Scott Horton Show - Just the Interviews - 8/8/25 Matt Taibbi on the Damning New Details about Russiagate

Episode Date: August 12, 2025

Matt Taibbi returns to the show to run through some of the new information we’ve learned about the origins of Russiagate.  Discussed on the show: “No Doubt Left: Russiagate Was a Cover-Up�� (Racket News) Scott’s interview with Jeffrey Carr 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 Roberts Brokerage Incorporated; Moon Does Artisan Coffee; 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, and author of Provote, how Washington started the new Cold War with Russia and the catastrophe in Ukraine. Sign up for the podcast feed at Scotthorton.org or Scott Horton Show.com. I've got more than 6,000 interviews in the archive. for you there going back to 2003 and follow me on all the video sites and x at scott horton show all right everybody it's matt taibi from racket dot news and uh of course wrote a bunch of great books including hate ink and a great anti-russia gator in a week or month of russia gate news here

exciting stuff welcome back to the show how you doing matt good scott how are you doing really good man great to have you here um i've been way behind on this I've been putting it off, and then I put it off too long. I only got about two-thirds of the way through the House investigation of the ICA this morning. And I haven't even gotten to the declassified annex to the Durham report, which is my favorite government report of all. So you're going to help me because I know you already did the work. You're the expert on this stuff, but go ahead. You're going to catch me up here.

First of all, can we start with the ICA? everybody if you don't know get the book and read up and catch up but in right before trump what one week before trump was inaugurated in january of 2017 they put out this sort of pseudo national intelligence estimate saying that the russians had rigged the election for trump and it was clapper and brennan and all them who did it and of course we know they excluded the dia and the bureau of intelligence and research over at state who obviously would have known better and Handpicked, I think was Brennan's own words for the people who wrote the report. So we already knew, you know, how rigged the whole thing was.

But now we found out much more about the background to essentially the excuses they hid behind to come up with this assessment. So can you full us in on that part first here? The excuses they came up with to... Oh, and that, well, where they said that, you know, essentially on the conclusion that Putin had chosen Trump and preferred him and wanted him to win. and this is how they knew. So you just referenced all the different agencies that were left out. It's incredible how this story has fallen away over time. We remember that before the election, it was a unanimous conclusion of 17 different intelligence agencies.

Then later, there was a correction. Then it was four, right? It was the DNI, CIA, FBI, and NSA. Then, of course, we learned that really was only three that were involved in the writing. You know, you can exclude the DNI's office with that. And then finally, now with this new report, this newly released HIPSA report, it turns out that the entire thing was written by five hand-picked CIA analysts, two of whom vehemently objected to the key evidence in the document and all of whom apparently

objected to a couple of the most important elements. So when you get right down to it, it's not even, it's not 17 agencies, it's not even three or four, it's not even one, it's really just John Brennan. Yeah. That's what it comes down to. Yeah, it's not even the CIA. It was just Brennan overruling his own guys throughout the thing, huh? I mean, it's breathtaking because, I mean, I don't know about you, Scott.

Like, you followed this. There's a handful of people who followed this story from the start. And probably most of us expected that there might be something in the report of substance that would point in the direction of Trump tried to help. I'm sorry, that Putin tried to help Trump win the election. And there's literally nothing in there, like not a thing. And I was shocked when I read it. Yeah. I mean, look, the core of the thing had always been the DNC hack.

You know, you talk about Facebook ads, and you talk about Carter Page and Steele dossier and all of these things. But everybody knows they hacked the DNC. But I had the computer security expert, Jeffrey Carr, on my show on April Glaspby Day, July 25th of January, of, of 2016, which is, I believe, four days. three or four days before the launch crossfire hurricane and yeah and it was three days after the leak right yeah so so car no no no that would no the the leak i believe was in late june right for the first posting that well there was one on the 22nd i think of july but anyway go yeah no i guess you're i guess you're right about that i had thought i always get this wrong you're right about crossfire hurricane it's definitely july 31st yeah but no even

on the Jeffrey Carr thing because I remember thinking, geez, when I looked back at it, oh, it took me a couple weeks to get him on after his first articles about it, which I hadn't remembered it that way. But maybe I was confused then. And I'm just remembering it, or I'm remembering it wrong now. Anyway, it was as soon as I could get him on. Anyway, I'm sorry. It was, but it was, it was July the 25th, the anniversary of the day April Glassby told Saddam Hussein to go ahead and invade the Northern Oilfields of Kuwait if he felt like it. And Jeffrey Carr goes, look, man, no group of experts anywhere in the world, anywhere in the federal government or anywhere else, can examine a server and tell you who broke into it. Because it's just too easy to leave false fingerprints and no way to really prove it.

You can just estimate and make a best guess. But like a real fingerprint is way more convincing if you have at least a few different people look at it or something. You know what I mean? But you just can not do that with a computer. And he says, on the contrary, though, assuming it was done over the Internet, there's one group of people in the world who can tell you exactly who did it. And that would be a national security agency. And they can tell you with 100% confidence what happened because they can rewind the whole Internet.

And they can watch where every packet came from and went and who did it and what. And they can follow it through 100 VPNs to back where it goes and the rest, right? like God overlooking the entire internet with full transparency. And then they're not standing behind this and they never were. Yeah, what a coincidence that they're the only agency that wouldn't bump up from moderate to high confidence in the final report, right? Exactly right. And so that was it. To me, so I never thought that there was anything there.

And I wasn't sure exactly where it started. And this is where actually, so you had a report that came out. I'm going to say like a year and a few months ago, when you had sources who had reviewed maybe the completely declassified version of this report I'm reading today, the House investigation, and it said this started with Brennan asking the five eyes, or at least I'm not exactly sure who all, to have their informants bump into Trump people and try to entrap them in the thing. And this was, I think, very convincingly portrayed then as the origin of what happened to George Poppidopoulos for one thing. And then even Stephen Halper and the Cambridge Four. Butter page, Michael Caputo, Roger Stone. There's a whole bunch. I mean, the number they gave us was 26 people.

Well, wait. So let's stick to for right now, though, before March. because I think we know for a fact that in March, the Clinton campaign decided they were doing this and they went for, they hired Perkins Cooey on April Fool's Day, right? But so before March, in February and in January and then back in December of 15,

this is John Brennan doing this already before Clinton knows. And what all can you tell us about that? And even if that includes Roger Stone and all that, just with the dates, do you remember? Well, that was a little later, that was May when they were, they were approached by this character named Henry Greenberg, aka Henry Okniansky, Caputo and Michael and Roger Stone, and they were offered, they were asked to pay $2 million for information about Hillary Clinton laundering money. But it was essentially the same approach that allegedly Papadopoulos got. And that was in early March, right? right, when,

Miff said, Oh, oh, you mean Papadopoulos, yes. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, I think it was March, you're right. Yep. But, you know, that ain't Hillary Clinton doing that.

This is a whole other operation that she's essentially signed on too, and we know from the great reporting that you published at your site by this guy, Stephen Shrage, about Halper. So tell us who Halper is and then this Cambridge 4 group.

Yeah, so Halper was a a Cambridge academic, and, you know, it's funny, I was just looking back at the old stories about this now, there began to be rumors in the spring of 2018 about the intelligence agency is using informants to do what are called like loyalty checks or bumps on members of the Trump campaign before the Crossfire Hurricane probe, and this was one of the things that came. Cash Patel's team at the House Intelligence Committee was looking at. And if you go back and look, you will see stories remarkably similar to the ones out this week about Tulsi Gabbard claiming, oh, my God, this is sources and methods.

Like, lives will be at stake if any of these names are released. Like, they literally said that. You know, Gina Haspel warned about this. And then it turned out that the informant in question was Stefan Halper, who was outed as a CIA operative in the pages of the New York Times in 1983. So they weren't outing any secret information. There was nothing to hide here. Like it was public knowledge.

And then, you know, it came out. There's an amazing subplot about, first of all, how he was paid. There's like a mail drop that exists. And through the Pentagon, through this thing called the Office of National Assessment, where the way it works is basically you write a crap. research paper that you can even farm out to somebody in India. And then they pay you like a fortune to write it. And that was how Halper got compensated an enormous amount of money, hundreds of thousands of

dollars. But to do what exactly? That still hasn't been fully fleshed out. I mean, I think that's one of the reasons why it's so important to keep doing these probes, but he wasn't the only one. Halper wasn't the only person who did this kind of activity of bumping into Trump people from Carter Page to Stone to Caputo to, you know, I forget who some of the other ones were, I mean, Papadopoulos, obviously. But yeah, I mean, obviously it started before the original

FBI probe. Right. And so, I mean, we knew from all different reporting that MIFShood, the guy who had originally talked to Papadopoulos, was an MI6 asset, not an officer or whatever, but one of their guys. as opposed to any kind of Russian, anything. And so your source, on this article from a year ago, the people that you talked to said that they knew for a fact that this guy was essentially this garbage in for Downer to get the garbage out of Papadopoulos. That was a setup as part of this bump operation

through the Five Eyes, and they knew that that was true, and they were telling you that, right? They didn't give me where exactly MIF Sud came from, and I worked on this with Michael Schellenberger and Alexandra Guten Tag. But they strongly implied it and I think we wrote it, we couched it in some fashion

in the piece, but I mean it sure looked like that, but yeah. So this is the thing, like we don't know about the secret golf trip where Hillary and Brennan really cooked this up back in 15, right? I just made up the golf thing. We don't know where this actually came from, but at this point it looks like

certainly was the director of the CIA who kicked the whole thing off. And we have Hillary's sign, officially we know, the first thing we know of Hillary's signing on would have been three months later, right? Yeah, something like that. And you're right. We don't, we still, it's so frustrating. We still don't know the source of the Nile of the whole thing. Oh, one more thing about that was, didn't you, the way you wrote it, you says, where that Cooke, Luke Harding had written in the Guardian, that it was GCHQ had found out some mystery that we still don't know.

And they tipped off Brennan. But your source said, no, no, no. That was Brennan asked them to pretend to do that for him like as a favor, right? To give him an excuse to start, something like that. Yeah, so Luke Harding and also Jane Meyer in the New Yorker reported essentially the same thing. I think the New Yorker language was that GCHQ had obtained a stream of illicit communications between Russia and Trump and that had asked the CIA to investigate that and that this. This downstream turned into the CIA asking the FBI to investigate. But what we were told is that was the other way around that the CIA went to GCHQ and that the whole thing was kind of a pretense.

So but we still don't know. I mean, we don't know the exact circumstances and that's one of the really frustrating things about this whole story. Now one thing about the house investigation. investigation here. Like, maybe I'm just too biased on this, but it seems like it also is the product of this kind of committee thinking and decision making here in a sense where they say, well, everybody knows that DC leaks and Goethefer 2.0 are, in fact, the Russians. But has anyone ever shown that at all? And as you mentioned, you couldn't get the NSA to vouch for the claim that they did the DNC leak. And we could see. where they were sort of, by my best analysis of the timeline, it looked like Julian Assange said, we're about to publish some things and then they kind of race to get ahead of the story

and pretend that they were the source for the things that he was about to leak, which clearly he had had in his possession for a long time before then. But go ahead. Yeah, well, there's a bunch of things about that, right? Not only did the NSA never sign off on that version of events,

but the CEO of CrowdStrike, you know, later testified that they didn't have any evidence of a hack or an exfiltration taking place, which seemed like pretty significant detail that was left out of all the news reports. So if we don't know that the stuff actually got out from the DNC, and we do know that the CIA and, you know, the rest of the intelligence community came into possession of this enormous quantity of stuff that came from Russia. Right around that same time, like a little bit before, it raises a lot of questions about what exactly was leaked and where it came from. And that, you know, again, we still don't, I still don't know anyway. I don't have a lot of clarity about that. But certainly the new stuff that was released by Durham, you know, from the Dorm report and this new Hipsy report.

Yeah, you're right. It does take a sort of committee approach to those other questions. But I think in their defense, they were focusing on the other issue. Right. Like, so, you know how it is. Like you're trying to sell something that's going to be a tough swallow for the intelligence. intelligence community. So, you know, why ruffle feathers over something else that they're going to raise

hell about when you want to get through this one point? And their one point was that the ICA was, you know, fucked up in the same way the WMD report was, worse even. Yeah. So now, and back on that, again, on the, you talked about how, geez, and I thought that horrible Andrew Kendall Taylor. She was one of them. No, like even she was overridden by Brennan on this thing.

It's just amazing to think. Anyway, so he's the one who started it. Then here he is a year later. He gets his own five handpick people to write the thing. They still won't go along and take his cherry pick garbage. And so he has to overrule them down to the last assertion, essentially in the thing. And it really is garbage, right? It's fun.

And I think, you know, even for people who don't care about this story, but you're just interested in government at all kind of thing. Like, it's interesting to see the absolute, like, 10th grade level of work in all of this stuff. Oh, my God. It's unbelievable. It's a junior high school newspaper. Yeah, yeah, exactly. So, no, but this is the intelligence assessment. Yeah, this is as good as it gets. When the people are telling Obama, this is what's happening in the world today, Mr. President, this is as good as they could do. You know, that's the world we're living in. that's that's really what it is it's it's as it's as dumb as you can possibly imagine and but they you know it's it comes with the imprimatur of the central intelligence agency you know so but yeah it's

unbelievable how bad it is like you know we have this word in journalism steading which is when you write something the fact checkers kill it uh and an editor says no let's put it in right that's That's called steading, right? Like when you take a disputed or troubled passage and you stick it in over objections. And Brennan steaded all of the key intelligence. So there were four pieces of intelligence supporting the main claims, which were that Russia aspired to help Donald Trump out of a, quote, clear preference for Trump. And each of those four elements were, were steaded. And then so I had the list.

This is what I was actually did have a chance to read up on today where there was a thing from right before the convention where supposedly Putin had said that he was counting on Trump to win. And then we'll go ahead. Well, okay. So this is amazing. You remember the story about the exfiltrated spy who. made his way to America.

So the entire basis of the claim that Putin, quote, aspired to help Donald Trump, specifically to help Trump, not that there was meddling, not that there was interference, none of that stuff, but that specifically to help Trump, aspired, the one citation for that is a fragment of a sentence that comes

from a human source who spoke directly to John Brennan, and Brennan never wrote the quote down. He briefed everybody orally on what was said. And the fragment that they were hanging this on, the line was Putin was counting on Trump to win. And it's a subordinate clause within a larger sentence that says something about the expectation that Clinton would win, but Putin is counting on Trump to win. And this was probably that exfiltrated, allegedly exfiltrated spy Alex Malenkov talking to Brennan, but relaying something that he heard from an unknown source.

And it could be opinion, it could be fact, we don't know. But I also know just from Russian that if that came from a Russian source, it's a mistranslation. like that that word counting on means something more like evaluated or calculated than hoping right so but that's the entire thing remember they told us they had all this amazing intelligence that you know highly specific detailed plants even in english that just means expecting right you know like obviously he has something at stake in it that's why counting on rather than just expecting is that because when something happens obviously he has to is going to have to deal with that circumstance where so that's why it's that different kind of turn

phrase it still doesn't imply any control or preference at all right right yeah I mean but in Russian it would be more like you know I count six crumbs on the floor like that's that's the kind of counting you're talking about it's like literal counting yeah but in either way you know it's it's one little line. And it's right before the primary is conclude, right before the convention, right? So it has nothing to do in November. If anything, they're talking about what's going to happen in July. And that's what it says in the report. It says, you know, there were five authors, five people read it five ways. And some of them thought that he was talking about the convention. So, you know, and that's, remember, like, I'm going to just read from a Washington

Post article from 2017, where they described this. They say the intelligence captured Putin's specific instructions on the operations, audacious objectives, defeat or at least damage the Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton and help elect her opponent Donald Trump. So that's what stuff like that was based on it. You know what I'm saying? It was like one half piece of a line in a sentence that was probably mistranslated. Anyway, you get it.

Yeah. And again, as you said, all. five of the people on the cherry-picked little that was his own term was hand-picked right team of people they all disagreed about it so the tie goes to the director of the CIA who gets to interpret it his way in the absolutely worst-case scenario which as they did over and they tried to leave it out too oh they took it out and he put it back in yeah and he put it back in so that's yeah and then Another one was, I don't even understand this, quite frankly. I understand the part about it.

It comes from Ukraine, okay? I'm listening. And then, and I remember where Brennan had said, well, you know, Ukraine is helping us with our Russia investigation into the medley. Oh, good. This must have been what he was referring to there. But this is what they call an empty email. No sender, no addressee. And then, and, and just some plain text in there that they don't know where it was coming from.

And it would, and it said just a fragment about that Rush had a plan for engagement with Trump, which presuming he won, assuming that he would, could win, whatever. And then what I wondered about that was, like, how is it even an email then? You know what I mean? If they actually, if it didn't have an addressee or a sender, what makes it? it not just a dot eML file or whatever you know what i mean like i don't know yeah it's not clear but you if you read the report um it it doesn't say it it strongly implies that this came from ukraine and the actual text was an alleged russian proposal to stick a um a person in the Trump campaign, and there were objections to this because, you know, why would Trump put an

obviously pro-Kremlin person in his campaign? Like that, and so the implication, I think, is that there was a, you know, possibly Ukraine cooks up a phony Russian proposal to insert somebody in the Trump campaign and then delivers that to some source who delivers a to the CIA, and that in turn works its way into this report. But you can see how there are so many different layers of, I don't know, in that. And it just smells bad to begin with, which is why the CIA, when they first got this thing, they discarded it. They didn't even accept it as a report when they originally got it in February of 2016.

So Brennan had to pull this out of the trash, this email with no address or send. and I don't know how they know what's an email. And that became part of the case. Yeah, it was completely ridiculous that they're able to get away with that. And by the way, when you say strongly implied is from Ukraine, yeah, the source is redacted out with a black magic marker. But then two bullet points later, the Ukrainians had a severe interest in doing this. Like, okay, Cash, I read you a loud and clear, buddy. Thank you. Right, right.

I like first time I ever referred to an FBI director's buddy before okay what a world and then the other one was a TV host said yeah they should work together it's you know obviously a joke there and then there was a whole thing a long long thing about the russians obvious preference for Hillary Clinton all being omitted or their ambivalence and even Putin's and I think they had an actual source for this one that said that Putin was very ambivalent about it and they ignored all of that. So to me, Scott, this is the most amazing thing in the report because my first reaction reading it was, wow, like the CIA really doesn't have a whole lot of good sources on what

goes on in Russia. They're using all this like third and fourth hand stuff, fragments of things, like little bits of intercepted whatever. And then, you know, in the middle of the report, it's almost like bathed and shimmering light for me as a reporter because when you see like a good source, it stands out. They have what they call significant intelligence from a quote confidant of Putin who's relaying a direct quote from the president of Russia. And Putin is saying things like, I don't care who wins. and he's listing the faults of both candidates. And then most importantly, because this is repeated multiple times from other sources,

that Putin says, we don't expect that relations with the United States are going to improve either way. And no matter who wins, we think we're, quote, well positioned to, quote, outmaneuver the United States. And what's significant about that, Scott, is that, a lot of different sources seem to get that same picture from somewhere, right? But you suppress the actual direct quote from the president, and you put in all this other crap, and that tells you a lot about what this thing was. Hey, all, if you run a business or a side hustle

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Get to Scott Horton's show blend. Just click the link in the right-hand margin at Scott Horton.org. It made sense, as Ray McGovern said, he was the long retired, but the former chief of the CIA's Soviet Union analysts back in the battle days. And he just said, look, just on the face of it,

let me just tell you, the Russians prefer stability. And they know good old Bill Clinton's wife down to her bones, dude, right? They know everything about what she is going to say next. Whereas with Donald Trump, he's at least some kind of wild card. But then, and the default is, and as the CIA's intelligence said, the Russians, they had intercepted this Russian assessment that said, you know, the Republicans really are usually more hawkish against us. And so if Trump wins, that's going to help the Republicans keep control of the Congress. and they're going to stay in the hands of anti-Russia Hawks

and Trump's administration is going to be staffed by these guys and so even if you know there was any wiggle room there it's going to be all taken up by the permanent government which is of course exactly what happened is they themselves told the New York Times Trump is like the captain of a ship his hands are on the wheel but it's not attached to anything right because they have their own Russia policy and they'll impeach him if he tries to change it actually and so Yeah, and what you said about Hillary, you know, that's what Schellenberger and I heard last year, like the quotes that we got were there were analysts taking Russian assessments saying that Hillary Clinton is a presidency of Hillary Clinton would be manageable and reflect continuity, right?

Like that was that was one of the things they kept out of the report. And it makes all the sense in the world, right? Like, if you talk to people who didn't work on the report but were still sovietologists or former intelligence experts like Ray, right, they would all say the same thing. The Russians probably felt like they, you know, they know how to do a Clinton presidency. A Trump presidency, you know, who knows with this guy, right? you can imagine them not being too stoked about it so it makes a lot of sense yeah yep um all right now let me check my notes and make sure because i got so many things i want to make sure

and not skip and i just realize we're only a half an hour into this thing we've covered so much ground already um but rather than letting everybody go i want to ask you more stuff um the uh the Durham report so this is John Durham was the guy who was appointed to investigate the origins of Russiagate it's clear though from the report that he did

release as much as is just absolutely outrageous to read it that it's clear that he had very limited access he never got a chance to demand a interview with Jim Comey or any of the top executives at the FBI you know, to cross-examine them about why they made the decisions that they made. He also didn't interview key people like Jake Sullivan until after the election in 2020.

Oh, okay, yeah. Oh, I didn't even realize he did get a chance to interview Jake Sullivan. He does. It's in the report. Okay. That's pretty funny. Yeah. It is an amazing report, though. I really, in fact, I have a grudge against him, Matt, because I had done so much work on my Russia Gates section of my book. which was greatly dependent on you and the guys, of course.

But I had done a lot of work on that thing. And then the Durham report came out. And there was so much of it that superseded what I had already, you know, cobbled together from all of this other stuff. And I was just like, well, I got to delete that paragraph and just replace it with one by this bureaucrat now. Thanks a lot, goon. And he left out the best stuff. Yeah, he did leave out a lot of great stuff.

Well, so first of all, well, tell us what you have in mind there, and then tell us all about this new annex that's been declassified and what all we've learned in there. So the big reveal in the declassified annex to the dorm report, which by the way, as I'm sure you know, like all of Washington has been waiting for this thing to come out for a while now, right? Like the word was, oh, it's going to be today, you know, it was that kind of thing. So it comes out and the big thing in it is that the intelligence community got had a stream of intelligence from a source called T1, which everybody says is Dutch intelligence, but I still have people telling me that that's not the case. But either way, but it's a, it's a, they get all this stuff from from Russia, basically. It's this gigantic quantity of material that the Russians have. And the Russians have somehow obtained just this mountain of correspondence between American officials from all the way up to the office of the President of the United States,

from the State Department, from Congress, from the DNC, and then also from think tanks like the Atlantic Council and the Open Society Foundation. of George Soros, and in those communications, there are rumors, right? So there's allegedly, ostensibly, there's communications back and forth between Debbie Wasserman Schultz, who was then the head of the DNC and a couple of these Open Society Foundation bureaucrats talking about a plan by Hillary Clinton to vilify Donald Trump by tying him to Putin and there are quotes also from other officials saying things like it's going to be a long-term plan to demonize Putin and Trump but what's most noteworthy and

we knew we already knew about that quote-unquote Clinton plan intelligence but the dates here are key because in the annex it tells us that they knew about this stuff as early as January and of 2016. So now we know that the FBI of 16. Right. So instead of, you know, sort of scrambling in the summer of 2016 to make sense of this, actually people like Andrew McCabe were already talking about what this means in March of 2016. And that just completely obliterates the entire official narrative of what Russia Gate is, because now we have to think about, well, how did the FBI not investigate that, A, and then turn that around into an investigation of Donald Trump, knowing that there's something on paper saying that they would do exactly that.

There's only one answer, because it was a criminal conspiracy between John Brennan and Jim Comey to do this. I mean, one would think, right? That that's the only thing that's left is that. But look, it is for a lot of people very confusing because we're talking about a Russian assessment of American correspondence. So Russians talking about rumors, American rumors, and then the FBI responding to those rumors, and then also responding to actual fake intelligence generated by the Clinton campaign. I mean, it gets to be kind of hard after a while.

But the key thing is they knew about this stuff a lot earlier than they said previously and knowing that there was something out there saying that they were going to, there was going to be a conspiracy between Clinton and what they call the special services was to cook up this story about Donald Trump. They went ahead and did it anyway, which is incredibly embarrassing. Man, I mean, Matt, I got to say, and I'm known former FBI agents. I remember I had, I interviewed this guy. If you remember, Frederick Whitehurst, he was the crime lab whistleblower from Waco and Oklahoma

City and I forgot the other one. Good guy. But I also talked to. I'm sorry. Ruby Ridge, maybe? I'm trying to. No. No.

I don't think so. um don't get started on him in oklahoma though boy i started thinking of things to say and i got to stay on subject here i i had a real long conversation with him i remember pacing around my apartment complex parking lot talking him on the phone one time and asking him about and or him just telling me about you know how bad it sucks to be an fbi agent because you do your job and you do your report and then you never get to find out what happened right they assign you you you do real good work and then they reassign you to something else and like great job jenkins but you don't get any satisfaction out of anything that you're doing

because you're just not in charge your own destiny whatsoever. And the bosses, everything is so compartmentalized. And so... That's got to be so frustrating. Yeah, I never thought about that. And you can see in the Durham report how there are a lot of guys doing their job at the FBI who they don't know what the hell is going on.

And they're not... All their communication with their bosses is essentially one way. Right. On the top floor, though, where they do know all the different compartments, and what's going on here. Jim Comey's not confused. They got all this Clinton plan intelligence coming in saying Clinton's cooking up this plan.

I forgot what date it was that they first used the term swift boat. We're going to swift boat Donald Trump with this Russia crap. And then all the Russia crap starts coming in from the Democrats. Jim Comey knows the time exactly. So the entire time he's pretending to investigate, the entire time that he's forbidding his agents from interviewing the people accused, which goes on for months and months and months and months and all of that.

Like this is pure felonious, seditious conspiracy to overthrow the president, man or something, you know, to frame up the presidential candidate at that time anyway. I mean, that is bad, bad, bad.

Yeah, and people are casting aspersions on this and saying, oh, it was made up by Russian spies and everything. Well, Jim Comey didn't think so. You know, it's on record.

It's in the report, by the Justice Inspector General Michael Horowitz that Comey was so worried about this Russian material, this T1 material, that he moved up the date of his announcement about ending the email probe because he was afraid that stuff would come out saying that he was like, because one of the rumors that's in there is that he was being basically bought and controlled by the Clinton campaign. And he said, I didn't want an email coming out and saying that, you know, Comey was run by Loretta Lynch

or whatever it was. So he moves up the date. So he clearly thought this was real. And not only did they not investigate, not only do they not interview any of those folks. They didn't even look at all the stuff officially. So it's not, there's no record anywhere of what all this stuff is.

Right. This is the thumb drives. They have all this stuff on the thumb drives that they got and they don't even want to plug it into the PC and look at what it says on there. And then also we know too, and this is always so fascinating to me, back to the compartmentalization or whatever. It could not

have been John Brennan or if it was, it must have purely been CYA, but he never claimed it. It must have been some lower level guy, but Durham says that there was a criminal referral from the CIA against Hillary Clinton to the Department of Justice. There are crimes

going on here with these dirty tricks against Trump that you guys need to look into based on the Clinton plan intelligence the and now I mean as you said we already knew that they had they that Brennan told Obama even that we know that the Russians know that Hillary's doing this now we know how they knew and that even as you're saying they turned a blind eye to thumb drives full of more data of what they didn't want to know there and amazing it got you got to repeat the fact that it wasn't like a Republican group of investigators who really blew the whistle on this. It's Barack Obama appointed Inspector General of the Justice Department,

Michael Horowitz, who looks at all this stuff, this mid-year exam, you know, the email investigation, and says, you got like eight thumb drives worth of stuff. Why is nobody even looking at it? They're not even looking at it for to see if there's anything cool like intelligence wise in there they came up with all these weird excuses like it's privileged you know and you know it might violate executive or congressional privilege or the speech and debate clause and there's like as you know there's a million ways around that they could you know they could easily have access this stuff and or had a had a third party review it you know and then give the relevant things to to investigators but they they just

just said they kind of just forgot about it like that's some of the excuses it just got away from us i forget with the exact quote it was something like that uh i got away from us i like that so to this day i did not as far as i know there's no written report anywhere of what exactly is in that material except for this duramanics which quotes like a tiny fraction of it yeah man that's something um all right now you know i know you're joking about it earlier that my rush gate section of my book i delineated every single one of those fake claims i could possibly remember because i was terrified that someone said oh yeah well what about this huh and then i would have missed one uh right so but i did

miss at least one a major one and you mentioned his name earlier caputo oh yeah i had totally you know I guess I remember his name coming up in the thing, but I never looked into it, and I do not have a section. It's Mark Caputo, correct? Mike. Mike. Mike. Okay. So, and this came up the other day, too, but in a different context.

But I wanted to go ahead and get this on the record because it's really like, I owe the guy. I feel like, you know, it's a real oversight on my part that he was really omitted from Russia Gate just out of negligence by me. So can you just tell us, like, what they did to him and what role they alleged he played in any nefarious thing or what it was? Yeah, so Michael, by a bizarre coincidence, he's somebody that I knew in Moscow, like over 20 years ago. He worked for IFES, he worked on campaigns basically like a Russian version of the Rock the Vote, the campaign that we sponsored to help get out the vote basically for Yeltsin. but I ran into him many years ago and so

you know in 2016 he's working on some kind of like restaurant deal he lives in Florida hey by the way Matt I'm sorry I just want to get clarification because I don't want anyone to misunderstand your misquote you I want to make sure I didn't either you oftentimes say we when you're talking about journalists

or when you're talking about American policy overall or whatever but you didn't mean to say that you participate in a campaign to help get Yeltsin reelected in 1990. No, no, in fact, that was something I was writing. By we, you met Bill Clinton, right? Right. Yes, okay, I just want to make sure no one misunderstood that. In fact, Michael and I were weren't on the best of terms at that time

because one of the things that I was writing about was, hey, it's a little bit messed up that we're sort of openly meddling in the Russian election. I was really young at the time, but it didn't look very good, right? anyway but I knew him and so he lives in Florida and he gets approached by this bizarre character named Henry Greenberg and it's it's some kind of proposal about a restaurant or a nightclub or something like that and then in the middle of those negotiations out of the blue he says yeah by the way if you give me two million dollars I'll give you information about Hillary Clinton laundering money.

And by then, Caputo was with Roger Stone, with whom he's friends, and they're like, well, how much money are we talking about? And the guy says hundreds of thousands of dollars. And they kind of look at him and they say, well, that's not a whole lot of money. And I think he recalculated and came up with something more impressive. But ultimately, he asked them for $2 million to give them that information. they told them to go away. And this is in the Mueller report.

If you go and look, you'll find a whole section about the approach by or this conversation with Henry Greenberg. What Mueller didn't tell you in that report is that Henry Greenberg, aka Henry Ockniewski, is a registered FBI informant. And you can find that on PACER if you run a search on them. And, you know, poor Caputo got sucked into this. He was overseas when suddenly he finds out that his name is being read out in the middle of Adam Schiff's, you know, hearing on Russia Gate in March of 2017. And his whole life got exploded right at the time, by the way, that he got cancer.

And it turned into this nightmare. I mean, it nearly killed them, this whole thing. And this Greenberg guy had nothing to do with Russia. at all in any way, right? No, he'd been in the States forever. He had no connections. And, you know, if you look at his history on... So in other words, like, even in terms of entrapment,

he didn't come and say, oh, Comrade Stone, I'm going to hook you up with him. Right, like... No, it was, it was so weak that the, you know, that those two guys, they were, like, laughing about it, right? Which is... Well, Stone knows from dirty tricks. He's not going to fall for one that stupid.

right yeah he's the guy for that so what but what can you do when that happened somebody comes up to you and says hey do you want you know intelligence from russia you're already part of it you know you're you're already standing there and and that is uh significantly how the whole russian thing was built it was built on these approaches by people who um you know claimed to have some kind of or had a veneer of Russian connection, but often really didn't. Like the Joseph Mifsud thing, uh, this is someone who was presented everywhere is like this cut out for the Kremlin. And he's Maltese missing and also has an extensive history that seems to point in the other direction. And yet, you know, they built the whole

thing around that. So, well, his own lawyer said that he was tied to MI6 and then the photographs all proved it too. Like here's pictures of him. palming around even with the prime minister and the defense minister and all of these very hoity-toity, you know, national security type officials in England here. So no question about that. He said, I believe, a direct quote of his was, I only have one connection in Russia. It's my friend, what's his name from the think tank? But so what?

That doesn't mean anything at all. You know what I mean? I just use him to help introduce people to people. Still is nothing but a tie in the coochiest sense of a tie, you know? Yeah, I mean, you had to, the only way they could present that as a story about Russia is to make it about something that George Papadopoulos thought, that he thought it was an approach from Russia. Therefore, you know, it's significant. But, you know, he never was. The FBI had to know he wasn't.

And yet they, you know, this is the, this is the predicate for opening up. this, an investigation into, you know, a presidential candidate in the middle of a campaign. And they claimed, but that's the parallel construction, right? Where you, this is where, like, you know, a cop knows a guy has drugs in his trunk from an illegal tap or illegal search of some kind, then pull them over for a tail light and go, oh, look what I found. Right. So with their, the FBI already has this operation going.

They were already part of it. And they're pretending to believe that. this Papadopoulos thing is anything so that they have a pretended predicate, although I would point out that Aramette is still skeptical that that was even really right, because they only told that story so much later that it seemed like they were kind of retroactively trying to come up with a new excuse to have started the investigation, although it just seemed like it was one of these bumps that we're talking about. Well, yeah, I mean, even the public record contradicts itself on that because Brennan had testified that he was the start of the investigation that he

triggered, he testified that he triggered the FBI investigation, which is exactly what the FBI said didn't happen. Oops, he wasn't supposed to say that part. Yeah. Forgot which lie and which truth he was supposed to stick to, I guess. Yep. Okay, so listen, I'm already keeping you late here, but I want to ask you one more big thing, which is going back to the start of the interview, you said that you've got no.

new breaking news today and i say give me the scoop because this interview isn't going to get posted for like three days anyway matt so tell us what's the deal man well it's not a huge thing but um if you read the news this week you'll see that there's lots of stories about how you know tulsie gabbard overrode the objections of CIA analysts to release you know that's yeah no no that's out there there's there's like a million of these stories that are out there world i tell you and they're they're trying to pitch this as a sources and method story that she's like in you know endangering sources and methods by releasing all this stuff um and you know i was at first going to just come out as media criticism but there's an underlying story here that's

actually really interesting um first of all there's more to come like the one of the reasons why there's this uh very aggressive media campaign against gabbard right now now is that there's a big argument going on within the Trump administration about what will still be released because there's a lot of stuff that still can come out and that they're already going to come. I mean, it is going to come out at some point. It's just a question of how much of it is going to come out and in what form. And the essence of the story is that there are still elements within the CIA and other parts of the government

that are trying to suppress all this material. So anybody who thinks that, you know, that the Trump administration, you know, as one is united in the effort to try to get this stuff out, that's not what's going on at all. Can you name who's trying to tell her to back off of that? Like among appointees that are taking the bureaucracy side?

Is that what you're saying? like other of the chiefs? Kind of, yeah. I mean, it's not that hard to infer, like if you go and look at the stories and see where the sources are coming from. Like, obviously there's friction between the CIA

and the DNI. You know, when Tulsi released some of the stuff, but not all of it, the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee complained. He said that our reports are being held hostage at the CIA, and the CIA shouldn't be allowed to whitewash this material,

and then Trump interceded and got the report released. And so that's one episode, and that's like an ongoing thing. Let's put it that way. Like there are elements in the intelligence community that aren't happy with Tulsi and don't want this stuff to. come out. So, uh, what, what does come out is coming out as the result of a, of, of a bureaucratic infighting, you know, and, and that is a really interesting story. I'm, you know, I'm going to flush it out as best I can, but, but, uh, the main thing is that there's more

coming and, um, that will continue to be really embarrassing to the agencies, uh, not just about Russia Gate, but generally, I think. Yeah. Well, and there's a grand jury now. And who knows, I mean, this is just i think we all recognize that when you get to that level of power when you're talking former fbi directors and so forth these are political decisions not legal decisions about whether to go forward so it's really hard to imagine people that powerful be prosecuted then again they tried to prosecute the president they swung and missed and he's pissed off and they deserve it so bad too they are guilty as hell so like oh i don't know like dare i dream but then again it would take Trump to tell Ratcliffe, listen

man, do what she says, turn over the things, and I'm not playing. Otherwise, it's plausible deniability. Does he want to win this thing or not? It's, Ratcliffe works for him. Well, that's what happened once? And Langley works for Ratcliffe. So what's the deal? You know?

Yeah. And then my thing is, too, and people should not lose sight of this. I'm not losing sight of this. Tulsi Gabbard's job needs to be getting all of this stuff, uploading it to WikiLeaks or whatever we got to do to get it out to the public and then to work with Joe Kent to keep bin Ladenites off our shores because there's terrorist attacks coming from America's participation in the

genocide in Gaza for the last two years. That's coming. I mean, in September 11th, this blowback from the Kana massacre in 1996, yeah, we've got certain problems that got to be dealt with. And even though America does back the bin Ladenites in Syria and in many places, they still are a real danger to this country. And I know she believes that. And I'm not saying we should go to war against them overseas anywhere. I'm saying there needs to be a 100% net of keeping them the hell off of this continent for real, you know. And that should be really her priority. And I would hate for something horrible to happen.

And it was because they were looking back at this, which she needed to do. We need to get these documents out. but then that should be up to justice to take it from there or the media just leak it all just make it all public and let's let Taiibi really name and shame these SOBs and maybe we'll just have to leave it at that you know what I mean and Scott Horton obviously no I mean the more the more the better I mean I don't think it can hurt to put all this stuff out and but as you know it you know it's not so easy to get this stuff out so when they don't want it to it's a political decision so yeah um but trump is pissed and it's his stay and um so i i think i think

we're going to get stuff yeah well to me it's the whole outrage because we've already known so much of the story for so long the outrage here's really what we're learning about how early this thing began and that this really begins with you know CIA and FBI and the clinton campaign seemingly coming in later but who knows exactly like where the plot was had yeah we need to backfill the whole thing and that and that's what these disclosures will do I think yeah yeah I mean the fact of the the Durham report says that the FBI was in on this by January is to me everything that's huge so that to me would be the point to really hammer home the most I guess that like what is the real origin of untitled gate you used to

call it here like where does this thing actually come from man we're almost there right we're almost yeah it's like it's like you know one more step yeah all right you're the best dude thank you so much for coming on my show thanks a lot scott take care man all right you guys that's matt tie eby he is at racket dot news thanks for listening to scott horton show which can be heard on a ps radio news at scott horton dot org scott horton show dot com and the libertarian institute at libertarian institute.org.