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April 10, 2019 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
27:28
BOMBSHELL: Attorney General Barr: Spying "Did Occur" Posobiec/Molyneux
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Hi everybody, it's Stefan Molyneux from Free Domain.
I'm here with Jack Posobiec.
We're going to talk about the thermonuclear bombshell dropped right at the heart of American politics today by Barr regarding Obama.
But first, Jack, tell us a little bit about yourself and why you were the guy I wanted to call about this.
Right, so Stefan, thanks so much for having me on again.
I'm a prior intelligence officer myself, worked here in the intelligence community conducting operations both through Defense Intelligence Agency, the DIA, and the ONI for several years, got out of that and went back into conservative media.
But one thing where I've been reporting at One American News Now for about the past year, and a lot of former contacts that I work with in that field and a lot of experience that I have from that field that I can draw on, it's very interesting how politics has brought this out because we've learned so much about counterintelligence investigations, it's very interesting how politics has brought this out because we've learned so much about counterintelligence investigations, into criminal investigations, FBI work, CIA work, and it marries up quite closely with everything that I used to do, at persons, when I was in the military.
That's actually one point of contention in everything where everyone's talking about Trump and what A.G.
Barr said today, was that these tools that the U.S.
government has, these tools that the federal law enforcement and federal intelligence agencies have these capabilities are not meant to be used on U.S. citizens and certainly not meant to be used on presidential campaigns.
That's something that A.G. Barr testified to specifically today.
All right.
So let's talk about what he said.
And I want a bit of a deep dive into the origins as well.
So he was asked why he felt the need to reinvestigate.
And Barr answered saying, I think spying on a political campaign is a big deal.
And then he equated Trump's claims of having been spied on, similar to the government spying on anti-war protesters during Vietnam and so on.
And then he said, I'm not suggesting, this is Barr, I'm not suggesting those rules were violated, but it's important to look at that.
And Shaheen said, so you're not suggesting spying occurred?
And Barr, and you could almost see him standing on the edge of that cliff, like I'm going to take this step, because it's a big step.
And he said, I think spying did occur.
And then Democratic Senator Brian Schatz said, you know, you can rephrase that if you want, because, you know, it seems like a pretty big deal when the Attorney General of the United States used the word spying basically on a political campaign.
And, yeah.
So Barr said, I'm not sure of all the connotations of that word you are referring to.
And he said, yeah, unauthorized surveillance, is that more appropriate in your mind?
You know, same thing.
And that is really an astonishing thing.
So to be clear, he doesn't say that he knows that it was improper and he's not discussing evidence, but just the very idea that the entire spying apparatus that is designed to protect Americans from foreign spies was used to spy on a competitive presidential campaign is really shocking.
Right, and so he specifically brought up the Spying that was done on anti-war protesters during the 1970s and something that at his age, something that his generation had lived through, there was a major reformation, a huge push in the intelligence community in the United States in the mid-1970s called the Church Committee.
It was read by a Democrat senator, Frank Church, but it was bipartisan, and it completely broke out And for the very first time, went through all of the different domestic spying operations that the U.S.
government or various entities of the U.S.
government were conducting.
Because this is essentially where the problem seeps in, is when you say, take the Vietnam War example, is we are fighting a war in Vietnam.
If you are against the war, then you must be a foreign agent because you are aiding foreign powers.
Therefore, we can use our Surveillance apparatus to spy on you because we think that you might be a foreign agent, right?
And you can see how the same type of very shaky logic was used to initiate the Trump campaign investigation and the spying that went on because that very same shaky logic of, well, Trump seems to be generally open to Putin and he's making all these comments about WikiLeaks and hacked emails publicly.
Therefore, he might be a Russian spy, so we better start spying on him.
And that's when they turn The intelligence apparatus, the spying apparatus, the agencies that we have set up under the Patriot Act and given immense power to, really, really immense sweeping power to, and to use that, those capabilities against him while running for president.
I mean, when you're talking about the very underpinnings of democracy, when you're talking about the very ability of any, you know, regardless of party, regardless of side, whether or not you're a fan of the president, this is a dramatic step.
And I think that's really what Barr was trying to get at and to say that, you know, we really shouldn't just overlook this as, as if it was something that just happened that should not see any repercussions or consequences.
And in any case of his investigation, whether or not it's going to lead to criminal prosecutions or indictments, we don't know at this point, but I think he's making the obvious statement as to say that any investigation of this nature is unprecedented.
It's certainly been unprecedented in U.S. history.
It's something that you hear from, you know, the third world, you hear from banana republics, right?
You know, we're going to investigate that guy who's running for president because we don't like him.
This is what you're you're not used to hearing that in a developed country like the United States.
And Barr is making that clear and saying that we need to be very careful about going down this road because it could easily happen again.
Well, and let's talk about some of the points that were brought up in this hearing as well, which is this, that the counterintelligence operations are designed to protect Americans from being spied on by foreigners.
So, As far as I understand it, this was fairly well explicated in the hearing.
And so then the question becomes, if you believe that there is foreign interference in Trump's election.
Why wouldn't you sit down with Trump?
And he had two, what, former attorney generals involved in his campaign, Christie and Giuliani.
Why wouldn't you sit down and say, you know, we've got rumblings, we're concerned, because that's what they did with Dianne Feinstein when it turned out that there was a Chinese agent sitting in her car for decades, driving her around and being her proxy at meetings.
They sat down with her and said, this is our concern.
And so if they had those concerns about whoever was in Trump's campaign, why wouldn't they sit down with Trump?
And that's a pretty important question.
Right, exactly.
And actually, if you go through and follow the investigation, I've been through every single day in court with Manafort, Papadopoulos, Flynn, etc.
I speak to Papadopoulos and Carter Page on a regular basis, both people.
We know Carter Page had a FISA.
We suspect there was also a FISA on George Papadopoulos.
We're told that Papadopoulos is the person who predicated this entire investigation because of his comment or his connections overseas, right?
That's the New York Times put out talking about Russian emails.
And it always starts with Hillary's emails and coming from Russian contacts, very dubious sort of underpinnings.
But you look at the FBI and to your point, what they brought up today, the FBI doesn't interview Page or Papadopoulos until 2017.
So if you think these guys are foreign agents, if you think there's foreign interference, I don't know.
Why not investigate them, or go and talk to them, while the interfering is going on?
Well, and why not talk to Trump and say, these guys may be compromised, you need to seal them off from your campaign until we figure out what's going on?
If I was running that as a counterintelligence operation, in fact, what I would do is, and what we're trained to do in that field is, you would go to the principal of the organization, obviously in this case it would be the presidential candidate, who's Trump, and you would then work with them
To design a counterintelligence operation by which you allow it to continue, but you're looking over their shoulder so that you can then find out what your adversaries intentions are and possibly their sources and methods as well.
So you, you know, if you think they really are a spy, then you, you would go talk to the principal.
You would get their, their buy-in on this.
You'd possibly set up some kind of cover or whatever.
Um, and then you look over their shoulders.
So you, that's why it's called count.
That's the whole meaning of the term counterintelligence.
So we're countering their intelligence operation with a counter-investigation of ours, where we're learning what their sources and methods are, and possibly feeding them disinformation, misinformation along the way.
Well, because this is the whole thing, is that the story afterwards was that the 2016 election was fundamentally compromised by foreign interference, which the FBI had been investigating since, what, early-mid 2016.
And so why would they allow that to continue to the point where it would compromise an election?
Right.
It begs a lot of questions as to say, if this was going on, why did they allow it to happen?
And why did they allow it to happen during the election and as the time people were voting?
I mean, if this really was such a big threat to democracy, uh, and the, the actual outcome of an election, there's certainly, it's something that should have been brought to the attention of the candidates and to the president.
And, you know, I think that's a big part of this, right.
And a big, big part of The idea that, you know, and I see what you're doing here, you're playing with their, you're using their logic and taking it to its logical ends.
But the real situation is, is that this never was about Russian interference, that it was about spying on Donald Trump and preventing him from becoming president.
The whole idea of Russian interference was sort of a cover screen, a cover story, smoke screen that was used in order to put all this into place.
And it was never really meant to hold up to The kind of scrutiny like a special counsel investigation or Attorney General Barr, what he's putting in place now with his new working group investigation that he's going to be launching at the Department of Justice.
The Steele dossier was never meant to be published publicly, right?
It was only intended to be an election trick.
It was intended to, you know, maybe plant a few stories, maybe get some opera research out of an investigation.
Remember, Hillary was supposed to win in their version of reality, their version of events.
So Hillary was supposed to win, and all of this would have been swept under the table in the first place, and we never would have known.
I've heard two origin stories about this spying stuff.
And one of them, of course, is that Papadopoulos was claimed to have a drunken conversation with, I think, an Australian diplomat regarding his knowledge of the information that ended up with WikiLeaks ahead of time.
And that was reported.
And then afterwards, of course, there's the Steele dossier.
And a lot of people think that the Steele dossier was the instigating factor.
But if the Papadopoulos conversation was there earlier, it would be that, would it?
Right, so a lot of that information is, it's best understood in a sense of how intelligence works, right?
And so even though there's this sort of media narrative, I can break down how it would actually have looked at on the inside as someone who actually was in the intelligence community in 2016, though I had no part in this, right?
That would have been a report.
Right.
So Alexander Downer, who was the Australian that met with George Papadopoulos in London, early London, by the way, they always describe him as a diplomat.
He was the foreign minister of Australia, right?
He was essentially, you know, John Kerry, Hillary Clinton level.
This wasn't just some low level guy as the New York Times tried to downplay it.
This, this was a very major, uh, major figure in Australian politics.
Also, he was the UN special envoy to Cyprus, uh, which, which plays a whole, a whole piece into what he was talking to George Papadopoulos about because Papadopoulos was involved with Cyprus and Israel in terms of energy assets that were going on there.
That's actually was a major point of their conversation in London had nothing to do with, you know, the emails was like maybe one little piece of it.
So after the emails come out in around the time of the DNC in 2016, the DNC convention in the summer, that's when Downer makes his, his
Reports to the Australian intelligence agency and then the Australian intelligence brings it over to US intelligence at the same time concurrently Christopher Steele is making his dossier, but his dossier isn't one Specific thing and that's that's one thing that that it's always I always try to very hard to explain to people is the dossier that we saw at the very end was the final piece of it, but I Know you're a fan of literature.
So you know how Charles Dickens used to write one chapter at a time in his serials when he did Oliver Twist?
It would be one chapter per newspaper as it came out, right?
So that's how the Steele dossier came out.
It would be one piece of it at a time would be fed into the intelligence cycle.
So every morning, if you're working the Russian counterintelligence desk, you're getting a new report on Trump.
And here's a new report on Trump.
And this one says Trump and Russia.
And this one says Trump and Russia.
And then another one says Trump and Russia.
And they're all coming from different sources.
So one of those sources ends up being Christopher Steele.
Another source ends up being Alexander Downer.
Now, interestingly enough, you wouldn't actually know at that level that that's who the source was.
You would just see Australian intelligence or British intelligence, right?
Because they're putting their stamp on it by just by the credibility of them releasing the report through their channels.
So they're seeing It seems very, very credible, right?
It's that sort of appeal to authority sense of, well, if Australian intelligence was reporting this and British intelligence is reporting this, then this must be a real thing.
Therefore, American intelligence had better look into it.
I don't know if that helps to answer your question, but at least trying to paint a picture of how it would have actually played out.
But was he working for?
I think he was always referred to as an ex-spy.
So how would it get the stamp of British intelligence if all of this unverified information, some of which Steele testified that he got from a user-generated section of the CNN site that has no verification, no journalistic standards, basically a blog with the CNN overhead to it.
So how did it get the stamp of British intelligence if he was an ex-spy who did some internet searches and just Came up with stuff.
Well, and in fact, you can actually find the famous or infamous, I guess, Golden Showers piece of it.
You can actually find that in an old 4chan post pretty early on in 2016.
And a lot of people have thought that it was actually something that he just found on 4chan.
So the way he was doing it, and this is key, with Fusion GPS, that he was running all this through in his own company, Orbis, in the United Kingdom.
They still have deep ties through organizations such as the Hacklet Group and through, on the Fusion GPS side, the fact that one of their chief employees, Nellie Orr, was married to a Department of Justice senior official named Bruce Orr.
So what they were doing was they were planting that information with these agencies and then having those agencies write it up as if it was an actual report.
This is actually fairly common in the human intelligence world.
You meet sources all the time that aren't official agents or aren't officially tied to one of the agencies.
You then meet with, because that makes it a lot easier when you're going around the world collecting information.
You get someone who's not part of your agency to do it, so that way they have a little bit more of a clean background.
And I'm sure we've also learned that a lot of the, you mentioned some of the sources that Christopher Steele found online were anonymous or 4chan, CNN.
He also worked with Ukrainians.
He also worked with Russians that he was paying off to do this thing.
So it's a whole source network.
We call that a sub-source network.
So the sub-sources work in through Christopher Steele.
Christopher Steele then brings it out to British intelligence and then back-channels it to FBI.
That gets written up as actual intelligence reports coming through their agency.
And they wouldn't say source, they would say, you know, Christopher Steele, they would say former intelligence service member from MI6, spent 15 years working, senior level.
And it would just say something like that.
So that's actually not even really all that unprecedented.
That's just how human works.
So then the idea, of course, you know, you've got your Fourth Amendment protections against unreasonable surveillance and search and seizure and so on, and the way it seems, Jack, that you can bypass all of this is you can have someone make up something overseas, feed that to the FBI, and then you can bypass the normal protections and the requirement for You are 100% correct, and that is why they did it in this case.
like the grand jury standard or some sort of standard of proof before you go around surveilling people.
It seems like quite a loophole in the whole thing that allows you to hop, skip and jump right over the Constitution.
You are 100 percent correct.
And that is why they did it in this case, because typically when we're talking about surveillance, when we're talking about investigations, we're talking about criminal standards.
And criminal standards or probable cause in a crime is extremely high.
And there are very strict rules on how that can be opened or what you need to open an investigation like that.
When it comes to counterintelligence investigations, like the one that was opened here, and this is something that we saw again and again under the Obama administration, was this idea that, oh, we can just say that there's some sort of foreign agent here, and now you can open a counterintelligence investigation for that specific reason, because they knew that you could use the same, and it's the same tools, it's the same databases, everything is the same.
You're just doing it under the auspices of a counterintelligence operation, not a criminal operation.
Right.
So the fact that the Mueller investigation has concluded and found no evidence of Russia collusion, is that casting a fairly long shadow back into the origins of these FISA court applications for surveillance because Because if after two years of open investigation with tens of millions of dollars of resources poured in, you can't find anything, I mean, doesn't that reach kind of like that claw far back in time to say, OK, well, how did this all come about to begin with then?
It does, and I don't want to sell any false hope to anyone here because the people that conducted this operation all very well knew how the process worked, and they know how the laws work, they know how to open one of these things legally, they know how to check all the boxes.
And because they did it as a counterintelligence investigation rather than a criminal investigation, as I stated before, the standard is very low.
There really is no legal standard for opening a counterintelligence investigation.
This was the issue, this was the debate, really, that civil libertarians were, which, by the way, were 100% correct about, actually, when the Patriot Act was passed, and the definition for terrorism or suspicion of terrorism was incredibly loose.
And, you know, people were checking out their, you know, library books, and they would say, oh, that's a potential terrorist, so we're going to investigate them and spy on them.
And what we've seen here is a complete reduction in the standard The legal standard that they would have need to use.
And so of course, they would have played by the rules on this.
And a big part of it, which is going to play into their, which is probably going to be their defense is they're just going to play dumb.
They are just going to play dumb from, from minute one.
We've already seen John Brennan start to do this when he went on MSNBC and said to the former CIA director, he said, Oh, I guess I suspected there was more going on.
I, gee, I guess I didn't know, but aren't we all glad.
That the president wasn't really a Russian agent, huh?
And they're gonna try to escape by just playing dumb.
And if you were to design a system, of course, a rational system, a fair and just system of this kind, you would definitely want to make sure that, for instance, it was not oppo research that was being handed to you under the guise of intelligence, that the people had actually personally met and vetted with the sources, that the sources hadn't been paid, all of these kinds of things.
And when you rely on overseas agencies, the quality control just seems to be right there down the shredder.
I just laugh because, I mean, honestly, I certainly can't get into it too much, but there's nothing like that.
There really isn't anything like that in the intelligence community.
I don't know of any country that really has something like that, and certainly not with American intelligence.
We get bad intelligence all the time, and it's a constant battle.
In the human intelligence community over, you know, whether or not we decide we believe one source over another.
And usually that decision unfortunately gets made at the top down because of political reasons rather than anyone on the ground who's saying, you know, well, you know, why should I believe one guy over another guy?
Right.
And many of the times that decision gets made at the higher levels and they come down and tell us regardless of, you know, whatever corroborating information we show them.
Right.
Because it seems to me that if the general suspicion turns out to be correct, and we may never know, in fact it's likely that we'll never know for sure, it's not like you'd write this, we're using skywriting airplanes or something like this, but if the general suspicion turns out to be the case that the Obama administration was using workarounds against the Constitution in order to spy on a political opponent with the goal of Changing the outcome of an election.
I mean, that is, as I've referred to it in the past, that has all the elements of a soft coup, a direct destruction of the peaceful transition of power, and taken a hammer blow to the very base of the Republic.
And I can't really imagine much more of a serious breach of ethics, if not legality, that can be conceived of.
I'm not really sure what else you can do.
And I actually, I have a quote here that I wanted to share with you.
And this is, so I mentioned the Church Committee earlier.
Well, that Senator Frank Church went on Meet the Press on NBC all the way back in 1975.
And he said a quote at the end of his committee on domestic surveillance all the way back, you know, a generation ago.
He said, if this government ever became a tyranny, if a dictator ever took charge in this country, the technological capacity that the intelligence community has given the government could enable it to impose total tyranny.
And there would be no way to fight back.
Because the most careful effort to combine together in resistance to the government, no matter how privately it was done, is within the reach of the government to know.
Such is the capability of this technology.
1975.
No one said it better.
Well, and that was long before, you know, general emails and web browsing and history and all this kind of stuff was available at the touch of a button, it seems, whenever people desperately wanted.
So the investigation that goes on from here, you know, if the Mueller investigation was two years, I got to imagine this would be even longer and more complex and more involved.
And where do you think it's going to play out from here?
Well, so actually there's one interesting aspect of this that I just covered for One America News, but I can certainly break it here for your viewers, is that because Barr is not a special counsel, he's also not the Inspector General, which is another review that was going on, he's the Attorney General.
So he is the Chief Law Enforcement Officer of the United States, and because of that position, the power vested in him He has access to all classified information.
He has access to all the investigatory notes of every investigation that's taken place before this.
So think about that, right?
He has now access to every document, every transcript, every piece of the Mueller investigation that went back over those two years.
He can use all of that now to go back and see how this all started.
In many cases, The Mueller investigation, because of the team that he chose himself, included people who started the Trump investigation.
So now Barr has access to all their own documents.
It's actually kind of ironic in a sense.
Do you think that there are enough?
I mean, it's very speculative, of course.
But do you think that there are enough good apples left in law enforcement in America that this can pursue with some semblance or trajectory of honesty and integrity?
study.
So I'll look at it from a perspective of institutionalists, right?
Most people that work in the Department of Justice or the FBI or in the intelligence community in general, they're not partisan.
They're not, they're not really one side or the other.
They have preferences just like any other human would or any other individual.
But They care much more about the integrity and the reputation of their agencies, of their bureaus, and the federal government writ large than any one political party or another, right?
We are talking about the bureaucracy.
We're talking about the permanent state.
Have you ever seen Yes Ministry?
You know what I'm talking about here.
So they want to do anything they can to restore the reputation of those agencies, of the bureaus.
When it comes to the FBI, you know, they spend a lot of money every year working with Hollywood To to make sure that everybody sees this wonderful image of the FBI through movies and TV shows that constantly seem to be turned out.
And that's that's very well curated by the FBI.
And so to have all of this come out and be such a black eye to the to the bureau and to be such a black eye to the department, I think that there's going to be a bigger appetite to clean that up and to blame that on a few bad apples that were running the place, which in this case would have been James Comey.
Andrew McCabe, Peter Strzok, Lisa Page in some instances, or and from the intelligence community side, that would be John Brennan and James Clapper.
So I really do think that there's going to be an appetite to want to quote unquote, get some justice for this, not necessarily for partisan reasons, but they're not pro Trump, but for institutional reasons, because they want to restore the institutional integrity and credibility of their own agency.
Well, I appreciate your feedback today.
We'll see how it plays out.
I rarely get goosebumps when I read the news, but when this came up, I was like, well, this is a very, very big deal.
And I really, really appreciate your feedback on this.
Thanks so much.
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