Title: Ep 5050 — Deep State's Search for a 'Russiagate' Scalp
Show: Scott Horton
Date: 2019-09-08
URL: https://youtu.be/Ke04A5kj9PU
Duration: 31:00

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[00:00] for Pacifica Radio September 1st 2019 I'm Scott Horton this is anti-war radio [Music] all right you guys welcome to show it is anti-war radio I'm your host Scott worden I'm the author of the book fool's errand time to end the war in Afghanistan and I'm the editorial

[00:31] director of anti-war calm you find my full interview archive at Scott Horton org more than 5,000 interviews for you now going back to 2003 all right you guys introducing John Kiriakou he is the only CIA officer to go to prison over the Bush era torture scandal of course for confirming the names of a couple of CIA officers involved in it not for torturing anybody he would have gotten out of jail free for that no problem

[01:01] anyway here he is writing at consortium news.com and the article is called in search of a Russia Gate scalp the entrapment of Maria boo Tina welcome back to the show how you doing John thanks good to be with you very good to have you here yeah Russia Gate scalp that's a good way to put it the Maria boo Tina she looks a lot like Anna Chapman so you're trying to tell me that she's not a Russian spy after all

[01:34] what's the deal that imagine that and you know the mainstream media CNN MSNBC even Fox when they refer to her they always refer to refer to her as either Russian spa.i or convicted Russian spy Maria boo Tina and that's just simply factually wrong she's not a spy she was never accused of being a spy she was never charged with spying she was charged and convicted of conspiring to fail to fill out a form literally

[02:06] that was the that was the crime well and I think as you talked about in article here she may have forgotten to fill out the form but there was never any evidence of a conspiracy to fail that fill out the form that's the funny part of this - um they so wanted to wrap her up in some kind of an espionage case that what the FBI did is they recruited a guy named Patrick Byrne Patrick and in

[02:37] the interest of transparency I know Patrick Byrne we're not friends but we're acquaintances and we traveled together for several months during the Gary Johnson campaign in 2016 I like Patrick he's a good guy I had no idea that he was secretly an FBI informant at the time but what they did was they recruited Patrick Byrne and they said this is the CEO of famously the the former now CEO of overstock.com zone heir and libertarian ish as you say

[03:07] they're mentioned Gary Johnson fellow traveler with libertarian party types yeah and who famously was on TV in the last couple of weeks spilling his story and there was a conservative journalist who he had spoken to previous to those TV interviews I forget her name I'm sorry but who had done a big write-up on his story about his involvement with poutine oh that's right and why was he involved why was he involved with the FBI because he was a patriot he considered himself to be a patriot he

[03:38] said the FBI approached him because he had already done some work with them that he didn't want to talk about and they said okay here's what we want you to do we want you to approach this Russian woman Maria boo Tina and want we want you to strike up a friendship slash relationship with her so he did and then he reported back to the FBI and he said yeah she's just a grad student she's not a spy she's not trying to infiltrate the the Trump campaign or the government

[04:09] she's a gun nut and she's trying to broker good relations between the NRA and whatever the NRA equivalent is in Russia but she's not a spy and the FBI told him and this is according to his own interviews everywhere on CNN on MSNBC on Fox he says that James Comey and Peter struck and one other FBI official who he did not want a name told him they

[04:41] directed him to go back to Betina and to initiate a sexual relationship with her which he did he began having sex with her and then when she was arrested and charged with failing to fill out the the foreign alien Registration Act form on the Internet the prosecutors disingenuously falsely went to the press and said she traded sexual favors in exchange for access that was a lie the

[05:12] truth was that the FBI told him to have sex with her yeah and what boy did they smear her as you know uh an attractive Russian woman so therefore this is a honeypot this is a trap this is how the agent of Putin sent here to suborn the Republicans and of course they all fell for it that is exactly what happened the fix was in from the beginning and let me tell you another thing and I do say this in the in the peace and consortium news

[05:43] I've become very well acquainted with federal sentencing schedule this crime is one of the most minor felonies that a person can commit it ranks up where up there with the great crimes like making a false statement okay so the federal sentencing guideline for a first-time offender is zero to six months what most people get and actually it was hard to find this because really nobody's ever

[06:13] prosecuted for failing to fill out this form well the backup behind it tell us this foreign agents Registration Act explain because you have a paragraph in here about you one time represented a foreign government for a minute there yes yes the foreign affairs Registration Act was written in 1938 what was happening in 1938 was that the federal government was afraid of German Americans representing German interests later Nazi Party interests in the United dates and they wanted to make it transparent so if you were taking money

[06:43] from the Nazi Party or from the Kaiser you had to register and so the Justice Department would know that you were acting on behalf of the Kaiser or later on behalf of the Nazi Party and so the law has been on the books for a very long time but it is almost never enforced the purpose of the law is frankly just to keep a list of lobbyists so if you're hired by I had the government of XYZ to do some work whether it's to lobby Congress or or Lobby the media you know write articles

[07:16] whatever that way the American people can go online and search the fair database and say okay Scott is lobbying for the government of Zimbabwe okay I say in the article that back in 2008 I was hired very briefly for a matter of a couple of months but the government of Abu Dhabi they hired me to write for op eds in support of doing business in the United Arab Emirates specifically in Abu Dhabi so I wrote the for op eds they

[07:47] paid me a few grand I went to the fara database and I said I'm John Kiriakou I took five grand for from the government of Abu Dhabi and I wrote these four op-eds and I put links and there I'm done I heard as a foreign agent by the way anyone who shocked that I would represent the government of Zimbabwe let me tell you they paid me a hundred trillion dollars how could I turn it down but the problem is is it didn't bob ways so anyway it's you know people get

[08:21] tripped up over the over the word agent and all it is is all it means is that you're acting on behalf of that of that country so the feds in the case of Bettina alleged that she was acting on behalf of Russia that she had been directed by the Russian government to to try to create a relationship between Russian gun clubs and the NRA well she never admitted that but the preponderance of the evidence I suppose showed that she was she was probably or

[08:53] made we have acted on behalf of the Russian government blah blah blah and so they got her for not filling out the form but when you don't fill out the form and you've never been convicted of a crime before the normal sentence is 18 months of probation but she didn't get 18 months of probation she got 18 months in prison now the federal sentencing guideline for a maximum sentence is 0 to 6 months she didn't get 0 to 6 she got 18 months in a federal prison so that

[15:44] actor not even accused so I think it's a red herring you know you see in the media all the time this is one of these things that drives me crazy you see that anytime anybody falls under suspicion they have ties to fill in the blank and they have ties to somebody who's always and I use this in air quotes close to Putin well what the heck does that mean every Russian name that we read in every American newspaper or every news website has ties to Putin

[16:16] what kind of ties to Putin are you saying the person is a spy he's the president of the country they live in so it's like your ties to Donald Trump and mine exactly correct yes and the thing is as Americans we don't ask those questions we read these articles we say oh well she's tied to you know boris and Natasha they have ties to Putin and we just accepted as fact hmm and just like all good conspiracy theories each part

[16:46] of the conspiracy theory also is a conspiracy theory and they all rely on each other to be true and so boo Teena we know she's a spy because of the rest of the Russia gates scandal going on and we know that the rest of the Russia gate scandal going on here is a thing because of Maria butene she's one of the pieces that make it all true there you go yeah I used to say it's the self licking ice cream cone you can hear the Scott Wharton show an anti-war radio on Pacifica 90.7 FM KPFK

[17:19] in LA KPFK org APs radio at ApS radio comm the libertarian Institute at libertarian Institute org and of course check out the full archives more than 5,000 interviews now going back to 2003 and sign up for the podcast feed at Scott Horton org and thanks san time war radio I'm talking with John Kiriakou now so here's the real flip side of this is that the CIA and the FBI America's secret

[17:52] police they decided to do I don't know people calling it a soft coup it seems like a pretty hard coup against the major party nominee for president you knighted States then the president-elect and the President himself and it happens to be a bunch of FBI counterintelligence officers that you are familiar with who did these indeed indeed when I was working for the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in 2011 I was approached by a Japanese diplomat who offered me money in exchange for trade secrets and I told

[18:24] him he should be ashamed of himself and I went directly to the office of the Senate security officer and I reported that I had been pitched by a foreign intelligence officer so the Senate security guy called the FBI the FBI sent two young agents up to interview me and they said here's what we want you to do we want you to call the guy back we want you to take him to lunch and try to get him to tell you exactly what information he wants and how much money he's willing to pay for it I did that and I wrote

[18:54] them a memo with all the details and they asked me to do it a second time and a third time and a fourth time and I did because I'm a patriot a year later I'm called by the FBI she just had lunch with him over and over again making promises but never actually finishing any kind of deal correct correct I just strung him along the whole time a year later the FBI calls me and they said you remember that case you helped us with a year ago I said sure they said

[19:24] well something else came up and we need your help and I said and these were my exact words because I'm a fool I said anything for the FBI I went down to FBI Washington field office headquarters and I met by two FBI agents we went over this Japanese case and then they started asking me other questions it was an hour-plus into the interview before I realized that they're investigating me and I said wait a minute wait a minute

[19:54] am i under arrest and the guy says not yet but you should know that we're raiding your house right now as we speak I said I want to see my attorney I got up I started to walk out and I'm blocked by a guy named Peter struck and Peter struck says to the two FBI agents tell me he implicated himself and one of them says not really no and I said again am i under arrest struck says not today and I walked out

[20:25] Peter struck arrested me the following Monday that was a Thursday he arrested me on Monday now the FBI likes to make its arrest on Thursdays because federal prisoners are not arraigned in Washington on Fridays so you spend Thursday night Friday night Saturday night and Sunday night in the DC jail getting the daylights beaten out of you and then finally you're arraigned on Monday morning well after that arrest we got discovery and in discovery we learned that there never was any Japanese diplomat he was an FBI agent

[20:58] undercover trying to get me to commit espionage because they had no espionage case against me and they had already made a political decision that they wanted to charge me with espionage that's what they've done with Maria boo Tina in other words you weren't even going to meet with this guy at all except on their instruction in the force and not and not that they were stringing you along other than they were telling you that you were working for them investigating this guy correct I only

[21:30] did it because they asked me to do it and it was in other words this isn't like if you take the parallel with like one of these you know fake terrorism case entrapments they trap the guy into agreeing to break the law and do something wrong I don't know of any where they entrap the guy by making him think that he's acting as an undercover agent for them helping enforce the law against another guy who also is working for the government no not at all what so this is a real this is real real

[22:01] entrapment oh this was real entrapment what they wanted me to do was to lie in the memos that I was writing them and say yeah you know what in this in this meeting he didn't offer me any money when in fact he had offered me five thousand ten thousand and they wanted me to put it in my pocket so they could arrest me for espionage and for actually taking the money but I didn't I kept reporting back every detail of those meetings right back to the FBI and then there's a memo I found from one of the FBI agents to Peter struck we got

[22:33] this in discovery and the FBI agent says we should probably end this operation he's obviously not going to take the bait and then they shut it down and you have that in writing oh yeah this Japanese diplomat told me in our last lunch that he had been promoted he got his dream job and he was going to become the number two in the Japanese embassy in Cairo I congratulated him I shook his hand and I never saw him again amazing so well go back then to 2016 and and I

[23:06] guess your view of his role with Jimmy and for that matter were John Brennan in getting this whole Russia Gate hoax going in the first place oh you bet so you remember back in 2017 the debate was was there spying against the Trump campaign and Peter stroked at all maintained that there wasn't spying there were inquiries because there were allegations that there was some kind of a connection between the Trump campaign and Russia

[23:36] that's nonsense whether there was let's even pretend that there was a connection between the Trump campaign in Russia you don't then begin electronic surveillance against a major Party presidential campaign what you do and this has happened in the past is the director of the FBI or the director of the FBI's field office either in Washington or New York will go to the chairman of the campaign and say listen you guys have a problem there's somebody in your

[24:07] campaign who's talking to a foreign government that's what normally happens but what happened in 2016 and we're not talking about Jill Stein or Gary Johnson here we're talking about the Republican Party nominee who's got flip a coin essentially a 50-50 chance of being the next president of the United States and this is something that David Stockman is said all along that that is all you need to know to know what a put-on this whole thing is that if they thought for a moment that oh no the Russians are attempting

[24:37] to make inroads into a campaign and they were not the ones setting it all up in the first place they would have ran straight to trump to warn him that would have been their obligation their overriding obligation yes that unless they really thought he was leading it all but they had no reason to claim that based on them setting up Carter page and George papadopolis I mean come on and and you know the the FBI owes an apology a public apology to Carter page at the very least I mean look at look at

[25:09] the the wrongs that were committed here you've got Carter Page who was utterly innocent of any wrongdoing and not only did they take out a FISA warrant against this guy to to intercept all of his electronics but they renew it three times knowing that the evidence that they're using is specious knowing that that report was no good that it was all hearsay so number one they dropped the ball there number two don't forget that Peter Strock wasn't just some FBI agent

[25:41] who hated Trump Peter struck was the director of the FBI's division for counterintelligence this guy wielded incredible authority he was the FBI's mole hunter well if the mole hunter is telling his adulterous girlfriend that he's going to take down this president if he wins you've got another problem so you know it seems to me that we're not talking here about just bad form on the part of Peter struck we're talking about potential criminal activity or even if

[26:12] it doesn't meet the threshold of criminal activity we're talking about conspiracy to commit criminal activity yeah I think we need to look at him so let's get back to her now so Bob Muller did not prosecute her someone must have brought him this case and he said now I don't worry whoever was running his so-called investigation over there said yeah no I don't think we're gonna go with this this is you know too low to even I mean these are the same people who prosecuted Mike Flynn but they didn't go for this and they let some

[26:43] other loser attorney at the DOJ do it instead it still made a great talking point on TV though oh yes yeah well you know this is the sad truth that is that the fix is in and there are so many different people so many different layers of bureaucracy that are involved the fix is in I've been I've been repeating in interviews this past week something that one of my attorneys told me and it bears repeating here I had received an offer

[27:13] from the Justice Department this was their best and final offer for two and a half years in prison I do 23 months and I make the whole thing go away and this isn't for the entrapment this is for the leaking of the CIA names right correct one name and I didn't even leak it I confirmed it and it was never made public right but like I say the fix was in so I thought about it literally all night long my wife and I stayed up all night long and I decided the next morning I was going to turn the deal down I hadn't done anything wrong there

[27:44] was no harm to the national security I had no criminal intent I was going to turn it down and one of my lawyers got very angry at me and he said to me you know what your problem is your problem is you think this is about justice and it's not about justice it's about mitigating damage take the deal and I came to realize that all of these cases are about mitigating damage they're not about justice nobody cares if you're innocent nobody cares about

[28:15] the degrees of guilt nobody cares about criminal intent what happens is people at the Justice Department get promoted people at the FBI get promoted only when you are successfully prosecuted so you're going to jail you know the the the Justice Department according to Pro Publica wins ninety eight point two percent of its cases that's not an accident that's a result of plea bargains because they heap so many charges on you they threaten you

[28:46] with so many years behind bars I was looking at forty five years in prison and they offered me twenty three months so what are you gonna do you're gonna roll the dice knowing that you have a one point eight percent chance of winning are you just gonna take the deal and make the thing go away yeah it's no accident that most of these cases are heard in the Eastern District of Virginia which is in Alexandria that's the home of the CIA it's the home of the Pentagon I hired Oh Jay Simpsons jury consultant and he flew up from Dallas and he said look if we were in any other district in

[29:18] America I'd say let's go for it we're gonna win this thing but the Eastern District of Virginia he said your jury is going to be made up of people from the CIA the FBI Department of Homeland Security Department of Defense intelligence community contractors you don't have a prayer he told me take the deal no we saw the way they did Jeffrey sterling where exactly didn't even really attempt to demonstrate that he had passed these secrets to James rice

[29:48] into the New York Times instead they just said well it seems as though I'm not sure they prove it seems as though they had called each other but they only know connections and numbers I don't really know who was on the line they don't you know and they had no more information than that other than on on sometimes it seems as though they may have talked on the phone and that was enough to get a conviction beyond a reasonable doubt so yeah they called it prosecution by metadata yeah that's all they had was the metadata and in fact in the sterling

[30:20] case at the same time sterling had filed a racial discrimination lawsuit against the CIA that that Rison was covering for the New York Times right so of course they were talking so in others they had a perfectly plausible explanation for why they were on the phone other than passing secrets yes exactly exactly it sounds like reasonable doubt but I'm from Texas that's what I would call thank you so much for your time on the show today John really watch it all right you guys that's John Kiriakou

[30:51] and he wrote this for consortium news.com in search of a Russia Gate scalp the entrapment of Maria boo Tina of course former CIA officer and author of The Reluctant spy I'll write you guys and that has been anti-war radio for this morning I'm your host Scott Horton the author of fool's errand time to end the war in Afghanistan an editorial director of anti-war calm you can find my full interview archive at Scott Wharton org more than 5,000 interviews for you now going back to 2003 I'm here every Sunday morning from

[31:22] 8:30 to 9:00 on KPFK 90.7 FM in LA see you next week [Music]
