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Nov. 8, 2017 - Ron Paul Liberty Report
21:26
Deconstructing 'Russia-Gate' with Joe Lauria

Why won't the "Russia hacked the election" narrative go away? Who's behind it and why? And how? Did you know that the only two sources for the claim that Russia hacked the DNC and Podesta's emails were BOTH being paid by the DNC? Is that not a conflict? Beyond the politics, the new Cold War is a dangerous development. We are joined by investigative journalist Joe Lauria to understand the basic facts behind the claims...

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Why The Article Was Taken Down 00:04:34
Hello, everybody, and thank you for tuning in to the Liberty Report.
With me today is our co-host, Daniel McAdams.
And Daniel, good to see you.
How are you this morning, Dr. Paul?
Very well.
We have a special guest today.
And he's a noted veteran foreign affairs journalist, well known and very thorough.
His name is Joe Lauria.
Joe, welcome to our program.
Thank you, Dr. Paul, for having me on.
Wonderful.
Before we get into a recent article that you've written about Russia Gate, which is fascinating, and we'll talk about that, I want to introduce a book here or show somebody, show our audience a book.
And I hope it doesn't help Hillary Clinton, but we want to show this.
It says, Hi, How I Lost by Hillary Clinton.
But it turns out that I think you had something to do with this book.
I think there's a lot of Hillary Clinton involved in this.
And there's a foreword by Julian Assange.
That's nice.
And you have annotated a lot of what Hillary has been saying.
So she was explaining this.
So it's an interesting take on that.
I just wanted the audience to know about this.
So did you have a lot of fun doing this little book?
I did.
We did it very quickly.
We used the WikiLeaks releases of her emails and John Podesta's emails.
So in that sense, it's by her because it's using her own words and her own associates' words.
But I did write about 22,000 words of introduction, annotation to provide the historical and political context of what she's been.
She indicts herself.
Okay, the article we want to talk a little bit more about today is it's called On the Origins of Russia Gate.
Whoever believed there could be a Russia Gate, but I agree with the title.
My little paper here said it was published at Huffington Post, but I don't think it appears on their page right now.
But anyway, we did get a copy of this, and you might make mention, if you care to, about why it is not on Huffington Post at this particular time.
But the title is On the Origins of the Russia Gate, and this is very, very detailed explanation and understanding of what's been going on.
Republicans are involved, Democrats are involved, Trump is involved, Russia is involved.
I'm particularly fascinated about the geopolitics of all this, the accusations and the false accusations and how NATO is involved in a bit and how things have changed over this period of time.
So give us a little introduction about that article and then we will follow up from there.
Well, the article, I originally published this article, Consortium News last week, the website run by Bob Perry.
It was under the title of The Democratic Money Behind Russia Gate.
I then updated it with the latest information.
The Manaford and Papadopoulos indictments took place after that was published.
So I updated it, included also testimony from Comey and earlier testimony from Comey and Clapper in there, and I published it myself on the website Huffington Post.
As a longtime contributor there, contributors have the right to post their own articles there.
It was then reviewed later by their editors.
So it appeared for about 23 hours.
And then I was informed that it had been taken down.
I was never contacted by anybody at the Huffington Post.
There's a kind of newsroom rule that before an article is retracted, the first thing you do is contact the writer, give him a chance to respond and defend his article.
And that never happened.
And since it was taken down, I've still not heard from anyone at the Huffington Post.
There's been no due process whatsoever here.
I gave them two days to respond afterward.
And then I wrote a letter 24 hours ago, about now.
I still not have heard why they took this article down.
They did, however, respond to Huffington Post to a reporter at BuzzFeed, their media reporter.
And I know this because he posted their response on Twitter.
And they said that they pulled it because there were factual errors in there and misleading claims.
Okay, so I want to know what those are.
And in the absence of any statement from them on what these misleading claims are and what the factual errors are, I can only conclude that this was not an editorial decision, but a political one.
And I rarely use and dislike the word censorship as I never use fascism.
Both are completely overused and misused.
But I cannot think of any other word to describe what's happened here but censorship.
Dnc Sources Questioned 00:07:24
This was a political piece that ran against the deep faith of many in the Democratic establishment about what happened with Russia and this election.
And my article, if you want me to go through it very quickly, I can explain what's in that.
But let me just make one comment first and we'll do that.
But I think when they do this to an author and they take it down, the opposite effect, instead of closing out it, makes people more fascinated.
It made me think, hey, I have to read this.
Why is this so important that certain groups doesn't, they don't want us to know about it.
So go ahead.
I think you're right.
There's probably more attention now to this article because they pulled it than it would have been originally.
Right.
Of course, we think, thankfully, we do have it up on the Ron Paul Institute website too, so our viewers can go see it there on the front page.
And it would be nice to go through the article, but I have to say, I stopped at the first couple of sentences because it hit me.
It was so well crafted, it hit me in the face.
Essentially, the article starts with the point that both of the sources for the claim that the DNC was hacked by Russia were paid for by the DNC.
And if that's not a conflict of interest in itself that should raise all kinds of red flags, I don't know what is.
So take it from there if you can and kind of take us through the article, if you can.
That's absolutely right.
There are two main sources for the allegation that Russia interfered with the election by hacking the DNC and the Jampodeski emails, and then supposedly giving them to WikiLeaks.
And the first was the memo written by Christopher Steele, the former MI6 intelligence agent, former head of the Russia desk at MI6 in Britain.
And the second source was CrowdStrike.
So let me talk about CrowdStrike quickly.
CrowdStrike is a private company run by Dmitry Alperovich.
He's one of the co-founders.
He's also a fellow at the Atlantic Council, very anti-Russian Atlantic Council, and he's an anti-Russian Putin-Russian.
Why did the DNC hire CrowdStrike?
Because they refused to let the FBI examine their service to determine whether there was, in fact, a hack at all, and then who may have hacked it.
So they didn't let the FBI observe it.
They examined, and they still have not examined those services.
They hired this CrowdStrike company, which within one day blamed Russia for hacking the DNC emails.
And the evidence they provided is, one, they said a very sophisticated operation had to be by a government.
And then the clues were some Cyrillic letters and the fact that they named the first Soviet intelligence chief.
So if this was a sophisticated operation, no one would have left behind such ridiculously amateur clues.
So then it turns out that Voice of America actually published an article in March 23 of this year in which it said that the software that CrowdStrike used to make that determination was found to have been wrongly accused the Russians of hacking howitzers on the battlefield in eastern Ukraine.
And that was denied by the Ukrainian military itself.
They said they were never hacked.
So the next day on March 24th, Crowdstrike had to rewrite the software that they used to determine that Russia had hacked the DNC.
That's the first bit of shaky evidence that the entire Russia gate allegation is based on, and again, paid for by the DNC.
The second one, these steel memos, which were paid for by the DNC, and we learned from the Washington Post about two weeks ago, a mainstream source, if there is one, that the Hillary Clinton campaign, also with the DNC, paid for this intelligence work.
No, it is opposition research.
It's important to understand the difference between opposition research in a political campaign, a mudslinging campaign, in which the standards are nowhere near what an intelligence report would be.
It would not have to be verified.
There could be rumor and an innuendo in there.
You're looking for dirt to throw it.
And both parties have done this.
This is long-standing.
So we know this.
The reason that Steele was hired, the New York Times reports, is because from the very outset, the Clinton campaign wanted to tie Trump to Russia.
That was the aim, to send him into Russia, because he was the Russia expert for the MI6, to somehow tie Trump to Russia.
If you recall, this is a long-standing, time-honored tactic in political campaigns in the United States.
If you recall, George H.W. Bush attacked Bill Clinton, Hillary Clinton's husband, in the 1990 campaign, for having spent a week on holiday in Moscow as a student.
So here they're trying to talk to tie Trump to Russia.
And what does Steele do?
He ties Trump to Russia.
He goes, does not go to Russia.
He's not allowed back in there, but he talked to various sources, all unnamed, in which he says, of course, that the Russians intelligence had gotten all this dirt on Trump and that they could blackmail him.
And it also says in there, this is the first instance of this before the crowd strike investigation, that Russia had hacked the emails.
So this was a couple of months before CrowdStrike even did that investigation.
And Steele quotes a source, he someone, an ethnic Russian close to Trump, supposedly who is saying this.
And how would he know that?
Why, if this were a Russian operation, would we need to know?
And no one in the Trump administration Trump campaign needed to know that this was happening.
So that link there is very specious, I have to say.
So the two sources, the CrowdStrike and the Steele Memo, were paid for by the Democrats and are both very, very shaky in terms of—now, don't forget, the CIA and the FBI did not believe and verify this Steele Memo.
They did.
And nor did the corporate media, to their credit.
The Clinton campaign was shopping it around in the summer of 2016 and in the fall, and they didn't publish any articles from it as well because they could not confirm this.
They saw it as a police of political research, not an intelligence report being vetted.
And even Clapper and Comey both said in testimony that they weren't able to vet it, but they both admitted that they used this as the basis, at least partly, for the January 6th intelligence assessment by three intelligence agencies.
This is key.
So the very intelligence agency report, the three agencies that the Democrats and all people who believe in the Russia Gate story point to is that intelligence assessment, January 6th, not by all 17 agencies.
It was not vetted in a national intelligence estimate, but it was based on the Steele memo for the most part.
And that is critical to understanding.
That's a very critical point I made in the article that we have to understand.
It was paid for by the Democrats, and that became the basis then for an intelligence report or assessment.
And then you have what could be the real scandal, which has not broken yet, and nobody is really writing about it.
You see some whisperings about it, but this Steele dossier, which as you point out, has never been verified, very sketchy.
We don't know whether Steele paid his Russian contacts to make up dirt.
We don't know anything about the origins of the information.
But this dodgy dossier was then, as you report and as I've seen elsewhere, was taken to the FBI as a basis for which a FISA warrant was issued to start monitoring and spying on Trump campaign people.
And then you had Rice and the others unmasking these people to get their names.
So I think this is really the smoking gun that hasn't blown up yet.
That's absolutely right.
That was used for the Pfizer, the Pfizer warrants that were gotten.
And that is, again, based on opposition research, opposition research, not an intelligence report.
And this is very troubling.
Returning To The Cold War 00:08:23
I have to point out to your audience, I am not a partisan at all because I really can't stand either party.
I don't think they represent my interests or millions of Americans' interests.
So I am not at all a fan of Donald Trump's, I can assure you.
But if you look dispassionately at the facts that have come out now about who paid for this, what exactly was contained in these two reports by CrowdStrike and Steele, you have to question what is really underpinning this entire allegation.
Now, separate from this, there may be financial crimes, as Manaford was indicted for.
Maybe they find that Trump was involved in some money laundering with Russian gangsters and all that.
That quite be possible.
That Mueller may come up with that, Abu Mueller.
But this is not about Russia hiking the DNC and Podesta.
That has not been proven yet at all, but it's taken as an article of faith by Democratic partisans.
And if you challenge that faith, they act as a zealot, that they will not be open to any facts that question what they believe in.
And I think this is what's happened at the Huffington Post until they tell me what I got wrong.
I think it's only that they could not accept someone challenging their deep quasi-religious faith in this story.
You know, I've been fascinated with the bigger picture of the anti-Russia sentiment, which is shared by both parties, as you say.
But I've often said that we don't need to pick between two parties.
I said, people asked me, should we have a third party?
And I was thinking that maybe it would help if we had a second party.
But the way I see this is this, you know, started out as anti-Russia.
It was Republicans started, and they go after Trump.
And then when they realize Trump isn't going to win, they shifted over and Hillary quickly grabs hold of this.
And as you pointed out so clearly, is that this is the way it's been done in the old Cold War and done in this Cold War.
And they continue to do this.
But the anti-Russian sentiment is something date-wise, when you think about it, it's hardly a Republican when you think about what Obama did in 2014 with the coup in Ukraine, as well as going after Assad.
And then quickly, it goes over to a Democratic thing.
And Hillary grabs this up again.
And it's anti-Russia is what it is.
It was easy to go after Trump early on by the Republicans because he was sort of pro-Russia.
But it also goes to show that a statement that I made that got a little bit of attention during the campaign, I said, the truth is, Hillary could run in either party, you know, because she fits into the mold of the Republicans that hey, Trump that are the hawks, and they're out there and they want this sentiment.
Unfortunately, we don't have enough people like you doing some writing and trying to make it a little bit more balanced about what's going on here.
But I think it's very clearly the sentiment that dominates both parties.
It's an anti-Russia sentiment, and it really dominates a lot of our foreign policy.
Well, you're right.
The other two parts of the article are, one, the consequences of this Russia Gates story, the new McCarthyism.
If there's a new Cold War, it makes sense there's a new McCarthyism.
You've had two lists now, blacklists, of news organizations, news websites that have been blasted by the Washington Post from an anonymous source as being Russian agents.
And then a couple of weeks ago, we had this group called European Values listing individuals who were called useful idiots for Putin.
That list are David Brock, the head of opposition research for Clinton, Secretary General Antonio Guterres, and David Ignatius, maybe the most CIA-friendly columnist there is.
Why?
Because they appeared on RT.
This is the way the nonsense has, this is what this has led to.
But more dangerously, as you've alluded to, Dr. Paul, is that the geostrategic tensions have arisen enormously because of this story.
And I put in the third part of the story that since the 1990s, it was after the end of the Soviet Union, the United States and Wall Street moved in, made alliances with oligarchs, and asset-stripped the whole country, impoverished the population, and enriched people in the West and local oligarchs.
It was when Putin came into power that he put an end to that.
And I firmly believe there's lots of evidence that we can go into on this show, and I wasn't able to go into too much depth in that article, but I've written about elsewhere, is that the U.S. wants to get back to that time.
They want to get back inside Russia to exploit its resources and financial resources as well.
But more importantly, they see Russia under Putin as a block to their geostrategic interests in Syria in particular.
And that was a very dangerous move that Hillary Clinton wanted to put in an OFLI zone that I get into in the book that you showed earlier.
That this was even after General Dunford testified that that could cause a war with Russia, she still stuck to that position in her last debate with Trump.
So she was certainly a hawk and Republicans did support her.
But the United States wants to stop, is troubled by Russia stopping them with Brzezinski's, what Byzinski had written about in his book, Great Game, that to get control of Eurasia, you have to get Ukraine from Russia's control.
And that was behind the United States' reasons, in my view, to back that coup d'état in 2014 that you also mentioned earlier.
And my book goes into great detail and depth about how German intelligence discovered that there was no Russian invasion.
There were not even 40,000 troops on the border, General Bridlov had said, the head of NATO at the time.
So Russia has to be stopped for the American strategic interest to continue.
And it's very hard for Americans to understand, I think, that maybe we aren't the good guys all the time, and that America could be an aggressive power, and that Russia is playing defense in Syria to stop jihadists, that America has backed there.
And again, my book goes into a Defense Television Agency document that shows the U.S. supported the proto-type of the group that led to ISIS.
And they needed to stop them.
They needed to get rid of a government in Ukraine that did not want to join the European Union Association Agreement.
So this is driving, I think, this entire Russia Gate story predates this election by a lot.
It's part of the U.S. strategy towards Russia.
They wanted to then target Trump with it, with Russia, and they have lost the election that the Democrats did, and the establishment did, really, in some ways.
And they are continually going on this path, this Russia Gate path, and ignoring the facts as they come out that the Democrats paid for all of this.
Yeah, you know, it's funny, the list of Putin's puppets that came out from this European values think tank.
It also includes Adam Schiff, who is the U.S. representative most behind the Putin-Trump story.
And also, Dick Cheney is on the list, too.
So I'm happy to report that the Ron Paul Institute is also on both lists.
Dr. Paul is on the list as well.
But, you know, it is kind of a perfect storm.
Returning to the Cold War, because you have this alliance between the U.S. oligarchs, the Wall Street oligarchs, you have the neocons who are all sitting in think tanks, very well funded.
And then you have the military-industrial complex that funds the think tanks, that makes a fortune off of selling weapons overseas and selling fear to everyone.
And they have it all wrapped up in this propaganda that if you somehow challenge this new narrative that pays so well for them, that you are in the service of a foreign government.
It is so chilling.
It sounds like it's worse than the height of the cold.
Joe, we're going to have to finish up here shortly, but before we do, I want to put your book up again, How I Lost by Hillary Clinton, and making the point of the picture.
Because sometimes the Republicans get painted as being part of the big business, and the Democrats are for the poor people.
And yet, as you mentioned before, there's not much difference between the two parties, and they are both very deeply involved with Wall Street and the military-industrial complex.
So, those are major problems.
I've always complained that there's too much bipartisanship in Washington because when it comes to foreign policy, they don't have any serious debates.
Too Much Bipartisanship 00:00:50
Yeah, and you go ahead and make a closing statement and let the audience know where they can reach you if they would like to.
Yeah, I think Consortium News is the best place for me to read it.
I wouldn't suggest the Cuffington Post at this point.
I wanted to make one last point about the bipartisanship.
Neither one has ever questioned NATO putting 30,000 troops on the Russian border, the way the German foreign minister at the time did, calling NATO a saber-rattler.
So, I think it's really important to open up one's mind and try to look at a different perspective of what the United States is up to outside the borders of the U.S. and what RussiaGate's role in all this is.
And I hope that my writing could help illuminate people on that.
Thank you very much for having me on.
Wonderful.
And Joe, thank you very much for being with us.
Okay.
And good.
I want to thank our viewers today for joining us for this very special interview.
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