars. Like, man, I can't Facebook.

haul myself that hard without giving myself a concussion. Wow. That is pretty messed up. I mean, if I see him, I'll ask him for sure. J.J. Goldberg? Yeah, J.J. Goldberg. I mean, he's the guy who's like, listen, everybody, you've got to understand the division between Sharon and Netanyahu and the Lekud Party over there. And it's Netanyahu and his men who are pushing this thing. And that's who we know as the neo-conservative fifth column in America. You know, Richard Pearl and his buddies. that's them

wow okay that's them all right well I'll check it out for sure all right you're a good man Matt thank you for doing my show dude thanks god no problem

take care thanks for having me on oh yeah appreciate it thank you the scott horton show anti-war radio can be heard on kpfk 90.7 fm in l a psradyo dot com antiwar dot com

scott horton dot org and libertarian institute dot org.