Scott Horton Show - Just the Interviews - 8/15/24 Matt Taibbi on Tulsi Gabbard being Followed and the Government’s Battle to Control Information

Episode Date: August 18, 2024

Scott interviews Matt Taibbi about some articles that he’s run at Racket News. They start with the stories Taibbi wrote about how air marshals followed Tulsi Gabbard as she traveled. They also talk about the so-called disinformation complex, some new Mueller investigation information, the Kamala Harris campaign and more.  Discussed on the show: “American Stasi: Tulsi Gabbard Confirms "Quiet Skies" Nightmare” (Racket News) “FOIA Files: The University of Washington” (Racket News) “FOIA Files: Did Special Counsel Robert Mueller Rely on Clinton Campaign Operatives to Point to Russia?” (Racket News) Connor Freeman is the Assistant Editor of the Libertarian Institute, primarily covering foreign policy. He is a co-host on Conflicts of Interest. His writing has been featured in media outlets such as Antiwar.com and Counterpunch, as well as the Ron Paul Institute for Peace and Prosperity. You can follow him on Twitter @FreemansMind96 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

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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 2003, almost all on foreign policy and all available for you at scothorton.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, on the line again, I've got Matt Taiibi from Rackett News. Welcome back to the show, Matt. Thanks for having me. I really appreciate you joining us on the show again here, and it's always so much fun to watch your podcast and read all your articles. And I'm so glad that you got new Russiagate stuff for me to include in the book before it comes out and all kinds of cool things here to talk about terrible, terrible things to talk about. Let's talk first about Tulsi Gabbard.

And this story, first of all, it was somebody else who broke the story. I forgot the name of the website, and I'm sorry, I don't have it in front of me, but can we talk about... Uncover D.C. It's Tracy Beans's site. Okay, and I know her from Twitter, Tracy Beans with a Z at the end there, right? And it's, what did you say the name of it was again? Uncover D.C. Uncovered D.C. Okay. And the story was, and did she have this from Gabbard? Is she had this from the TSA somehow had given it to her, somebody?

No. She got it from... from the air marshals national council, which is like an association that advocates on behalf of air marshals. And it's a bit of a complex store, but basically they have this quiet skies program that allows the government to follow people on airplanes with these teams of air marshals.

And they've been doing this for years. And when Tulsi Gabbard's name showed up, up in the list, a couple of the marshals got freaked out and eventually decided to come forward and make a whistleblower complaint. And actually, as of this morning, they've kind of formally done that. They sent letters to committees in Congress. But that's the story that Uncover got first was that there were whistleblowers who were coming forward. Wow. Okay. So good for them. It's nice to know there at least some Patriots inside the government agency somewhere. And I guess I'm kind of resentful that they're only mad because she is literally an officer, a major in the Hawaii National Guard.

So it's a federal government employee who they're being made to tread on here. But still, she's a good person. Of course, than that, she's a lieutenant colonel, actually. Oh, lieutenant colonel. Oh, my gosh, she got promoted. So, again, because she keeps getting promoted because she's actually not a Russian agent. Is that right? Right. Right.

They're promoting her because the whole government is still under the control of Russia ever since Trump was in there the last time. It doesn't make a lot. I mean, so many things about this don't make any sense, right? Like if she really were a domestic terror threat, like somebody, you wanted to follow on an airplane because you were afraid they were going to hijack or bomb civil, you know, an aircraft, you would think that your first call would be to the Army to strip that person of their. top secret and security clearance. But they didn't do that. There were no interviews, no calls on that end either. Yeah, that's funny.

Yeah, just like with Trump, they never sent the FBI to warn him that we think they're a Kremlin spies inside your campaign. No. Because they didn't really think that. That's why. Right. Right. Right. This is a similar thing. It doesn't make any sense on

any logical level. It's just... Okay, so now what were they doing to it? So, I mean, this program is it's kind of amazing that it hasn't gotten as much press as it should this quiet skies thing has been around for years since the early 2010s and there was a predecessor program before that and what happens is when somebody like Tulsi's put on a list the air marshals basically just get a sheet of paper and then they have to follow her and it's three marshals per plane per flight. So if the person takes three flights in a day, you're talking about nine

marshals. If she's on a wait list for another flight, you need another three marshals. They had bomb-sniffing dogs assigned to Tulsi Gabbard. You can have as many as 15 people in an airport following a single person under this program, and this is not confined to former presidential candidates. They've been doing this to thousands of Americans who are not even suspected of crimes, this program has never once resulted in an arrest or even in someone being elevated to another threat list as ever. So it's literally useless, but extremely expensive. Yeah, but what did she ever do to Kamala Harris? That's true. She wouldn't, I mean, you have to think about that. I mean, Tulsi Gabbard was

instrumental in Kamala Harris's presidential campaign faltering last time. And I know from talking to Tulsi, that was one of the first things that she thought about when she found out about this. It's the appearance of impropriety, I'll tell you. It isn't exactly a one-to-one connection that we can see. It seems to be something, you know, maybe. But then again, you know, Harris aside, Hillary Clinton didn't specifically name her, but basically did, and everybody knew exactly what she meant, and she accused Tulsi Gabbard of being a Russian agent sent to disrupt the Democratic Party election in 2020. Yes, she did, called her a Russian asset, and the thing that I think was even as sinister

is that NBC News had a gigantic expose about Tulsi being essentially. a Russian front that was timed to the launch of her campaign in 2020. So they had a story come out that very day that was sourced, by the way, to Hamilton 68, among other things. So, yeah, there was a coordinated effort to identify this person who has nothing to do with Russia at all. men is a decorated war veteran not that that should make a difference but um you know yeah they've been they've been playing this game um since the last campaign at least and uh now they've gone on to you know following people on airplanes which is the stuff of like you know the stasi or some you know crazy uh cold war era regime yeah well it's too bad that it's too bad that

it takes them doing it to her to bring this to people's attention um but it's just as wrong when they do it to her as when they do it to everybody else too it's completely crazy it's maybe it's worse in a way where it's when it's so obviously political kind of persecution has nothing to do with even a pretension of a real suspicion over activity uh in this way but yeah at least then again she can defend herself too so that's you know the other side of that but right yeah and um you know there were a lot of people who are in this program who basically were just um at you know in Washington on January 6th or they flew into Washington on the 5th and left in the 7th or something like that um there was actually a whistleblower

complaint two years ago from a TSA from an air marshal who saw his own wife on the list I like that one. Yeah, that actually happened. And that person came forward. They made a disclosure. They complained to Congress. Nothing happened. But the morale is incredibly low in the Air Marshal Service

because they have all these people who've been trained to do this high-level work and they're falling around like 75-year-old ladies and MAGA hats. And it's not cheap either. I mean, think about the expense of sending three air marshals to follow somebody around for any stretch of time, it's a significant expenditure. They're spending hundreds of millions of dollars a year on this stuff. Yeah. And just

presuming for the sake of argument that we need these guys to provide security on planes, it'd be much better to have one on each plane in case something happens. And by the way, Israel bomb and little kids in their shelters is what caused September 11th last time around. And there's been much lower level, but still there's been kind of renewed Islamist terrorist attacks across the old world anyway and potentially here as blowback from the current crisis. And people really should, I think, be paranoid and have their eyes peeled about real terrorist attempts. And that also means that the air marshals should be keeping regular people safe and not running political errands. for corrupt masters, which is so obviously the case in this case,

or like you say, casting such a broad net, they're following people around who haven't done anything or aren't associated, looking for, you know, going on a fishing expedition against somebody who may have been in Washington on the six,

things like this. I mean, it's just like in Boston, they were right in the middle of entrapping a guy into a phony plot when the Boston plot, the, marathon plot went right under their nose. Right.

You know? Right. Yeah. Well, I mean, this is what happens when you commit, you know, awesome amounts of government resources to stupid, you know, missions chasing stats or where there's no chance of success whatsoever, where there's no oversight. I mean, one of the problems with this program is that, and this has to do with a lot of the war on terror stuff. Because they're not intending ever to make cases, they're not trying to, you know, develop a prosecution against somebody. None of this stuff is ever reviewed. They don't even plan on it being reviewed.

So there's no probable cause. They don't, you know, they don't have to have a reason to follow somebody. They're just following people around to do it. And as you say, if they actually had to conduct high-level investigations and pick appropriate targets, they would definitely do a, you know they would choose people who who are real priorities uh you know and i i did hear from marshals this week about the you know the sort of post october seventh reality where we have we should be committing more resources in other places yeah all right so um well that'll be interesting to see whether this becomes more of a controversy at all i don't i know that

she does not have a lot of juice in washington but she is still pretty high profile and I mean did this get picked up by the post of the times at all I don't think I saw it no but it's it's getting more traction now I think because the a letter went out to eight committees last night and I know that there's some momentum within some of those committees to actually do an investigation the the problem is there have been complaints about the TSA and about this quiet skies program for almost 10 years now and congress is just kind of afraid to go there because it's such a gigantic fix uh but this is the marshals are basically on you know they're hoping that this is a high profile enough incident to uh move congress to finally take the plunge and fix the whole thing

and and there's a chance that that might happen so yeah let's hope yeah seriously um hey by the way i'm interview your buddy, Matt Orphalia. How do you say it, right? Orphalia. Orphalia. Oh, that makes sense. Orphalia. Okay.

Could be Orphalia. I don't know. That's great. So, yeah, I'm going to talk to him today because he has this great thread on censorship here, which I'll let him tell this story, but it's about how they were censoring the disinformation and misinformation that there's anything wrong with Joe Biden's old brain and how they got away with that apparently. So that's at least a segue into our topic, our next one here, which is this story by a guy writing for you, James Rushmore, here at Rackett News.

The FOIA files the University of Washington through its center for an informed public has played an outsized role in shaping anti-disinformation campaigns. So now this is the thing that that lady from what, Grenada or something, started accusing you of perjuring yourself because you mixed up at one acronym or. another about which acronym was a government agency or not and of course it turned out that you were right and she didn't know what she was talking about but this ties into that right and this is like more revelations about the

massive and impressive censorship industrial complex right yeah so after the Twitter files you know I invested a whole bunch of money and sending foil letters out

really to every you know public university that has anything to do with the anti-disinformation complex that's what they call it right it's really censorship studies is what it is but you know a lot of these universities are doing this kind of work and there are a number of them in particular that were involved with um what you were talking about the election integrity partnership which was the big kind of cross-platform review of posts heading into the 2020 election. It was headed by Stanford University, but it also involved the University of Washington, a company called Graphica and some others. So we got a whole bunch of information through the University of Washington voias that we sent there. And there was a lot of really

interesting stuff in there, including what I think is a really key question, which is that they may not really even have a process for determining what is. is and is not disinformation, even though they excessively study it and are constantly identifying things as disinformation, they don't have even a basic process for picking that out, which is really interesting. That came out in some of these letters. Yeah, that's great. So I had imagined that there was a giant pyramid-shaped structure inside the Ministry of Truth, and then like the King of Snopes was at the top, and he was told everybody what was right or not. And you're telling me that's not how it worked? No. So, you know, there are a number of different academic institutions

that were involved in this effort. And it's still kind of mysterious. I mean, I asked them directly, you know, how do you, let me back up. The reason this came, became public is because there is a letter from an attorney that the election integrity partnership had hired to review their final report. And the attorney asks a question. He says, how do the authors of your report determine that a statement is false or disinformation or worthy of a ticket? Is there an articulable standard? And he's doing the same thing that every journalist attorney does. He says, you know, did you check? What was your process for making sure that something, you know, is false or something is true? You need to have one because under the law you can be sued for negligence otherwise.

And so there's this, after he sends that letter, there's correspondence back and forth between these different bodies where they're essentially saying, well, gee, who is in charge of that? And it's not clear. You know, the University of Washington says this was done at Stanford, but then they kind of said after that that, well, not really, I mean, there was a, they do do some kind of post-factum checking where they would get interns to look it up online, but that wasn't how they picked out the topic. So it's kind of fascinating, actually, because it suggests to me that they kind of know what disinformation looks like to them before they even. and research the issue. And that's the really scary part. Yeah, because, of course, they're complete dim wits who don't know about anything other than how to shut up other people, right? If they knew what they were talking about, they'd be doing something else.

Right. And look, it's very easy to identify. I'm sorry to interrupt, but it's just, it's so easy to identify political disinformation because you know what that is. You know what sounds wrong to you if you're in a position of power. And that's, I, I, I've always suspected that that's kind of how they do it, is they just say, well, that sounds wrong. Right. And then they go after that.

Yeah, which makes total sense. And then in the context of all this other brilliant stuff that you wrote, like in your book, Hate Ink, about the different silos of this, that, and the other thing, you have probably worse group thing than ever before, where the kind of what counts is, and as we've seen in practice here, there's reason to doubt some of their, since. But there's also reason to give the benefit of the doubt to a lot of these cooks that, of course, they believe exactly what they're supposed to believe about Russia Gate and Ukraine Gate and vaccines and Ukraine wars and Biden's dementia and every other thing. And so they know that anything that disagrees with the party line is crazy talk. And so what else is there to know? and so therefore what they've actually done for these past years is enforce a bunch of crap and censor the people who were telling the truth debunking it because they're stupid and because they were simple enough to believe this propaganda that was so obviously false to some of the rest of us yeah and all the incentives you know push them in the direction of you know predetermining you know what's going to be a topic for them to call disinformation and not a lot of the stuff that we looked at involve correspondence where they they're all discussing with each other how are we going to pick out narratives for the next election so they're already kind of like determining ahead of time what they think is going to be you know a source of disinformation information in, you know, coming elections before it even happens. So they're talking about places where there's, you know, close elections or where the results don't match the polls or, you know, all sorts of other things, which, you know, as a journalist, that could equally be an indication that there's corruption or a problem, right? But they're only looking for disinformation. So it's very disturbing what they're doing.

Yeah. And then was it the same report? My brain we saw the stuff together these days anymore. But was it the same one that was shown where they were trying to define misinformation and disinformation and couldn't even really be strict about falsity when they talked about that? Yeah. And this is this is crazy too. So the Department of Homeland Security, They have a sub-agency called SISA. CISA had this thing called the MDM Committee, so that's misinformation, disinformation, and mal-information. Now, mal-information, they define that as basically something that is, you know, might be factually true but misleading or, you know, could lead to a wrong conclusion. Disinformation, they define here on paper as false or misleading information intentionally spread for an objective.

And then misinformation is the only thing that is categorically false information. So that means two of the three categories of things that they are calling, you know, some kind of misinformation or disinformation aren't even necessarily untrue. So that could be something like, you know, somebody takes a vaccine and dies of myocarditis. Well, that might have really happened, but it would be misleading because it would lead people to be afraid of a vaccine that they shouldn't be afraid of. And when I had a back and forth with some of these folks about this, it was clear to me that they don't really understand the distinction between false and misleading.

They think it's the same thing. And in journalism, it's, you know, there's a huge, big, bright line there, right? You know, false is false and misleading is kind of, you know, in the eye of the beholder. And that's why these people are so dangerous. And look, Matt, I don't know how long ago I learned this. But when I was very young, I remember, or very young, whatever, teenager or 20s or something, defining misinformation, disinformation, my own mind, at least. I think I learned it from somewhere else. Like, these words already had, you know, definitions that people understood.

Misinformation was like a common misunderstanding kind of thing that possibly was a mistake in the first place that people think but ain't right. Whereas disinformation is when somebody's deliberately lying and putting out a story about something that's not true. So now they've switched those and added new ones and done whatever they want with it. Right. Yeah. And disinformation actually comes from a Russian word. It came from a Soviet term desinformatia, which has a very concrete connotation of it's like an operation. It's something that spies do, you know, to plant a false. story to get you people to believe the wrong thing now what's so interesting to me is that they took that that word that very strong word disinformation something that's like not only untrue but maliciously spread right that was the idea that's been the idea for 70 80 years they now are

adding this new idea that it well it may be it's just misleading information and the reason i think they need to do that is because you know now they can include things like derogatory information about hunter Biden for instance right so that might be true or there might be elements of that story that are true but let's you foreign powers might want to spread it anyway and which is what governments have always done right they've always spread derogatory information about each other but we never called it disinformation before. Now we are. And the problem with that is that now that can be, you know,

a reason for something to be bounced from the Internet or deamplified. Yeah, exactly. Exactly, because that's the disinformation itself, is essentially lying about everybody who didn't do anything. Like you were saying, Hamilton's 68, everybody I don't like is a Russian agent and telling the media that and the media believing them every time. even though it was Bill Crystal's group that sponsored the thing,

the guy that lied us into war with Iraq, the very same individual guy who was in charge of lying us into war. They're like, oh, yeah, that guy. I bet he's telling the truth this time. He's a solid gold source, that guy, right? Yeah, no, that's the crystal. The irony of this whole thing is that, and as you say, giving them the benefit of the doubt,

I don't even think they're aware of it. the that they know i don't think genuinely the that they see that they're actually creating disinformation or misinformation when they do a lot of this stuff um they've they've convinced themselves that this is a righteous objective and that there's such a thing for instance as political truth um as opposed to like objective or journalistic truth and that's why you know them meddling in this world is so crazy. Yeah, seriously. Well, and speaking, as one of the censored,

you know, anti-war.com got thrown in and apparently the Libertarian Institute as well, based on my Google results, have been censored based on this smear that somehow we're representing anybody else's interests. And where did that come from?

It was that little weasel, Michael Weiss, who's from the Atlantic Council that's funded by foreign powers, smearing and lying. He was proper. or not, smearing and lying about every one of his journalistic betters and calling us Russian agents and then Google itself, which is like the king of the internet, the 800 trillion-ton gorilla of internet search decided that, oh, I guess Michael Weiss knows what he's talking about,

so people don't get to look at anti-war.com and their results anymore. That's crazy, man. That's so infuriating. Yeah. And the Atlantic Council was one of the of the main one of the four partners of this election integrity partnership so that should tell you um you know another thing about how much they should they should be trusted you know that proper not that was like the first story that led me personally down this trail because all right i'm sure you remember that was that was based on them in late 2016 uh where they you know there was a whole story about alternative media outlets that were like in sync with russia

and there was there was no evidentiary standard whatsoever it was like somebody sitting in a room making the stuff up and as you say that can translate pretty quickly into really being demarited in something like the google search engine and will have a direct impact on your ability to make money i mean this was a complaint uh believe you don't have the world's Socialist website did a lot of research on this and did a quantitative analysis of what happened when they kind of redesigned Google after Trump's election. And yeah, a lot of alternative sites on both sides of the aisle got massively deamplified. Yep, exactly right. I got a whole section on that in the new book. You're heavily featured all throughout the book, but especially,

of course, in the Russia Gate section and which this censorship, you know, is a huge part of. The Russiagate scandal, of course. Oh, good. I'm glad to hear it. Yeah, well. But yeah, and as long as I'm accusing Michael Weiss, I'll go ahead and accuse him of high treason, and all of his material support for al-Qaeda in Syria for all of those years.

It's the worst traitor to America since Benedict Arnold. And I'll also cite my source, which is on the proper knot thing, which is Yvese Smith, if that's how you say it, from naked capitalism, ran sophisticated tools on the site and found where the proper night site was ultimately sourced back to his project that's how she did it okay interesting yeah i didn't know that um yeah she she does great work and and those proper not folks you know they've been pretty dogged even though they haven't been in the limelight uh since early 2017 late 2016 i i heard during the twitter

files that they were they were still influential with a lot of people in this world so yeah it's a thing man it's just incredible it's you know after all this time that they still carry that way that they didn't have to revise after the miller report came out or whatever they didn't have to revise any of that they just left it on that they were right all along mode uh instead of having to ever fess up. Because, hey, the interns checked it on Google. So, you know, by circular Google reasoning, that proves the point, you know? Right, right. And look, not to be too dramatic about this, but if you look at what's going on in the UK right now, obviously, you know, the violence there is a terrible thing, but they're moving forward with this program.

of arresting people on the basis of statements made online, and they're applying, you know, an extremely subjective criterion for what's false or what's inciting, and, you know, it's moving the entire world in this direction of criminalizing misinformation, which is, I think, the ultimate end goal of a lot of this stuff, and it's a scary moment. I guess it's what I'm trying to say. Yeah. Hey, you guys, coming up this October 7th through the 11th, join Miguel Thorup, host of the Expat Money podcast, the heroic Ron Paul, the great Tom Woods, Doug Casey, Mark Faber, Tom Luongo, myself, and many other great speakers for the online expat money summit, 2004.

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starring Academy Award winner Olivia Coleman, Academy Award nominee Benedict Cumberbatch, Andy Sandberg, Kate McKinnon, and Allison Janney. A hilarious new comedy filled with Dream. drama, excitement, and a little bit of hatred, proving that marriage isn't always a bed of roses. See The Roses, only in theaters, August 29th. Get tickets now. Well, Dave Smith was on the Tucker Carlson show, and, like, at one point, he started basically talking straight to Trump and was like, listen, man, run on censorship. This is the thing. They want to crush free speech. You're its last chance. Go out there and say that. you know go out there and threaten Google they better quit it and it worked for Zuckerberg right

he if i remember this right from three weeks ago and i admit i got what joe biden's got so correct me if i got a story wrong here trump said oh that Zuckerberg i'm putting him in prison and then the next day Zuckerberg unscrewed all of the censorship of trump and his game on twitter his campaign and whatever else on there and so said, you know what, on second thought, I think it's about time we give his Facebook results a fair shot. Right, right. Yeah, I mean, I do remember that he was taken off. And it's still amazing that that happened. I mean, you know, that all these different platforms kind of decided based on what exactly that they were going to remove, you know, somebody who was still the

President of the United States from communicating on internet platforms. And even Bernie Sanders thought that was crazy. You know, the only people who think this is normal is this very narrow slice of the Democratic Party. Well, actually, that's not true. There are people in the national security world on the Republican side who also like these tools. They just want to use them in a different direction. but you know this this stuff is um it's it's designed uh to be applied against the general population in protection of a relatively small group of people and that's that's what's so scary

about it yeah seriously all right so uh last topic here uh new muller report stuff and this is way in the weeds but um i like it and i need to understand it as good as i can it's really really complicated stuff. It goes to the sourcing for the FBI attribution of the hack of the DNC and the Podesta emails to Russia and how it wasn't just crowd strike. It was other people that we already know about, but we didn't know we're involved in this. Is that right? Yeah. So if you remember when there was the Durham investigation,

and then it came out that, remember that crazy story about Trump and Alpha Capital or the Alpha Bank communicating by virtue of some crazy server? This was one of the few Russiaget stories that came out before the election. It came out in Slate.com and then it had a resurgence after he got elected. as well the Clinton campaign went to the authorities to try to get them to investigate this whole thing and then it turned out you know there was a lot of evidence that the story was basically sourced to these researchers at Georgia Tech who were doing work on who are also on on a contract for DARPA which is the It's a Pentagon Research Agency, you know, that it's famously responsible for all sorts of exotic military inventions, but also the Internet, right?

Like, they're a sort of high-tech agency. Anyway, we've been told forever that it was Crowdstrike. It was this private company CrowdStrike that identified Russia as being responsible for the hack of the DNA. in 2016, but we turned up emails from FOIA results that suggest that it was actually these Georgia Tech researchers and DARPA played some kind of role in the attribution as well and may not have been entirely forthcoming about that to Congress, which is interesting. Yeah, that was going to ask my question. This isn't in any of those transcripts because I read a bunch of them and I don't remember

this part but it was not in there huh no and again DARPA so there were a couple of senators took an interest in this whole thing afterwards one of them being Chuck Grassley of Iowa and sort of wrote to the Pentagon and said hey what's going on were you got were you guys behind you know this whole hack and attribution and they sent him a letter back saying no we did a retrospective analysis, you know, we were, you know, we didn't have any, you know, we didn't fund any of that research, blah, blah, blah. And then it turns out that, you know, we got these emails from a person in the National Security Division to the Georgia Tech folks saying, you know, hey, we're particularly interested

in the DC League stuff, we'd like to get more. So that kind of suggests that, you know, the DARPA was actually involved in this whole thing. It's very complicated, it's very weedsy, and it's not going to make a ton of sense to people who didn't follow this story a lot. But basically, we were told that story about Crowdstrike doing all the identification,

and now it looks like there was a group that was sort of connected to both the Pentagon, and Hillary Clinton that did the research. So that's kind of your 30,000-foot view of the whole thing. Right. Well, yeah. So two important things there. Well, the big one being the connection to Hillary Clinton.

The Georgia Tech team is not DARPA. Now, I don't know. I guess they're also DARPA contractors, but then they were hired by Perkins Coy, correct? Yeah. Or Perkins Coy sort of liased with them through somebody else and took their research to, you know, to the FBI and also shopped around that alpha capital story.

But didn't hire them, you're saying the Clinton campaign didn't hire them to find this stuff in the first place, that they, or what? Well, the hiring part of it is kind of, that's a little mysterious to me. They had this connection to this research through a company, called New Star and this guy Rodney Jaffe and all that is complicated. But here's what you need to know is that the Georgia Tech team had a very strong connection

to Perkins Coe, to the lawyers who worked for the Clinton campaign, and that the Clinton campaign was using their research and going around the hill to try to drum up investigations based on it. Yeah. Well, and this is huge because this is the other huge part is these stories are completely bogus. It's not just the Alpha Bank, which, as he said, the story's completely nuts that Trump had a secret server

secretly communicating with this Russian bank. And this is how he was getting all of his secret mentor and candidate spy orders to overthrow the American Republic and finally sneaky coup d'etat was through the secret server. That's the key. everybody understands that that was how they did it was through the secret server for the people who believed it was huge and but then and it was total crap but then also was the yada phones and the just whatever other web traffic i think are distinct stories if i kind of have it right these were all pushed by this same georgia tech team and none of them held up and then you're telling me these same people are involved in the attribution of the hack as well yeah so this story again yeah came out in slate the headline for it was was a trump server communicating with russia and it was the the author was a guy named franklin foyer um and it's it's one of those stories that's

that's so dumb that even critiquing it makes you look stupid right because it's it sounds conspiratorial to even talk about it but they publish this stuff there a lot of people ran with this story and the essence of it, it was like beyond silly. The whole idea was that there was these two servers were somehow speaking in some kind of beep beeping secret computer language and communicating spy codes to each other, why they couldn't just pick up on the phone and talk. It's not clear or meet or whatever it was if they were actually having some kind of conversation. but this got out there and it was it was essentially a spoofed story right like somebody conned a bunch of

reporters into saying oh my god this this computer research demonstrates that there's traffic back and forth between Trump and this Russian bank in fact it's really easy to generate something that looks like that right and it the same researchers who produce the wrong materials for that seem to have had a hand in producing the attribution for that said that the Democratic Party DNC was hacked by Russia and that is deeply disturbing right you can't have somebody who is involved in a ridiculous journalistic hoax being responsible for essentially the the kickoff of Russia Gate right so it it's a crazy story we you know the the frustrating part about this is that we get it in little bits and pieces through these

emails and you know it's like one inch of the time you move it forward but you know this communication between one of the Mueller investigators and these folks at Georgia Tech asking about about the hack is is significant evidence that you know it's on the right track right that that we're on to something here and And that's just really crazy. Like so many things involved with resurgated, it just sounds too silly to be true, but it is. It looks like.

Yeah. Well, and this is what's so great about it, right? Is if you doubt this story, you're the kook. Because what are you saying that the CIA and the FBI counterintelligence division and the Department of Justice and the former director of the FBI and the leaders of the Democratic Party and the Hillary Clinton campaign and all their friends in the media, conspired for three straight years to push a giant lie? That's crazy, Matt. How could you think such a thing?

Well, right. I mean, I remember I had a group phone call, believe it or not, between me and a bunch of other reporters who had worked in Russia after one of the early Russiagate stories broke. And we were all kind of talking to each other about, well, could this be true? And our conclusion, right away was this is either the biggest intelligence story of all time in other words you know that Putin had successfully planted a Manchurian candidate in the white house or it's the biggest you know hoax of all time you know by like a factor of a million and there's no in between it it has it has to be one of those two things which meant that you know as journalists it was going to be a very difficult thing to deal with one either way right I mean, you know, convincing your audience that it's not true is going to be just as hard as convincing them that it is true.

So, yeah, it's nuts. Yeah. And just like always, there's no accountability whatsoever. I mean, just like we're joking about with Crystal there, but the same with all of them. These are all the same cooks who were all wrong about Iraq and Libya and Syria before they had a chance to be bad on Russia Gate and then Ukraine war and the rest. Yeah, right. no there's there's no accountability that's all kind of past now i mean i think the only thing you could maybe theoretically you know hope for but you know that it would only come in

conjunction with trump being elected um is that there would be some kind of you know retrospective investigation of say the spying on the trump campaign in 2016 or the faking of the intelligence community assessment or this stuff right like faking the hack i mean but you know it would be so hard to even figure out how to prosecute that because it's it's not on the books there's nothing on the books that says make up a gigantic lie and move the entire uh enforcement apparatus in that direction for three years i mean how how would you prosecute that it's just so crazy yeah i mean and you can tell in the durham report which i recommend everybody read i mean it's a government report but it's a fascinating story it's the investigation into the

investigation and how it all started and he comes up against solid granite walls over and over again when it comes to accountability for comie or any of his chiefs he's not even allowed to talk to them you know right right yeah and and hoping to get the national media involved with it is equally, you know, equally a hopeless task, because they're never going to go there. They've already declared them. They actually have as much to lose as the guilty parties and the stories. So they're not going to walk this stuff back either unless there's like a total overthrow of all three networks.

So it's an unprecedented kind of story. Yeah. You know, I can't get over the Ray McGovern counterfactual here from very early on in the thing. He recognized he's a former CIA. Soviet analyst, as you know, I'm sure. Yep. texting yesterday with him.

Oh, there you go. And he had said that, look, the solution to this, obviously, since the investigation is the persecution here, what he should do is he should do a massive Saturday night massacre and fire everyone at the top of justice, FBI, and the Mueller investigation. All of them were completely fired. But in the same speech where he announces that, he announced that he's declassifying everything. that FBI, justice, CIA, and NSA have on him and his team, everything, and he wants it all delivered in triplicate in U-Haul trucks over to the Washington Post, the New York Times National Public Radio, and the Wall Street Journal, and then do your worst, you sons of bitches, and just see what they can find, because he already knows there's nothing in there. As we talked about before,

it's in the Bob Woodward book. He had instructed his lawyer Dowd to give Mueller everything. don't fight him on anything I don't give a damn and they did they gave him literally they drove a rented truck full of documents over there with everything

because Trump knew he was innocent because he was because the whole thing was stupid and so he should have just went with that but he didn't he let them just completely pummel the crap out of him for the first two years of his presidency with this thing and I know it would have been a huge controversy

but then if he'd just given all the documents to the New York Times they could hardly cry about that you know and to congress you know they would have i mean they they would have found some way to make something horrible out of it but but for sure yeah he should have done that i mean they frankly when the the first day that the intel chiefs came to him with the you know the steel dossier stuff and um you know tried to tell him that he was going to be blackmailed by putin he should have fired all of those guys i mean he wasn't even in office yet unfortunately but yeah i agree with you i

think that would have been the move and i think ray's definitely right there yeah and especially like it would be fitting with his character too that like i'm not going to let you do this to me but he didn't know what to do and he didn't have good advice and they ran that banon was the only one who cared about him i guess i don't know if that's even true the only one who gave him any kind of real advice from his own point of view anyway maybe you know what i mean um yeah and they got rid of him quick yeah the only people who in his circle who had any experience with this kind of thing were Flynn and maybe Bannon right um you know Bannon just had the correct instinct I think in terms of this stuff but yeah knowing how to deal with these kinds of creatures in Washington it's

I think it's an art you know you have to be like a certain kind of crocodile to know how to swim with these folks and yeah uh he didn't uh that was that was a major flaw of his presidency i think yeah yeah that's a great way to say i remember thinking you know there'd be just an incredible piece by aaron mtay in the nation magazine you know i'm paraphrasing titled trump acquitted this is a bunch of crap by aran mtay and then it would have just this is not true none of it is true look everybody line by line by line by line can't you see they're just framing them and trump couldn't make the most of that his staff couldn't tell him that hope hicks or whoever could not tell him look boss the liberal magazine says it's not true tweet that out make the hay out of that

like look even the nation delved into this and showed that it's not true he could have made major how to that didn't even occur to him or a single person who worked for him apparently and he blew opportunities like that over and over again you know yeah yeah and it's it seemed that he was afraid of the intelligence services which he probably should be um but uh um the problem is i'm not sure that he's past that fear of them so yeah um you know that that's that's a concern if he gets elected again he's he's got to get over that and find a way to, you know, counter these kinds of things. Yeah.

All right. I'm sorry. I kept you over time. Can I ask you one more thing real quick? Yeah, of course. Are you having fun with this Kamala Harris craziness or what, man? I think it's an amazing story. I mean, the really amazing story of thing with Kamala is the complete acceptance of

Democratic Party voters with a process that, didn't involve them at all. You know, there's so many different things that happen now in America where they just kind of float by without comment by, you know, the entire national media complex. We had a completely crooked primary season where, you know, we had primaries in places like Florida and, you know, North Carolina, where there was no choice at all, Massachusetts, New Hampshire had a real election replaced by a fake nominating event. And then when the candidate, you know, gets to the point of where he's going to be nominated,

they just suddenly decided, no, we're going to get rid of him and put in this other person who unilaterally declares on television that she's the new nominee. Like how? Don't we need to go to convention first? I mean, this stuff is all crazy. They're not even telling us what the process is. And even weirder than that, there are no questions about it. So I don't know.

And then, of course, there's humor just in her whole attitude to everything anyway. But yeah, for me, it's that whole thing. It's the way that we just bypass voters and nobody cares. Yeah, man. And like, seeing people at the crowds, you know, I don't watch much TV, but I've seen some clips on the Internet. stuff of people out there supporting her and it's like, yeah, they're

going for it. Just like, I guess we're blaming Saddam Hussein for 9-11 now, okay, I don't know if you say so. They just go from Biden. There's nothing wrong with Biden at all. And she's leading the chorus on that, by the way, telling me, no, I'm with this guy all the time. He's perfectly fine. I don't know what you're talking

about. Oh, yeah, no, he's too insane to run. Obviously, he can't win because nobody believes in his leadership. So, then they give it to her when everybody already knows about her

that she knows nothing about anything and then they just pretend just like they just finished doing with Biden no she's great everybody loves her and they're not even bothering

with sharp as attack I guess they don't have to bother nobody cares if she I mean can you imagine her sitting at the oval office at the giant desk actually being the one in the chair making the call

on what we should do I guess she's just going to keep blinking and Sullivan and it'll just be more the same but like I don't know well at least we would have no you know we would know whom to blame um for things that go wrong I mean I right now we don't know who the president of the United States is I mean the country has no idea it's clearly not Joe Biden if the missiles fly who who's going to make the decision with the nuclear football like this stuff is all we're in this weird uncharted territory and you know as for the her crowds i get the fact that there are people out there who hate don't trump and will cheer for

anybody who's his opposition that part makes absolute sense to me it's the stuff where you know two days ago um we had to believe that biden was the candidate because uh you know Kamala was so guaranteed to lose because she was so demonstrably a bad candidate in 2020. So we're going to all claim that Biden is totally healthy. And then 24 hours later, saying the exact opposite, people make that psychological switch just effortlessly now. And I just don't know how they do it. I know. It is embarrassing. And I agree with you that. I've always sympathized with any liberals who reject the right, and vice versa, too. Like, I could see the problems with the other side that makes you choose the side that you choose.

That's fair enough, but to believe in Kamala Harris? And come on, man. And I'm not, like, being sexist and racist about it. There could be a woman of any whatever who could do the job, but not. Even the evil job of Empress of the world. Fine. But she can't, you know? Like, I could see her maybe running a J.C. Penny's or a grocery store or something like that, you know.

Well, she's certainly, she certainly really struggled as a national candidate in 2020. I mean, I saw her on the stump a bunch of times. I'm not going to lie and say it was 10, but I probably saw her four or five times. And, you know, it was, it was like the moon to her, you know, campaigning to crowds that she wasn't used to. you know she seems to have gotten a little bit better at it on TV but the fact that she's not answering questions or doing press conferences tells you that they don't really know what she stands for and that wasn't that was a big part of her problem in 2020 was that there was no discernible message from her campaign yeah and um so yeah you know i guess we'll find out but you know we'll see it's funny matt is

people compare her to that show Veep but that does sound just like a sitcom scene where they make the decision that like, well, I know would just not answer any questions at all but we'd just stick with that, you know? And then that works. That's the real world we live in. I mean, not to joke about it,

but there was a book about Hillary's campaign after 2016 where there was a scene with a bunch of of Hillary staffers where they were trying to come up with a slogan for her and couldn't

because they didn't know what she stood for and they experimented with it's her turn because it's her turn and they realized that was a bad idea I mean like that's the

it's the stuff out of as you say it's like an HBO comedy but it's now real life so and true like even then they they settled on we're for her

when all they had to do is just make it say she's for us right right it's all you had to do is just pretend it's not like we believe you anyway but like you can at least say it's not though like we owe it to her

okay good luck I know well that tells you a lot about you know where their heads are at so but it does make sense to me where Biden had two really big things really hurting him one he's too old

for this in a way that is just so vivid to even the most disconnected person, you know, to just see him on TV, much less like political people who really do know about this stuff. But then also the horrific slaughter in Gaza for this last year,

which you can credibly argue is not really her fault. It's not like she's Dick Cheney and Scooter Libby over there running things in the vice president's office, like in the bad old days of W. Bush or something. She doesn't have power to decide these things and nobody thinks that she does so it's not being really hung around her neck and people i guess even people who are mad at the the current government for it uh are like

giving her the benefit of the doubt that she she couldn't possibly be worse than trump on that particular issue it's the thing that he's the worst on out of everything is israel palestine and so they're willing to not hang that around her neck and not really put her feet to the fire and force her to contradict Biden and get herself in trouble before the election and stuff. And so then what do they got? Like, apparently they don't mind that she's completely vapid. They just fill in the blank with whatever they imagine. And but the two big negatives that really were hurting Biden are gone.

And when it comes to the Republicans making such a big deal about how old Biden was, well, now who's the old man and who, like, stumbles over his words and gets confused and whatever, even compared to her, even though she's a dummy, she's still half his age. And so, like, it's amazing to see, but the way the stars line up, there you go. She's at 50-50. They have her ahead in some of the polls. Yeah, and assuming those are true, I mean, it's an amazing story. And it's going to validate this idea that we don't need voters, so.

Yeah, exactly. We just let the Atlantic Council decide. Right, right. Yeah. Great. Okay. Great. Well, listen, man, keep doing all your great journalism. I'll keep reading it and interviewing you about it. Awesome. Thanks a lot, Scott. Don't you soon. Thank you so much, Steve. Bye-bye. All right, you guys. That's a great Matt Tauibi.

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.