RUSSIAGATE: The Fraud, Its Consequences, the Ongoing Damage, & Those Who Caused It—With Aaron Maté
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Welcome to a new episode of System Update, our live nightly show that airs every Monday through Friday at 7 p.m.
Eastern, exclusively here on Rumble, the free speech alternative to YouTube.
Tonight...
We revisit the multi-pronged fraud called Russiagate.
We do so in part to prevent the memory holing of what has become one of the most extreme embarrassments to the D.C.
political and media class, up there with the fraud of Iraqi WMDs and the decision after the 2008 financial crisis to save those who caused the crisis, the Wall Street barons, with bailouts and handouts while letting America's middle and working classes drown in foreclosures and debt.
We do so in part because there has never been any accountability for the media and political elites who perpetrated these multiple hoaxes.
We do so in part because so much of what was done during Russiagate and by whom sheds ample light on the key dynamics shaping our politics now, especially headed into the 2024 election.
And because the full extent of how deranged and unhinged and unmoored from reality or any rationality and how pathologically conspiratorial our elite class became is something that I don't think has ever been fully appreciated.
And most of all, understanding and remembering the full scope of Russian aid is vital because the damage it has done, both to our geopolitics and our central institutions of authority, continue to endure to this very day.
It's not some old relic of the past, but something still ongoing.
Now, one of the benefits of how our show is structured, that we don't have hard time limits to how much we can broadcast, that we have the luxury of not being wedded like cable news shows to the fleeting daily news cycle, and that we're not interrupted every seven minutes by commercial breaks, is that it gives us the ability, I think the unique ability, to delve deeply into topics that deserve that level of deep examination.
And we especially like doing so and doing such episodes on Friday since viewers we have found have more time on Friday and especially on the weekends to devote the time necessary to slightly longer episodes that take a step back and are the kind necessary to deconstruct false establishment narratives.
To help us highlight just what an absolute fraud Russiagate was and how much elite malice and deceit was necessary to create and perpetrate it, we will be joined by one of the very few journalists who, from the start, was willing to pay the non-trivial career cost of objecting to the prevailing narrative.
He is Aaron Maté, and despite a career that he was building, a good career in progressive media, he did not hesitate in 2016 to loudly and quickly express severe skepticism and ultimately outright disbelief of the core claims that formed this fake scandal.
Along the way, Aaron became one of the two or three journalists in America who I would argue possessed an encyclopedic level of knowledge of this ongoing scam.
He had really mastered the details.
And that wasn't easy given that what we now call Russiagate was composed of so many different lies and debunked stories.
It's a carousel.
The Unhinged claims that the difficulty was keeping up with this media tsunami of falsehoods but Aaron managed better than almost anyone and so we are delighted that he will join us to examine some of the core events that are still in our view the ones that compose this still vital scandal.
Before we begin the broadcast, we have breaking news about Iran and the United States, namely that the Biden administration has, just a few hours ago, bombed multiple sites in Syria and Iraq that it claims are places where Iran has both troops and militias that it funds.
So, not just bombing in Syria or in Iraq, but both places, multiple sites.
This obviously represents what the New York Times as well acknowledged was a very serious escalation of the kind that the Biden administration has said.
Since the start of the war in Israel, it was eager and desperate to avoid.
There was no congressional consultation, let alone congressional approval of any kind for what is basically a new war.
We haven't yet bombed targets inside Iran, but we have absolutely bombed barracks and places where Iranian troops are likely to be found.
This is a real escalation, and so we are absolutely gonna cover this as the new war progresses on Monday, but this was a predictable outcome, and so on Monday night, we devoted our show to the dangers of bombing targets in Iran, not only from the perspective that doing so without congressional approval is unconstitutional and why that's so important, but also just geopolitically, why it's insane
To try and pursue a new war with China when the U.S.
is already enmeshed in wars in Ukraine?
Wars in Gaza and Israel, wars with Yemen in the broader Middle East, and now potentially a war with Iran.
But that is the decision of the Biden administration.
It seems like this is just the start of what they're calling the retaliation, not the end.
And so, if you want to, until Monday, our QHR coverage, then you can consult last Monday's show, where we really delved in in a comprehensive way to the issues governing all of these decisions.
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For now, welcome to a new episode of System Update, starting right now.
The central difficulty of trying to do a retrospective on the fraud of Russiagate, and it's very similar to the difficulty that I know I encountered at the time when trying to report on it, and it's very similar to the difficulty that I know I encountered at the time when trying to report on it, is that there are so many different individual falsehoods that composed the scandal that we now call Russiagate,
That it's almost impossible to devote a single show to chronicling or documenting all of the lies that the media spread in partnership with the Hillary Clinton campaign, the Democratic Party, and the U.S.
Security State, because there are just too many of them.
And it would take probably a six-hour show in order to do that.
So what we want to do instead is delve into what this scandal was, its genesis.
As a way of reminding you exactly what happened at the kind of top level.
To demonstrate why it is that it is beyond any reasonable dispute.
That the only truthful label to call this scandal is a hoax and a fraud.
There simply is no space for a reasonable debate about whether it was that.
And most of all to demonstrate how unhinged the media became.
How completely detached from reality.
In a way that I would argue is at least as responsible for the collapse in trust and faith in institutions of news and media in the United States, as was the debacle with Iraqi WMDs that led the United States to invade Iraq on various false pretenses, and the 2008 financial crisis that was a failure of every institution of authority.
The lies that were told during Russiagate, the obvious mission that the media was on, being fed lies by the CIA and the FBI to the point that media outlets actually showered themselves with Pulitzers, particularly the New York Times and the Washington Post, really accelerated the collapse of whatever remaining trust Americans had in media institutions.
It wasn't much to begin with.
It's now at record levels, and Russiagate is a major reason why.
And then beyond that, and probably the most important reason that we decided we wanted to focus the show on Russiagate, even though I know a lot of people hear Russiagate and think I'm already familiar with it, I already have my views on it, I already know most of what went on, is that the damage that it caused, not only to our institutions of authority, but also to our geostrategic relationship with Russia,
That the way it contaminated and poisoned the relationship between the two countries that had the largest nuclear stockpiles of any on the planet with thousands of intercontinental ballistic nuclear-tipped missiles still aimed at one another's cities
On hair trigger alert that comes from the Cold War, the way it deliberately fed Americans this anti-Russian hatred to justify not just Cold Wars, but as we're seeing in Ukraine, actual hot wars that the United States is basically fighting with Russia, using a proxy in Ukraine, is a damage and a harm that is very much still ongoing, as is what became the Democratic Party pathology, the habit,
Of simply labeling any of their opponents or adversaries, any dissidents or critics of their foreign policy as Russian agents.
It's something that is done so often that it's normalized to the point that just this week, Nancy Pelosi went on CNN and when asked about anti-Palestine or pro-Palestine protesters, anti-war protesters, who have been protesting in her events and disrupting her events and protesting outside of her house,
Instead of saying why she hates them or why she disagrees with them or why she thinks they're misguided, she accused them instead, talking here about American citizens who are marching against the U.S.
support for the wars in Israel, of being funded in some way by Putin.
This is hysteria, this is delusional behavior, but it became so normalized during Russiagate that it is now just commonplace.
Nancy Pelosi even called for the FBI to investigate American protesters based on the suspicion, obviously accompanied by no evidence, it never is, that these are agents of the Kremlin.
So what I want to start with Is a recollection of exactly what the scandal was about, because this is something that has been deliberately distorted by the people who were most involved in it, who are now embarrassed about it, who know that the central claim that gave rise to the scandal was completely debunked by the person they deputized to be the arbiter of truth, Robert Mueller.
And as a result, they have an interest in pretending that it was about a lot of other things that were ancillary at best, To the core claim of the scandal.
So here's the New York Times in May of 2017 on the day that Robert Mueller was appointed as special counsel for the Russiagate investigation by the Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein.
You may recall that the Attorney General for Donald Trump, Jeff Sessions, recused himself for some reason.
Don't think is very clear.
As a result, his deputy, Rod Rosenstein, was in charge of the investigation.
He decided the Justice Department had to recuse itself from the investigation and appointed Robert Mueller in order to determine whether crimes were committed.
You only have the Justice Department involved and a special counsel appointed if there's reasonable grounds to believe that actual crimes were committed by American citizens.
And because the New York Times thought And assumed, like most liberals, like most people in media, that it was absolutely clear that Mueller was going to find evidence of this conspiracy and evidence of the guilt of not only people in the Trump circle, but Trump himself.
You had Saturday Night Live singing songs to Robert Mueller about how all they wanted for Christmas were indictments of Donald Trump and his family.
It was the religion, the obsession, of large parts of America and of our political discourse for at least three years, starting from the middle of the campaign until Robert Mueller finally closes investigation.
And at the time of May of 2017, none of these outlets doubted that this So they described it with very clear language, what exactly it was that was alleged that gave rise to the scandal in the Mueller investigation in the first place.
Here's the headline, quote, Robert Mueller, former FBI director, is named special counsel for Russia investigation.
Quote, the Justice Department appointed Robert S. Mueller III, a former FBI director under George Bush.
As special counsel on Wednesday to oversee the investigation into, and here is what the investigation always was intended to determine, and only this, to oversee the investigation into ties between President Trump's campaign and Russian officials.
Dramatically raising the legal and political stakes in an affair that has threatened to engulf Mr. Trump's four-month presidency.
This was four months into his presidency.
They were trying to suffocate his presidency with this fake scandal.
In a statement, Mr. Trump said, quote, as I have stated many times, a thorough investigation will confirm what we already know.
That there was no collusion between my campaign and any foreign entity.
I look forward to this matter concluding quickly.
In the meantime, I will never stop fighting for the people and the issues that matter most to the future of our country.
Now, that quote, of course, was included in the New York Times because it had to, but at the time people thought it was a joke that Trump said he's very confident that the investigation will finally reveal the truth, clearing him of any wrongdoing in the core claim
The allegation was that Russia had hacked into the email servers of the DNC and John Podesta, and that the Trump campaign collaborated with them, colluded with them, conspired with them, in order to do that hacking.
And the reason that never made any sense to me, from the first second I heard it, Was not only that it was all done through anonymous leaks from the CIA and the FBI, and I know, if I know anything as a journalist, it's that you do not trust evidence-free leaks from the U.S.
security state.
The New York Times claimed that was the lesson they learned after selling George Bush's and Dick Cheney's Iraq War by front-paging every evidence-free claim that came from Dick Cheney about Iraqi WMDs, and only to repeat that behavior to stop Donald Trump.
It wasn't just that it was evidence-free and came from all of these intelligence agencies that have always lied to the public, but also it never made any sense.
Even if it were the Russians that had hacked into the email server or the email inbox of John Podesta and the DNC, why would they need the help of the Trump campaign to do it?
But it was never about things like meetings at the Trump Tower or efforts to try and boost Donald Trump's presidency, the issue, the thing that made it a criminal investigation, the only claim was that Donald Trump and Trump officials criminally collaborated with or conspired with or colluded with the Russian government to the only claim was that Donald Trump and Trump officials criminally collaborated with or conspired with or colluded with the
That was the claim.
Now the Mueller investigation, the reason why Robert Mueller was so celebrated is because he had a dream team, we were told, of the best, most aggressive prosecutors.
And he had been given an unlimited budget and full subpoena power.
And he was told, go look everywhere and anywhere.
And they went all around the world subpoenaing everybody they could find and getting their hands on every document and every witness.
And they set up perjury traps and they were able to convict people based on crimes allegedly committed during the investigation.
Lies to prosecutors or covering things up.
But they were able to get their hands on every single thing they wanted for 18 months at Drag Done.
And when Robert Mueller finally closed his investigation and issued his report, there was one paragraph that was the decisive paragraph about the core conspiracy theory, namely that Trump and Trump officials had criminally conspired with
The Russian government on this hacking and to interfere in the election and here is what the Mueller investigation and again this was set up by Democrats and by the media and by the proponents of Russiagate as the supreme arbiter.
Robert Mueller was this old school FBI agent who only operated with integrity and gusto And nobility.
And he gets to the truth no matter what.
And here is the truth that he discovered.
Quote, although the investigation established that the Russian government perceived it would benefit from a Trump presidency and worked to secure that outcome, and that the Trump campaign expected it would benefit electorally from information stolen and released through Russian efforts, the investigation
Did not establish, the investigation, and this is the key phrase, did not establish that members of the Trump campaign conspired or coordinated with the Russian government in its election interference activities.
Anyone honest at that point, reading that paragraph, would have admitted immediately that everything we've been doing and saying for the last three years has been a lie.
Because Robert Mueller was unleashed on the world, unleashed on the Trump campaign, unleashed on the Trump family and the Trump presidency.
And he came back 18 months later and said that they could not find evidence to establish That anyone in the Trump campaign conspired or coordinated with the Russian government in its election interference activities.
And they just demonstrated from the New York Times article announcing his appointment, that was what he was supposed to investigate.
That was the crux of the Russiagate scandal from the start, was that allegation.
And Mueller said there was no evidence to establish it was true.
It was a gigantic humiliation for every media outlet that pushed this, every media outlet that gave itself Pulitzers for doing so, all of the TV news networks that pumped this non-stop for Democratic Party officials led by Adam Schiff, who claimed that he had seen smoking gun evidence.
That proved this collusion that apparently Robert Mueller never discovered because if he had he wouldn't have said we did not discover any evidence to establish this core conspiracy theory.
It was as much of a gutting of a knifing.
into the gut of American centers of power and institutional authority as you could possibly imagine.
Easily the worst since having to admit that there were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq 20 years earlier.
It was most definitely on that scale.
Except the one difference being that there was a lot more dissent permitted in the run-up to the Iraq War than there was on this.
I can tell you personally that any journalist who tried to question any of this, or who tried to say from the start that there's no evidence being offered to substantiate it, was the target of an attempt to destroy the person's career, to exclude them from every media venue.
It was a requirement, the price of entrance to get into anywhere to affirm that you believed in Russiagate.
And anyone who didn't, and there were not many people willing to say it, I was getting emails while I did, and I was getting messages while I did, all the time from people and media outlets saying, I'm so glad you're doing what you're doing, but they didn't have the courage to do so because, in their defense, they knew that their careers would be destroyed if they did.
And I always kept one foot in independent media, and never relied on those large media corporations in order to have a career, and so I was much freer than they were to do it.
But the clamp down on dissent was so extreme, That they would never even put anyone on television or in the op-ed columns of major newspapers who question this narrative at all.
There were people heard who opposed the war in Iraq even though there was a lot of repression back then too.
It was right after 9-11.
This was so much worse.
And the person they picked To tell us the truth ended up in saying this.
Now, that's not all he said.
This is a different passage, and there's probably about 15 different passages from the Mueller investigation I could show you, the report, where on every claim that was made and hyped by the media and by the Democratic Party over the course of two years, they had very similar paragraphs saying our investigation could not find any evidence to establish its truth.
In fact, one of the main narratives, the most unhinged narrative, that came from BuzzFeed's decision to publish the Steele dossier, even though there was never any substantiation for it and the media completely got behind the Steele dossier, was that Trump was being blackmailed.
It was one of the most deranged conspiracy theories of all time.
It was basically a claim That Russia had taken over the United States, had seized control of the levers of power in the United States and was forcing Donald Trump to undertake decisions that undermine American interests and served the interests of the Kremlin.
Because of sexual, financial, and personal blackmail.
Here, for example, is a tweet from Nancy Pelosi, and there were so many of these, we'll just keep that there, where it says, what do the Russians have on Trump, personally, financially, or politically, that he's about to stand in, that he's too afraid to stand up to Putin, asking for millions of Americans and our allies.
I mean, it was Nancy Pelosi, the senior Democrat in Washington, spreading this innuendo.
Robert Mueller did not even take that claim seriously enough, that Trump was the victim of Russian blackmail, to even include much of anything on it in his report, let alone substantiate it.
This is why they want to memory hold this.
They were all saying that.
That Trump was a victim of Russian blackmail and was controlled by the Kremlin to the point where Russia had seized control of the United States was something that almost every major outlet endorsed.
There were covers on both Time Magazine and the New Yorker showing the Kremlin infiltrating graphically the White House and basically taking it over.
This was a conspiracy theory as deranged as any that they claim you could find on places like 4chan or the most outer fringe precincts of the internet.
But it came from our most influential corporate institutions.
Here's another passage from the Mueller Report.
I'll just show you one more.
Just to give you a sense for how devastating it was, how fully debunked This conspiracy theory was that drowned our politics for three years.
Quote, the investigation, the Mueller investigation, did not, however, yield sufficient evidence to sustain any charge that any individual associated with the Trump campaign acted as an agent of a foreign principle within the meaning of FARA or, in terms of section 951, subject to the direction or control of the government of Russia or any official thereof.
In particular, this office did not find evidence likely to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that campaign officials such as Paul Manafort, George Papadopoulos, and Carter Page acted as agents of the Russian government or at the direction, control, or request during the relevant time period.
So it wasn't just that The Mueller Report said we have no evidence to establish the core conspiracy theory.
They said we can't even find evidence to prove that any of the people associated with the Trump campaign, even these kind of obscure lower-level figures like George Papadopoulos or Carter Page or Paul Manafort, the campaign manager, ever acted as an agent of the Kremlin or added the direction of the Russian government.
A more devastating destruction of their three-year narrative could not be imagined.
And this is why they all want to pretend that this never happened.
This is why Russiagate is something you never hear about anymore.
And if someone like me brings it up and says, hey, remember when every institution of authority practically in the United States endorsed a false fabricated conspiracy theory that came from the CIA to destroy an elected president?
Not for a week, but for three years, people say, oh, why are you talking about Russiagate?
That's old news.
The reason it's necessary to talk about it, as I said, is because this, the full extent of what a destruction to credibility of these institutions it was, and the lack of accountability has really never been created.
It has never been accepted.
So that was the Mueller Report.
That was the complete destruction of the entire scandal.
And yet, let's remember what happened in mid-2016 when this narrative first emerged.
The amazing thing is, is that one of the main places that it emerged from was the Atlantic magazine run by Jeffrey Goldberg, probably the journalist who has spread more lies than any other over two decades.
He was the one who, while at The New Yorker, convinced Americans and the liberals who read The New Yorker that Saddam Hussein was in a partnership with Al-Qaeda and Osama bin Ludd, he won National Magazine and other prestigious awards for publishing that fiction.
Which is why 70% of Americans believed in September of 2003, six months after the invasion, that Iraq was actually a participant in or Saddam Hussein helped to personally plan the 9/11 And he got promoted to the Atlantic.
In fact, reports were that he was Barack Obama's favorite journalist, who Barack Obama read the most.
And in July of 2016, exactly as when the Clinton campaign was starting to acknowledge and to tell its most closest confidants in media that it intended to concoct this scandal of Trump and Russia, here's where Jeffrey Goldberg made the official announcement on behalf of the media.
Quote, it's official.
Hillary Clinton is running against Vladimir Putin.
Quote, fulfilling what might be the Russian autocrat's dearest wish, Trump has openly questioned whether the U.S.
should keep its commitments to NATO.
The Republican nominee for President Donald Trump has chosen this week to unmask himself as a de facto agent of Russian President Vladimir Putin, a KGB-trained dictator who seeks to rebuild the Soviet Empire by undermining the free nations of Europe, marginalizing NATO, and ending America's reign as the world's sole superpower.
Trump's sympathy for Putin has never been a secret.
Trump said he would, quote, get along very well with Putin.
Oh wow, you wouldn't want an American president getting along with the leader of the country that has the most nuclear arms in the world.
And he has pleased Putin by expressing a comprehensive lack of interest in the future of Ukraine, the domination of which is a core Putinist principle.
Remember this was 2016, Obama was the president.
Jeffrey Goldberg had interviewed Obama about his foreign policy doctrine in which Obama said it's ridiculous to consider Russia a grave threat.
Remember it was Obama who in 2012 mocked Mitt Romney for having said Russia is the number one geopolitical threat to the United States saying, oh that's a old foreign Cold War view from the 1980s.
And it was Obama who said we will never go to war with Russia or risk war with Russia over Ukraine.
And so here's Jeffrey Goldberg taking Obama's views, attributing them to Trump, and saying this proves that Trump is some sort of agent of the Kremlin.
He went on, quote, The Trump movement also agrees with Putin that U.S.
democracy is fatally flawed.
A Trump advisor, Carter Page, recently denounced to a Moscow audience America's, quote, often hypocritical focus on democratization, inequality, corruption, and regime change.
So, that was an effort to take Trump's, in my view, very reasonable foreign policy views and present it as proof that because it opposed the foreign policy orthodoxy of official Washington, of the CIA, of bipartisan foreign policy that has proven to be so destructive for so long, that was proof that Trump was a Russian agent.
And that was the framework they pursued and are pursuing to this day.
An old neocon tactic.
If you question their wars, neocon wars, it means you're not a patriot.
It means your loyalty is to other countries.
They did that in 2003.
David Frum wrote an article in the National Review accusing conservatives who were opposed to the invasion of Iraq of being unpatriotic.
This is the core neocon tactic.
And Russiagate was the perfect framework to implement it.
That anyone who challenged American, the war machine or the military-industrial complex, should be Here's something I think people have really forgotten.
The former CIA directors under both political parties Went to the New York Times and the Washington Post to call Trump a Russian agent in mid-2016, perfectly aligned with Jeffrey Goldberg and the Clinton campaign.
Here is Michael Morell, who was the acting director of the CIA under President Obama, in the New York Times in August of 2016.
Opinion, quote, I ran the CIA, now I'm endorsing Hillary Clinton.
And here's part of what he said, quote, The dangers that flow from Mr. Trump's character are not just risks that would emerge if he became president.
It is already damaging our national security.
President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia was a career intelligence officer trained to identify vulnerabilities in an individual and to exploit them.
This is exactly what he did early in the primaries.
Mr. Putin played upon Mr. Trump's vulnerabilities by complimenting him.
He responded, just as Mr. Putin had calculated.
In the intelligence business, we would say that Mr. Putin had recruited Mr. Trump as an unwitting agent of the Russian Federation.
This is what liberals spent decades saying was the low point of civil liberties in the United States, which was the McCarthy era.
When anyone critical of US foreign policy was deemed an agent of the Kremlin.
And here liberals decided to march behind the CIA as they made that exact accusation based on the exact rationale from the McCarthy era against Donald Trump.
Here in the Washington Post was Michael Hayden, who was the director of the CIA under George Bush and Dick Cheney, as well as the NSA director under both of them.
And here you see the Washington Post headline.
Former CIA chief.
Trump is Russia's useful fool.
You have the CIA directors from both parties endorsing Hillary Clinton.
Based on this allegation, quote, "I know I'm not the first to notice this," Hayden wrote, "but Donald Trump really does sound a lot like Vladimir Putin.
We have really never seen anything like this." Former acting CIA director Michael Morell says that Putin has clearly recruited Trump as an unwitting agent of the Russian Federation.
I'd prefer another term drawn from the arcana of the Soviet era.
Polesny-Durak.
That's the useful fool.
Some maith, manipulated by Moscow, secretly held in contempt, but whose blind support is happily accepted and exploited.
This was a scandal that came from the CIA, just like the lie right before the 2020 election that the Hunter Biden laptop was Russian disinformation.
And it was a decision that was made by the Hillary Clinton campaign to concoct and manufacture this, knowing that the U.S.
security state would be on their side, as would the media, and would spread this innuendo that Donald Trump was a Russian agent.
And it worked perfectly.
The very first time that I ever noticed that this was becoming a very serious and a very real attack by the Clinton campaign on Trump, and I just couldn't believe it as someone who is steeped in civil libertarianism, because I immediately recognized that it was a resurrection of the McCarthyite script from the bowels of the CIA.
I just couldn't believe.
That liberals were going to get behind a tactic, a campaign, to accuse their enemies of being Kremlin agents.
And didn't just react with repulsion, didn't recoil from it immediately because of its genesis.
Aside from the fact that there was no evidence for it, here was the very first Clinton campaign ad ever run designed to raise these sinister insinuations about the relationship between Donald Trump and the Russians.
Putin's been a very strong leader for Russia.
He killed journalists that don't agree with him.
At least he's a leader.
Putin did call me a genius.
He said very nice things about me.
Trump always seems to upend American foreign policy tradition in a way that benefits Vladimir Putin.
The prime objective of the foreign policy of Putin has been to destroy NATO.
NATO is obsolete and it's extremely expensive to the United States.
Trump campaign guts GOP's anti-Russia stance on Ukraine.
We don't know why Trump's top advisors have ties to Putin.
Trump advisor Michael Flynn is weirdly, strangely friendly with Vladimir Putin's regime, Vox, the liberal outlet in July of 2016.
Showing Moscow, we don't know why Trump is so connected to Russia.
Or why Donald is inviting them to Russia.
the work of Russian intelligence.
Or why Donald is inviting them to Russia.
I hope you're able to find the 30,000 emails that are missing.
We don't know how much Trump has invested in Russia.
Or how much they're invested in him.
Russians make up a pretty disproportionate cross-section of a lot of our assets.
We see a lot of money pouring in from Russia.
Russian oligarchs.
Or how much they're invested in him.
Is he getting money from Russia?
Is his business built on Russian loans?
Russians make up a pretty disproportionate cross-section of a lot of our assets.
We see a lot of money pouring in from Russia.
Donald Trump Jr. 2008.
We don't know what's going on here.
And Donald Trump won't tell us.
We'll let you guess.
I mean the minute I saw that I was nauseated by it.
I was at the Intercept at the time, and here is the article that I wrote when I began realizing that this was really going to be the primary attack on Donald Trump from the Democrats.
And I have this article that I wrote that said in the headline, Democrats' tactic of accusing critics of Kremlin allegiance has a long, ugly history in the United States.
Democrats are mimicking and echoing many of the most shameful people and tactics of the 20th century.
And yet from there they were off to the races.
You have that Nancy Pelosi tweet that we showed you.
This is from 2018.
Just to show you how long this went on.
What do the Russians have on Trump personally, financially, and politically?
And then, here was the MSNBC host, Joy Reid.
You see how coordinated this was?
July 2016, that was right when the Jeffrey Goldberg article came out.
Tomorrow on AMJOY, we'll explore the unprecedented affinity between an American presidential candidate, Trump, Russia, and WikiLeaks.
Now, one of the things that made this so bizarre, and I remember watching this in real time, was that the gap between how certain all these people were that this connection had been proven and the complete and utter lack of evidence presented for it was larger than anything that I have ever recalled covering as a journalist.
It was surreal.
The only basis for it was that the New York Times and the Washington Post every day would print stories claiming that intelligence agencies officials have told them X, Y, and Z. And never any evidence had been presented to corroborate that there was any sort of criminal conspiracy or even loose collusion between the Russians and the Trump campaign.
It just didn't exist.
Early on in the Trump presidency in March of 2017, here's NBC News reporting on the fact that Michael Morrell, that CIA director who not only endorsed Hillary Clinton in the New York Times, but did so based on the claim that Trump was a Russian agent, admitted In the headline there you see Clinton ally says there's smoke but no fire.
No Russia Trump collusion.
Ex-acting director CIA Michael Morrell says there's no evidence of Trump Russia collusion.
Quote, there is smoke but there is no fire at all.
Quote, former acting CIA director Michael Morrell who endorsed Hillary Clinton and called Donald Trump a dupe of Russia Cast doubt Wednesday night on allegations that members of the Trump campaign colluded with Russia.
Morrell, who was in line to become CIA Director if Clinton won, said he had seen no evidence that Trump associates cooperated with Russians.
He also raised questions about the dossier written by a former British intelligence official which allegedly alleged the conspiracy between the Trump campaign and Russia.
His comments were in sharp contrast to those of many Clinton partisans, such as former communications director Jennifer Palmieri, who have stated publicly they believe the Trump campaign cooperated with Russia's efforts to interfere in an election against Clinton.
So right away, you could see that this whole thing was smoke and mirrors.
And occasionally, someone would be honest enough on Clinton's side even to say it and to the point where NBC had to report it.
This is one of the originators of that accusation and yet it didn't stop them at all.
Now, it's often the case that foreign countries want one presidential campaign candidate or the other to win because they perceive one or the other to be in their interests.
For example, if you're a Middle Eastern country And you've seen Hillary Clinton advocate coups and attacks on multiple countries in Syria and in Libya.
You're going to hope she's not the president because you know that if she is, there's a good chance that you're going to end up being bombed.
That's what Hillary Clinton loves to do.
She supported the war in Iraq.
And when she wrote her book, after leaving the Obama administration, she criticized Obama almost exclusively for his failure to pursue more wars against Russia and more wars in the Middle East.
One of the countries that took a position wanting a certain candidate to win in 2016 was the country of Ukraine.
They were expecting Hillary Clinton to win and they wanted her to win for obvious reasons.
She was the one who put Victoria Nuland in a very high position in the State Department and the Ukrainians knew that if Clinton won they could expect anything they wanted from the U.S.
government.
And they worked with Democratic Party officials to help Clinton win exactly in the same way that there was an accusation that Russia did with Trump.
Although there was no evidence the Russians and the Trump campaign did that.
But there was evidence of Ukrainian interference in our election.
And here it was reported by Politico in January of 2017 by the reporter Ken Vogel who is now at the New York Times.
He's actually one of the best reporters of the New York Times.
He was the one who most intrepidly reported the story about Hunter Biden's role with Burisma and the corruption that that entailed at the time he was with Politico.
And there you see the headline on the screen.
This has been completely buried from memory.
Ukrainian efforts to sabotage Trump backfire.
This is obviously in the transition when the Ukrainians knew, oh, I guess we bet on the wrong candidate.
Because Trump won.
Quote, Ukrainian government officials tried to help Hillary Clinton and undermine Trump by publicly questioning his fitness for office.
They also disseminated documents implicating a top Trump aide in corruption and suggested they were investigating the matter, only to back away after the election.
And they helped Clinton's allies research damaging information on Trump and his advisers, a political investigation found.
A Ukrainian American operative who was consulting for the DNC met with top officials in the Ukrainian embassy in Washington in an effort to expose ties between Trump, top candidate aide Paul Manafort, and Russia, according to people with direct knowledge of the situation.
The Ukrainian efforts had an impact in the race, helping to force Manafort's resignation and advancing the narrative that the Trump campaign was deeply connected to Ukraine's foe to the East, Russia.
But they were far less concerted or centrally directed than Russia's alleged hacking and dissemination of Democratic emails.
That was Politico having to cover its base and say, oh, I don't think it went as far as what Russia and Trump did.
But there is overwhelming evidence that the Ukrainians tried to do everything they could to help Hillary Clinton win the election, including feeding dirt to DNC officials traipsing through Kiev And exactly the way they tried to depict the Trump Tower meeting and every other thing they said about Trump as having done with Russia.
Weirdly though, there was no concern about the effort of the Ukrainian to interfere in our election, to come down on the side of Hillary Clinton.
The way there was with this fabricated story about Trump and Russia.
Now, probably the most incriminating and illuminating document that destroys this entire scandal, other than the Mueller Report, Came when John Durham was appointed special counsel and what he was asked to do was to investigate whether there were crimes committed in the FBI and CIA's creation of the Russiagate investigation.
And he issued a comprehensive report in May of 2023 that was submitted to and accepted by the Justice Department.
In which he laid out very clearly how the FBI came to open a criminal investigation to determine whether there were ties between Russia and the Trump campaign and who exactly was behind this.
Listen to what he said.
Here is the cover so you just see what it is.
It's the Report on Matters Related to Intelligence Activities and Investigations Arising Out of the 2016 Presidential Campaigns by Special Counsel John Durham.
Remember that it was the FBI and the CIA that concocted this scandal in order to help Hillary Clinton win, just like they did in the 2020 campaign.
When they concocted the lie that the reporting on Joe Biden from Hunter Biden's laptop was Russian disinformation.
This is two straight elections.
They got caught for political motives interfering in an election by spreading lies.
Here is what the Durham report in part concluded, quote, Our office also considered as part of its investigation the government's handling of certain intelligence that it received during the summer of 2016.
That intelligence concerned the purported, quote, approval by Hillary Clinton on July 26, 2016, of a proposal from one of her foreign policy advisors to vilify Donald Trump by stirring up a scandal claiming interference by the Russian security services.
In other words, the CIA, the FBI under Obama had obtained intelligence, had learned that the Hillary Clinton campaign was planning to attack Russia by tying it to Trump.
Quote, according to his handwritten notes, CIA Director Brennan subsequently briefed President Obama and other senior national security officials on that intelligence, including the quote, alleged approval by Hillary Clinton on July of 2016 of a proposal by one of her foreign policy advisors to vilify Trump by stirring up a scandal claiming interference by Russian security services.
Indeed, Durham went on, based on the evidence gathered in the multiple, exhaustive, and costly federal investigation on these matters, including our investigation, neither U.S.
law enforcement nor the intelligence community appears to have possessed any evidence of collusion in their holdings at the commencement of the Crossfire Hurricane investigation.
This is an amazing statement, that neither Neither U.S.
law enforcement nor the intelligence community possessed any actual evidence of any collusion between Trump and Russia and despite that, they opened this crossfire hurricane investigation
And then of course leaked to the New York Times that there was now a criminal investigation to determine whether or not Hillary Clinton or whether or not Donald Trump and the Russians had some sort of sinister and criminal relationship even though they had no evidence to justify opening that investigation.
They did so at the behest of the Hillary Clinton campaign.
It was the Clinton strategy to do so.
And you had people at the FBI.
People like Andrew McCabe and Jim Comey and the FBI agents assigned, like Lisa Page and Peter Strzok, who got caught being anti-Trump operatives, abusing the power of the FBI to concoct a criminal investigation that they could leak to the media to dirty Trump's reputation by tying him to Russia, even though Neither U.S.
law enforcement nor the intelligence community possessed any actual evidence of collusion in their possession at the time they opened that investigation.
That is a gigantic scandal.
Ask yourself whether it has ever been really described that way.
Durham went on, quote, In particular, at the direction of Deputy Director Andrew McCabe, Deputy Assistant Director for Counterintelligence Peter Strzok, opened Crossfire Hurricane immediately.
The matter was opened as a full investigation without having spoken to the persons who provided the information.
Further, the FBI did so without, one, any significant review of its own intelligence databases, two, any collection and examination of any relevant intel from other U.S.
intelligence entities, three, interviews of witnesses essential to understand the raw information that it received, or four, using any of the standard analytical tools typically employed by the FBI in evaluating raw intelligence.
Had it done so, again as set out in sections 4 and C of the report, the FBI would have learned that their own experienced Russia analysts had no information about Trump being involved with Russian leadership officials.
Nor were others in sensitive positions at the CIA, the NSA, and the Department of State aware of such evidence concerning the subject.
In addition, FBI records prepared by Strzok in February and March of 2017 show that at the time of the opening of the Crossfire Hurricane investigation, that's a criminal investigation linking Trump to Russia, the FBI had no information in its holdings indicating that at any time during the campaign, anyone in the Trump campaign had even been in contact with Russian intelligence officials.
It was not until mid-September that the investigators received several of the Steele reports.
Within days of their receipt, the unvetted and unverified Steele reports were used to support probable cause in the FBI's FISA application targeting Carter Page, a U.S.
citizen who, for a period of time, had been an advisor to Trump.
As discussed later in the report, this was done at a time when the FBI knew that the same information Steele had provided to the FBI had also been fed to the media and others in Washington, D.C.
This is a scandal without many parallels in American history.
Those paragraphs that I just read to you are astonishing.
There was nobody who had evidence of a connection between Trump and the Russians.
And despite that, the FBI, because it was the Clinton administration's strategy, opened a criminal investigation and then leaked to the media that it had done so in order to fuel this scandal for which there was never any information.
They then used the Steele dossier to get a spying warrant to spy on Carter Page Even though, as Mueller found, there was no evidence to believe Carter Page had anything to do with the Russian government.
And an FBI lawyer, the FBI lawyer who prepared that application for a warrant against Carter Page, ended up having to plead guilty because he lied on the warrant.
The real crimes committed here were crimes committed by the people who concocted and manufactured this collusion scandal, this Russiagate scandal, and who abused the power of the FBI and the intelligence agencies to work hand-in-hand with the Clinton campaign to defeat Donald Trump.
That's the reality.
That is the truth.
And yet the media just bombarded the United States and Americans with constant propaganda, insisting that this is all true.
Here from the Washington Post, this is already in 2019, two years into the Trump presidency.
The neocon columnist Max Boot had an article headline, here are 18 reasons Trump could be a Russian asset.
These are the people who tried insisting That they hated Trump because he was spreading disinformation.
And over and over they were publishing articles with insane claims.
In 2018, Chris Hayes called Jonathan Tait onto his show.
Jonathan Tait is a partisan Democrat who writes for New York Magazine.
And Tait had just published a cover story Raising the possibility that Trump was actually a Russian agent going all the way back to the 1980s.
And then when Chris Hayes had shade on his show, here you see the two of them.
Chris Hayes, very, very intellectual.
Deeply offended by disinformation.
Takes his job as a journalist very seriously.
Here you see the amazing graphic on the screen of MSNBC.
Shade, it's unlikely but possible that Trump has been a Russian asset since 1987.
Why do people hate the media and why are they happy to watch it implode and all these jobs get lost?
Because this phrase, unlikely but possible, ended up guiding the things they were willing to publish that Chris Hayes was willing to put on the air.
It's unlikely, but possible.
That Trump is a Russian agent since 1987.
I think probably the low point in terms of how pathetic the Washington establishment was willing to sink was when Donald Trump met with Vladimir Putin at a summit between the United States and Russia, the kind that had happened countless times before in Helsinki.
And I'm not making this up, you probably remember this.
The entire media class and the political class decided that because of their interpretation of Trump's body language, it proved that Trump was clearly submissive to Vladimir Putin and that was confirmation for them that Vladimir Putin did in fact have the ability to control Trump like a puppet because of his blackmail.
They use body language, non-verbal signs, to accuse Trump of being a traitor at this Helsinki summit.
No evidence, nothing, other than the way they claim that Trump was interacting with Putin non-verbally.
Here from the Washington Post, the storied August Washington Post, want Pulitzers for their brave and important reporting on Russiagate.
They published this headline.
This is a news article.
Not bad.
In the battle for nonverbal dominance at US-Russia summit, Putin was the clear winner, experts say.
Body language experts.
Here from the article, Keating, one of their experts, quickly ticked off more than a dozen nonverbal assertions of dominance by Putin, including Putin's agile hop onto the podium versus Trump's lumbering walk.
Putin's animated gestures and the way he often disregarded the audience when speaking.
Hear from The Economist during that time as well.
Donald Trump's humiliation in Helsinki.
How to interpret a shameful press conference with Vladimir Putin.
Quote, in Helsinki, asked whether Russia had attacked America's democracy, he treated President Vladimir Putin as someone he trusts more than his own intelligence agencies.
It was a rotten result for America and the world.
Oh yes, how dare Donald Trump question what everyone around the world knows is the sterling, integrity-based pronouncements of the CIA, after spending three years watching them disseminate one lie after the next.
Now, in 2019, and this goes back to what I said at the start, that it's almost impossible to chronicle every story, I had an article that happened right after BuzzFeed had a gigantic embarrassment.
BuzzFeed had claimed that Robert Mueller was in possession of proof, of evidence, of Trump instructing his lawyer, Michael Cohen, to lie to investigators.
That's what BuzzFeed claimed.
And obviously if that had been true, then people would have been angry at Robert Mueller for not having shared that information.
Why have you had such smoke and gun evidence of Donald Trump Instructing Michael Cohen to lie to investigators.
Why have you not shared that?
And so Robert Mueller had to come out for one of the only times during an investigation and issued a press release saying the BuzzFeed story is false and made up.
We have no such evidence.
The BuzzFeed story was just a complete lie.
And so at the time I published this article, the 10 worst most embarrassing U.S.
media failures on the Trump-Russia story.
And even back then, in early 2019, before the close of the Mueller Report and the investigation, I said, quote, the most challenging task is choosing the 10 worst embarrassments.
The most notable aspect is they all go toward promoting the same narrative.
And I talked about stories there like, One day the Washington Post announced that the Russians had hacked into the electricity grid of Vermont with the intention of obtaining the power to turn off electricity in winter and kill people in Vermont.
And the Vermont governor and all these politicians came out and said, how dare Putin?
I will never back down to Putin.
And it turned out the whole story was completely fabricated.
The Russians had nothing to do with what happened.
It wasn't a hack of the electricity grid at all.
They had to retract first the story that Russia was involved and then second that there had even been a hack.
Their, I think, the most ridiculous embarrassment was CNN one time in 2018.
went on the air and said that they had obtained smoking gun evidence that the Trump campaign and Donald Trump had advance knowledge that WikiLeaks had this information about John Podesta and the DNC and was going to publish it.
And of course the story would have been a smoking gun if Donald Trump had actually, Donald Trump Jr.
had received advance notice that WikiLeaks had this.
And CNN, their congressional correspondent, said that he had two separate sources who told him that there was an email to Donald Trump Jr.
from some unknown member of the public telling him 10 days before the WikiLeaks publication about certain documents that were in there that was coming.
And then an hour later MSNBC said they had independently confirmed the same story.
And the media melted down.
They said, oh my God, this is the smoking gun that we've needed.
And then three hours later, the Washington Post got a hold of the emails.
And as it turned out, CNN or its sources either misread the date or lied about it.
The date of the email to Donald Trump from this random member of the public talking about the WikiLeaks documents did not come 10 days before WikiLeaks published it.
It came several days after.
It was just some guy writing to Donald Trump Jr.
saying, hey, you should really take a look at this.
They just got the date of the email wrong.
How is it that CNN had two separate highly placed sources, both of whom misread the date, to lead them to make this claim?
That Donald Trump Jr.
got advanced knowledge of the WikiLeaks reports and the WikiLeaks documents, MSNBC independently confirmed it and it turned out to be a complete lie the entire time and they had to go and sheepishly retract it.
There was an article in the Guardian claiming that Paul Manafort had multiple times visited Julian Assange in the Ecuadorian Embassy.
And I remember that day Chris Haidt said, oh, this is true.
That's the ballgame.
That's the whole ballgame.
If we have Manafort visiting Assange, that shows collusion.
And I had visited the Ecuadorian Embassy.
I know how surveilled it is.
And yet, why was there no Evidence at all, no video evidence of Paul Manafort there.
And, as a result, you see the Guardian story here.
Originally, the headline was, Paul Manafort held secret talks with Assange in the Ecuadorian Embassy.
Period.
And when people started to react to this story, saying, what?
How does nobody have this video evidence?
Where's the evidence that this happened?
The Guardian, instead of doing what they should have done, which is retracting their story, just added that phrase, sources say.
And their argument was, look, look, we don't know if it's true or not.
We just know that our sources did tell us that.
And obviously there was no truth to that.
The Mueller Report didn't even mention this claim.
This happened over and over.
One lie after the next, one story after the next, completely debunked.
Back in 2021, We asked the brilliant videographer and video editor Matt Orfella to create a compilation of all of the lies and disinformation spread by just one person in the media, Nicole Wallace, who was the former Bush-Cheney spokesperson for the Bush-Cheney White House and the camp re-election campaign.
She was a Bush operative in 2005, and now she's become The favorite media host of liberals on MSNBC and yet she is a pathological liar.
I've never seen anybody more willing to lie over and over and get caught doing so than she.
And Matterfaila produced about a 25 minute video that was brilliant that showed how she dissed every single story that has been debunked.
She's at the center of affirming and spreading.
And the vast majority of them are about Russia and Russiagate.
So here's the trailer that we made to promote that documentary, each of which has been seen by several million people.
And just watch this, this is two minutes, just to get a sense of how much these people lie, these people in media corporations, especially when it comes to Trump and Russia, the insane things they have endorsed and are willing to say.
Talking about exterminating Latinos.
100% pants on fire.
The Havana Syndrome.
Headaches and a loud noise.
Clearly acts of aggression, acts of war.
Scientists say the sounds were crickets.
The Havana Syndrome.
Our enemies might be weaponizing technology, beaming something to hurt people's brains.
The claims are scientifically implausible.
Donald Trump to now investigate a conspiracy theory about COVID coming from a lab in Wuhan.
This theory needs to be investigated, which is what President Biden is doing.
Hunter Biden's laptop reveals emails.
We shouldn't look at it as any Anything other than a Russian disinformation operation.
The Hunter Biden laptop material is genuine.
The murder of a police officer.
Officer Brian Sicknick was killed in the line of duty.
They beat a Capitol Police officer to death.
Officer Sicknick died of natural causes.
A steel dossier.
It may be dirty, but it ain't fake.
Obviously, the sealed dossier is discredited by far, actually.
I mean, this is the lunatic response to what is a very rational, evidence-based, fact-based investigation.
FBI pleads guilty to doctoring email.
What the report shows is something that won't be surprising to people that have spent a lot of time in the federal government.
The report left former officials aghast.
The FBI is exonerated today.
It doesn't vindicate anyone at the FBI who touched this.
They are all absolved of any wrongdoing.
The activities we found here don't vindicate anybody.
The Trump administration cleared peaceful Black Lives Matter protesters so the president could take a photo in front of a church.
We did not find evidence that federal agents used CS gas.
The DC police used the CS gas.
Protesters were gassed to clear the way for Trump's photo op.
Demonstrators were pushed out to allow contractors to build a fence, a response to damage done during the two previous nights of rioting.
Russians offered a bounty for the killing of U.S.
soldiers.
U.S.
intel walks back claim Russians put bounties on American troops.
This mountain of evidence that we now have of bounties that Russia paid.
The Biden White House acknowledged.
There was little evidence.
January 6th committee's investigation into a 7-hour, 37-minute gap.
Possible cover-up in the records of calls, and it is no coincidence.
The call logs are complete with no missing pages.
The gap is explained by use of White House landlines and cell phones.
These are the facts.
Let that sink in.
So, as a little taste, as one person, but she is very representative of what they did throughout the 2016 campaign, throughout the Trump presidency, and will absolutely do again as the election approaches.
These people are pathological liars.
And Russia is their North Star of their paranoia and their delusions and their conspiracy theories.
Now, what is amazing is, after the debacle with the Iraq War, there was at least some attempt by these media outlets to grapple with what they did.
The New York Times published an editor's note apologizing for how credulous their reporting was on WMDs.
They vowed in the future not to be so trusting of anonymous claims that come from the CIA and the FBI.
Obviously, that didn't last very long.
But in the case of Russiagate, there's been almost no efforts To hold other journalists accountable.
How many times have I pointed out that every media outlet that spread the lie before the 2020 election that the Russian, that the Hunter Biden laptop was Russian disinformation has refused to retract that story even as many of them acknowledge that the laptop was in fact authentic.
They don't care anymore about lying.
They really don't.
You can catch them lying and they don't care.
One of the very few times there was any attempt to hold any of these people accountable was when the Washington Post press critic Eric Wemple did a series on the journalist who most benefited from pushing the Steele dossier and the two journalists he identified in particular were Rachel Maddow and Natasha Bertrand, a common subject of the show, where we documented how the more she lied on Russiagate, the more she got promoted.
And in response, Rachel Maddow said, oh, the Steele dossier, I never really pushed that.
I never really believed in that.
And Eric Wemple demonstrated how many times she went on her show and presented it as credible.
But probably the most serious effort to provide any accountability to the media was a four-part series published in the Columbia Journalism Review.
Probably the most prestigious academic journalism review.
The Columbia Journalism School is considered one of the top journalism schools in the country.
And the Columbia Journalism Review has been where media ethics and media stories are often aired.
And they got a reporter, Jeff Gerth, who spent 30 years at the New York Times.
As mainstream of a journalist as it gets.
And he published this four-part series in January of 2023 called The Press vs. the President.
And he in great detail documented how radically and woefully The media failed by spreading one lie after the next and refusing to account for it in any way.
He did acknowledge the handful of journalists, including myself and Aaron Maté and Matt Taibbi and a few right-wing journalists like Molly Hemingway and Chuck Ross and a very small number of people who weren't engaging in any skepticism of the story, while the vast majority of the media, in this indictment that he published in the Columbia Journalism Review,
That indicted the media as pathologically lying over and over and throwing all journalistic ethics out the window when it came to Russiagate.
And they basically completely ignored it.
Not a single media outlet mentioned in this article barely addressed it.
Can you hear about a major mainstream media figure, Jeff Gerth, an investigative journalist at the New York Times for 30 years, in this outlet, and they are such a closed Insular system where they protect one another's lives that they didn't even bother to address it.
And what was really fascinating about this article is that he began by explaining what happened at the New York Times when they realized That the Mueller investigation was closing and none of what they thought was going to happen actually happened.
That Robert Mueller didn't indict any American, not a single one, on the core allegation of criminal conspiracy with the Russians.
And the New York Times had placed its entire institutional authority behind the scandal that they were now realizing was bullshit.
And here is his reporting.
This is someone who worked for the New York Times for 30 years, so you can imagine the kind of sources he has at the New York Times.
This is what he wrote, quote, Holy shit!
Bob Mueller is not going to do it, is how Dean Baquet, then the executive direct editor of the New York Times, described the moment his paper's readers realized Bob Mueller was not going to pursue Trump's ouster.
Back Hey, speaking to his New York Times colleagues in a town hall meeting soon after the testimony concluded, acknowledged that the Times had been caught, quote, a little tiny bit flat-footed by the outcome of Mueller's investigation.
That would prove to be more than an understatement.
But neither Bakay nor his successor nor any of the paper's reporters would offer anything like a post-mortem of the paper's Trump-Russia saga, unlike the examination the Times did of its coverage before the Iraq War.
In fact, Bakay added, quote, I think we covered that story better than anyone else and had the prizes to prove it, according to a tape of the event published by Slate.
But outside of the time zone bubble, the damage to the credibility of The Times and its peers persists three years on.
Today, the U.S.
media has the lowest credibility, 26%, among 46 nations, according to a 2022 study by the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism.
In 2021, 83% of Americans saw, quote, fake news as a problem, and 56%, mostly Republicans and independents, agreed the media were, quote, truly the enemy of the American people, according to Rasmussen Reports.
It was one of the most extraordinary indictments of the US media, the corporate media, in general, and specifically with regard to their pushing a debunked fraudulent scandal for three years And they decided to ignore it.
Now, just to give you a sense for what we were constantly told was going to happen with the Mueller investigation, here is the former CIA director under Obama, John Brennan, obviously one of the most vocal advocates of Russiagate from the start, who went on MSNBC a week or so before Robert Mueller closed his investigation.
And he was asked about the potential for Mueller to close his investigation and John Brennan said there's no way Robert Mueller can close his investigation yet because there's a lot more that he's obviously going to do.
Listen to what John Brennan told the country through MSNBC that Robert Mueller was obviously going to do before closing his investigation.
This reveals just how distorted and demented The perception was of American elites about all of this.
Listen to this.
For example, this week on Friday, not knowing anything about it, but Friday is the day that the grand jury indictments come down.
And also this Friday is better than next Friday because next Friday is the 15th of March, which is the Ides of March.
And I don't think Robert Mueller will want to have that dramatic flair of the Ides of March when he is going to be delivering what I think are going to be his indictments, the final indictments, as well as the report that he gives the attorney general.
What makes you believe that he has more indictments?
Because he hasn't addressed the issues related to criminal conspiracy as well as any individuals.
Criminal conspiracy involving the Russians?
The Russians, yes.
Yeah, I think it was very... So what he's saying is like, look, of course Mueller is not ready to close the investigation because he hasn't yet arrested anybody on the core conspiracy.
The fact in his mind that Trump officials criminally conspired with the Russians.
He's like, we've gotten perjury investigation indictments, we've gotten process indictments, we've gotten unrelated financial crimes indictments like in Paul Manafort.
But he's like, but the core of the scandal, which is that Trump colluded with Russia, which he obviously did, we haven't gotten those arrests yet, no indictments yet.
And of course that is coming.
There's no way Mueller can close an investigation without that.
That's an area you know something about.
That investigation was developing while you were still on the job.
Well, it was, in terms of looking at what was going on with the Russians and whether or not U.S.
persons were actively collaborating, colluding, cooperating, involved in a conspiracy with them or not.
But also if there's going to be any member of the Trump family.
Did you see enough at that stage to believe that that would result in indictments once investigated?
I thought at the time that there was going to be individuals who were going to have issues with the Department of Justice.
Yes, and I think we've already seen a number of individuals who have been indicted, either have pled guilty or have been convicted now.
So, again, I don't have any inside knowledge.
I'm not talking with anybody in the special counsels.
Yes, you do.
You have the inside knowledge.
But not about the status of the investigation right now.
But I do think also if anybody from the Trump family, an extended family, is going to be indicted, it would be in the final act.
of Mueller's investigation, because Bob Mueller and I think his team knows that if he were to do something, indicting a Trump family member, or if he were to go forward with indictment on criminal conspiracy involving U.S. persons, that would basically be the death knell of the special counsel's office, because I don't believe that Donald Trump would allow Bob that would basically be the death knell of the special counsel's office, because I don't believe that Donald Trump would allow John Brennan, thank you very much.
He wanted to say it's vital that we listen to every word that you say because it's filled Do you see how completely ignorant and demented our elite class was?
John Brennan was saying and encouraging MSNBC viewers to believe that we were on the verge, obviously, of having members of the Trump family indicted and arrested for colluding with Russia because we haven't had that yet and Mueller is saving that to last.
Because he knows the minute that he indicts a member of the Trump family, Trump's going to fire him.
Now, Mueller never indicted any member of the Trump family for colluding with Russia, nor did he indict any other American for doing that.
And the reason is, as he said in his report, they obtained no evidence to establish that actually happened.
And yet, these people were Lying to the American people for years, and now they just move on as though this never happened, which is why we can't let them do that.
Now, the other issue that I think has always been so overlooked, a lot of people treated Russiagate as a political scandal that the CIA concocted despite having no evidence, and that's obviously serious.
You do not want the CIA and the FBI interfering in our political system.
They're not supposed to.
It's illegal.
But the other big concern I always had from the start is that what was happening here is that they were essentially making it illegal for any American to speak with any Russian.
Because every time an American got caught having dialogue with Russian officials, the climate in Washington treated it as though it was inherently treason.
It was inherently a crime.
And so, corrupting the American-Russian relationship that way when you have, in multiple places around the world, Russian and American military planes and ships passing very closely to one another, and destroying the possibility for the two countries to have communication, was always something that was very obviously dangerous and reckless to me.
Here are just a couple of examples.
The Washington Post, March 2017.
Remember, this is less than two months into Trump's presidency.
Jeff Sessions met with a Russian envoy twice last year, encounters he later did not disclose.
Quote, then-Senator Jeff Sessions spoke twice last year with Russia's ambassador to the United States.
Just Department officials said encounters he did not disclose when asked about possible contacts between members of President Trump's campaign and representatives of Moscow during Sessions' confirmation hearing to become Attorney General.
One of the meetings was a private conversation between Sessions and Russian Ambassador Sergei Kislyak that took place in September in the senator's office at the height of what U.S.
intelligence officials say was a Russian cyber campaign to upend the U.S.
presidential race.
The previously undisclosed discussions could fuel new congressional calls for the appointment of a special counsel to investigate Russia's alleged role in the 2016 presidential election.
Russian senators meet with, American senators meet with Russian officials all the time.
You want that to happen.
But they wanted to imply that Jeff Sessions had done something improper, in fact was involved The worst example was the prosecution of Michael Flynn.
the Russians because they wanted him out of the investigation so that a special counsel could be appointed.
And so they created a climate where any contact, no matter how trivial, with Russian officials was treated as criminal.
The worst example was the prosecution of Michael Flynn.
In May of 2020, we did a two-hour full deep dive into the sham of that prosecution called the sham prosecution of Michael Flynn.
We can put that on the screen.
I was still at the Intercept at the time.
So you can imagine how well that went over there.
But the reason why this investigation was so disturbing to me Was in part because every single liberal principle, in quotes, about the criminal justice system was discarded in order to try and turn Michael Flynn into a criminal.
But the worst part was that all Michael Flynn ever did was that once Trump designated him as the National Security Advisor, he picked up the phone in the transition the way, of course, you want the transition team to do.
And he reached out and called Ambassador Kislyak and said, oh look, I know Obama just imposed all these sanctions under you because he was under a lot of pressure to do so because of this whole Russiagate fraud, but don't worry, once we're in office, we're gonna meet and we're gonna soothe out the relationship.
And then the FBI decided, because they were eavesdropping on Michael Flynn, their target, of course, was Kislyak, they said, and then someone leaked This conversation to the Washington Post, even though leaking NSA intercepts is the most serious crime you can possibly do under the U.S.
Code, it was designed to say that Michael Flynn had done something wrong by even having a conversation with Ambassador Kislyak.
And that's what led the FBI to then ask for a meeting at his office.
Ask him questions about what happened during this conversation months earlier, even though the FBI obviously knew because they were eavesdropping on it and had a transcript of it.
And then when Michael Flynn's recollection was different than the transcript in very trivial ways, they decided to turn it into a perjury case or a lying to the FBI crime.
And prosecute him on this.
So you see, what had happened here was that they were feeding Democrats on this anti-Russian bile, telling them to blame Vladimir Putin for what, for Democrats, the most cataclysmic event in their lives, which is the defeat of Hillary Clinton.
Constantly getting them to hate Russia, to view Russia as an American enemy, even though Obama insisted that they weren't.
And at the same time, they were making it impossible for Washington officials to speak with Russian officials.
Incredibly dangerous and reckless thing to do for partisan gain.
This is why Russiagate continues to stay with us.
Because the tactic of accusing foreign policy critics or anti-war critics of being Russian agents is as pervasive as ever that came out of Russiagate.
Although, through via McCarthyism.
The anti-Russian animus that the CIA and the media injected into the American bloodstream is still very much shaping dangerous war policies, including, obviously, the funding and arming of Ukraine as they continue into their third year fighting Russia.
But the most important thing is that this was a massive fraud.
The 2020 fraud of telling the public of the Hunter Biden laptop was Russian disinformation, when in fact it was authentic, was just as much of a lie.
It just wasn't nearly as consequential as this.
This drowned our politics for three years.
It was the number one story for the entire Trump presidency.
And it was based on a complete and utter lie.
Now, to help us explore and understand more about the origins of this story, about some of these Prongs of the Russiagate scandal that were completely false and to understand the ongoing implications and why American elites are so desperate to just forget this ever happened.
If you bring up the Hunter Biden laptop, if you bring up Russiagate, they'll act like you're talking about something trivial in the past that everyone should just forget about, move on, precisely because it reveals the truth about it.
We are going to speak with Aaron Maté, who, as I said, was one of the very few journalists willing from the start to put his career on the line to State that so much of this not only was evidence but made no sense and he was particularly in a risky situation because he had long worked in progressive media and it was heresy.
To do what they decided to view as defending Donald Trump, when in fact it was just doing his job as a journalist.
He became, in my view, one of the two or three people who became most expertise, had most expertise in the details and kind of the granular facts of Russiagate.
And so we were not going to do this retrospective without talking to Aaron, given what an important journalistic role he played.
And I think the interview that we did with him, we taped it yesterday.
Sheds a lot more light on some of the key issues and the reason why this deserves ongoing and systemic attention.
Here's our interview.
Aaron, thank you so much for joining us tonight.
There's nobody with whom I would rather do this show than you, and I really appreciate you taking the time to talk to us.
Good to be here.
Absolutely.
So let's go back to the very beginning, the kind of origin of this entire debacle that came to be known as Russiagate.
I think there's been a lot of confusion deliberately stoked by Democrats who now want to distance themselves from what had been their primary political weapon by saying, oh, it wasn't the Hillary Clinton campaign or the Democratic Party that created this narrative.
Instead, it was actually anti-Trump.
media outlets and operatives who did it, and we just kind of, in the Hillary Clinton campaign, just inherited it once those other candidates dropped out.
How do you, and obviously there was a lot of involvement in the U.S. security state and the corporate media, when you look back on all of this and you look to the origins of where this scandal began, how do you assign the blame?
The origins are with the Democratic Party, specifically the Hillary Clinton campaign, which hired the opposition research firm Fusion GPS.
In the spring of 2016, I I believe the exact month is May.
And immediately got them to start looking into what they imagined were Trump's ties to Russia.
And why they chose Russia, I'm not sure.
One rumored reason is that Hillary Clinton was at that point under scrutiny for her suspected ties to Russia over her tenure as Secretary of State and some money that her husband Bill Clinton had gotten from a Russian bank.
And so possibly this idea of looking into Trump's fictional ties to Russia was a way to simply deflect.
Regardless, Fusion GPS was hired.
They immediately hired Christopher Steele to write up this phony dossier of elaborate conspiracy theories involving Trump and Russia.
And meanwhile, the Hillary Clinton campaign also hired a firm called CrowdStrike.
Which, upon realizing in April and May of 2016 that their emails had been stolen, quickly pointed the blame at Russia in a really dubious sequence of events that I can get into.
But that's the origin.
And also, simultaneously, funnily enough, there's also a Ukraine tie, because you had people inside of Ukraine who, once it was clear that Trump was getting the nomination, were not happy about it, because he was openly talking about cooperating with Russia and not getting into a World War III over Ukraine.
So now it's documented—and this was in Politico and a few other outlets—that officials at the Ukrainian embassy started cooperating with the DNC to try to feed them dirt about Trump's then-campaign manager, Paul Manafort.
So the Clinton campaign really is the heart of this.
Ukraine plays a role too.
And then very quickly after the Steele dossier gets underway in June, July 2016, Steele starts passing his conspiracy theories to his contacts at the FBI.
And one of the people who's involved in this happens to be Victoria Nuland.
Because in early July 2016, it's Victoria Nuland, who's then serving in the State Department, who authorizes an FBI agent to go and meet with Christopher Steele to receive his dossier.
Obviously anytime there's Ukraine involved there, you're going to find the fingerprints of Victoria Nuland.
And yeah, there was a political article that has been memory hold right after Donald Trump won the 2016 election that basically said Ukraine made the wrong bet, that the Ukrainians were doing all sorts of things to try and help the Clinton campaign by passing dirt about Paul Manafort, about other Trump associates, because they expected Hillary Clinton to win, they wanted Hillary Clinton to win, because obviously they perceived that the Clinton circle was so fanatically Supportive of Ukraine.
Just, I want to get into the Steele dossier because I do think that's where so much of the most extreme revisionism is now coming from.
Before we get there, you mentioned this question of why they chose Russia.
I mean my view, and of course you can only speculate to an extent, but I think there's some things we can know, is that if you look back at the part of the Obama years that was dominated when Hillary Clinton was at the State Department, There was a fixation she had even back then on confronting Russia when she wrote her book.
One of the areas where she was most harshly critical of Obama was his quote-unquote failure to confront Russia both in Syria and Ukraine.
She of course wanted him to do far more than he in fact did to remove Bashar al-Assad and she wanted Ukraine flooded with lethal arms.
So she was always kind of fixated on Russia.
She actually financed as part of this National Endowment for Democracy and other groups The opposition in Russia helped stimulate a lot of these riots that took place in Russia.
That's one of the reasons Putin hated Hillary was because she had been doing the kind of interference they accused Russia of doing.
But I also wonder whether you think that one of the reasons why Russia works so well here is because Russia has always played this role In American political life for decades, which, you know, obviously during the Cold War, which was this was the big evil country that we're supposed to fear.
They're doing everything possible to subvert our institutions and undermine our sacred values.
Do you think that part of the appeal of Russiagate was that so many Americans over generations had been trained to view Russia as this existential threat that kind of the fear was already built in?
Oh, absolutely.
And if you, you know, read the accounts of the central figures in Russiagate, including Jim Clapper, who was the former Director of National Intelligence, he would talk about how he hates the Russians, how they're genetically driven to lie and cheat.
Many other top officials like Lisa Page, who was with the FBI during the Trump-Russia investigation, or Peter Strzok, they all talked in really derisive terms about Russia.
So absolutely, I think it was that, you know, Cold War This revisionism actually infuriates me because, of course, the attempt by Democrats is that they know that this has become a huge embarrassment.
The core conspiracy theories that gave rise to the scandal in the first place were disproven by the person they deputized to be the Supreme Authority, Robert Mueller.
And one of the most embarrassing parts of all was the Steele dossier because essentially it turned out to be a gigantic hoax.
And there were a couple of attempts, very few, but one journalistic attempt to hold other journalists accountable for the frauds that they helped spread was when Eric Wemple did a series on the journalist who most spread the Steele dossier and identified MSNBC's Rachel Maddow and Natasha Bertrand now at CNN.
And Rachel Maddow said in response, oh, I was never really a big booster of the Steele dossier that really didn't play a role, a big role in the scandal.
That's what they all say now.
You cannot find anybody anymore who is willing to say they ever were pushing the allegations, the core allegations of the Steele dossier.
Talk about the role that the Steele dossier actually played in this scandal called Russia Gate, because I think this is the thing that has been most deliberately rewritten. - Mm-hmm.
People forget that when the Steele dossier was released in January 2017, shortly before Trump took office, this was huge news.
When BuzzFeed News released the entire dossier, everybody ran with this.
And that set off a series of articles in every single outlet.
And in fairness to Rachel Maddow, she was far from alone.
This was everybody.
This was Jane Mayer of The New Yorker, wrote a glowing profile of Christopher Steele.
of this intrepid British spy who came across this damning information about a presidential candidate turned president and just wanted to alert the world to protect democracy.
I mean, everybody did this.
New York Times portrayed him as credible.
Anonymous FBI officials laundered claims to reliable stenographers in the media that they've been looking into Steele's claims and they're all checking out.
laundered claims to reliable stenographers in the media, that they've been looking into Steele's claims and they're all checking out.
When meanwhile they knew that from the start this was a fraud, they had spoken very early on to Ivan Denchenko who was Steele's supposed main source, who was Russian, but at the time he wasn't even in Russia.
When meanwhile, they knew that from the start, this was a fraud.
They had spoken very early on to Ivan Denchenko, who was Steele's supposed main source, who was Russian, but at the time he wasn't even in Russia.
He was in Washington, D.C.
He was in Washington, D.C.
And in his telling, the tales that made it into the Steele dossier came from him having drinks with his friends and just basically making stuff up.
The FBI knew all this, but gave their media contacts a completely false picture.
And these media staffers, rather than doing their jobs and subjecting these claims to minimal scrutiny, printed all this and treated Steele as if he was credible.
So this was an across-the-board failure.
And yes, for Rachel Madder to claim that she never took Steele seriously, she did an entire special on the Steele dossier.
It was called The Dossier, I believe.
And she interviewed all these people.
Yeah.
You know, Michael Isikoff, David Korn of Mother Jones, all of them who took the Steele essay seriously.
In fact, David Korn and Isikoff's book, Russian Roulette, was pretty much entirely based on the Steele essay.
Same with Luke Harding, who I famously interviewed early on in all this.
His work was also based on Steele.
So yeah, this was an across-the-board failure.
Yeah, and we're going to show clips of that interview that you did with Luke Harding because he had the number one best-selling book in the country purporting to have proven the existence of collusion and you spent the interview pressing him on just some evidence on which he was relying to make that assertion and he simply could not answer and then finally hung up on you in shame because you had exposed The entire book is a fraud.
It's really a remarkable interview that I encourage people to watch, but we are going to include it in part of what we're doing.
So, one of the things, and I know there's going to be people who, when they hear that this show is about this topic, are going to say, oh this is old news, why are you still focused on this?
And the reason I find that just so enraging is because it was the issue that Dominated our political discourse for three years.
It was by far the number one story used throughout the 2016 campaign and for at least the first two, two and a half years of the Trump presidency.
And so to pretend that it was just some kind of trivial footnote that wasn't really important is such a form of deceit and historical revisionism that it drives me crazy.
One of the things about it is, you know, it's very hard when I was thinking about talking to you about what I want to talk to you about.
There's so many different prongs of it that turned out to be a hoax.
But one of the ones that got the most attention, and again, this has been memory hold, is this allegation that the Clinton campaign pushed very aggressively that a secret server had been discovered that permitted the Trump organization to speak to a bank in Russia called Alpha Bank.
Talk about kind of where that came from and how it is that that got debunked and the role that that played in perceptions being shaped.
Yeah, this was rolled out during the 2016 campaign, if I remember correctly.
I'm forgetting some of the details now because it's been a while.
Hillary Clinton's lawyer went to the FBI.
That's what he got prosecuted for, by hiding that he was there.
And the FBI, after a couple weeks, was like, this is a joke, there's nothing to this, and never bothered to tell the public.
Yes, so thank you for refreshing my memory.
So just as Hillary Clinton's lawyer, Michael Sussman, is feeding this fake claim to the FBI, because again, the Clinton campaign's goal at this point is to get the FBI to investigate anything to do with Trump and Russia to make their scam look credible.
So Sussman, this Clinton lawyer, had already fed the FBI the claims of another Clinton contractor, CrowdStrike, that Russia had stolen the Democratic Party emails.
The FBI was on that.
And Sussman decides to double down by also giving him a bunch of so-called data that some researchers working for him had put together, showing that there is, as you said, a secret covert communications channel between the Trump campaign and a Russian bank.
And the theory here is that the Trump campaign is using the secret channel to transmit messages or get messages back from the Kremlin.
And of course, the FBI looks at this and concludes that it's baseless, which we find out way after the fact.
But meanwhile, the Clinton campaign, via Fusion GPS, the firm working for them, who are involved in this, they're also pushing this on loyal media allies, like Franklin Foyer, who's now with The Atlantic, but then he was with, I think, Slate.
And Foyer publishes his big story in Slate, and when it comes out, what does the Clinton campaign do?
They put out a press release saying, oh my God, There's evidence of a secret Trump channel speaking to a Russian bank.
What does this mean?
Is this an evidence of a covert operation between Trump and Russia?
This needs to be investigated.
This was put out before the election.
And who signs that press release?
It's Jake Sullivan, who's then a top Hillary advisor, who's now our national security advisor.
Has there been any accountability at all for Jake Sullivan, who's supposedly in charge of U.S.
national security, a pretty big portfolio?
Any accountability at all for him putting out a documented fraud to the public before the 2016 election?
There's been none at all.
So that's one example of the scam for which there's been no accountability whatsoever.
And it goes, the consequences go far beyond just lying to the public and embarrassing the media.
I mean, we can talk about it.
Yeah, I want to get to that, for sure.
Not just the harm that it caused, but the ongoing harm that it's causing in terms of U.S.-Russian relations.
You're talking about the two biggest nuclear stockpiles.
Before we get to that, I just want to ask this other question, which is, you know, the way The run-up to the war in Iraq happened, and liberals used to talk about this all the time with indignation, is that Dick Cheney or Paul Wolfowitz would leak fake intelligence and fake claims to the New York Times or the Washington Post, and they would publish it with claims and they would publish it with claims that it was based on anonymous sources inside the intelligence community.
And then Dick Cheney would go on shows like Meet the Press, and when asked about those claims, he would say, "Look, I can't talk about the intelligence, but even the New York Times today or yesterday published X, Y, and Z when the whole time it was in fact planted by Dick and Z when the whole time it was in fact And he was citing these media outlets as though it was a vindication of something that he himself couldn't speak about.
This is exactly what the Hillary Clinton campaign did, which was they were constantly working in conjunction with the US security state to feed media outlets Fake stories like this Alpha Bank.
And then they would go and they would say, oh look, this amazing story from Slate today revealed that Trump had the secret server with the Alpha Bank when they were the ones who planted that along.
And you can still go to Hillary Clinton's account on Twitter.
It is still up.
I think it's been retweeted like more than a hundred thousand times.
It went mega viral because that was the intention was to constantly contaminate our discourse with precisely the kind of disinformation they claim to be so offended by and claim that the Russians interfered in our election by spreading.
Um, let me just ask you I think And again, I think there's so many of these prongs that have been forgotten and I think it's so important to preserve them and make sure that they're not forgotten to history because they say so much about how our institutions function.
If you say now that the Mueller investigation admitted that it could not find the evidence to establish the conspiracy that gave rise to the whole thing, people will say, oh well, there were other things that happened and other things that Mueller was able to prove.
What was the actual core original claim that allowed there to be a special counsel appointed to investigate the possibility of potential crimes committed?
You mean like what was the predicating incident for the Trump-Russia investigation?
Yeah, what was the original claim that allowed there to be a criminal investigation?
Well, the official claim is a joke, and I don't believe it's the actual predication that.
I believe it was just a pretext.
But the official claim, if you read the document that opened up the Trump-Russia investigation in late July 2016, the claim is that a low-level Trump campaign volunteer named George Papadopoulos overheard, and I'm quoting, a suggestion of a suggestion That Russia could somehow help the campaign.
And if you read this FBI document, it doesn't specify what the supposed suggestion of the suggestion is.
So it doesn't mention the stolen emails that supposedly Russia took and gave to WikiLeaks to help Trump.
It doesn't mention that at all.
It doesn't mention who relayed the supposed suggestion to George Papadopoulos, this low-level volunteer.
All it says is that he got a suggestion of a suggestion That Russia could be of some help.
And that, we're supposed to believe, is the reason why it was legitimate for the FBI to open up an unprecedented treason investigation.
That's what it was, basically.
A treason investigation of not just a presidential candidate, but his entire campaign.
Because as soon as they opened up this investigation, purportedly based on what happened with George Papadopoulos, a low-level Trump campaign volunteer, the FBI immediately pivoted to saying, OK, well, who else could have received this supposed suggestion from Russia?
Let's look at everybody.
So they also investigated Michael Flynn, who was a top Trump aide on his campaign and became his first national security advisor.
They also investigated Paul Manafort, who was Trump's campaign manager, because he was working in Ukraine previously.
They also investigated Carter Page, who was another Trump campaign volunteer, because he had ties to Russia.
And they used all this to investigate the entire campaign.
And that, we are supposed to believe, is why it was legitimate to investigate not just a presidential campaign, but then a president after Trump won the election.
So they, obviously, the foundation of the entire scandal began with the assertion leaked by the CIA and the FBI that they were able to establish with certainty that the party that had hacked these emails and provided them to WikiLeaks Was Russia.
And I think there's a lot of people who are skeptical of Russiagate in terms of the core allegations, the ones you just referred to, the idea that the Trump campaign criminally colluded or conspired with the Russians to do that, who nonetheless believe that it's probably the case that it was the Russians that were responsible for this hack, namely the Russian government.
They allege in particular that it was Vladimir Putin who ordered it.
You have always been somebody who has remained skeptical of that claim of the assignment of blame to Russia for this hacking and the conclusion by CrowdStrike that it was Russia and then everybody else jumping on board.
What is your reason or what are your reasons for that skepticism?
Before I answer, just a quick word about why I also don't doubt the official predicate for Russiagate, the George Papadopoulos supposed predicate, which is that in the weeks before that, the FBI had already received the Steele dossier.
So we're supposed to believe that even though the FBI received the Steele dossier before opening the Trump-Russia investigation, supposedly based on George Papadopoulos, that Steele had nothing to do with it.
Really, all this was just simply because of the George Papadopoulos information, which I just don't believe.
Why I'm skeptical of it.
But why I'm skeptical of the Russian interference claim is there's never been any evidence presented for it.
And all the purported evidence presented doesn't add up.
I've written about this extensively.
First of all, it's important to remember that the claim that Russia stole Democratic Party emails and gave them the WikiLeaks to help Trump, which is the core allegation at the heart of Russiagate, it predates even the collusion allegations.
That begins with another Clinton campaign contractor called CrowdStrike.
Because after the DNC discovered that something was going on with their systems, they hired CrowdStrike.
And CrowdStrike immediately said that we think that this was Russia that stole the emails.
And the FBI, after opening an investigation of all this, rather than doing their own analysis of the Democratic Party servers, they relied entirely on CrowdStrike's forensics.
That would be like me claiming that my home has been robbed.
And when the police come and investigate, I say, don't worry, I'm going to handle the investigation.
I'm going to hire a contractor.
You can rely on their work.
And meanwhile, I'm going to accuse someone across the street of being the culprit.
You'll have to rely entirely on my work product.
I mean, it's unprecedented.
No serious investigation would ever do that.
But for some reason in the case of CrowdStrike and the McClain campaign, this was allowed to happen.
While simultaneously the FBI was relying on the Steele dossier.
another Clinton campaign contractor for its pursuit of these collusion conspiracy theories.
So that's where it begins.
And then you look at the evidence that's been produced.
And from the start, it's been qualified, vague language, always obscuring the fact that there's no concrete evidence at all.
And fast forward to the Mueller report, and you read it carefully.
And Mueller, first of all, presents a really implausible timeline.
According to Mueller's timeline, Julian Assange would have had to have received the stolen Democratic Party emails before he even made contact with his purported source, who Mueller says is a character named Guccifer 2.0.
So Mueller's timeline doesn't make sense.
The language he uses is heavily qualified.
He uses words like Russian hackers likely exfiltrated data.
And there's so many other glaring holes like that.
And then fast forward to May 2020.
So the Mueller report comes out in April 2019.
Fast forward to May 2020, and what do we get?
The transcripts of the head of CrowdStrike, Sean Henry, testifying before the House Intelligence Committee in December 2017, which up until that point had been under seal because Adam Schiff, the top Russiagate fraudster in Congress, had been sitting on these transcripts and not letting them be released.
And what does Sean Henry of CrowdStrike say in this transcript that we only get nearly three years after his testimony?
We have no concrete evidence of any Russian hacking.
Pretty much that's what he says.
He's pressed multiple times.
How do you know that Russia did this?
He says, we have indications that it was Russia.
We have no concrete evidence.
And you read this and you think, OK, so on what basis are they claiming that Russian hackers stole these emails if the firm that generated this allegation and that was relied on by the FBI can't even vouch for it?
And why was this extraordinary mission kept under wraps for so long?
Just like so many other Russiagate bombshells, this is yet another one that is undermined when the available evidence comes out.
So we referred earlier to the ongoing effects of this scandal that it wasn't just that our country was drowned in continuous lies and a hoax of a scandal by virtually every corporate media outlet and every major center of power in the United States.
That would be bad enough.
Part of the ongoing effect is that there are a lot of Democrats, not a lot but some, who continue to insist this alternative reality that actually Russiagate was proven true.
There was a fundraising email sent out by Adam Schiff, the aforementioned Adam Schiff, who's running for Senate now in California, where he was basically touting the fact that, according to him, it was he who led the way in proving the existence of this Russiagate collusion conspiracy theory.
I mean, there are a lot of Democrats who just live in this alternative world where this was proven and not debunked.
But the major change to me, I'm interested in understanding what you see as the kind of ongoing effects is that if you go back to the Obama administration, and we were talking about this before with Hillary Clinton's criticism that Obama didn't confront the Russians enough, Obama talked about Russia all the time as a country essentially with whom the United States could partner.
He wanted to partner with them in Syria and have common bombing targets against ISIS and Al Qaeda.
They did actually work on the Iran deal.
Russia played an important role in helping diplomatically Iran and the United States reach common ground on the Iran deal.
He really spoke about Russia.
I'm good.
Now the way the establishment in Washington talks about Russia is fundamentally and radically different, and we're obviously now involved in a very costly two-year proxy war against the Russians in Ukraine, as well as all other different ways that we are constantly looking for ways to augment the tensions.
What to you are the greatest harms, not in the past, but the ones that are ongoing that require us to continue to talk about what was done here?
Yeah, look, on the point about Obama, if you remember when he's debating Mitt Romney in the 2012 campaign, he's mocking Mitt Romney when Romney says on the debate stage that Russia is our top geopolitical foe.
And Obama, you know, quips in response, the 1980s called, they want their foreign policy back.
And Democrats joined him in mocking Romney.
And there was even an ad making fun of Romney.
And that was the party line.
That ad had Hillary Clinton, Madeleine Albright, John Kerry, the whole gang, mocking Mitt Romney for his archaic view of foreign policy and thinking Russia was our enemy.
Yes.
What I think changed in the intervening years is that Russia stood up, or Russia interfered with U.S.
hegemony in two major areas.
In Syria in 2015, Russia intervened on the side of Bashar al-Assad, who the U.S.
was trying to overthrow.
And as John Kerry explained at the time, the reason Russia came in is that the U.S.
was watching as ISIS was encroaching on Damascus.
And Kerry explained that the U.S. thought that they could use the threat of ISIS to force Assad to negotiate his way out of power and allow for someone to come in who the U.S. favored, to replace him.
And Kerry says that's why Russia came in, is because they didn't want an ISIS government.
That's a direct quote from Kerry.
So when Russia did that, Russia really angered neocons in Washington like John McCain and his counterparts in the Democratic Party like Hillary Clinton.
And then you have also the coup in Ukraine, the Maidan coup, which the Obama administration took part in.
Obama himself was not, I think, a committed neocon, but he also just wasn't very, you I don't think he really cared that much about foreign policy, or at least he didn't care that much about Russia.
So I think he sort of delegated Ukraine to other officials like Victoria Nuland and Joe Biden, and they pulled off the backing of this coup in Ukraine.
And Russia again responded to that by seizing Crimea.
And the tensions around that set off the ensuing war in the Donbas.
So those two incidents of Russia resisting U.S.
regime change efforts Really angered people in Washington like John McCain and Hillary Clinton.
I think that fed into the animus that we saw in 2016.
And that's why, after Russia was accused of stealing Democratic Party emails, people like John McCain and Lindsey Graham, even though this alleged Russian interference had favored their candidate, Donald Trump, they were saying things like, this is an act of war, and we're going to, you know, respond to Russia really, really aggressively.
So the consequences, as you were saying from the start, Fed into this Cold War neocon view of the world, that Russia was an enemy that couldn't be negotiated with, Trump's whole campaign line about Russia is that it'd be good for us to get along and we don't want to have a world war with Russia.
And that really angered neocons who framed their entire worldview around confronting adversaries, especially Russia.
And so anytime Trump tried to get along with Putin or he raised questions about the same U.S.
intelligence community that was accusing him of being a Russian agent, he was denounced as a traitor.
This incentivized him to show he could be quote unquote tough on Russia, which led him to abandon his stated calls for cooperation with Russia.
And it also incentivized the U.S.
media and Democrats to ignore and look away when Trump's policies actually escalated tensions with Russia.
So, for example, Trump authorized weapons shipments to Ukraine that Obama didn't want to send because Obama, rightfully, I think, didn't want to worsen the Ukraine crisis.
Trump came into office.
He's accused of being a Russian agent.
He now has the incentive to disprove his so-called critics who are obsessively focused on this.
And meanwhile, Democrats are obsessive or are incentivized to ignore that because they want to buy into this conspiracy theory.
These really are Russian agents.
So all this produces really toxic atmosphere where even as Trump increased tensions with Russia by also tearing up nuclear treaties and conducting war games, Democrats are incentivized to look away.
And And this played a major role, I think, in the crisis we're seeing today in Ukraine, because it made diplomacy with Russia pretty much impossible.
And I don't think without Russiagate we'd be seeing the war in Ukraine as we're seeing today.
Yeah, absolutely.
I mean, they made it basically criminal for any U.S.
officials to even speak with Russians, which is, again, when you're talking about the two countries with the largest nuclear stockpiles pointed with thousands of intercontinental nuclear tip missiles ballistic missiles at one another city is probably the most reckless thing I've ever seen a political party do in pursuit of some sort of partisan gain and for sure that not only makes Alright, last question Aaron.
Ukraine dangerous, but all kinds of relations more dangerous.
And it also made Democrats feed on this anti-Russian hatred for so many years because they were constantly told it was Vladimir Putin who was to blame for the most apocalyptic event in their life, which was the victory of Donald Trump.
All right, last question, Aaron.
I just want to end it by focusing on the role of the media because, as you all know, so many parts of the corporate media have just been caught.
I don't mean being deceitful or misleading.
I mean outright lying, like on the level of fabrication.
In so many ways, you can kind of call it a small ways like the Guardian, including your friend Luke Harding.
Publishing a report that said that Paul Manafort had visited Julian Assange several times while Assange was in the Ecuadorian embassy.
The most ridiculous claim given that I visited there.
It's one of the most surveilled places on the planet.
The idea that Paul Manafort could have snuck in and out without being detected didn't even pass the lap test.
And the only thing the Guardian was willing to do in response to pretty much the entire world saying that didn't happen, Mueller didn't find it happen, was they just added to their headline saying Manafort visited Assange, comma, officials say.
In order to say, well, officials did say it, so our headline is still true, but they would never retract it, have an editor's note explaining it, nothing.
But then there's the much bigger lie where right before the 2020 election, the entire media said that the reporting from the Hunter Biden laptop was Russian disinformation, only for not just the media to subsequently admit that, in fact, that laptop was genuine, but for the U.S. government and its prosecution against Hunter Biden but for the U.S. government and its prosecution against Hunter Biden to say that the story of how they got that laptop, namely that he left it at laptop repair shop in Rhode Island and that he didn't come pick it up and then the store owner passed it on to Rudy Giuliani.
It was actually completely true all along and yet again you have no media outlet, not one who spread that lie, willing to now go back and acknowledge that or retract it.
It seems like they're fine now with even getting caught lying.
How did looking back on Russiagate and everything that happened in the media world change your view, if it did, of what the corporate media does in the United States, kind of the function that it serves?
Well, I've always seen it as being a stenographer for power, but Russiagate was just so striking in how dumb it was.
It was centered on this ridiculous conspiracy theory that the President of the United States was being blackmailed by Vladimir Putin with a sex tape and was engaged in a sprawling conspiracy with all sorts of tales.
Remember the tale about Michael Cohen going to Prague to meet with Russian hackers to pay them off?
All these fantasies that were just so ridiculous and yet everybody was incentivized to buy into it.
And if you didn't buy into it like us you were on the margins.
You were no longer allowed in respectable places.
So this was just so I mean at least in previous Scandals like Iraq WMDs?
Yeah, Saddam Hussein's a bad guy.
Okay, so maybe it's plausible he might have WMDs.
I never thought he did, but at least you can imagine that it's possible.
This was just so stupid.
But yet the entire media, not just the corporate media, but a lot of progressive media, a lot of places where I used to be welcome and work at, bought into it too.
It's it speaks to how important it is to have critical thinking skills when you're working in media and how hard it is for some people to hold on to them when they're incentivized and not just this isn't just careerism.
This also is you know you've talked about this.
This is the social incentives to play along because you People who are liberal minded, who live in coastal areas, don't want to be seen as somehow helping Donald Trump win or playing into his supporters who are all deemed to be deplorables.
There's a certain snobbery going on.
And I think that played into this dynamic where people were able to buy into these dumb conspiracy theories about Trump and Russia.
And then in 2020, once again, the same playbook is, the exact same playbook is rolled out.
You have corruption.
Allegations against a Democratic Party candidate.
In 2016, it was Hillary Clinton.
In 2020, it's Joe Biden and his son, Hunter.
And you have actual emails documenting this corruption.
In 2016, it's the DNC emails, the John Pesce emails.
In 2020, it's the contents of Hunter Biden's laptop.
And what happens?
The same intelligence officials say it's Russia's doing, and everybody just runs with it.
And when you try to challenge that at your adversarial outlet, The Intercept, you had to resign because you weren't allowed to write what you wanted to write.
And if there wasn't even space for you to do that at an adversarial site, imagine how bad it was for the rest of the media.
That I founded that was built on my name and my work.
Yeah, no, I think that's exactly right.
You know, there's, I think, a recognition historically that the media was very repressive in allowing dissent on Iraq WMD.
But if you compare the amount of dissent that was aired and platformed and heard, even in the mainstream media, when it came to the war on terror and Iraq and the Iraq war,
It makes what happened with Russiagate, or Russiagate makes what happened with the Iraq War run up to be a festival of free speech and liberty because every person who worked in media understood, and in part because they saw the examples of the few of us who descended from the start, that if you didn't get on board with this lie and with this hoax, they were going to do everything possible to exclude you from being heard, from having a platform, essentially trying to destroy your career, and
You know, one of the things that I always admired about you so much is that it was harder for you, I think, than me and others who did it, like Matt Taibbi, because you were, you're younger in journalism, you don't have, you know, this kind of developed platform that we did, and yet the fact that you did it, I I think.
became not only a source of pride and obviously the basis for awards that you won, but something that I think in the long run has really helped your journalism.
But at the time, it was very difficult to see that there was a high price to pay.
They wanted to make a high price to pay.
And you were relentless in saying what it is that you thought without regard to the consequences or how angry you made people feel.
And to me, that's the most important journalistic attribute.
So, Aaron, that's why I say there was nobody else with whom we wanted to do this retrospective.
than you.
I think you were the person who really mastered the facts the most and from the start smelled the rat that was at the heart of this entire hoax.
And I really appreciate you taking the time and coming on and talking to us about it tonight.
Thanks, Glenn.
Great to be with you.
All right, Aaron.
We'll see you soon.
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