America This Week, February 16, 2024: "How a Political Scandal Fed Two Podcast Hosts"

It's a Montana blizzard.

I'm cozy here in the embrace of the alt-media, and...

You're in the loving embrace of the alt-media.

The only place I feel safe right now.

talked about how he didn't want to be wandering the wilds of national public radio.

In the cold winds of the mainstream media.

No, I'm tucked away in our little, slightly invisible niche of alt-media.

I mean, I guess we should...

Last week, much of the show was about...

We did the show early, in advance of Tucker Carlson's interview with Vladimir Putin.

What did you think of the interview, by the way?

read to the end of it.

And I don't know that you had seen it yet, so...

Number one, it was not a Russian propaganda coup.

It was a coup for meme makers.

The meme being, a simple question is asked of Putin, and he responds with a thousand-year

saga of Russian history.

The firmament was divided from the ocean.

And I thought, by the way, that that was just kind of an assertion of Russian cultural dominance

over narrative, saying, you know, you guys think you're storytellers in the West, but

let me tell you what a real story is.

And the guy was Homeric on Tucker, you know, soundbite man gets homered by Putin.

For that reason, I don't think Putin was able to seduce or hypnotize a Western audience.

I also felt that his antagonism toward Carlson was evident, and in retrospect, maybe even

stronger than I perceived at the moment, because I was listening for information the first

time I went through it.

But when I went back and did my body language scan and so on, there was no love lost.

In fact, I kind of saw the, you know, former communist and Putin coming out going like,

who is this rich person from America?

You know, I'm going to, I'm going to crush them in some fashion.

It was almost more important that he didn't let Tucker run his modern media game than

he won the hearts and minds.

Putin was, Putin was odd.

You know, he would have known what red meat for those sort of Putin questioning, Putin

curious people were in the West, and he didn't give them much.

if they get a chance to interview Putin, they're thinking ahead to the moment when he's displeased

with the results and you're in the well, in silence of the lambs, and he's up at the top

saying it puts the lotion on its skin.

You know what I mean?

Like it's, he's, he's a scary character and he's probably not used to having to deal with

conventions of Western media and, you know, do anything but be, but be whatever his whimsical

self is.

But I don't think it was effective.

I mean, he was, he was trying to propagate, propagandize.

It was through a kind of storytelling and reasoning and argumentation that the West

is largely immune to because of our short attention span.

But but also you remember how when people used to go interview Castro and he would like

spend six hours, you know, overwhelming them in some interviews, smoking his cigar.

There seems to be for, for authoritarian leaders a real attraction to the monologue and maybe

no ability to check themselves because no one in real life checks them.

I mean, Putin probably, can you imagine the people who ooh and ah over every story he

tells?

And you know, we can't forget that these sort of ex-communist leaders, they were raised

on the worst television in the history of television.

I mean, you know, stuff like conversations with Paustowski, right, which is, it's just

hours and hours and hours of like an elderly person mumbling into bad audio and, you know,

not saying anything that could possibly offend anybody in any direction.

So they're used to this sort of rambling thing that that was a convention, I guess, of his

youth.

But, you know, I've seen him be good at the other thing.

So it's mystifying what happened.

But we certainly heard afterwards that there was this pleasure in the Russian world about

the outcome of that interview.

But even in the case of sort of little revelation, like who did Nord Stream, and Putin said very

succinctly for once, you did.

That was really funny.

not one I would have made.

I would have said, who do you mean by you?

What entity?

And so on.

In any case, not to second guess the whole thing, I felt that if Putin had sort of bombs

to drop, he was probably signaling all the intelligence services and State Department

and so on who are watching this interview, that he wasn't doing it.

Mm hmm.

using, showing off the fact that he wasn't using it.

Well, this is the difference between somebody who has to secure widespread popular support

and someone whose real audience is always, you know, officials and intelligence agencies

and other bureaucracies.

Putin definitely thinks like that.

I mean, he's never really had to campaign.

He was essentially handed the presidency of Russia and, you know, the only competitive

election that he ever held.

The competitiveness of that is always dubious.

So who knows?

But it was it's interesting.

I think you predicted that it would complicate the passage of the Russia aid package, which

it may very well have.

But, you know, as of this broadcast, it's not true, is it?

I don't believe.

It was passed in a sort of midnight way through the Senate.

Certain American senators made a pretty big deal of opposing it, Mike Lee, J.D. Vance.

And now, yesterday, as of yesterday, we get this sudden scare headline.

I mean, the progression of that story was amazing.

It just started off as there is a threat.

going to talk about aliens.

Yay.

Finally.

But it didn't turn out that way.

And then, you know, then then it was somebody said it was about hypersonic missiles.

And then somebody said it was about, you know, nuclear Russian nuclear capability or, you

know, perhaps the use of weapons to attack our space defenses.

And then it came out that it was allegedly about some nuclear capability that has not

even been deployed yet.

I mean, I didn't even get that far.

This idea that, you know, this is this goes back to the Bush administration days when

they had that threat indicator that the DHS used to put out, like, here's how scared you're

supposed to be today of the terrorist threat.

And they wouldn't even specify it.

And people would, you know, they would have psychotic episodes or not based on how high

or low the bar graph was.

The idea that people take this stuff seriously is just unbelievable to me that, you know,

we can release these highly nonspecific things that we have no, that the public has no ability

to do anything about, about which the public has no ability to do anything.

I don't know, whatever.

And put it out there.

For what reason?

Like, why are we being told this?

The only possible reason that they did that was, was to try to, you know, desperately

nudge a little bit more of this, you know, aid package, right?

Isn't that the only conceivable explanation for that thing?

To me, I mean, especially since it's not an imminent threat now, we find out it's something

they could have sounded their fake alarm about at any time.

And it just happened to be now.

So I'd say, you know, we can infer that motive.

But I just want to know generally, as I sit here in midwinter Montana, in our cozy niche

of the alt media, why we went from, you know, the 1950s wants its foreign policy back or

whatever, you know, the rejoinder to Mitt Romney, to Russia all the time.

I mean, since 2016, to now, to this moment, I've had more intense Russophobic content

in my world than I did as a kid between 1976 and 1984, in which I was allowed to forget

about it for a few days every once in a while.

When they were an active nuclear adversary, that was a real threat to counter launch if

something bad happened.

And some bad things did happen.

We had a couple of very near misses where we were almost in nuclear war with the Russians.

And yet, we weren't, you know, asked to take the threat nearly as seriously as we are now.

So what happened between 2012 and now, you know, I mean, that gets into the activities

of this week.

You know, what I spent a lot of time on this week, obviously, you know, people who watch

this channel who follow Racket know that on public and now today, as of Thursday on Racket,

there was a series of exposes about basically about Russiagate.

But there were two main revelations.

One is that there was a surveillance campaign that included at least 26 Trump aides and

associates that was directed by the CIA.

It started before the FBI investigation.

And the other one is that they cook the intelligence for the intelligence community assessment

that said that Russia had done an influence campaign to specifically to help Trump, which

is like the last surviving myth from that era.

But the interesting thing about this, and as people have pointed out, everybody from

Maria Bartiromo to Dan Bongino to Aaron Maté to Chuck Ross to a million other people have

covered this stuff because it's been floating out there since 2018.

But I think one of the interesting things is that Russia was kind of an incidental part

of the campaign against Donald Trump.

I mean, if you look at the early Steele dossier reports and what we were told, they didn't

have a direction to go in as late as the spring of 2016.

And they kind of coalesced around this Russia theme that summer.

But not before then, because they didn't have a real predication to be worried about Russia

in conjunction with Trump.

So this whole thing, this whole Russia thing, it's not like it's fictional, because obviously

there's been tension dating back a long way, including the Maidan revolution and all that.

But in this specific circumstance, I think it's just sort of an accidental consequence

of this weird PR campaign.

As a consumer of Racket and Publix, I'd like to ask you a few questions about it.

One, how early did it really start?

What's the earliest you can trace it to?

The surveillance of the Trump world.

by informants in March of 2016.

But we've had people tell us that it was as early as December of 2015.

I mean, there's some stuff in the public record.

A lot of this stuff is in the public record.

It's just that people haven't looked at it because it hasn't been stressed.

For instance, in the infamous text between counterintelligence chief Peter Strzok and

his lover slash FBI lawyer Lisa Page, there's a reference to what they call Okunis lores,

which is overseas.

Yeah, exactly.

So that refers to 2015.

We've been told that that's the case.

And then also, there was a series of public stories involving the New Yorker and the Guardian,

which quoted the GCHQ, Britain's version of the NSA, saying that the genesis of all this

was late 2015 when the British picked up stuff.

So looking in retrospect, it reads like they were pre-bunking these revelations a little

bit, like they were setting the stage.

But certainly it was before the FBI thing started.

So were they all betting on the Donald Trump wars?

Had they set up this international intelligence effort to surveil Donald Trump in the hope,

in the fear that he would be nominated?

Or was it only him that was being surveilled?

Were there similar efforts with other possible Republican nominees?

Unfortunately, this is one of the remaining holes in the story is we just don't have a

good grip on the why of this.

Why did they start doing it?

relations to the Russians, that he required extraordinary measures.

But if they were doing it to other people too, and we just hadn't heard about it because

they didn't need to use those files, then that blows all to hell the notion that it

was just Trump.

If they had another program for Ted Cruz...

And so what we were told was that the question was asked, was this done for some national

security objective?

The answer was a definitive no.

They were just trying to take advantage of a rookie, inexperienced political campaign.

They specifically picked people like George Papadopoulos and Carter Page, who they thought

wouldn't see this kind of thing coming.

But the specific why, so far we got a peek at what's in this missing intelligence, but

we didn't get the whole glimpse, which is forcing us to speculate about what happened.

The question has been asked, why focus on Donald Trump?

He didn't even win Iowa, right?

Why would they focus on him so early?

One answer to that is, well, that's what they said about Watergate.

I mean, why would Nixon do it?

Remember, that was even a line in All the President's Men, where Ben Bradley Jr.

says to Woodward and Bernstein, why would Nixon do it?

I don't believe the story, right?

Because he was ahead by so much.

I think, you know, I mean, if I had to guess, which I hate doing, but my suspicion is that

they just overuse these tools a lot.

And we're finding out about this particular incident because Donald Trump happened to

become president.

But I think when there's digging into this, and unfortunately, the hearing to dig further

into this 702 slash five applies a program for collecting foreign intelligence.

There was supposed to be one this week, and they abruptly canceled it.

I think we're going to find out that this is just something that is overused a lot.

And maybe in this particular case, you know, there was a little bit of extra curiosity

about Trump because he was running for president because he was so disliked because they thought

they could get away with it.

I don't know.

It's an interesting question.

I don't know that I've ever mentioned that on this show.

This is cool.

Yeah.

of fooling people.

It's one of their, you know, it's one of their industries.

And the making of what appear to be predictions is an interesting thing.

One of the ways you can do it is to make predictions about a lot of things and then

suppress the ones that didn't come true while highlighting the ones that did.

So you can appear to have, you know, covered only Donald Trump when you release your dossier

on him, but the four other dossiers that you would have every reason to compile if it was

a political operation, which it was.

I mean, if anything, what you're reporting has revealed is that this was a political

And so why would they confine themselves to only one person who might, if they were, who

if they, if they put all their eggs in that basket and Trump blew up, they have no, they

have no info or no strategy against other people.

That doesn't make a lot of sense to me.

Number two, you're talking about when it started and when it got going.

Well, the thing that happened in 2016 that we all remember and that still hasn't been

addressed by this is the WikiLeaks business.

You know, I mean, that was used in the public, on the news, on MSNBC, you know, later to

be the home of John Brennan, right?

For his, you know, second career as a, and clapper, right?

I mean, dude, let's, we'll, let's hold off looking at what this implies for the big picture

of American politics and media.

But when WikiLeaks happened, it was the prima facie evidence of collusion.

Somehow the idea that the Russians on Donald Trump's behalf in some fashion had hacked

the DNC and Podesta and so on and released all these emails in order, you know, that

was, that was the dirty trick that America, that was used to convince America that all

this happened.

And later it got into the weeds.

Oh, there were Facebook ads and this other stuff, but we still don't have an answer.

On the WikiLeaks, the origins of that WikiLeaks.

party sued Trump, Russia and WikiLeaks for a conspiracy.

And the suit was tossed, not only because they didn't prove any of the individual elements

or connections, but also on the basis that the WikiLeaks leaks were protected speech

in the public interest.

But they never, ever established the connection between WikiLeaks and Russia and Russia and

the Trump campaign.

In fact, in one of the like amazing episodes that, you know, still to this day baffles

me, Aaron Maté pointed this out.

The indictment of Roger Stone disproved the entire theory of Russiagate because it talks

about how after the initial WikiLeaks releases about the DNC hacks, that he was dispatched

by Trump officials to go talk to WikiLeaks, to try to find out more about what was coming

next.

any of these people, go and make an unsuccessful attempt to talk to WikiLeaks on social media?

By the way, all of us reporters were trying to get the same information out of WikiLeaks.

I was certainly doing it.

But there's so much contradictory information about this whole thing.

And no, you're right.

They never clarified the WikiLeaks role.

And, you know, there's certainly some outstanding mysteries involved in that episode.

One phrase that you have, you know, centered your reporting on is manufactured intelligence.

Now, it's another one of those Orwellian terms because it's not intelligence.

Intelligence is something that's true, right?

I mean, manufactured intelligence is actually not intelligence.

It's the opposite of it.

It's deception.

It's disinformation.

You know, we've lived in a world now for a few years now where you and I and people like

us get accused of tolerating or even spreading disinformation.

But the Russiagate story is the preeminent example of disinformation in our time, you

It has a lot in common with that story, which we can get into.

But yeah, absolutely.

It's even worse.

It's worse than that because they're yeah.

of disinformation.

Happens, how?

How did it happen in this case?

I mean, there are certain techniques that are common.

What are they?

is in.

Obviously, all the Russiagate stuff happened.

There was incredible furor as Trump was getting elected.

Michael Flynn got dismissed.

James Comey stood up in Congress and announced that there was an investigation into Trump

and his possible links to Russia.

And then in response to that, the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, the House

Intelligence Committee, which at the time was chaired by a Republican California congressman,

Devin Nunes, started an investigation into the origins of Trump, Russia.

And so they they had two teams, one that was kind of based on the Hill.

And then there was a smaller unit that worked at Langley.

Their ingress and egress was controlled.

They were monitoring the way in and way out.

They couldn't take anything out.

So only a portion of what this team uncovered, they had access to all kinds of raw intelligence.

Only a portion of it ever got out.

And that was through the mainly through the Nunes memo.

They also helped uncover the fact that the Clinton campaign paid for the Steele dossier.

But this is where people who follow this story obsessively have always known that there's

stuff from there that is going to come out at some point.

So this is that stuff coming out.

This is what people, you know, all these conservative commentators have been wondering about for

years.

So what did they find out?

One of the things they found out was that the manufacturer of what what was called the

intelligence community assessment, which was a big report that was published on January

6th, 2017.

You remember that?

This was the this was right after January 6th, the other January.

It's amazing coincidence, right?

And this was the one it was like a 30 ish page report.

And it said, we assess basically that Putin ordered an influence campaign to denigrate

Hillary Clinton and and help president elects Trump's electoral chances.

And there was an annex to that report that included Steele dossier stuff.

The four intelligence chiefs, Comey, John Brennan from the CIA.