The Duran Podcast - Russiagate and the conflict in Ukraine

Episode Date: July 21, 2025

Russiagate and the conflict in Ukraine

All right, Alexander, let's talk about Tulsi Gabbard and her Russiagate revelations, which is something that shouldn't surprise many people that have been covering Russiagate, as we did back in 2016. But it was interesting to finally get the documents, to read the communication that was taking place and to confirm everything that we were reporting at the time, about the meetings taking place in the White House between the high-level Obama officials, allegedly under the orders of Obama, at least these are the documents that Gabbard has published, which claimed that the meetings that were taking place were under the directive of the U.S. President

in order to manufacture the whole Russia meddling in elections story. That's what we got. once again, nothing that should shock anybody that was following this story, but it still is shocking to read the way these people were scheming. I mean, because you could read it now. You can read it and you can get a clear understanding as to how Brennan and Clapper, Rice, Lynch, McCabe, how all of them were scheming to derail Trump's presidency and to make Russia into the enemy of the United States. And of course, all of this, as we have said many times over

the years when we've talked about Russiagate, all of this did lead to the conflict in Ukraine. It played a big part in getting us to where we are in Ukraine. So your thoughts about everything that was released from Tulsi Gabbard? Well, the first thing you said was that anybody who's been following Russia Gate closely should not be surprised about this. We followed Russia Gate very closely. From about 2016 to about 2019, it was one of the most important stories we covered. And we wrote many articles about this, both you and I, we did many videos about this. We went through all of the various things. We went through it in enormous detail and giving to. it very, very close attention. So you're absolutely right. It's no surprise. These revelations are no surprise to us and they would not be any, they would not be a surprise to anybody who was following and reading the articles and watching the videos that we were putting out at that time. Having said that, you're quite right, it is nonetheless unnerving to find out,

firstly, that what were in those days, our speculations were actually true. And in some respects, I think that this latest information goes a bit beyond what we had figured out during that time in the sense that we always felt that there was a massive degree of concoction about the whole Russia gate thing. But what we did not know and what these latest papers show is that the senior analysts within the intelligence community were actually publishing reports and were advising the United States government that there was no Russian interference on any significant scale taking place in the election. that to the extent that the Russians were interfering, it was not making any significant difference.

And that all of that information, all of those, all of that advice was actually suppressed, and that there was apparently some kind of an intelligence assessment made in the autumn of 2016, which concluded that there had not been any significant effect from anything that the Russians had done in the election. under that that assessment was also suppressed. We didn't know about that then because we couldn't know about that then, because it was all at that time classified and kept secret. So that is something new. Now, for me, the most interesting thing about this latest tranche of documents,

and I would say that we only got the merest, smallest tip of the iceberg, about all of the various things that were taking. place. But the most interesting thing is about this meeting that took place, I believe, in the Oval Office, with Obama chairing it in December 2016. Because I can remember, I think it was in 2017, 2018, as information began to circulate about certain of the things that had been happening in the winter of 2016, 2017, the destruction of Donald Trump's National Security Advisor, Michael Flynn, the unmasking of Trump associates,

in other words, the leaving of clues that would enable people to work out their identities and to establish that they were under suspicion. and investigation, which is a most improper thing, an extraordinary statement or rather message, or I think actually it was a minute that Susan Rice produced, which I notice has not been mentioned here. Anyway, we worked backward and we discovered that there'd been this meeting in December 2016 with Obama sharing it. And I remember that we commented at the time that this was not just a very important meeting,

but perhaps the important meeting, the most important meeting in the whole scandal. And that eventually we might find ourselves looking at the famous Watergate question, what did the president know and when did he know it? I remember we brought that whole whole thing up. And we said that this meeting appeared to pose that question in connection with Russia gate about Obama himself. And here we are. And we're now seeing reports all over the media in the United States.

And they're asking that very question, essentially, about Obama himself. And they're wondering what role exactly he personally played. So it's fascinating to see how, after all these years, that question that we were floating then is now starting to be asked and in connection with the very same meeting that we identified. Well, Obama and Biden as well, right? Biden was at that meeting, a fact which incidentally is not mentioned in Tulsi Gabbat's summary. But he was absolutely there at that meeting. All sorts of other people were either there. Well, I do wonder about that.

There's something else, which is, I seem to remember that there were reasons to think that Peter Strach, who was an FBI investigator who finally had to leave the FBI, but he was perhaps the most aggressive investigator in the FBI. Anyway, he seemed to know an awful lot about the meeting, and he was writing all kinds of reports about this. and some of those things that he was writing and in handwriting about that meeting sort of gave the impression that he also was there. And I found that most astonishing that a person of his level in the FBI could possibly have been there at this meeting. I'm not sure that he was, by the way, and I'm still not convinced that he was. Probably he was briefed about the meeting by McCabe. but it's interesting that McCabe, who was not the FBI director, but, you know, a deputy,

that he was at this meeting too. I mean, you know, with all of these other people. So, I mean, it has, I have to say, look very much like a planning meeting in which all of the operatives and enforcers were there and were being given their instructions. I mean, that's how it looks from the distance. I mean, that's speculative and we'll need to get more information. But I do hope now, finally, that these questions are going to be asked, just saying. A distraction from Trump's Epstein woes? No, I didn't.

Well, before you answer that, I was thinking the other day, you know, why is Trump, in all of his truth posts, trying to connect Epstein to Russiagate. I mean, you read all of the truth post as he was putting out there about a week ago. He kept on bringing up Russiagate over and over.

And I was doing videos and I was always asking the questions, why are you connecting Russia Gate to Epstein? I think maybe we have our answer there. I don't know. Maybe he was preparing the ground for the eventual Russia game.

I mean, obviously he knew that Tulsi Gabbard was conducting this investigation, this report and it was going to be published. So maybe that's why he kept on telling us, forget about Epstein. Actually, he was saying, forget about Epstein, but Epstein is a hoax, a hoax just like Russiagate and just like the election meddling, which Obama and Biden. They kept on bringing up those names.

So I think we may have some sort of answer there. And why didn't Durham, Mueller, Ratcliffe, Ratcliffe was at the DNI? Yeah. Why didn't all these people find these documents? Well, let's first talk about the, oh, you see, the Epstein thing. I don't think that this material has been published in order to divert attention away from Epstein. I think that this is clearly something that's been underway for a long, long time. I wonder whether, and I'm being here very generous to Trump, by the way, and probably people will not agree with me.

But I wonder whether the reason that the Epstein thing was closed down was because he hoped that that would focus attention instead on Russiagate rather than on what he perhaps thinks is, you know, the other thing. I'm being very, very generous and I want to stress, don't know and I would say let's not speculate about that further but I agree he clearly did know that this was coming and he clearly is very upset and alarmed about this and very angry about this um uh russia gate thing and we could see why actually from the papers that we don't know now um about Mueller um well Mueller barely ran his own inquiry that was basically run by other people, as we well remember. Mueller was not interested in finding, in getting to the core of the truth about that allegation.

It was basically a performance intended to destroy Donald Trump. I mean, that was what the Mueller investigation really was. And to a great extent, it succeeded. I mean, I went through all of the reports. At the time, I went through the details report that Mueller produced. He came up with no evidence at all of any collusion between Trump and the Russians. And he quickly discovered just in a few months' time that there had been no collusion between Trump and the Russians. But then he went off on a ludicrous, ludicrous diversion, a frolic alleging obstruction that Trump might be guilty of obstruction.

of Mueller's own inquiry, which made absolutely no sense at all, given that Trump gave Mueller every single document that he wanted and made every single person that Trump Mueller wanted to interview, available for interview, about by the way from Trump himself when he responded in to Trucke to Mueller's questions by giving written answers. So, I mean, the Mueller thing, we can we can forget about. I mean, there was no real attempt there to get to the truth about any of this. Durham is a very, very different question. Now, I have to say this. I mean, as of today, Durham looks like a cover-up. I know a lot of people thought so. When it all began, I felt that maybe Bill Barr and Durham really were serious about getting to the bottom of what was

happening. They clearly were not. I think we can see now that Durham's job was to cover everything up and not to help get to the truth at all. Because it is inconceivable that Durham could not have found all this information if he'd wanted to do. He clearly wasn't looking. And Radcliffe the same. A cover up, right. Right. Final question. given that that Biden was in the room and he was a part of this as Obama's vice president. And then it was Biden that became president in 2020. And it was a Biden that eventually took us to the conflict in Ukraine. How much of what happened in 2016 is connected to what is going on with the conflict in Ukraine

and everything going on with Russia. Well, as far as I can see, it is massively connected, because, of course, relations between the United States and Russia were poisoned, and on a completely false basis. It is increasingly looking as if the Russians didn't interfere in any meaningful, in any serious way in the 2016 election at all. The documents say as much. Well, the documents say as much, exactly.

So you remember that famous press conference with Putin and Trump in Helsinki? Putin told Trump we didn't interfere in the elections. Trump came to the press conference and said Putin is telling me the Russians didn't interfere in the elections. Trump was slaughtered because he appeared to accept to Putin's assurance. which, by the way, he didn't do, people were saying that it was unacceptable that Trump should accept the truth, accept an assurance from Putin, which contradicted the advice that was being given to Trump by Trump's own intelligence services. What we now see is that Putin was telling the truth, and it was the intelligence services that weren't, and look as if they were lying. I think we need to go back and revise our assessment of that press conference as well, because that had a massive effect, that had a massive effect on Russian-U.S. relations.

It had a very bad effect on the relationship between Putin and Trump at that time. The Ukraine war would not have happened had there not been at Russia gate. We had a program with, I think it was Aaron Matte, in which we discussed all of this. He was absolutely right. Yeah, even in the recent elections in Romania that the European Union canceled, they used the excuse of Russian meddling. It all goes back to that narrative that the Obama White House decided to spin. Yes. And we're feeling the effects of it 10 years later, even in an election in Romania.

Yes. Even though that narrative is now being discredited, it is still there. Discredited, but still, we still get the whole Russia election. And I'm sure you do as well. I come across people every day. I get messages from them. I've lost friends over this, people who continue to insist that the Russiagate narrative is in its entirety true.

And it was all made up. And it was all made up. All right. I think we'll end it there. Well, we have a lot to... Well, I hope... I hope this... Can't know, before we do end it,

I hope this will be the start because there is just so much more to find out. I mean, I mean, we're only at the beginning. I mean, there's the whole Papadopoulos affair, which nobody ever wants to talk about anymore. There's the mysterious identity of the very mysterious professor, Mithson,

and what's happened to him. There are so... So many unanswered questions that require an answer. We have the whole business, the whole story of the Steele dossier, what was going on with all of that. They used the Steele dossier. The documents from Gabbard said that, say as much. Yeah.

Yes. Yes. And the documents say that the Intel community, there were some people in the Intel community who warned the group of people that were scheming that the Steele dossier is a complete mess. It's all made up, but they ignored it. Absolutely. Well, this is what we now know.

They're the best analysts who are saying this just doesn't add up. It doesn't make sense. And that information was ignored and was suppressed. And it seems an intelligence assessment that gave the wrong answer was suppressed. And instead, we got an intelligence assessment, which was then made public, not in its entirety, but most of it was made public. which appointed in entirely the wrong direction and which had references to the steel dossier in an annex and that dossier was, that annex was then shown to Trump

by Comey in an extraordinary meeting, which we're not going to talk about in detail now, and that it was leaked to the media as well. I wonder how much of the Russia meddling narrative that Obama and his team decided to come up with, was connected to actually provoking a war with Russia further down the line. I mean, why not China meddling in the elections? Why not Iran meddling in the elections? Why did they go with Russia? Did this have to do with the 2014 coup? Did this have to do with

how Putin outsmarted Obama with Crimea? And perhaps Obama wanted to felt jilted and wanted to hit back at Putin. I mean, everyone knows that Obama always felt that he was intellectually inferior to Putin. I mean, we know that there was this kind of feeling from Obama that he was just not up to par with Putin when it came to foreign policy. And he always disliked Putin for it. But was this a way by injecting Russia into this narrative? Was this a way to not only derail Trump's presidency, but also a way to continue the escalation with Russia

because the original plan, I'm just thinking about this right now, the original plan was Hillary to win the election. And then the war to happen, and that's when the sanctions were going to be launched against Russia. And that would have brought down the Russian economy if back then Hillary was president and all of these shock and all sanctions were directed towards Russia. Then absolutely that would have done a lot of damage

to the Russian Federation and the Russian economy. But instead they got Trump. And so I wonder if they were kind of in a bind saying, you know, we need to not only derail Trump, but we need to derail any repression. with Russia, at least in order to get to the next globalist, deep state Democrat candidate, whoever that's going to be, who will then be able to continue the project that we have

with getting a regime change towards Russia. Do you know what I mean? Maybe this was like a cold, two birds with one stone type of scenario. I have absolutely no doubt that is true. I think priority one was to stop Trump. getting elected because Trump was talking in 2015 and 2016 of improving relations with Russia when the whole plan on the country was to escalate against Russia. You're absolutely right. I mean, if sanctions of the sort that we saw in February 2020 had been imposed on Russia in

in 2017 or 2018, they would have been far more effective. I mean, at that time, Russian banks were still using Swift to send messages to each other. And there was no fallback. I mean, the central bank, the Russian central bank was working on setting up one, but it was still not ready. So, I mean, you know, it would have had a devastating. The sanctions, if they'd been imposed there, would have been. devastating. And the Russian military was much weaker in 2017 and 2018 than it was in 2022 and

and certainly far weaker than it is today. So absolutely, I've no doubt about this. One, to stop Trump getting elected. Second, to prevent any possible rapprochement between Trump, between the United States and Russia during Trump's first term. Remember Katzer, the combating, Americans through sanctions act or whatever it was, American enemies through sanctions act, which was rushed through Congress in 2017. Again, quite obviously with the purpose of stopping any sort of improvement in relations between the United States and Russia. And of course, also using Russia gate to poison people's minds about Russia and about Putin himself. And all those terrible articles that were being written about Putin at the time, pictures like one that I remember in which he appears in The Economist as, you know, a giant octopus.

And he's referred to as the meddler and all of that. And of course, it worked. The rapprochement between the United States and Russia never took place. The Minsk Agreement was never implemented. we ended up with the war that we have, and that war I have absolutely no doubt about. This was always intended. Yeah, all right. We will end the video there. The durand.com.

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