Scott Horton: The FBI knew they were lying the whole time. They knew this was coming the whole time ' cause they were in on it with the CIA the whole time and as all the internal government reports show every time FBI agents doing the work said this is a bunch of crap. This doesn't hold up, whatever, whatever. The executives would all pretend to not hear that and would go on to pretend believing that all these accusations were true and to go on to pretend believing that they had no reason to know otherwise. When all the stuff had already been debunked, it was all trash.
Steve Hsu: Welcome to Manifold. My guest today is Scott Horton. He's the director of the Libertarian Institute. He's also the editorial director of anti-war dot com and the host of the Scott Horton Show. He's the author of the 2024 book, Provoked: How Washington started the New Cold War with Russia and the Catastrophe in Ukraine.
Scott, welcome to the show.
Scott Horton: Thank you very much for having me. Good to be with you.
Steve Hsu: Super excited to have you on. I've been a fan of yours for a long time, and, and the thing I like about you is that you're often on a show. Maybe you're on a panel with some people who disagree with you but you have a tremendous command of the facts and you're able just to go to the heart of the matter.
And so there are two topics I wanted to get into with you first, Russiagate and the recent indictment of James Comey. Then what if we have time at the end we'll talk about Provoked the lead up to the Ukraine War. But before we get into any of those things, I'm curious about you as a person.
So could you just tell me a little bit about your childhood, how you grew up, and how you ended up where you are today?
Scott Horton: Oh, you know, I'm just a skater from Austin. I'm not that interesting of a guy, particularly there's a lot of libertarians that come outta Austin because. I guess, you know, it's sort of a liberal town in a conservative state, so you can either take the best of the left and the right or the worst of them. And so a lot of libertarians, you know, are, you know, as, as I guess Ayn Rand called libertarians, right wing hippies, which is, you know, there's a bit of truth to that, whatever. So
Steve Hsu: but
Scott Horton: also, you know, I just came of age during the time of Bill Clinton when all good men hated the government and wanted to see it destroyed.
And so I just kind of stuck with that. And then when W Bush came, of course he ruined the whole world. And so, you know, I've had plenty of work to do, you know, ever since the days of Clinton and Reno.
Steve Hsu: Are you involved directly in politics or do you consider yourself mostly a writer?
Scott Horton: Oh, you know, I I've been an advisor to libertarian party presidential candidates and, you know, I try to support my friendly faction there. Trying to prioritize sort of the Ron Paul in way, you know, gold, guns and peace as our biggest priorities, you know? And so I mess with that. I haven't really messed with the Republican party or the Democrats sometimes I've had to vote like in an emergency, in a defensive way, particularly like in a primary where, for example, in Williamson County, Texas where I live, the sheriff murdered a guy. So yeah, we all had to make sure and vote for the other guy, whatever his problems were, and which he had problems too, but, so things like that. But otherwise, no, I don't really participate in that. I have too much against either of the factions. I mean, if I had to participate in one, it would be the Republican faction, at least on the base of it. They accept property rights and freedom as. Overall their goal, you know what I mean? We're like, I don't know where the Democrats are on anything at this time. You know what I mean? And yet there's so much about the Republican Party that is, I don't want to be like, part of the best part of it. I can't, it's too much for me.
So I would rather just stay out and criticize. But, you know, it's constructive criticism for everybody. Like I really care about, I consider it an emergency, like what's happening to America, and it's been like this for a long time. So I'm perfectly happy, you know, it's all in, in in the best spirit as far as certainly the voters of the Republican party.
Those people are all my friends, I hope. But the, the party establishment itself to me is still Mitch McConnell and Lindsey Graham and for, you know, whatever Trent Lot from back when, whatever, same group
Steve Hsu: Well, I
Scott Horton: personified,
know,
Steve Hsu: I, before we get into the two main topics, I wanted to ask you about this. So the, the two main topics we're gonna discuss in my mind are, are really dramatic things that happened. But which most of the general public doesn't really know the ground truth about. And I think for me, like you've spent your whole career pointing out these kinds of things.
Do you feel that the public is more disconnected from reality now than, say 20, 30 years ago? Has it gotten worse or has it always been this way in America?
Scott Horton: Yeah, no, it's different now, but I would think, you know, for good and for ill, virtually everyone in America is politicized now. We're used to be much more common for people to just think that's somebody else's curiosity or hobby or interest. But that isn't my thing. Me and my friends, we do this instead. Everybody's plugged in. So everybody can be on Twitter or Facebook or Instagram or whatever it is and, and get into it. For a lot of issues, you don't need to know that much about it to know that that ain't right. And so, you know what I mean? Once you get your, your toes wet in it or whatever, then you know, people get very political very quickly.
And so that's good. And for i'll, 'cause it means that people can't be old friends anymore, you know what I mean? And things like that. A lot of families break up over stupid arguments and
god
Steve Hsu: Yeah.
Scott Horton: that collateral damage from it. At the same time though, it used to be just the New York Times, Peter Jennings, Dan Broka Dan Rather and Tom Broka would tell us what the deal is and that was it.
And so, yeah, everybody was basically on the same page, but it was all a bunch of crap. Oh yeah. The branch of Ians set their own children on fire with gasoline and whatever they want to tell you, dude, you just believe anything they say. 'cause you don't have access to anybody telling you different. So it's funny, man, there was a middle ground there where like.
I was doing pirate radio and then getting into podcasting, and there was even a time where it was like the bloggers, it was like, this is, this is pretty free market man. You have people who are just homegrown geniuses who are writing great stuff, anti-war dot com. Of course, were, you know, compiling all the anti-war news. But we had a lot of really great in-house writers who still do, but especially, you know, at that time or whatever. But then once Facebook and Twitter came out, now every single person has equivalent to their own radio show, their own anton war.com, their own blog. It used to be the blog writers and the blog readers.
Now everybody is a blog writer and every blog entry is that long, and that's just how it goes. So overall it's beneficial overall. I mean, this is what we want is Thomas Jefferson said, for all the flaws in the people's idea of whatever it is. They're still the most responsible repository of the power, because what are you gonna do?
Let just some of them have the power. Like those people are people too, right? So if man is not fit to govern himself, how can it be fit to govern someone else? So you don't like what I tweet? We'll, screw you, tweet back. I don't care what I mean? Like, that's all we can do. So that's,
I, I like the great, I, I don't mind the great equalization at all.
I think it'sit's, it's got all of its flaws. The real problem is the, the algorithm. You know, I scroll like, man, when I look at YouTube, it just shows me the same standup comedy, the same old skateboard videos, the same old, whatever, ultimate fighting matches or whatever crap that I clicked on a few times.
That this is all I ever get to see for the rest of my life. Now on YouTube, you know, and Twitter's the same way where they have following and then they have for you, but both of them are for you. The following tab is not everybody you're following, it's like one, 100th of who you're following. Maybe not even that.
I have no idea what's going on on Twitter, even when I'm looking at Twitter. So, and I don't know how you fix that. I mean, that's up to somebody else. And I think that's the real problem. 'cause I really want to subscribe to, look, I want to see tweets of people that I don't necessarily want to like, or retweet their thing, but I do want to see it with my eyeballs and think about it. Like, that's not a fair interaction. I have to like, demonstrate my interaction with a thing, you know what I mean? I, and or else I'll never see something like it again. Great. You know, I don't know. I don't like that. That's the part. And, and that's what causes, you know, Matt Taibbi wrote this great book called Hate Inc. And it was about how, okay, you used to have this idea where like whatever, you're the editor of the Post or the whatever, Dallas Morning News or whatever. You want to not piss off your Democrat audience or your Republican audience that much, or at least you want to piss 'em off both a little bit equally,
but try to play it basically down the line as far as those differences go.
To keep your broadest audience, sell some classified ads, that's the business you're in, right? And then what happened is really Fox News figured out that, you know what? We just want to be the voice of the Republican Party and we'll sell gold to old people and that will be our entire model. And so they just killed it with that.
So then it turned out that, okay, we don't have to play it down the line anymore, we just gotta find a line and play that line. And then so everybody did that. Right? And then with the, as I was saying, now everybody with a Twitter account essentially has their own radio show. No matter who you are, the barrier to entry is nothing.
And so you can get on there and add your own bit and especially. People gain a lot of prominence, especially if they're willing to oversimplify things. They're willing to demonize their enemies, portray themselves as the only ones who can really explain the real truth and help you protect you from the terrible thing that's coming and whatever.
And people like that end up with huge followings and audiences. And it's the us of them kind of dynamic that ends up driving that loyalty, which means the greater the emergency, the more people get to it and it makes that good business. So now, instead of rather Jennings and Brokaw telling everybody what we all believe, we got 10,000 Dan Rathers out there with their own little niche audience that only listens to them and hardly anybody else.
So you got people who, and this has really been going on for a long time. I remember when I was driving my cab, a guy at my cab, this is would've been in 2004 or oh five. A guy in my cap says, oh, I read Glen Reynolds, and I'm like, Glen Reynolds, I'm a Justin Raimondo guy. You know, are you crazy? So but that's how it is. So for, for all its pluses and minuses, I guess.
Steve Hsu: Okay, so this first topic I want to get into is one where if I were to state it dramatically, maybe if a Martian came to earth and asked me about, Russiagate, I would say something like US State Security and Intel Services spied on the sitting president and tried to, conduct a coup and they failed.
But all the information's kind of out there. It's just people are not really aware of what happened. Maybe give your take of the events. It's, it's, I know it's, you have to go deep in the weeds and we might lose a bunch of the audience in recounting what happened in 2016 and thereafter. But maybe you can give a sort of compact summary of what happened and then what's new in this indictment of James Comey.
Scott Horton: Okay, sure. Well, first of all, you ain't wrong. Lemme just stipulate 'cause I have no idea who your audience is. Let us pre presume, presume that there are millions of people gonna see this thing and they have no reason to like me or understand my point of view in any way or to be charitable to me in any way.
So let me be charitable to them just so that everybody understands where I'm coming from. I never voted for Trump. I'm not a Trump supporter. I ain't no Democrat. And quite frankly, I, I rooted for him all three times and I was very happy to see him crush his enemies. And, and I don't mean out in the country like rounding up whoever, but I'm talking about in Washington.
I very much detested the establishment that he defeated as personified by Jeb Bush and Hillary Clinton in 2016. But the rest of them too. But I'm not a supporter of his 'cause. The guy's got real flaws that I'm not willing to look away from. So that's where I'm coming from. I'm not a Trump loyalist.
I'm not here to sell this from the point of view of like, I'm Benny Johnson and my party line is Trump didn't do nothing wrong ever, no matter what or whatever. 'cause that's the loyalty. That's not where I'm coming from. But you should understand, and I would say exactly the same thing, if the circumstances were changed and they had done this to Bernie Sanders, or even to Hillary Clinton, I would tell you the same story.
'cause it's just the truth. What happened here was the CIA and the FBI and the Democrats framed Donald Trump for treason and they did so when he was the major, the presumed nominee, the by far front, front runner for the major party Republican party candidacy for the presidency of the United States which is absolutely beyond belief right there, that they would dare to go that far.
If he told me they ran some co intel pro dirty tricks, the FBI went and screwed up the Libertarian or the Green Party candidate on behalf of the Democrats, I'd say, of course it's Thursday, everybody, you know? Yes, of course they did that. You know what I mean? It's Friday actually. Point being that Thursday's funnier in the joke is really if you say it that way, but Thursday's a funnier word than Friday to me.
I don't know. But anyway, the point of it is that they did dare to do that and then they dare to continue that after he was nominated and then they dared to continue on after he won the election and was the president elect. And then even after he was sworn in and was the president of the United States.
The CIA, the FBI, the Justice Department, they ran what you correctly described as a coup and they openly admitted that they tried to invoke the 25th Amendment, which is the kind of thing that you would actually use against Joe Biden when he is two senile to be the president of the United States. That amendment was added, I say the 25th,
Steve Hsu: I think you.
25th. Okay,
Scott Horton: good. That amendment was added in the context. I don't think it was necessarily immediately in reaction to, but the idea was in case Woodrow Wilson has a stroke in there, right. That you don't just turn the government over to his wife and you don't have to necessarily wait for the Senate to remove him from power, for a crime that he hasn't committed.
We need another way to get rid of the president in that case. And that would be, if you can get a super majority, or I don't know what, maybe it's three-fourths or even unanimity in his own cabinet to say that he is incapacitated. Then you can remove him from power there. They were gonna try to use that against him, and that was what they said.
And then when that didn't work, and I'm skipping ahead in the story, I will rewind. I'm a year into it now on the timeline here. But when they decided that wouldn't work and they couldn't do that, they said they openly told CNN the FB. I said that, look, if we can't remove him through the 25th amendment, at least we can reign him in and particularly they meant on his Russia policy. So bottom line, the whole thing, all of it, no matter how much your mom or your sister, your dad or cousin or little brother, next door neighbor wanted to believe this thing, or maybe even you, it wasn't true. Just none of it, man. It was the same thing like they did to Saddam Hussein.
This make up a thousand lies. And they go, oh, you're defending this guy. And then if you're not willing to master. The debunking of 1000 accusations and relish it. Then you surrender to that and you go, God, I guess he must have done something, but no where There's smoke, there's fire, but that's not smoke.
It's steam, it's hot air, it's all bs, and it was invented originally by John Brennan. This is what we've learned in the new documents coming out, that we already had strong indications of this that, well, in fact, in his own words, what he had told Frontline was that this had started in the end of 2015, but now we know for sure that the FBI was in on it in January, and that was before any, any proof that we have.
Anyway, the Democrats got in on it in March, so now there may have been a secret golf game between Hillary Clinton and John Brendan, where they cooked this up at Thanksgiving, but I don't know that. But what we can see is what the CIA did in kicking the thing off. The FBI and then the Democrats going, okay, great.
And then contributing to the thing climbing on board for the whole operation. And we now know that the investigation into Hillary Clinton's missing emails that had been deleted and scrubbed from her home server, that Jim Comey, the director of the FBI, closed that investigation because he was afraid that his investigators on that case would figure out what they were doing as far as their cooperation with the CIA A or glom and honor the CIA's plot
Steve Hsu: Could we.
Scott Horton: come up with more lies.
So the whole time, from the very, very beginning of 2016, the entire time that the Clinton administration is coming to the FBI with lie after lie, after lie, after lie after lie, to try to force the FBI to investigate just so they can say, oh my God, there's an investigation for the politics of it. The whole time.
The FBI knew they were lying the whole time. They knew this was coming the whole time ' cause they were in on it with the CIA the whole time and as all the internal government reports show every time FBI agents doing the work said this is a bunch of crap. This doesn't hold up, whatever, whatever. The executives would all pretend to not hear that and would go on to pretend believing that all these accusations were true and to go on to pretend believing that they had no reason to know otherwise.
When all the stuff had already been debunked, it was all trash. So the actual cops doing their job, they knew it was trash and debunked it all in real time. And it was things like the guy, one of the main guys accused of being Trump's handler for Putin Carter Page. They were looking at him from early summer 2016 at the latest, maybe even in the spring. Well, they wouldn't interview him until next spring, 2017. He's even going, he's writing letters to the director of the FBI going, interrogate me, please. They won't talk to him. Why? Because they're pretending to believe that maybe he's a Russian secret agent who controls Donald Trump, and if they talk to him, he'll say, I'm a loyal CIA asset.
They know everything I know down to the comma. And so you got the wrong guy. You're barking up the wrong tree. They didn't want to be told that they wanted to be able to pretend to believe because the investigation itself was the scandal used to try to hurt him to successfully weaken him.
Steve Hsu: So Scott for most listeners, they probably only vaguely remember this. These are events of roughly 2016. You know, there was an election on the sitting CIA director is Brennan the sitting. Correct me if I'm wrong 'cause I don't have the same mastery of these, uh, details anymore as, as you do. Comey was the FBI director and they concocted a set of false accusations, a report that was written by people paid, I believe, by the Clinton campaign.
But Brennan and Comey embraced that report wanting, pretending that they believed that it was true. They went to the, a court to obtain a warrant to spy, I believe, on Carter Page. And then I believe the way it works is they can then spy on people within something like two hops of Carter Page and his social network or that he communicates with.
So that, that basically trap, that basically covered a very large fraction of all the people around Trump and as you point out all of the initial claims against Trump, that he had some Russia connections that he had done something incriminating in Moscow, et cetera. These were all more or less made up.
And the, the people that I named knew that it was made up, but they just wanted to promulgate this whole investigation because it made Trump look bad. One thing I never figured out was, was the spying that they conducted actually ever important to them? Was it useful to them? Did they use information that they got from eavesdropping on people in the Trump campaign?
That part I, I've never really gotten clarity on. But, the other thing I wanna say is that I think, as you point out by now, because of testimony under oath even articles written in the New York Times or CNN or what have you, we, we, we now have a full picture that. This was a fraud from the very beginning.
The whole thing was fake and it was used as an attack on Trump. So do I have those details right? Please, please flesh out what I just said. I.
Scott Horton: Sure. Yes, you're exactly right. They used accusations in the Steele Dossier that was written as opposition research paid for by the Clinton campaign as the premise to pretend to investigate Carter Page, not even as an American criminal, but as an agent of a foreign power subject to a FIA warrant and a much lower standard of evidence than probable cause.
Like in the Constitution, he's acting as a agent of a foreign power. But the thing is, the CIA told the FBI, oh yeah. We know this guy. He's a loyal asset of ours, and every time he talks to a prominent Russian businessman or politician of any kind or government official of any kind, he always comes and debriefs us about everything. Well, the FBI or the Justice Department official, a lawyer named Kevin Kleinsmith, deleted that from the FISA warrant. They pretended not to know that this guy was a loyal American, not just some guy but a CIA asset, a loyal American asset serving his country. And whenever they asked him whatever he, you know, Hey, is there anything we need to know about what's going on over there?
He is like, yeah, lemme tell you everything I know. That was their relationship. And so they pretended all along to believe that he, there was anything there, just so as you say, they could spy on the rest of the campaign. Now what did they get outta that? I would have to clarify something. 'cause I know that obviously they were spying on Mike Flynn.
I'm not sure if that was under the two hopper rule under Paige or if that was just because Mike Flynn was on the phone with the Russian ambassador in the United States and his calls are not protected. And Flynn at the time was in the Dominican Republic. And so that may have also put him in a separate category for unmasking and what have you as far as who he's talking to.
The thing about that was, so that may or may not be connected to the two hops as far as whether they found any information on ties to Russia through all that surveillance. Absolutely not. There was nothing there. When you say it was more or less made up? More, it was all made up seriously. I mean that there was nothing to it.
It was all lies, all of it. And I'll go down the list 'cause I got it. So on this point though I'm not certain that the Carter Page surveillance is what led to the surveillance of Flynn. That was the only surveillance that led to anything and they had to absolutely lie and come up with a fake transcript.
Okay. Or actually we don't know this either Justice came up with a fake transcript to show to Vice President Pence, or they got Pence to lie with them about what the transcript said. They pretended that the transcript said that Flynn was making a deal about lifting sanctions with Russia, which he had every right to be discussing these things with them.
Anyway, this whole thing is completely stupid, pretending he was in violation of the Logan Act when he's a designated national security advisor of the incoming president-elect of the United States of America. Give me a break. You saw Trump doing all kinds of diplomacy in November, December, January, leading up to his inauguration, to his second term.
Did Joe Biden call in the Logan Act on him? Then when he started talking to the Russians and the Israelis then? No. That's completely stupid. Are you kidding? It was just a pretext. But anyway, they lied and they pretended that Flynn was making some corrupt deal when he actually did no such thing. And it was only years later they finally released the real transcript, which showed that he was 100% innocent.
Of obeying any orders from Russia to lift any sanction to take control of American sanctioned policy and lift it as a favor to his masters. What they really showed was actually he was operating on behalf of the Israel lobby and asking the Russians would they please veto a un resolution regarding colonization of the West Bank, which they declined to do and told him, sorry, Charlie, as far as the sanctions, all he said was, Hey, we should not do like tit for tat and keep adding more and more sanctions.
And in fact, Obama had just put sanctions on them and kicked a bunch of Russian diplomats out of the country. And so Flynn said, Hey, we shouldn't do tit for tat since we're coming in and we're like, in a spirit of wanting to get along here. So there's no promises there, nothing specific there. And the Russians, what they did was they did not kick out the American officials in reprisal and instead invited them to a Christmas party.
So, but th there's no treason. There's no deal, there's no backhanded, nothing, there's nothing secret, there's nothing there. They just lied to frame Mike Flynn. Now, I'm not the biggest Mike Flynn fan 'cause I, I am very critical of his role in the war in Iraq War II as well as in Afghanistan. And I think he's kind of a wing nut who wrote a book with Michael Ledine, blaming Iran for everything in the world.
And I don't really know what the hell the other guy's gonna say at any given time. He has said some very true things, including about bombing from the air with the lack of intelligence about what's going on in the ground in Afghanistan, although, of course, recommending an escalation on the ground as a solution to that problem instead of just calling off the dang war.
And which that didn't work either, by the way. And, you know, he blamed Benghazi on Iran and God knows what. So, however, what he never was, was guilty of treason with Russia for God's sake, by the, any more than you. It is just preposterous what they, and, and the claims that they made against this guy. And then, so look, I'll try to just go fast down like the bullet point list here of some of the things that they say.
They said that this guy Papadopoulos, who was this low level staffer, had received a secret from a Russian spy who told them that they had Hillary's emails. Well, that never happened. The guy that leaked it to him wasn't a Russian spy. He was an English spy,
and what he leaked to him was nothing. And then he didn't even repeat anything.
There's no reason to believe he said anything important beyond, Hey, I, you know, I don't know. Something. It a, this a, there's, they had nothing on the guy. They ended up prosecuting him for like getting a date wrong or something.
Steve Hsu: Loose end here. So that person you're talking about was a professor, if I'm not mistaken, and kind of went into hiding. And has he ever resurfaced? Do you, do, do you know who I'm talking?
Scott Horton: Ms. Wood. Yes. He's a Maltese professor who is clearly working for MI six and was sent to entrap this kid.
Steve Hsu: yes.
Scott Horton: to, to give him some garbage in so that somebody could get the garbage out on the other side and get him to repeat something. On the other hand, actually, I don't know that there's really any reason to believe that he said anything substantive to Papadopoulos for Papadopoulos to even repeat.
They both deny it. And then the guy who was supposed to get the garbage out, he also says that, well, there was a suggestion of a suggestion that maybe the Russians suggested they had something or something. Like, what are we even talking about here? So, that seemed to be like a fail entrapment really, that they just kind of pretended worked anyway, even though it didn't, they didn't even really get the juice that they were trying to get out of the thing, but it was, they were clearly just trying to set the kid up.
There was no Russians involved in the thing and it, the whole thing was a hoax. It was, and it was part of what was already in motion, this ongoing hoax. So the Clinton campaign hired a law firm called Perkins Coy, or Coy or something like that. And that group. They were the ones who hired, first of all, Glenn Simpson and his group Fusion, GPS, who hired Christopher Steele, the British spy, who wrote up the Steele Dossier.
And the Steele Dossier was the thing that said that the, the Russians have been cultivating Trump for five years. They have video of him paying prostitutes to pee on the bed that the Obama family had slept in when they were in Moscow as some kind of insult to them somehow. And so that was their blackmail over him.
And the whole goal was to use him to destroy the nato Western alliance and all whatever. And then, you know, people would say for a couple of years, well, parts of the dossier have been confirmed, but come on, man. What happened was the FBI, of course, and anyone could have done this if they were trying the FBI made a spreadsheet and said, okay, here's all the claims.
Here's everything in here that we can verify. And everything in here that's true is just stuff that was in the newspaper. Before it was written here so that anyone could have known it. And none of that is scandalous and all the stuff that is scandalous cannot be verified. Like all, none of it can be shown to be true.
So you see all that happened here was this guy took things like, guy takes trip to Russia and then he goes, yeah. And then I heard that while he was there, he had all these secret meetings with these guys. That's what he did to Paige. Paige is like, dude, I've heard of this guy before but I sure don't know him. And this guy, I don't even know who the hell that is and I don't know what you're talking about. And that's 'cause some liar made it up. That's why. Right? It was all just, it was all of it was lies. That same law firm also hired, was called the Georgia Tech team that went through and they were the ones behind the Alpha Bank hoax that said that Trump had a secret server getting his secret commands from the Alpha Bank in Moscow.
Again, completely made up crap. They also had perpetrated, the same group had perpetrated the hoax of the Russian yada phones and Russian web traffic, DNS, you know, web traffic near Donald Trump's, tower in New York, and all this, again, totally fake manufactured ridiculously and completely and ruthlessly debunked by the FBI and the ccia A upon receipt, both, you know, just absolutely trashed stuff.
And they also helped with the fake attribution, which was also made by a group that was hired by the same law firm called CrowdStrike, where they claimed that it was the Russians who had hacked the DNC and provided all these emails, the DNC, the DCCC, which is the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, and then later the Podesta email files, and he was Hillary Clinton's campaign chairman.
Now, to this day, there's not one shred of evidence nor even indication or reason to believe the Russians were behind this whatsoever. And I don't know who. But I do know that Julian Assange is the most credible, authority on this. And he swears that the Russians had nothing to do with this. He knows exactly who gave it to him.
And I interviewed a friend of his named Craig Murray, who's the former British ambassador to Uzbekistan and who's a decent guy and a good writer. And I talked to him, he says, I know who, he didn't say he received the leak, but he said he met with the people who provided the leak in both cases, the DNC stuff and the Podesta stuff.
And he implied heavily, it was an inside job. In both cases. He said, I don't, well, I'm paraphrasing him. He basically said it was the NSA, someone at NSA who leaked the Podesta emails as revenge for her breaking all the security protocols that they all have to obey or go to prison. And then he said that it was essentially somebody at Democratic, national Committee Headquarters. And he did not say or imply that it was Seth Rich for people who think that, and I should have followed up and asked him that specifically. And I dropped the ball on that at the time. But point being, what Craig Murray says is, is more credible than any of these claims that the Russians had anything to do with it.
Craig Murray told me himself, I met with the guy and he trust me, he's got nothing to do with the Russians or being a cutoff of the Russians, the person did So and never even mind that because forget even, you know, Craig Murray telling me anything. The point is nobody ever gave a slight its reason to believe that it was the Russians who did that.
You know, they make this claim that, well, we think that it was a hacking group called Cozy Bear, aggressive, persistent threat, 28. And we think that that's the Russian military. And we think that because years ago there was an attack on the Germans. And at the time we thought that was the Russian military. So that's it. You got turtles all the way down. All right. The whole thing is stupid. They got nothing. And of course, when the Vault seven leak came out, it showed that the CIA specializes in hacking your computer and then leaving behind false fingerprints in other languages to make it look like somebody else did it.
Oh, you don't say, huh? it was called Marble cake. It was the CIA program, how to do that. So, and, and regardless, there's no reason in the world and in the Mueller report, investigation, whatever, they, they say, Hey, we have no chain of custody to WikiLeaks from Russia whatsoever here. And they don't.
And, and I go through the timelinevery carefully in the book Provoked. I have a whole section, 75 pages on Russiagate, and I go through the timeline. I show why the government's claims that it was this guy Gucci for two and DC leaks, who they say were fronts for Russian military intelligence. Who furnished these leaks to WikiLeaks. I show why there's no reason to believe that whatsoever. And there's every reason to believe that Julian Assange already had these leaks in his possession before he got anything from them, and that he never posted what they had given him. And the stuff that they posted independently was either stuff that he already had or was a bunch of trash. And even you had, you know, clintonite types admitting that at times, like, oh, okay, this doesn't actually seem to be right. If you look at the timeline, we know Julian Sandra Saviano if anything, he screwed up by saying, Hey, I've got some upcoming stuff on Hillary Clinton. Look out everybody when he shouldn't have said anything yet.
You know? And so you could see how they kind of kicked their operation into gear to sort of frame it up to make it look like it was the Russians who were giving him this stuff when he clearly already had it. And we know that whenever they get a leak at WikiLeaks, they spend weeks, or months or whatever it takes to vet and verify every document and make sure, and they have never published a fake document ever.
Because they're meticulous and double, triple extra verifying as best they can in every document. 'cause you could have a trove of real documents and one fake one in there that's meant to really do something bad to somebody or something. And so they're very meticulous about that. So then in the timeline, we're supposed to believe that they turned all this stuff around in four days and whatever, when usually they take weeks or months.
No way. And he had already said he has some stuff coming out. If anything, he was smart to say that 'cause well maybe he set himself up in a way, but also that just goes to show he already had this stuff in the works and they were lying about that then so they framed we talked about Paige. They also pretended to be scandalized.
This is actually Kamala Harris's big break in politics. If you go back, Kamala Harris, grilled Jeff Sessions, the senator and member of Trump's campaign. And then his attorney General, no, no, no. Was it Flynn? No, no. It was Sessions. Oh man, I'm pretty sure it was Sessions
sessions then recused himself as attorney General. Yeah.
Yep. Right, so, so this is before that. So he was, first of all, he was on Trump's campaign and then he became Attorney General. So I think in the meantime, before he, before he was sworn in, or maybe it was after he was sworn in, there's a scene where Kamala Harris is grilling him, and the Democrat said, oh, she's a rising star.
This is an NPR News one, Kamala Harris Rising Star. She has these aggressive prosecutor instincts that shows that she can take on Trump. So they're looking at her to run in 2020 against him. That was what they said. So even though she'd gone nowhere when she tried to run in 2016, So Sessions was accused cavorting with the same Russian ambassador Kislyak that Flynn was accused of his crooked deal with, and Sessions was accused of, oh my God, he met this guy twice. Yeah. But one time was in his Senate office surrounded by his staff who were all retired US Army colonels by the way. And he said, hi, how you doing?
Whatever, perfunctory nothing. And it was not as part of Trump's campaign. It was in his role as a senator. There was absolutely nothing scandalous about it whatsoever. In fact, what he did in the meeting was give the guy dressing down over Russian policy in Ukraine and Moldova. Let me tell you what I don't like about Russia you is what Sessions said to the guy in the meeting right?
Then the other one was he went to a speech at the council for the national interest and shook hands with the guy in a line of people's shaking hands. And they go, oh my God, contacts with the Russian who, head of secret police? No, the Russian Ambassador to the United States. Right. You're just, you have to pretend, you have to want to be upset. You gotta be like a MPR listening liberal stuck in your sport utility vehicle and traffic in the afternoon going, you know, oh my God, he, oh, he fired Jim Comey. Oh my God. It looks like, you know, you just hear how breathless and, and upset Mar Eliason is, and you go, oh my God, something is really going on here. I'm like, yeah, no, there's nothing going on here. And then, so I'm trying to think of, of any major people that they accused. I, I covered the hack and the leak. And then, so there were also like kind of a million subplots here. They pretended to believe that the Russians had hacked Vermont's electricity grid and they were gonna freeze everybody to dark in the wintertime. That was a big one for Rachel Maddow.
They pretended to believe
Steve Hsu: Probably we don't need to go to all these subplots, you know, part of this is politics, so the, the.
Scott Horton: say there were, lemme just say there, there were about a thousand of those or whatever, a few hundred of those endlessly and breathlessly repeated about every little thing of Russian interference in every part of our lives and threatening our bodily fluids and all this thing on a red scare level. And you're right that this was a long time ago and people maybe don't remember, but it really was like that where people were really terrified over this stuff. You know?
So, I'm sorry, go ahead.
Steve Hsu: But the point I wanted to dig into is the power of the Intel services, C-I-A, F-B-I, maybe NSA to take down in, in what, you know, at the beginning it was the campaign, but then after that, Trump was actually president and they, you know, they impeached him. They would've happily taken him down. And I think that's maybe the scariest part of this, not the partisan bickering over, you know, ac just accusations. But having our Intel services directly involved in this whole thing, I think is the scariest thing. And that's why when I saw they were finally indicting Comey, I felt quite good about it because, you know, it is almost a decade later, but, you know, there should be some penalty for someone who's the director of the FBI from trying to, trying to actually contrave democracy and take down a democratically elected president. So may maybe just comment on that.
Scott Horton: Yeah. Well, you know, first of all, this is one of those things where. Believe me, you know, as I'm sure you and your audience know, the government does this to regular people all the time are like, well, if we can't get 'em on this, we'll get 'em on something,
Steve Hsu: Mm-hmm.
Scott Horton: you know, or charge you with a hundred things and make you plead guilty to something, or that kind of thing. Like, you know, we got the statute of limitations to deal with, especially when it comes to government officials breaking the law. We have just politics and all that. So there's a level of impunity that comes with being the FBI director. The fact that he's been indicted at all as a miracle it's on a very narrow charge of lying to Congress and obstructing Congress with his lies. Now, it may depend on how they frame the question. You know, it was like him saying to Ted Cruz, I stand by my earlier statement, like, this is getting difficult to prove in a court of law here but your Honor, the son of a bitch deserves to go to jail for life plus two 50, right? I mean, he is guilty as hell of this whole mess. He and John Brennan both.
And so I don't know whether they're gonna be able to nail him on this perjury and obstruction charge. If they gotta try him in Virginia, then probably not. It's all cops wives sit on those juries. I mean, you're just, you go to trial in Alexandria, man, you're done. Or if you're Jim Comey, you're safe, dude. You're already sitting in the dugout, you're good. So, I don't know, you know, how well they're gonna be able to get him there. It, it just goes to show how badly they got 'em. Because, you know, the, the Russiagate scam was over in 2019. But then, you know, he ordered this review.
The, the John Durham Special Counsel investigation was ordered by Barr after that to say, well, what was the origin of Russiagate?
And I urge people to read the Durham investigation. This is some of the new documents that we have is an appendix to the Durham investigation that had previously been censored away. That shows like really how corrupt behind the scenes, even the handpicked people who were picked to, write the thing the intelligence report of January 17, accusing Trump.
Even they were overridden by John Brennan, who basically just wrote the damn thing in himself in the end and all that. But that, that Durham investigation took forever. And so what Trump should have and could have done then is sort of what he's doing now, where he is having Tulsi Gabbard release everything and this is what he, he could have and should have done then.
First of all. He should have never let the thing go on. He should have fired everybody, but then also declassified everything and turned everything over the times in the post and the journal and the NPR and all his enemies and said, go ahead and have at it. There's nothing there. Carter Page is a hero. Screw you and gone gone on with life, you know what I mean? A Saturday night massacre, but with total declassification,
right? Because he was a hundred percent innocent. So it would've been fine. And then even after the, the after the thing was over, instead of hiring Durham to do the special counsel investigation, which he know is gonna take years and FB i's gonna drag out, he's not gonna be even be able to interview Comey and all of these things.
What he should have done then was declassified everything and ordered and had one good loyal guy go to C-I-A-N-S-A and justice and FBI and, and make sure root out everything. They're finding things in burn bags now in locked away hidden offices at DOJ headquarters. Now, all that should have been found in 2019.
Trump should, he hired Christopher Ray, this scumbag from inside the swamp to be FBI director. He should have made like whatever, Don Jr. FBI director and said, go and settle this son.
Steve Hsu: right.
Scott Horton: is, he should have absolutely cleaned house at that point. And, and then see you could have waited on the special council investigation 'cause that would've come from the journalism cause even the Post and the Times in National Public Radio would've said, holy shit. Pardon me. But wow. Looks like John Brennan and Jim Comey and Hillary Clinton framed this whole thing up. 'cause that's exactly what happened. And that's what the documents show. And then the, the, if with the truth first, then the investigation could have come later.
And so instead they were able to get away with this and they were able to get away with railroading him right out of power, you know?
Steve Hsu: Can I get you to tell us the things that have emerged post derm report? So I remember the Derm report came out. It was a little bit disappointing for some people like myself. I guess there were things that were redacted or still classified that are now known. So maybe you can tell us what are the highlights of what is now known that wasn't known in 2019.
Scott Horton: Yeah. Well first of all, the Durham report itself, you're right, is very flawed and it was very limited in its scope. However, I think for you and for your audience, I really urge people to read it. 'cause to me it's still just absolutely breathtaking. And I got some kind of disorder where I just don't get desensitized to this stuff.
Like, so none of it is surprising to me, but it is shocking. It is like, I'm sorry, man, I got a sensibility that says that people that run the FBI, they have to obey the law or else what in the hell is going on around here, right? Like this is, we have the Gestapo, or this is the United States of America, and these people are just so outside the law.
It's unbelievable. So even just the derm report itself, I think is just mind blowing, right? If you know, if you didn't watch Waco Burn, go read the derm report. That'll get you good and upset. And then, so now the new documents that have come out, I actually have a whole group of tabs on my on my desktop here that I have been postponing doing the deepest of dives on this 'cause I'm so busy on other projects right now.
But I know for one is they released the house investigation of the origins of Russiagate and there's a, a real long report there. And what that really shows is how Barack Obama ordered them to show how Russia intervened in the election for Trump begging the question. That's the correct use of the term, begging the question.
Everyone, assuming your conclusion in the question, show us how they did it, not if they did. Right? And so then John Brennan went and picked. His own people. He didn't go to Russia house at CIA to write it. He didn't go to the DIA whose responsibility the Russian GRU military intelligence is, no, he didn't go to them.
He didn't go to the State Department Bureau of Intelligence Research who know exactly what the hell Russian political and foreign policy goals are in great detail. Nope. Didn't want to talk to them. And instead they went to just five handpicked members. We had been told of FBI, CIA and NSA, Nope, all CIA.
And then we found out, and people really gotta read racket news. That's Matt Taibbi and the boys over there, especially Matt Taibbi doing the best work on this, went and find out in the end on every single bogus little indication that they were grasping at that Russia had intervened in the election for Trump. Every one of his own guys, one of the five of objected to one of the, at least one of the five, objected to each of the five indications all the way through and on. Each and every one of them was overruled by Brennan himself. So as Taibbi put it to me, essentially Brennan alone wrote the ICA of 2017 saying that all these accusations, all this bogus intel says that Putin intervened in the election cause he had a clear favoritism for Trump and was trying to make sure that Trump won and Hillary lost because of his goals on. Total lie. It was Brennan himself. This is a year after he invented the plot. He's the one who completely isolates every intelligence analyst in North America out of the chain and determines a loan. And in the name of, and as you I'm sure remember at the time, they claimed over and over and over again, Hillary Clinton herself and all the rest of 'em over and over and over, claimed. All 17 American intelligence agencies agree. So that's a reference to what's called the National Intelligence Council.
And that's where absolutely DIA is there, and, and the f the state departments bureau of Intelligence and Research is there, and also with the FBI and the CIA and whoever. So this is exactly what did not happen in this case. And they knew that. I mean, by the way, I mean, when they released the ICA, they said that this was a small elite group.
This was not a national intelligence estimate, an NIE, they called it an IECA, an intelligence community assessment, which is guess what made up crap. That's not a thing. That's just John Brennan lying to you. That's all that is. And then they just pretended it was an NIE anyway, and went on and, you know, look, if you knew better, then. Gimme a break, guys like me and all my friends on Twitter, but at the same time, like I recognize though, that was really powerful. They didn't read the ICA, but they heard about it. And what they heard was that all 17 American intelligence agencies agreed that essentially there was a coup last year. And Moscow, the Kremlin overthrew the government of the United States of America and installed their loyal henchmen in power, and he's got control of our nukes and everything, and he's gonna round up and kill all the trans women and fuck, whatever, right?
The, the paranoid fantasy that they put out about like, and, and why, why would the Russians do this? Because it's the only way to install a white supremacist Nazi fascist in power in America. Otherwise, we would never vote for a Nazi white supremacist fascist like Donald Trump. So they had, they're just, in other words, the Democrats.
The, the left half of the population in the United States at that time was so far up their own ass as far as all of their fears and all of their you know, projections of what they thought was happening, that they were just lost. It was like your classic, like numb nuts conspiracy theory, right. It was no, you know, and there are good conspiracy theories, but any, even conspiracy theorists can admit some conspiracy theories are completely stupid. Right? You can see where someone makes themself believe something, but it just ain't true. And, and this is really a classic case where even though it's coming from the government themselves, it's not about them. It actually was 'cause it's about the current candidate and the current president, even though it's coming from the CIA and the FBI.
But it's a classic conspiracy theory in the sense that, check it out man. We have. 100 points. The Alpha Bank and the DNC link and Jeff Sessions and Mike Flynn and Carter Page and George Papadopoulos and all of these things. We have no proof for any of them, but if you believe them all at the same time, then check it out.
It all fits.
Steve Hsu: Now
Scott Horton: the Seal Dossier has been confirmed. Have you heard?
Steve Hsu: causing that panic among, as you said, the left half of the population is. Is it a set of dirty political tricks, but still politics or is it treason? At what point does this actually become
Scott Horton: Well, it's certainly criminal. It's certainly criminal what they did. I mean, I don't know if you know whatever the federal penal code on sedition or this and that, it's not treason 'cause they didn't do it for an enemy state that we're at war with, which is the very technical constitutional definition of treason. We don't allow broad definitions of treason in the United States as they do in the old world. So. No treason is Benedict Arnold giving secrets to the British attack at 2:00 AM I'll leave the gate open
for you. Right. That's treason. But this is, you know, if you want to call it like just in the common parlance of the English language, lowercase t treason by these sworn officials against the people of this country and our constitutional Republican system.
Absolutely. Right. Like I honestly, man, this is to me no less scandalous than the Waco massacre. Right. This is the just how dare, this is like lying us into a Iraq war II. These people and their families should all be banished from North America forever and their confis, their property all confiscated and sold off.
And they have no right to live in this society with the rest of us anymore. If this statute of limitation says we can't put 'em in the supermax, then force 'em to go live in France with the rest of the goons.
Steve Hsu: But in, in fact, of all these actors, it's really just Comey that's in jeopardy now. And Comey may still skate. Is that, is that true? Yeah.
Scott Horton: Look, this is all political and, and they helped,
and I don't think they necessarily rigged all the votes and whatever, but through the mail-in voting and through the online censorship of Trump supporters in 2020, I think it's fair to say that they really did cost him that election.
This, the suppression of the laptop story, the framing up of the plot against the governor of Michigan, which is a total hoax. That was, remember October, 2020,
Steve Hsu: Yes. Yes.
Scott Horton: they thwarted the Republicans October surprise with the laptop, with total censorship on a Soviet level, and then they had their own October surprise, which the FBI did again, as a favor for the Democrats framing up these kooks and saying, look, Trump supporter's trying to kill a lady, Democrat, governor, you know, poor thing and all that.
So they really helped rig the election against him in 2020 as well. Problem is the Democrats sucks so bad. He was able to just come right back again and the demo and the Republicans sucked so bad too. Remember how hard they tried to put Ron DeSantis in Trump's shoes? No way, dude. That's all y'all got is Ron DeSantis.
Gimme a break, man. He might as well be a member of the Israeli canes. I mean, not that trump's any better on that, but, but he's such a fraud that was never gonna stick, and so Trump's right back again anyway, despite all their worst efforts. But I wish him luck in persecuting these people ruthlessly. I mean this thing too, where the lady tried to prosecute him criminally for mortgage fraud in New York, and now she's going to jail for
Steve Hsu: Yes.
Scott Horton: to get life. you know, I saw a clip of her going, we're going through everything on him trying to find something. Are you kidding me? You know, again, I'm not a Trump guy, but this law fair makes it absolute, it destroys, nevermind, makes a mockery of, or whatever. It destroys any semblance of having a rule of law.
You're, what you're saying is there is no law and you'll just use the power of the state against your enemies as you will. And then, oh, it's really bad when the other side does it, but it's just fine when I do. And it's really the Democrats who are normalizing that more than anyone. They really did it to Nixon too. And, and you know, the kind of thing that they're trying to do, uh, even still to Trump or what they tried to do in the meantime, in the Biden years while he was out to try to prosecute him on as many things as they could. And as close as I got to voting for Trump was in October of, right about this time, a year ago. October would've been maybe another week from now.
In the middle of October of 24, I saw a headline that said Jack Smith files new charges, updated indictment against Donald trump. I'm sorry, but like. I hate cheaters because, I don't know, I was raised by a father or something. I don't know what to say. Like, yeah, you don't cheat and I don't like that. And how, and after everything, dude, after Russiagate and Ukraine gate and all of the prosecutions throughout the Biden years, now in October 24, when the vote is two weeks from now, you just, you think that you're gonna make me, now you're gonna make me think, wow, Trump must really be a criminal for the heroes of justice to be after him this way.
No way. And you know, I would rather see Jack Smith go to prison for daring to try it. And again, I don't know the penal code, but he deserves that. How dare he try to intervene in an election that way? He should be in the supermax with Ramsey Yusef, the other terrorist.
Steve Hsu: Well, I, I'm glad we took the time to go into the details here. You know, we might have lost a few people who, you know, weren't following it with the same interest that I was following it back, back then. In the time we have remaining,
can we talk a little about the lead up to the Ukraine conflict?
And the title of your book is Provoked. It's a reference to the fact that seemingly every Western establishment person when referring to the Ukraine conflict has to say that it was an unprovoked invasion by the Russians. I think I heard this first from Nom Chomsky, some time ago. He said, you know, if they say repeatedly or they always say it's unprovoked, you can bet your ass it was provoked. And so maybe, maybe just make the case for non-experts. For why it was provoked or just refresh people's memory of what happened in Ukraine from say 2014 to 2022. Because I think most Americans paid zero attention to it, and don't have a good sense of it.
Scott Horton: Well, so the book goes from the end of the last Cold War when H.W. Bush was in power. A little bit of Ronald Reagan in there, through Bill Clinton w Bush, and the rest all the way through. So the long and the short of it is, well, hell, I don't know how old your audience is and what they know. After World War ii, the Soviet Union dominated all of Eastern Europe, half of Germany and everything east to there.
Now the republics were the Baltics, Belarus, Ukraine, and then the Stan Azerbaijan and Armenia down in the caucuses. But in the rest of Eastern Europe. In Poland, in Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, these nations were what were called the Warsaw Pact States, which meant that they were not part of the Soviet Union.
They were occupied by it and dominated by it, and had Kami sock puppet regimes that were run out of the Kremlin. That was the Soviet Empire in Eastern Europe. And at the end of the 1980s, it finally all fell apart, beginning in the end of 1989 when the war came down in, in West Berlin. And people say, we won the Cold War, and we did in the sense that America could afford to keep the thing going and the communes couldn't. And the thing ended up basically unraveling. And then it was really the government of Russia led by Boris Yeltsin that finally finished overthrowing the Soviet Union and destroying it and letting the last of the republics go in the end of 1991. So now the question is how are we gonna handle American and global power in the new era? We got a decade until the year 2000 and the whole new Century kicks off and everything. So what is, as they called it then the new world order going to look like? And so let's lowercase new world order in this sense here. How's it gonna be?
And the answer was, America's not coming home. We're staying and we're gonna be the dominant power in Europe, in Asia, in the Middle East and everywhere. And because after all Soviets and then Russians, you don't really want Germany to have an independent foreign policy and their own nuclear weapons, do you? And so Britain and Russia and France agree, actually we prefer America stay the dominant military power in Germany. Thank you very much. And why not? And in fact, it's better than whatever alternative they could imagine. So that was a big part of. Then, and the Soviets agreed to that, and the Russians were acquiescing to that.
They, you know, allowed German reunification and everything. And the Americans did promise people have claimed to debunk this. Well, I unk it in my book beyond any reproach whatsoever, that they absolutely did promise repeatedly not to expand NATO East of Germany into Poland, the Baltics, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, or any of the other Eastern European nations, central or eastern European nations.
And then the idea was, and this was the question at the time, are we erasing the dividing lines in Europe or are we just moving them? And the answer was, we're just moving them. We're telling the Soviets and then the Russians that we're erasing them and that they are going to join our security arrangement. We're gonna replace NATO with a new deal that includes them either under the OSCE or under what Bill Clinton called the Partnership for Peace. We'll all be in this together. Ukraine and Russia and Belarus and everybody will all be part of one organization. So everybody's neutrality is baked in and it's fine when in fact that was not the plan.
They were lying. The plan always was to expand nato. To keep nato, the focus of American military dominance on the continent as the founding commander of NATO said, Lord Isme was the British Lord said The purpose of NATO is to keep the Americans in the Germans down and the Soviets out, and, and now the Russians out.
So that's the same game. That Cold War really never ended. They just kept moving the line further and further east. That is the overall narrative here. And or the, the overall way that this played out that's important to the story of what caused the war there, because the Russians, this whole time were warning.
You're putting us in a very dangerous position here and we really wish you wouldn't. And the Americans who were doing it were also saying, boy, we shouldn't do this 'cause you know, what's gonna happen if we do? And then they all kept doing it anyway, led by the Neoconservatives of course, but with the rest of the foreign policy establishment, eventually getting on board for the thing and pushing the project forward.
And this included tearing up the anti-ballistic missile treaty and installing missile interceptors in Romanian, Poland, but that are launched from dual use launchers that can host tomahawk cruise missiles that can be fitted with hydrogen bombs. And so that would've been against the treaty, but we had no inspection regime, which all you needed was a Russian captain sitting on a bar stool, making sure nobody's putting tomahawks in there and it's fine, but nope, they wouldn't even give him that dignity of that, you know?
And then the color coded revolutions where they overthrew. Essentially, anybody who's friendly to Russia in their near abroad replace them with American sock puppets, including overthrow in the government in Ukraine in 2004, along Georgia, in oh three Ki Gustan in oh five. They tried in Belarus three different times in oh 1, 0 5, and in 20.
And so this is essentially relentless aggression from the point of view of the Russians against their interests and military threat to them. And in friendlier times. Putin had said that, listen, I like George W. Bush. We have a good relationship. We're friends and I trust him and he trusts me, and we're cool. But national security policy can't just be based on friendship. When you guys are literally ringing my country with these missile systems, then I have to figure out how to respond to that. That's my job. Right. So he's saying Our American partners, we're sure they mean us no harm. However, you know, I'm gonna have to build more missiles now.
Right? And then of course that's what they did. And so look, this is, and the book is called Provoked. It's not called Justified. You're right. I am mocking the propaganda line where they said 100,000 times it was unprovoked. You know, that's their alibi. That's the only reason they're saying that is 'cause they don't want you asking. They want you to feel like what You'll get icky if you like, somehow go beyond the line and ask how it might have been provoked. We don't, that's not polite to wonder about that. Just 'cause they said that so many times. Gimme a break. On the other hand, I'm not saying Oh yeah, no, over there in Russia, they're just angels.
And whenever they do something that you might, you know disapprove of, that's only 'cause they had no choice or something. I'm not saying that. And, and I delineate all kinds of things that they did where they have to take responsibility for their own role in the project. Let's get real. As you and me and everybody listening to this knows we are number one USA, we are the superpower and they're not. There used to be two superpowers. That was 35 years ago. Now there's just the one. And now you could say growing again china is, you know, compares to us in terms of economic power. Nothing like America's military posture in the world. Nothing like the Soviet Union's military posture in the world. A gen two generations ago just absolutely does not compare, in any way.
And so everybody knows, as George H.W. Bush said, what we say goes the international community. Yeah, that's the National Security Council in Washington, DC that's the international community. And this is what they say and this is what they'll do. And everybody else is just gonna have to learn to suck it up.
And the thing is, and so couple things. First of all, just I want to emphasize the people who are responsible for this policy of NATO expansion in Eastern Europe, and especially the people who were like the leaders of building the consensus for the agenda. People like Zanu Brezinski and Henry Kissinger, you know, the most influential Republican and or pardon me, democratic and Republican strategists, both Rockefeller men, basically council on foreign relations men Nixon and Ford's National Security Advisor and Carter's National Security Advisor, the two of them. And they said, you know what? We need a special status for Ukraine. We need permanent neutrality and a treaty for Ukraine. We should not have a contest with Rush over Ukraine. We shouldn't, we should let them be a bridge between east and West. This is how we treated Austria and Finland during the Cold War.
They weren't part of the Warsaw Pact or nato. They did have Soviet troops in Austria at first, but they ended up withdrawing by at least I think the mid fifties they find. And Austria was allowed basically independence, just long. They don't sign up with the Americans, which they refrain from doing. And that was the understanding.
And so even Kissinger who, you know, if you read the grand chess board, he's a severe anti-Russia hawk and is saying, we're taking Ukraine away from them. And if they don't like it, they're just gonna have to live in a world dealing with their Asian neighbors and lose their status as a European power. Screw them if they don't like it. Is his point back in 97, by 2017 he's saying, nah, check that. You know what we need to, well, hell not even then By, by, by late Bush years before Obama really screws everything up, he's saying maybe even in early Obama years, same for, for Henry Kissinger. We need a permanent status like Austria or Finland or Ukraine.
And many of many others said that there's a guy named. Michael O'Hanlon, or was it Ken Pollock? I forget. They're interchangeable guys. They were sort of the Burton Ernie of Democratic Hawks supporting w Bush's or Iraq War II back in 2002. Like, you know, we gotta do this Democrats, 'cause even O'Hanlon and Pollock say that we have to, and they're Democrats, right?
That kind of thing. So, but one of them, I guess it was Pollock, wrote a thing in 2018 saying, we gotta do this. We need a new security structure for Eastern Europe. And it included security guarantees and whatever, but it included permanent neutrality for Ukraine so that we don't fight about it. But guess what?
It was in 2018, right at the height of the Russiagate hysteria. So the whole thing was just dead letter. I mean, this is a Brookings Institute guy, right? He's a senator Le, he's Hillary Clinton in pants, right? And, and, and he wrote this thing that was perfectly reasonable, but nobody wanted to hear it because he was being all expertise instead of being political.
Right now, we all hate and want to kill Russia. We don't want to come up with something reasonable in order to avoid conflict. So read the room, Ken beat it. Powell was how that was, you know, received at the time. Unfortunately, I don't know if they even noticed it. I think it was published by the, by Foreign Affairs, or maybe not, I forgot, but whatever it was No, no. It was published by Brookings. I guess it was like a little monograph by Brookings, but it sh it should have been a big deal among all the wonks, and instead it was not, unfortunately.
And then, so look, as I said, Trump is completely hemmed in by Russian gate and then Ukraine Gate the first time around. When Biden comes in, like, come on man, this guy was always horrible. He always was. John McCain. The No-no, the know-it-all. Blowhard, loudmouth, belligerent Warhawk always was, he had opposed a rock war one and was embarrassed by that and learned to never oppose a war again and was nothing but a hawk again for the rest of his life. And by this time he's in his late seventies and is clearly not capable of learning new things, of concentrating hard, of staying up for hours and having in-depth discussions. And what it would take to be the president of the United States in a major crisis with Russia. Right now in the spring of 2021, he's just not even the Joe Biden he used to be, who himself was not up to the task. Right?
So in 21, especially, and I'm sure you heard him say this so many times, all you could do is just resort to historical analogies. Well, listen, you gotta be Winston Churchill and punch the bully in the nose and you know, it's ev, it's Putin's Hitler and that means he's Churchill slash FDR. And the last thing you want to be in a situation like that is Neville Chamberlain. And so, so that's it. Now, I think importantly, Stephen Walt from the Realist School and the Dean of Foreign Policy Studies at the Kennedy Center at Harvard, he said, you know what this isn't the deterrence model. Like, I don't know, I didn't go to college. So like maybe there's some graphic in the textbook where they show you the deterrence model versus the S spiral model. And in the S spiral model, actually not dealing with Adolf Hitler, the madman who wrote AMP about how he wanted to expand Germany's borders by 10 million miles or whatever.
But no, in fact, in fact, you're dealing with Vladimir Putin, who has very real security concerns. Now, when you have that situation, what you're supposed to do, Stephen Walt said, is appease, yes, appease the guy because he's acting out of fear.
Steve Hsu: Mm-hmm.
Scott Horton: You're not trying to make him afraid, right? So do what you can to settle things back down again to ramp things back down again. But instead, no, you're like on the wrong page of the textbook pal. Where it says in appeasement, well that's when the other guy's a big bully and you just got punch him in the nose. That's when the other guy is Hitler at Munich. And what Neville Chamberlain should have done was stabbed him in the heart and launched an invasion instead of waiting around or right something.
So that's the way that they framed it. And so for Joe Biden in his late seventies, look at me, I'm Winston Churchill and he can't think any harder than that about it essentially. And, and I look, go back and look at his statements throughout 21. And then, so Putin wrote his thing in July saying, you know, Ukraine and Russia are really one people anyway in one nation anyway, always have been. Their response to that was just escalate. Their response to that was have the State Department and Defense Department put out new documents saying we once again reiterate that we're going to bring Ukraine into our NATO alliance. We once again reiterate our goal of total interoperability between their military and ours.
Well, what does that mean? That means defacto bringing them into the NATO military alliance. If they don't have a war guarantee from us, they get everything. But that, and interoperability means what it means. We completely restructure your military so that it follows our systems of command and control, our ranks, our communications systems, and more and more as possible standard NATO rounds right from the 5, 5, 6 to our artillery, to everything else, make them a truly Western army instead of a legacy Soviet army.
So in other words, if NATO and the Russian Federation went to war, Ukraine would be just another auxiliary military along with Hungary and Poland and Germany. Lithuania and the Czech Republic and whoever in the overall NATO war against the Russian Federation at that time. So in other words, giving them everything but an Article five Declaration of Protection, but in every other way, literally making them a member of the NATO Alliance at that time.
In, in, by the end of 2021, Putin introduced a treaty that was very reasonable, and I'm not saying America should have just signed on the dotted line, but I talked to real experts like Chass Freeman and others. He said this was reasonable. This was not a go to hell treaty, you know, like meant to be rejected as a fake ultimatum.
Like when Hillary Clinton pulled that stunt at ramble yay. To start the war against Serbia in, in 1999, where it had this poison pill that said, we get to occupy the entire country right up to like the president's bedroom and whatever. Yeah. Right, right. Which was meant to be rejected. This was not that.
This was meant to be negotiated and it could have been negotiated, but they did not do that. Go back and look at the history of December of 21, January and February of 22. The and for that matter, November of 21, the Biden administration policy was, plan A is you better not plan B. And, and, and if you do, and yeah, and plan B, if you do, we will arm a Ukrainian insurgency against you. They assume that the Russians will break the Ukrainian military, but we will arm up an insurgency to fight you for the long term from the west of the country if you do this in order to inflict a strategic defeat on you. So you notice plan B was not, we will sit down and negotiate with you and figure out what we have to do at all costs to prevent a hot war from breaking out on Russia's border and a hot war breaking out in Europe for the first time since the breakup of Yugoslavia.
And you know, with, with the God dang Russians, right? Which if you had pulled the 8 billion of us on the planet. The priority here is to prevent this from breaking out into war. But the Biden people made themselves clear over and over and over again that, you know what, if they're gonna do this, we are not gonna stand in their way, and in fact, we're gonna go ahead and bog them down and inflict a strategic defeat on them.
They invoke the Afghan war of the 1980s where we helped the Mujahideen bogged down and defeat the Soviet Union and drive them out. After 10 years. You might have seen Rambo three about it, and they said, we're gonna do that again. In just the same thing, the bin Laden Knights had done us in Afghanistan.
Now we are gonna do that to the Russians in Ukraine by essentially luring them in. In fact, at one point Putin said, I think they're trying to trap us and sort of force us to invade the country. But then he said, but they might succeed. We might have no choice but to invade in order to prevent the things that they're doing here.
mm-hmm.
Steve Hsu: So Trump has often said, if I had been president, this war would've never started. And one way of interpreting it's, it's hard to know exactly how he means that, but I, I, I, from what you say, I, I think one way of interpreting it is just that he would not, his administration would not have behaved in the way that you just described the Biden people as behaving.
And in that counterfactual universe, we just never had this conflict do. Is that fair?
Scott Horton: it's,
yes, it's, he's not Ron Paul. So it's more like he would've made it clear to Putin, you better noter. I might shoot you myself, kind of thing, and make the warning would've been much more explicit at the same time. See, and here's the thing. Forgive me if I'm repeating myself. I did another interview earlier today.
I think I said this before, earlier today, not to you. And yeah, in 2019 when he was the president, still, the Germans introduced what was called the Steinmeyer Formula, which was essentially a new order of operations for implementing the Minsk two deal. The Minsk two deal said that. They have to have permanent neutrality in their constitution, and they have to guarantee essentially full statehood hard autonomy for the far east of the country and these kinds of things.
And Kiev and Washington were reinterpreting it to mean that the rebels have to completely surrender and give Kiev total control over all the territory first, and then they'll do any other thing on the list, which was meant to be a deal killer there. Right? So the German foreign minister Steinmeyer said, well, how about this for a compromise?
And reordered the steps and hoping that they could sit down and figure it out. So then Trump's ambassador, William Taylor told the brand new President Zelensky, don't do it. Don't go along. And all they did was the first step was a, a small prisoner exchange. That was it. And there were a bunch of Nazis holding rallies across the country called No to capitulation rallies and swearing to murder the new president dead if he dared to negotiate with the Russians at that time.
So that was part of his thinking too. But the Trump administration, they could have protected him from those Nazis and instead they took the Nazis side and said, yeah, don't work this out. Now, if he had been reelected in 2020, I think it's fair to argue that it would've been something like what happened when he was elected in 24, which is he came in with people who actually were his guys and were loyal to him and cared about him and wanted to do what he wanted to do, which was far different than what happened in his first presidency, where he is just surrounded by enemies from the beginning.
And so I don't, I think God, it, especially if they had just impeached him over Russiagate a year before, you know, eight months before the election, and then he won anyway. Then now it's like a year after they impeached him and he is being sworn in again and screw you guys. That would've been so much more like satisfying for me if he'd been reelected in twenties.
Way better than him being elected in 24. 'cause it would've been such a repudiation of what they had tried to do to him four years of calling him a Russian traitor and a white supremacist and all this crap, you know, and, and, and impeaching him literally. Well look at this, for the third time in American history, an American president was impeached for supposedly temporarily holding up an arms deal to Ukraine.
Steve Hsu: Yeah. Right.
Scott Horton: I mean, it sounds like I'm lying 'cause that couldn't possibly be true, but it was. That's what happened. So anyway, we're doing the counterfactual here. If he'd been sworn in in 2020, I think Putin would've been nuts to try to do what he did. It would've been a whole different circumstance there. He might well have called up Trump.
And said, listen, I want this Minsk two deal implemented. Let's end this civil war. And I think Trump would've been very amenable to that and probably, you know, would've even been able to tell his National Security Council to go to hell if they don't like it. That that is what we're going to do here. And that, quite frankly was the solution to the thing.
The two absolute, you know, major controversies here, huge controversies were potential and essentially impending NATO membership for Ukraine. And along with that, as a subset of that, the installation of American military facilities, including anti-ballistic missile batteries that again, are dual use launchers that can host offensive missiles. And the ongoing civil war in the East that had been going on, I'm sorry I skipped this in my blabbing here, but that had been going on since Obama had overthrown the government for the second time in 10 years. Back in February of 2014. And so that civil War broken out soon after. They always say, all this started when Russia sees Crimea, but what happened right before Russia sees Crimea, Washington sees Kiev.
That's what and it was a reaction to that. SoSo that war had been ongoing and, you know, something like 9,000 people had been killed total in the war. No, no, no, sorry, 14. It was like nine the first year and then another five after that. It was like 14,000 people have been killed since 2014.
And so could all of this have been resolved in, you know, in the year 2021? Absolutely. It could have.
Steve Hsu: Almost, almost resolved after, after the invasion even. So
Scott Horton: right, that's right. And people might say, oh, well that was just a pretext for war. Okay, well you know what, why don't you sign the guy's Perfectly reasonable treaty. And Stevie goes to war anyway, and then we'll deal with the problem then.
But we, you know, there's just no question that the Biden people were not willing to negotiate in good faith. They had no intention of doing that.
Steve Hsu: Great. Scott, I've taken up a lot of your time. I, I appreciate the dense details that you're able to provide on this matter for my audience. You know, I, I, some of what Scott says might seem to you to be shocking because you don't read about it in the, you don't read it in the establishment media, but in my experience, Scott's points are always defensible. So you might disagree a little bit with him, but he always, he, he, he's not he's not miscalibrated. What he says he believes to be true is, is very defensible. So Scott, I wanna thank you very much for being on the podcast.
Scott Horton: Thank you very much. I appreciate you having me.