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July 11, 2017 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
29:28
3740 Donald Trump, Jr. Russian Collusion Email Scandal | True News
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Well, you don't often see the left happy, but today, well, I wouldn't say exactly that they're happy, but they're probably in a state of mind as close to happiness as could be conceived of.
Because after seven-plus months of wandering across the stony desert of dead ends and false leads and stuff that doesn't pan out, they believe that the oasis of the Trump-Russia collusion has verily, yea, coalesced.
Into something tangible, a smoking gun, and they doth celebrate.
And let's have a look into what there is and if it is what the left hopes or believes that it is.
So after seven months, what do they have?
Well, they have an email from a British music producer and ex-tabloid reporter of secondhand information to Trump Jr.
Now, this music producer knows Trump because Trump partnered with one of his clients for the 2013 Miss Universe beauty pageant.
Because nothing spells international conspiracy like fake tans and juggling.
So, to respond to a New York Times article that made claims about this email, Donald Trump Jr.
has released the chain of emails that was referred to in reports by the New York Times.
And in it, there's this music publicist who offered to set up a meeting between Donald Trump Jr.
and a Russian lawyer.
And apparently, as part of the dangle fruit being held in front of Donald Trump Jr., was that this Russian lawyer could provide damaging information on Hillary Clinton.
So this happened last summer.
So Don Jr.
has released the email.
There was an introductory email that was written in June of 2016 by this music publicist and ex-tabloid reporter Rob Goldstone.
to an offer from the crown prosecutor of Russia who offered to provide the Trump campaign with some official documents and information that would incriminate Hillary and her dealings with Russia and would be very useful to your father.
Now, just to set the stage a little bit here...
I've been a high-level executive in a software company and lots of people want to have meetings with you.
Lots of vendors want to sell stuff to you.
Lots of people want you to hire their friends and lots of schools want you to hire their grads and so on.
And let me tell you, if you have something to offer people Then they will try and get meetings with you.
Now, the way that they try and get meetings with you is not always fully, fully on the up and up.
You know, like they'll say, oh, I have X, Y, and Z that is very positive, very helpful, and so on.
And when you get to the meeting, that stuff kind of evaporates, and the real agenda comes forward.
This could be the case with this.
So the email to Don Jr.
continued from Ron and said, quote, this is obviously very high level and sensitive information, but it's part of Russia and its government's support for Mr. Trump.
Wow.
That is some serious stuff.
And I can completely understand it.
Why the Democrats and the mainstream media are saying, Aha!
We've been talking about this for a long time.
Nobody believed us.
But here it is in black and white.
Right?
So let's just go over this part again because it's pretty substantial.
The email says, from Ron to Don Jr.
says, This is obviously very high level and sensitive information, but is part of Russia and its government's support for Mr.
Trump.
That would be Donald Trump Sr., of course.
Now, the email, of course, does not refer to any cooperation or collusion or coordination between the Russian government and the Trump campaign, which is one of the things that the leftists have been looking for, the Democrats have been looking for.
So, Donald Trump Jr.
says, yeah, yeah, I took the meeting.
This information that was supposed to be incriminating towards Hillary Clinton was kind of contradictory, kind of vague, and that...
The lawyer from Russia never handed over any opposition research that could be usable.
And I guess we know that because it wasn't used throughout a particularly ferocious campaign for president.
Now, the woman who met with Donald Trump last year, she says, I'm not linked to the Kremlin.
And she says, I never met with him with the goal of handing over any compromising information about Clinton or her campaign.
She says, what I did want to talk to him about was this thing called the Magnitsky Act.
And so the Magnitsky Act...
Imposed sanctions on Russian officials who had supposedly been linked to human rights abuses.
And President Vladimir Putin, the Russian president, responded to this by banning the adoption of Russian children by prospective American parents.
And that was her big core bring to the table why she wanted the meeting.
Now this was not a campaign issue.
I didn't even know about it.
Nobody really cares about it outside of a particularly...
I guess, specific group of people.
So if she had said up front, I want to talk to him about this problem that there is, it's hard to adopt or impossible to adopt.
Russian children, if you're American parents, Donald Trump Jr., I'm going to go out on a limb here, would say, I'm sorry, that's a little bit below my pay grade, so I'm not going to take the meeting.
However, if there's this dangling, important oppo research on Hillary Clinton, he'll take the meeting, and the meeting didn't last very long, and nothing concrete happened.
Seems to have come out of this.
Now, the White House says that Donald Trump didn't know about any of this, the meeting or the emails or anything, and Donald Trump Jr.
says the same thing.
So...
Someone dangled important opposition research in front of Donald Trump Jr., and he took the meeting to see if it was going to pan out.
And so what?
I mean, is it a crime to listen to people who say, aha, I have incriminating information about your political opponent?
It's really not.
I mean, it doesn't matter whether they live in the United States, whether they live on Mars, Timbuktu, Russia, it doesn't really matter.
It's not a crime to listen to people who say they've got compromising information on your political opponents, even if they come from another country.
I mean, Democrats should really know this.
So Politico reported during the campaign, right?
This was during Hillary Clinton's campaign, and I quote...
A Ukrainian-American operative who was consulting for the Democratic National Committee met with top officials in the Ukrainian embassy in Washington in an effort to expose ties between Trump, top campaign 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 Trump's 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.
So that's just one particular example.
They're actually meeting with Ukrainian government officials to try and transfer incriminating information against Donald Trump.
And did the media go mental about this?
That seems to have actually been the content of the meeting, unlike the content of the meeting from the Russian lawyer with Donald Trump, where nothing of substance was passed in terms of OPPO research, and it turned into a rather fruitless discussion about something that wasn't even a campaign issue, and I imagine trailed off as quickly as civilly possible.
So here's the thing.
This guy may be a very nice guy.
I don't know.
The guy who sent the email, the music publicist.
He says, well, you know, the Russian government likes your dad.
Okay.
You know, music publicists are not usually privy to extremely private Russian government plans.
You're not usually deep in the Kremlin's inner sanctum.
You're not in the star chamber.
You're not in the beating deep heart of Russian government calculations because you're a music producer and you used to write for tabloids.
I mean, look, either the Russian government did or did not do anything to influence the American election.
Now, if they did, either they want it to be known or they don't want it to be known.
Now, clearly they don't want it to be known if they did it, because it's not known.
So clearly they don't want it to be known.
If the Russian government are such evil masterminds that they can hack computer systems and plot to debase an election for the most powerful political office in the world, they're either those kinds of genius masterminds and Machiavellian sinister overlords of brilliance, but somehow they relay their plans through a music producer who sends this information in a plain text email.
It's really sensitive, which is why I'm going to write it down and send it into plain text email.
Come on!
This is like an intelligence test.
I mean, if they're smart enough to do something to influence the US election, to wend their way into the ironclad Berlin Wall security of the DNC servers, then they're smart enough to not tell their plans to a guy who bleats it all over email in plain text.
Come on.
But look, to me, there's no doubt that the Russian government preferred Trump if they had to choose, which they had to, I guess, in terms of having an opinion.
I mean, for a number of reasons.
You know, Putin has an ally, Assad, in Syria, that he's trying to help put down all of these crazy radicals who are trying to overthrow his government.
Now, Hillary and Obama...
Trained and armed ISIS and other jihadists fighting against Russia's ally in Syria.
That I'm going to, again, go out on a limb here.
I'm going to put that in the minus column for the relationship.
Hillary and Obama, as well as Bush Jr., helped destabilize the entire Middle East.
Russia has a huge border with the Middle East.
It matters.
It matters.
I mean, imagine if there was some leader in Canada who was working to destabilize all of Canada, which shares a huge, largest, longest, undefended border in the world with America.
Can you just imagine?
I can.
Hillary, in a speech, threatened Russia with actual war for what she referred to as cyber warfare.
You know, this woman who pretended that wiping a server meant with a cloth, right?
Actual war!
Actual war against Russia for cyber warfare.
Now, that puts Russia in a rather challenging position because, as we know, a lot of homegrown security organizations in America created...
You know, Satan crap malware that then got out, escaped the inner sanctum, got out into the world and is now in the hand of every hacker you want, which allows you to imitate wherever you want.
You can pretend you're coming from here, from there, you can insert this, you can insert that, you can bypass this, you can bypass that.
Every single weakness that is out there you can exploit.
And so if you've got someone saying, I reserve the right and in fact probably want to declare war against you if I ever think that you, Russia, may have done some cyber warfare at the same time as the government of this person has created and released tools that allows anyone to mimic your country during a cyber warfare attack, that is going to raise your alarm levels just a little bit.
And if it doesn't, you're too stupid to tie your own shoes, let alone run a complicated country.
Now, compare all of this interventionist stuff, arming the enemies of Russia, threatening them with war for easily spoofable cyber attacks.
Trump, he's a nationalist.
Kind of like Putin.
Hey, remember when the left used to love Russia when they were a communist dictatorship?
Now, they hate it because it's Christian nationalist.
Anyway, so Trump is a non-interventionist.
Trump is a non-interventionist and is not threatening Russia with war.
You know, I'm not exactly Julie, the cruise director from The Love Boat, but I do know a little bit about human relations.
Pro tip.
If you want people to like you, don't threaten to blow them up.
That's just...
I think I can extrapolate that from personal experience.
Just if you want people to like you, don't threaten to blow them up.
So, is this proof of anything?
No.
This is some guy saying that Russia likes your dad.
Russia supports your dad.
What does that mean?
Anybody with a brain knows that Russia is more likely to support Trump, to like Trump, rather than Hillary Clinton, for reasons that frankly are entirely rational.
It's not proof of anything.
There's no smoking gun here.
This is like fifth-hand information sent by a guy who got the content of a meeting wrong to Donald Trump Jr.
But the left is intimating...
It could be criminal!
No.
He took a meeting.
He's a private citizen who took a meeting with someone from another country.
There's no law you can stretch enough to make that a problem.
They say, ah, Trump Jr.
originally didn't report the meeting.
So what?
He's a private citizen.
Who's he going to report the meeting to?
Your mom?
Ah, he contradicted himself.
His first statement about the meeting was X. And the second statement was X plus Y. No.
If I tell you I went to the store and you say, can you provide me more details?
I say, I went to the store and bought apples.
Have I contradicted myself?
No, I've just given you a little bit more information.
They say, ah, Trump Jr.
has lawyered up.
Of course he's lawyered up.
Of course, because there's a witch hunt going on.
Of course you lawyer up.
It doesn't mean you're guilty.
It means you're sane.
But this is the weird position the Democrats are in, that they claim to be manically, maniacally, psychotically, I would say, concerned with foreign influences on the U.S. election.
Dear God, Hillary Clinton used her position as Secretary of State to facilitate the sale of a good percentage of American uranium to Russia in exchange for millions and millions of dollars in donations.
I mean, imagine if Trump wanted to do that.
Imagine how the leftist media would respond.
If President Trump started putting that in motion, it's a payoff, it's a sovereignty, arming the Russians.
I mean, they're going mad, like hanging is in a blender, over an innocuous, innocent, no-result meeting between one U.S. citizen and one Russian citizen.
But you don't see the media, mainstream media, focusing much on the more than two million dollars of donations from Russia that made its way into the Clinton Foundation.
If you remember this, remember they put funds through Canadian financial institutions and then they ended up in the Clinton Foundation and then, wow, lo and behold, Russia got control of a lot of uranium from America.
That seems like some pretty verified information about foreign influence in American politics.
Oh, I got another one for you.
Do you remember the Steele dossier?
I'm not even going to get into the contents because that's like the darkest side of internet fetishes.
It was a 35-page dossier, right?
And this dossier said Russia is in possession of embarrassing information, damaging information about Trump that the Russian government could use to blackmail him to cooperate with whatever the Russian government wants to do.
This was, you can look it up if you have a strong stomach, these were allegations about Trump's financial dealings in Russia, his sexual habits, and, you know, it's all, in my view, complete nonsense.
McCain, John McCain, the guy who hand-delivered this fake dossier to Comey.
I mean, help me understand.
Help me understand.
All the people out there, they promoted the Steele dossier.
Help me understand the difference between Steele and this lawyer from Russia.
Help me understand.
A foreign person providing information.
Except, well, the difference is that the steel stuff went a lot further and contained a lot of actual stuff.
The Russian lawyer, I don't know.
Did she say, well, I got damaging information on Hillary?
Oh, actually, I really don't, but I really want to talk about this adoption stuff.
It's crazy.
It's crazy.
And now at the time that these emails were sent to Donald Trump Jr., Hillary and Trump were private citizens.
Obtaining oppo research, damaging information on them.
Doesn't matter what the source is.
Perfectly legal.
Wasn't stolen.
Wasn't illegally obtained in any way.
And here's the difference.
This is one difference between the left and the non-left.
See, Hillary Clinton smashes a phone with a hammer, deletes and wipes classified information.
Donald Trump Jr.
releases his private emails.
Releases his private emails to put suspicion to rest.
Russia is not some rogue nation.
It's not like North Korea.
There are trade relations with Russia.
There's diplomatic relations with Russia.
Some Russian lawyer handing over oppo research is exactly the same as the steel former MI6 guy doing exactly the same thing.
But you see, in that case, a foreign person handing over oppo research benefited Hillary.
So the mainstream media went, oh, yeah, it could be true.
Let's broadcast this.
Let's make sure everyone knows about this.
Goddamn foreign influences in the American election.
My God, are you kidding me, Democrats?
Are you kidding me?
Friends of Arabia, a pretty thinly veiled public relations organ of the totalitarian and repressive Saudi regime, gave between $1 and $5 million to the Clinton Foundation.
Other donors to the Clinton Foundation include the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia itself, Oman, Australia, Germany, and a Canadian government agency promoting the Keystone XL pipeline.
Strangely enough, when Hillary Clinton left office, the donations to the Clinton Foundation slowed to a trickle.
Isn't that interesting?
It's almost like they were buying something she had the power to give them.
The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia gave between $10 million and $25 million to the Clinton Foundation since it was created in 1999.
We've got a Saudi prince claiming to have funded significant portions of her entire presidential campaign.
But the problem is some music publicist set up a meeting where oppo research was offered but never delivered.
Ooh, yeah, that's a smoking gun.
I can't see the smoking gun...
Illusion.
I can't see the mirage of the smoking gun, I'm afraid, because of the thermonuclear cloud of obvious evidence that's blocking my view.
Some music producer said the Russian government liked Trump, so Don Jr.
took a meeting, which produced nothing of value.
That's it?
This is your thing?
You think this is related to the DNC hack?
Hey, if you want to find out who hacked the DNC, you could, theoretically, comply with the FBI's repeated requests to have a look at the DNC servers.
But you have denied those requests repeatedly, haven't you?
Why?
Why?
Why don't you just take a bunch of screenshots of the relevant information from your servers, put them out on the internet, you can block out or...
Redact anything that's sensitive.
Just put all of the information out there and let the combined genius of the internet go to work on it.
I mean, that is your Skynet.
That is your Borg brain.
I mean, these guys...
I mean, I'm waiting for them to find Jimmy Hoffa's body.
Don't.
I'm just kidding, right?
I mean, just put it out there.
You can find it all.
But actually, it's probably coincidental that this came out right after an analysis has emerged.
So there's an independent researcher.
Who's looked at the files, and particularly the modified, last modified dates, of the files that were eventually published by Guccifer 2.0.
So these files...
We're downloaded by a person.
And the speed of the file transfer seems to conclusively indicate that whoever downloaded this information from the DNC server had physical access to a computer directly connected to the internal DNC network.
We're talking USB speeds.
This is really, really important to understand.
So that is the last modified date.
And if you have a thousand one meg files and you copy them, In a thousand seconds, that's one meg a second, right?
And they have calculated, this person has calculated, that the speed at which the DNC files were copied was 23 megs a second.
You cannot get that on the internet in any reliable basis, in any sustained basis.
You sure as hell can't get it from America, which is where the DNC server was, to Romania.
Guccifer was supposed to be getting this information.
So that's pretty important.
This analyzer, I'll put a link to this below, He concluded that the odds that the files had been accessed and downloaded remotely were too ridiculously small to even think about this with any seriousness at all.
You can't support an internet connection which regularly and reliably over the course of a significant amount of time gives you 23 megs a second.
That, in my opinion, that's local.
That's USB. That's somebody who has physical access to this.
So this is very important to understand as well.
Oh, and also he's pointed out that the time zone stamps were Eastern Standard Time, which means that they were in the probably Eastern Seaboard of the United States.
This finding, this analysis, virtually destroys the entire Russia hacked my files narrative.
So that's important.
Another point that struck me was, according to some of the leftists of the Democrat narratives, Trump and Putin have been working cheek by jowl, they've been working together for years.
But in this instance, last summer with Don Jr., they had to just connect and pass messages via second-hand info from a British tabloid guy to arrange their conspiracy.
Oh, come on!
See, this is what...
The DNC wants to be true.
This is what the Democrats want to be true.
The leftists and their supporters want to be true.
They want this to be true.
The Russian government hacked the DNC servers and released their emails, which cost Hillary the election so Trump should be impeached.
That is the genuine and general narrative.
So, let's do a thought experiment.
I don't believe it for a moment, but let's just say that all of this is true, right?
That Russia hacked the DNC and released through WikiLeaks the emails.
What happened?
Well, the DNC hacked released facts about the Democrats.
See, there's being sorry you did something and then there's being sorry you got caught.
So let me give you an analogy.
Let's say that you're a woman and your boyfriend, I think he might be sleeping around.
And then what happens is you find out that someone has hacked your boyfriend's cell phone And you get access to the messages and his phone calls and his videos and his photos.
Someone hacked your boyfriend's cell phone and you find out beyond a shadow of a doubt that your boyfriend has been having multiple affairs, unprotected sex with people who were coughing and sallow-skinned.
And so he has basically exposed you to the risk of potentially fatal abuse.
Gonorrhea is pretty bacteria-resistant these days.
Potentially deadly, fatal, god-awful STDs.
So he's basically a dangerous and terrible person, and you found this out because his cell phone got hacked.
Now, you find out this information, you see the videos, the photos, the text messages, all of the salacious stuff going back and forth, and you break up with your boyfriend.
And do you know what your boyfriend does?
Does he say, man, I was really a bad boyfriend.
I did the wrong thing.
I betrayed you.
I put you in danger.
No.
What is his defense?
The hacker is the problem.
Not my behavior.
It's the fact that I got hacked.
It's not what I did.
It's not that I betrayed and lied to you and endangered you.
It's not what I did.
It's that I got caught.
And the hacker is responsible.
And I'm going to go and get that hacker.
I'm going to find that hacker.
And I'm going to get you back to being my girlfriend once I find and punish that hacker.
Are you kidding me?
But the DNC only pretended to be a democratic organization.
They pretended to have a fair race between Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton.
It wasn't fair.
They had the thumb on the scale.
You see...
If you find out through a phone hack that your boyfriend is a dangerous lunatic putting you in danger, sleeping around on you, and then all he does is scream that the only problem in the entire thing is the hack, that only confirms why you broke up with him!
And months later your boyfriend is still obsessively trying to find this hacker?
To do what?
It doesn't change that he cheated!
And let's say he finds some hacker and he punishes some hacker and he reports some hacker.
It doesn't change that he cheated.
And it only confirms that he's obsessively focusing on the person who exposed his bad behavior rather than his own bad behavior.
That's exactly why you broke up with him.
Let's say he finds the hacker and punishes the hacker.
Are you going back to him?
No, you're not.
Not if you're sane.
So, this may seem like a bad thing.
I don't honestly think it's a bad thing.
Call me a hopeless optimist, Pollyanna, staring at the sun till my eyes cry, but I think it's a great thing.
It's one of the best things that could have happened.
Because what it's going to do is it's going to have the mainstream media continue to focus on this Russia thing, this Russia narrative as to why they lost the election.
Which means they're not going to change their own behavior because they've got someone else to blame.
They can focus on persecuting and attacking and following this mirage off a damn cliff.
It means they don't have to develop an actual platform.
It means they don't actually have to listen to concerns of the voters.
This eruption of the mirage of Russia hacked the election and that's why we lost is perfect.
It positions the Republicans perfectly for 2018.
And it makes sure that the Democrats keep alienating any potential base they might acquire by focusing their rage on the people who expose their bad behavior rather than attempting to reform their own bad behavior.
It's perfect.
It couldn't be better.
And I'm confident enough that they're not going to be able to change their approach perspective or opinions to openly state this.
They may not, but they won't change.
Because this has become an idée fixe.
It has become like OCD. It has become this tiny sun that they orbit around.
A decaying orbit, which ends in a political flame.
So, yes, this has roused the specter of the Russian ghost.
Keep chasing that Russian ghost right off the political cliff.
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