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June 7, 2023 - Ron Paul Liberty Report
33:15
'The Rise of Nihilism' with Peter Van Buren- at the RPI Houston Conference

'The Rise of Nihilism' with Peter Van Buren- at the RPI Houston Conference

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How the Deep State Operates 00:07:58
Good morning, everyone.
Thank you for joining me today.
And my apologies for not being there in person with you.
I appreciate the introduction, and hopefully, we'll be able to share some insights here.
I'm going to be talking today about the Durnham Report, Democracy's Horror Show, the final report by the prosecutor out of Connecticut, John Durham, about RussiaGate.
And I'm going to be arguing that this is a perfect example.
In fact, it's about as close as we're ever going to come to actually seeing how the deep state works.
The Durham Report exposes it, and we're going to have a chance, if we know where to look, to uncover some of the way that things work, really work in Washington.
Quickly to define the term deep state, mine is not quite, my definition is not quite as nefarious perhaps as someone else's, but it basically refers to people that are part of the U.S. government that are not elected,
that are not subject to term limits, that just work there, basically civil servants, if you will, who are working against the interests of either the political people that are elected to direct them or the United States directly or the Constitution.
And in this case, we're talking particularly about the FBI, who took it upon themselves to try to intervene in the 2016 election and to influence the campaign and to influence who would be elected.
In this case, they were interceding on the side of Hillary Clinton against Donald Trump.
This is not unusual.
The Durnham report, however, is a perfect example of the detail that these things get into that we'll never really see in many other cases.
For those of you that are still somewhat skeptical, and I suspect this audience is not the most skeptical on this point, the FBI has not stopped its work on intervening on things.
It's joined occasionally by other parts of the intelligence community.
We saw this in the most recent election, for example, when people from the intelligence community got together and tried to deep six the Hunter Biden laptop by claiming it was Russian disinformation or looked like Russian disinformation.
So we've seen this before and we've seen it again and we will continue to see it.
So it's important to keep an eye on what the Durnham report found.
It gives us an idea of how these things actually work.
What we know from John Durham's work is that Hillary knew, and this is very important because she came very, very close to being president of the United States.
She remains a power broker of some sorts within the Democratic Party establishment.
And Hillary knew it was her campaign that paid for the Russian information to be washed through a report by former British intelligence officer Christopher Steele.
And she knew all the information was false and could potentially allow her to win the election.
When given the chance, she lied to the FBI about it and lied to the American public.
Such was her appetite for power.
And these are the kind of people that the deep state seems to be attracted to and kind of people who seek out the deep state in order to satisfy their appetites, if you will.
The FBI certainly knew that what they were doing was wrong.
They knew the information in the Steele report could not be corroborated, and they knew most of it was false to begin with.
They turned a blind eye to the falsities, and they turned a blind eye to the fact that they couldn't corroborate the information purposely and with the intent to defeat Donald Trump in the 2016 election.
They threw out basic investigative and tradecraft rules so they could use the Trump corrupt information to surveil the Trump campaign.
As we famously know, they lied to the FISA court in order to get the secret warrants in order to start surveilling the Trump campaign.
At the end of it all, they were using the full spectrum tools that were available, including a failed honey trap, intelligence dangles, and all the other electronic means that were there to surveil a campaign.
And in particular, they used what was known as the two-hop rule.
Basically, what this says in the intelligence world is that if you have legal permission to surveil person one, that gives you permission to surveil two hops away from them.
So, if Danny McAdams is our subject and we have a FISA warrant to surveil him and he calls me, well, that's hop one.
And then, if I call Scott Horton, then that's hop two.
And suddenly, that FISA warrant, which only was issued for Danny, now somehow includes me and Scott Horton.
Arguably, they can only collect metadata on us, but we all learned earlier that metadata is actually as important as anything else.
Those are one of the disclosures we learned from Edward Snowden.
Just in case any of you are future Jeopardy players, only one person actually was successfully prosecuted for any of this, and that was a minor player named Ken Klein, Kevin Kleinsmith.
And so, the answer, who is Kevin Kleinsmith, is going to be one day a Jeopardy clue that should get some of you a little extra money.
And he was basically the FBI official who provided false information to the FISA court.
There's no changes that are planned after all of this.
There's nothing that was going to come out of this that's going to cause things to be done differently.
We saw that in the 2020 election with the Hunter Biden laptop, it was deep six.
And so, we've gone there.
The conclusions of the Durnham report were really quite significant in that it was really the only comprehensive review of what was to be called Russia Gate.
And it shows how close to the edge our democracy came into falling into the abyss here at the hands of the deep state.
I know it sounds dramatic.
Those terms have been bandied about so often in so many contexts, they've lost a lot of their meaning.
But make no mistake about it.
The FBI tried in the 2016 election and failed to run Trump out of office.
When they failed to run Trump out of office and he was elected anyway, they repurposed the same information in order to get themselves in a position to impeach Trump or embarrass him or otherwise depower him, if you will, so that even if he remained as president, his ability to affect things and affect change would have been dramatically limited by RussiaGate.
Let's not forget how this dominated the news for almost two full years and still dribbles out occasionally.
Rachel Maddow is still beating the drum for various forms of RussiaGate, and other people further down the food chain have not left it alone either.
So, this stuff doesn't really go away.
The Steele report itself, which is still online, and I commend you to take a look at it if you get a chance.
There's nothing true in it.
It's basically all made up, including this key paragraph, which has been cited many, many times.
Speaking in confidence to the compatriot, to a compatriot in late July 2016, Source E, an ethnic Russian close associate of Republican U.S. presidential candidate Donald Trump, there was no person who fit that who actually was that person, admitted there was a well-developed conspiracy of cooperation between them and Russian leadership.
That's not true either.
This was managed on the Trump side by the Republican candidate's campaign manager, Paul Manafort.
That wasn't true, who was using a foreign policy advisor, Carter Page, and other intermediaries.
That's not true either.
Dolan And The Disinformation 00:05:32
The true sides had a mute, the two sides had a mutual interest in defeating presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, whom apparently Putin both hated and feared.
We don't know if that's true or not.
Putin has not responded to our inquiries.
The FBI had no intelligence about Trump or anyone associated with Trump being in contact with Russian intelligence beyond the Steele report.
And that makes it a critical part of all this and worthy of taking a little look a little deeper because it was used.
The accusations in it were used to justify full-spectrum surveillance against the Trump campaign, the first known such operation in American history.
And that's an important point to make.
We're all familiar with the work of Edward Snowden in exposing the powers that the FBI and the NSA have in order to surveil people.
What did you think those powers were going to be used for when you heard about them first?
Were they going to be used simply for law enforcement, legitimate law enforcement, or were they eventually going to be turned against us, against the people of the United States, in this case, the campaign of Donald Trump?
Love him or hate him.
He was the first known victim of the deep state's intelligence capabilities, and don't think they're not going to be used again.
Durham found that in the process of doing all this, the FBI investigators, quote, ignored exculpatory evidence, put too much stock in information provided by Trump's political opponents, and carried out surveillance without genuinely believing there was probable cause to do so.
Now, that's a pretty damning statement.
I don't think anybody here would want that on their job evaluation.
You know, Mr. McAdams has done a fine job, except for ignoring compulsory evidence, putting too much stock in information provided by Trump's political opponents, and carry out surveillance without generally believing there was any probable cause.
Other than that, they did a great job.
Throughout the duration of Crossfire Hurricane, which was the unfortunate name of this Russia Gate investigation, facts and circumstances that were inconsistent with the premise that Trump or persons associated with Trump paying were involved in a collusive or conspirator relationship with the Russian government were simply ignored or assessed away.
The FBI, Durham wrote, acted without appropriate objectivity or restraint in pursuing allegations of collusion or conspiracy between a U.S. political campaign and a foreign power.
It could not be more clear.
And damn them all to hell, the people who wrote of the Durham report that it was a nothing burger or that it simply reiterated earlier statements.
Those are very powerful condemnations of the Federal Bureau of Investigation.
And sadly, nothing will be done about them except to reveal to us the way the FBI actually works and the way the deep state clearly functions.
When they don't have the data that they need to open surveillance on someone, they simply create it, make it up, and go on from there.
We know now, for example, that almost all of the disinformation, there's a popular word these days, in the Christopher Steele report came from a single man, Igor Danchenko.
Danchenko was actually in the FBI's bullseye until 2011, being investigated as a Russian intelligence agent.
In the end, he took over as Christopher Steele's main source.
He used a couple of cutouts in order to pass his information to Steele.
Now, cutouts in the intelligence world are people who are not directly associated with, say, source A, but are used to pass information on.
So it looks like the information is coming not just from source A, but also from source B and C and D and E and E and F and things like that.
And this is also very interesting because you'll find that as we talk more about it, everyone knew and everyone knew that the Steele report was the project, was the output of an actual intelligence agent.
Christopher Steele had worked for MI6 in Britain and had quote unquote retired.
Though, of course, you never really retire from those jobs.
You just move into the private sector.
He had retired from that job and was hired in order to write up the Steele report.
He worked in particular, and the FBI was aware of this, he worked in particular with Charles Dolan, who was a Clinton supporter and actually a registered foreign agent for the Russians.
And Danchenko fed information to Dolan.
Dolan then fed information to Steele.
And depending on your generosity, the Durham report says the failure to identify the primary subsource, this guy Danchenko, prevented the FBI from properly examining the possibility that some or much of the open, non-open source information contained in Steele's reporting was Russian disinformation, willingly or unwillingly passed along to Steele, or that the reporting was otherwise not credible.
Dolan was supposedly the guy responsible for the, if any of you have had breakfast recently, forgive me, the P-Tape allegations that Donald Trump had cavorted with prostitutes in Russia and this information was being held against him by the Russians and used as a kind of blackmail.
Charles Dolan basically made that up and based and fed it to Chris Steele, who put it into his report.
Fbi Briefing Obama Biden 00:05:56
When I say that everybody knew, I'm not kidding around because on August 3rd, 2016, the Russiagate allegations, roughly as we've stated them, were briefed to President Obama, Vice President Joe Biden, and FBI Director James Comey by CIA Director John Brennan at an Oval Office meeting.
This is an outstanding piece of information that had not been widely circulated, though there had been hints that Biden and Obama had been told of this.
But essentially, within a month of the investigation kicking off and with days of the formal investigation crossfire hurricane being started, John Brennan at the CIA claimed that his people had picked up hints of this overseas and had fed this back into the system in the United States so that President Obama knew, Joe Biden knew, and James Comey knew as early as August of 2016.
All of them would go on to prevaricate or lie about knowing, but that's neither here nor there.
Most importantly, none of these people did anything to intercede either to stop the FBI from its illegal surveillance and its illegal actions or to warn the Trump campaign that it might be the subject of Russian influence.
This is known as a defensive briefing, and its absence here is one of the key indicators of how the deep state actually works by parceling out these types of things to different people.
A defensive briefing basically says we, the FBI or the CIA or whoever, have uncovered information that suggests that you, Peter Van Buren, are under surveillance by the Russians or that you're just going to be the subject of a campaign in order to try to recruit you or otherwise use you for their purposes.
And we're telling you this so that you can take precautions and protect yourself.
I myself, as part of the State Department, received these defensive briefings.
One of our jobs was to go out and meet people, particularly foreign diplomats.
And occasionally, you'd get a little note from some friends in the embassy who would tell you, hey, you know, you want to be careful when you're talking to so-and-so over at the Chinese embassy.
We believe that he's an intelligence officer.
And you would be able to act accordingly at that point.
The fact that that was missing from the Trump campaign and from Crossfire Hurricane made it obvious that this was all designed to take Trump down, not to give him the chance to protect himself.
Durnham goes on to write somewhat brutally that the FBI failed to uphold their important mission of strict fidelity to the law.
They displayed at best a cavalier attitude towards accuracy and completeness.
There were clear opportunities to have avoided the mistakes and to have prevented the damage resulting from their embrace of seriously flawed information that they failed to analyze and assess property.
Much of this seems to have been clear at the time, the report concludes, although, of course, hindsight is much clearer.
And in the end, all that they come up with was that some training programs should come into place.
Look, without the FBI's help, Russia Gate would have been nothing but a flimsy campaign scam, a little blip on the campaign radar.
The FBI managed to give the reports credibility and through the FISA court managed to use them as an excuse in order to kick off surveillance of the Trump campaign.
When that failed, they tried to use it as a bit of bait to see if they could catch Trump.
There was a meeting in early January of 2017 after Trump had been elected with John Brennan and James Comey present, where they told Trump about what they had found from the Russians.
And James Comey recorded Trump's reactions to all this, not for evidence purposes, but evidence to be used against Donald Trump when it came time to prosecute him as a Russian spy, as a Russian agent, if you will.
Later, the information from the Steele report and Crossfire Hurricane was fed into the Robert Mueller report.
You remember Robert Mueller, the former FBI head who was charged with basically coming up with enough information in a formal category that they could indict or impeach Donald Trump in 2017.
His report came up shallow as well.
And it's an interesting bit of political speculation about that.
Robert Mueller is not stupid and he's no fool.
And it must have been obvious to him early on in his own investigation that most of what the FBI had done was, I was going to say a bad word there, but we'll just say BS.
The FBI had obviously done this, tried to set up Donald Trump and tried to manufacture information.
Robert Mueller found all that.
And I'm of the mind, a bit of political speculation, that he failed to indict anyone in his report primarily to cover the FBI's backside, that it would have come out in the course of certainly an indictment where the powers of the courts would have been available, but likely in impeachment proceedings as well.
It would have come out about how poorly the FBI handled everything.
And I think Mueller decided to take the easy way out and cover for his old agency, the FBI, and cover for an awful lot of people.
The upshot of this is keep your eyes open for accusations of collusion and foreign interference very closely around the 2024 election that's coming up.
It's the same cast of characters, Donald Trump there.
I've heard a few rumors here and there and seen a few bits and pieces on the mainstream media about Russia and Trump's connections to Russia.
George Papandopoulos's Meeting 00:12:41
And there's no reason not to bring them up again because it worked one time, it might work a second time.
And because mainly no one was called to task for them, the Durham report was dismissed by the mainstream media as a nothing burger.
But I want to go one level deeper, and I know we have a limited amount of time here, and I want to take you back to July 2016 and pull these threads together for you, step out of the Durham report as a singular entity and kind of give you a bigger picture, which will also show you how these different facets work together.
Remember, the goal is to get Hillary Clinton elected, and the goal is to push Donald Trump out of the election or to push him aside.
It all starts on July 5th, 2016.
And we know these dates exactly basically from the Durham report.
The seeds of this were planted actually a little bit earlier in May 2016 when a guy named George Papandopoulos met with two CIA FBI users, usable people, if you will.
Papandopoulos was a very, very minor player in the Trump world who was trying to talk his way into a foreign policy job.
He was one of these guys who never seemed to really have a job, but always seemed to be kind of on the edge of what was really happening.
And he definitely wanted to get himself ingratiated with the Trump people.
And he set himself the goal of setting up a meeting between Trump and Vladimir Putin to resolve some differences.
And he met by introduction.
Now, standby for this one.
He met by introduction from an Israeli embassy official in London after meeting.
He met with the Israeli, the Israeli embassy official introduced Papandopoulos to an Australian diplomat in London back in May of 2016, where Papandopoulos passed on information that had been given to him via a guy named Joseph Misoud, who worked for the FBI and CIA in various capacities.
He wasn't an officer for them.
He was kind of an agent at large, if you will.
Just as a bit of trivia, Papandopoulos also met his now wife through Missoud, who introduced him to it.
So it's a small world out there in the intelligence things.
That happened in May 2016.
And if you're really into these things, it serves as a bit of seed planting that went on earlier.
You plant these seeds, you see where they go, and then when you need them, you call them up.
And that's what happened a little bit later in the game.
July 5th, 2016, the key moment here: FBI Director Comey issues a statement exonerating Hillary Clinton from any naughtiness or anything indictable with her emails.
You remember, she ran her own private email server and transmitted highly classified information over open lines.
Her exoneration was supposed to be the green light for her to go on and win the election.
And it was just a coincidence that Christopher Steele provided his report to FBI handling agents in Europe on that very same day.
Steele has testified that he told the FBI that his report was being paid for by a company called GPS Fusion, who was being paid for by the Clinton campaign's lawyers who were being paid for by the Clinton campaign.
But he claims, Steele, that there was no question that the ultimate client for his work was the leadership of the Clinton presidential campaign, and that he understood that Hillary herself was at least aware of the reporting.
We know now that she actually okayed it.
July 11th and 12th, Source 2, which is probably Joseph Massoud, meets a guy named Carter Page at a three-day conference in the UK.
Carter Page is another one like George Papandopoulos, who's hanging around the edges of a campaign, hoping to get a job if the candidate wins.
The difference here is that Carter Page is a paid source for the American CIA.
And now he pops into the story.
We'll come back to him in just a moment.
Then you've got two dramatic events that unfold in mid to late July.
The DNC convention, where Bernie Sanders was pushed offstage, and July 22nd, which is when WikiLeaks released the Democratic emails that were hacked out of John Podesta's account and some other ones there.
No one has ever really shown us who actually did that hacking.
The U.S. government's official position, of course, is that it was the Russians.
There are many, many, many people who believe that the hacking was done by someone on the American side, and it would be consistent with what we're talking about here.
Nonetheless, we learn on July 26th, right after the WikiLeaks come out, and this causes some consternation, that Hillary Clinton had approved herself what we now know as RussiaGate.
She had signed off on it within her own campaign structure and approved the funding of it all.
And by coincidence, on the same day, July 26th, that she approved this program to start formally, the Australian ambassador to London, who had met with George Papandopoulos, after waiting two months, comes to the FBI with the information that Papandopoulos had told him.
Now, Papandopoulos got his information from Joseph Massoud, who was, of course, the CIA operative.
Papandopoulos says he heard through rumors, which was actually just Massoud, that the Russians had Hillary Clinton's emails, that some of what she had transmitted in the clear, or most of it had been translated in the clear, had fallen into the Russian hands.
Downer sits on this information and then waits two months before he tells the FBI on the exact same day that Hillary approves the campaign that this is all going on.
Meanwhile, the WikiLeaks emails are circulating, and Bernie Sanders has been pushed off stage so that the path is clear for Hillary's nomination and things like that.
Then you've got soon after that, a tussle within the FBI where they try to get the guy named Peter Strozak off the case.
Strozak is the one who was famous for writing the text to his girlfriend, his lover, his non-married mistress, saying, you know, we're not going to let Trump get elected.
Obama gets briefed, and the FBI formally rejects the idea of defensively briefing the Trump campaign, claiming that this is an offensive operation there that they're running.
July 31st, the FBI opens the Crossfire Hurricane Investigation formally.
Now, keep in mind, they're opening it based on two pieces of information.
One is this Papandopoulos quote from Australian Ambassador Downer, who tells us that Papandopoulos knows that the Russians have Hillary's emails.
That information was pushed through from a CIA operative named Massoud.
We also know that the other key part of all of this is that the Christopher Steele report, which was based on nothing but made-up stuff from a Russian spy named Igor Danchenko, was the other piece of information.
Instead, the FBI's response is to go to the FISA court and get permission to electronically surveil Carter Page.
You remember Page was one of the other kind of camp followers around the edges of the Trump campaign, and Carter Page had come first to everyone's attention after he met with Massoud at a three-day conference in London.
One of the things that happens is our buddy Kevin Kleinsmith, the guy who's going to be the Jeopardy clue at some point, actually lied to the FISA court and failed to tell them that Carter Page was a paid CIA operative in good standing who had been used by the CIA to spy on foreign oil transactions and other things connected with foreign oil sales.
The fact that he was a paid CIA agent and thus credible for the U.S. side was not used in the FISA report.
Instead, it was hidden so that the FISA court could approve Page as a target for surveillance.
In addition, the FISA court was appraised of all this based on a press report written by a guy named Michael Iskoff.
And Isaakoff used to work for Newsweek, now works for Yahoo, which is not necessarily a main source of news for many people, but works for Yahoo, wrote an article basically saying Trump and the Russians are working in cahoots with one another.
It turns out, and see if you can follow this, that Isenshoff's sole source for his article was Christopher Steele.
And this is known as an information loop.
And if you're running an information operation in the intelligence community, this is the gold ticket right here.
You're basically feeding information into your adversary, in this case, Christopher Steele sending his report to the FBI, while at the same time, feeding information to people like journalists who are going to report it as independent information.
So suddenly, you become the confirming source for your own information.
It goes on and on and on and there.
Finally, we get finally another FBI informant pops into the picture exactly at the same time that the foreign FISA court approves Carter Page for surveillance.
An FBI informant named Stephen Halper, who's been working for the FBI in many, many years overseas, he meets Papandopoulos in London and gives him $3,000.
Papandopoulos was the guy who told the Australians based on the FBI and CIA plan information that it was the Russians who had Hillary Clinton's emails.
And that's it.
You've got two low-level people, Carter Page with a FISA warrant on him, and Papandopoulos, who's now being paid by an FBI informant in order to give information.
Papandopoulos was never interviewed by the FBI agents until late January, months, months after this all had basically set in stone.
Carter Page was surveilled and the FISA warrant was renewed several times.
Each time the lies were repeated.
And this gives you an example of how the deep state actually works.
I'm conscious of our time is running short here.
And I just want to wrap up by letting you see what happened in the course of a single month that we know about.
We don't know a lot about many and the other parts of all this, but the parts that we do know, and everything I've told you is based on open source information, primarily the Durnham report.
This is extraordinary stuff.
You've got the FBI, the CIA using the Israelis to plant information early on.
That information then gets fed back to the FBI as if it was not their own stuff.
Christopher Steele creates an information loop where he's the confirming source for information that the FBI is going to use to get a Pfizer warrant.
You've got the Australians involved in it.
You've got people being paid off.
You've got people as high as the President of the United States being briefed on all this and taking no action to preserve the rule of law in the United States.
In the end, it all fell apart and RussiaGate was proven to be complete garbage and all of these shortcomings were exposed.
Though with one exception, nobody went to jail over any of this.
Nobody was punished over this.
And I can easily predict that some of this RussiaGate stuff will show itself again in the 2024 campaign against Donald Trump.
Clever Clues in 2024 00:01:05
That's how clever these folks are.
That's how hard they work.
And that's how the deep state does its work through cutouts, through information loops, through self-confirming sources.
Keep an eye out for all of these little clues.
These are called tells in the intelligence world, things that kind of indicate there's some naughtiness going on out there.
Keep an eye out for them in the 2024 campaign.
See if you can spot them before someone else does.
I want to thank you all very, very much for the chance to talk with you this morning.
I know I had to go through this very quickly.
The Durham report is 300 long pages, but a lot of it is skimmable.
I commend you to take a look at it if you get a chance.
The Steele report is even shorter.
It's only about 30 pages and worth reading as a historical document.
And you could suddenly know about as much as Barack Obama and Joe Biden knew, but they knew it six years before you did.
Keep that in mind.
I want to say thanks again very much to Dan and everyone else there.
And thank you all for the hard work that you're doing and for the work that you're doing to support our political thoughts.
Thank you very much.
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