Ray McGovern on By Any Means Necessary (05/16/2017)

Supplemental document for: "Theory that Roger Stone's back channel to Wikileaks was Randy Credico", link: https://wakelet.com/wake/2d352ae9-febe-44a1-a7bb-51674a2e4bf5

Ray McGovern on "By Any Means Necessary", broadcast on Sputnik, hosted by Eugene Goodyear. Broadcast date: May 16, 2017.

Transcript runs from 9:40 to 39:02.

File link: https://www.spreaker.com/user/radiosputnik/anonymous-sources-control-us-narrative-o

EUGENE PURYEAR
And we're very happy to be joined here to continue our conversation, on this issue of Trump and Russia, and the Oval Office, by Ray McGovern, who's a former CIA analyst and a political activist. Ray, thank you so much for joining the show.

RAY MCGOVERN
Most welcome, Gene.

PURYEAR
And so, I think the biggest issue here in some ways, uh, to me, I guess, that's not really being discussed, everyone's saying, well, Trump did x y z, but the reason why he did it, is very important to me. I think anyone for the story, now of course those who already believe that Trump is a "Kremlin agent", this is just more, you know, grist for that mill, but it also seems to me, and I'm curious to hear your thoughts, and of course you're someone who has briefed presidents with classified information, that Trump also could have been making a strategic calculation, that revealing this information to the Russians could have been a sign of good faith in their collaboration.

MCGOVERN
Well Gene, that makes good bit of sense, you know, the one area where...under the surface of things, we have been co-operating with the Russians is Syria. Now the Russians don't much care for those Tomahawk missiles pouring into Syria, [but] Trump warned them ahead of time, and they did very little damage, and...in my view, the Russians got some good practice shooting some of them down, so...[laughs] For them it was hardly a terrible, a terrible episode. What has transpired since, is that the Russians and the Turks and the Iranians have created these zones within Syria that have a...realistic prospect of isolating the really bad guys from the jihadists, like ISIS and Al-Qaeda [sic, have no idea who "the really bad guys" are supposed to be here]. So, we've been working with them on that, we even sent a delegate to Astana, in Kazakhstan, where this was worked out most recently. And so the question would be, is Trump willing to deal with the Russians on Syria, because that would, that would be a real token of progress in U.S.-Russian relations. So, when we're talking here about all this other stuff, about whether he would deliberately talk to the Russians about some sensitive material, well, we're sortof in no man's land, because we don't know what he's said. Your explanation is quite plausible...but without knowing what he said, we're all sort of whistling in the dark.

What interests me most of all is this: number one, there's a full out campaign to get rid of Trump by one means or another. Right now, it's a completely dishonest media campaign painting him out to be an agent of Russia, without any evidence by the way. And number two, who are these anonymous people that, call Greg Miller [journalist at Washington Post] and say, "Hey, we've got a real story for you! If you're quick, we can put it up this afternoon. It'll be, you can make a lead story out of it." And indeed, if you look at the Washington Post today, it's a banner headline, like it goes from the left edge of the first page [laughs] to the right edge of the first page. That's usually reserved for war, or stuff like that. So the Post is being totally dishonest, and the question is, "Who leaked this information into the Post, and _why_?" And the only sensible conclusion that I can come up with, it's part and parcel of the CIA and the deep state determination to get rid of Trump by blackening him in any way they can. Until somebody can tell me different, that's how I interpret this, and the issue is really joined here: I mean, who is Pompeo, the head of the CIA, working for? Now, if he's...Trump, if he's really in the Trump camp, he can find out about this stuff. He can find out, how it was, that the DNC, in my view, was hacked, now...hold on to your hat, here...that the DNC was hacked by John Brennan's CIA. Now, I can't prove it 100%, but I do know that the New York Times suppressed the information that CIA, under John Brennan, had developed this incredibly sophisticated program, costing billions, like with a b, of dollars, worked out with the NSA over a period of fifteen years, to do what? To hack...into servers, and computers, to disguise the origin of the hack, and indeed, working in five languages, Russian, Chinese, Arabic, Farsi, and Korean. To be able to insert little telltale signs deceiving any outfit trying to figure out what happened, into thinking...oh, well, you know, if it was Cyrillic, a computer firm like CrowdStrike might deduce, "Ah...those Russians, they're so expert, but they left behind these telltale signs, Cyrillic in this hack of the DNC." What am I saying here? I'm saying...that Pompeo can find out, if he's a real loyalist, to Trump, who did this? Why they did it, and who leaked this information to Greg Miller of the Washington Post. So that issue is joined, will he do that? I dunno. I dunno whether Pompeo is working for the deeper state, [laughs] or whether he's working for Trump. If he's working for Trump, Trump has the goods on all these guys. The last thing I'll say, on this aspect, is that these guys, and I'm talking CIA, I'm talking NSA, I'm talking Comey, and the rest of them, they know...that the goods is out there [sic], if Pompeo wants to use it. And so, in a very meaningful sense, this whole thing, this hysteria, of this last week, can betoken a pre-emptive measure to prevent, or to put Trump in such a bad position nobody will believe him when he says anything. Even if he says, "Hey guys, guess what I find out. Nobody from Russia hacked into the DNC. It was our own guys, it was John Brennan and this is how they did it." Okay?

Now, last thing I would say, is that we know now, at least I know now, or at least I'm persuaded now, that the so-called "hack" into the DNC, was not a hack. It was a leak. What's the difference? A hack goes over the system, goes over the network, NSA intercepts everything that goes over the network, including knowledge of the sender and the receiver...if this was a hack, if the Russians hacked into the DNC, and sent it over the network to Julian Assange or to one of his friends, NSA would know that. What's a leak? A leak is when you take a thumb drive or some other medium like that, you stick in the computer [laughs] itself, it doesn't go over the network, it goes on the thumb drive, you give that to somebody, who gives it Julian Assange, or one of his people. That's what happened. Now, we know that from the former technical director of the NSA, his name is Bill Binney, and we wrote about that. In the fifth of Sept- On the fifth of January, of this year, the Baltimore Sun printed an op-ed by both of us, me, and by Binney, and it said, "Look, we know from the technical end of this issue, that it had to be a leak, and not a hack, and here's the difference." [ "Email were leaked, not hacked" link: http://www.baltimoresun.com/news/opinion/oped/bs-ed-hacking-intelligence-20170105-story.html ] We explained that. Now, we are confirmed in our judgement, in the fact that this young Democratic National Committee worker, Seth Rich, who was killed. He was plugged by two people, in the back, on the 10th of July last year. He was working for the DNC, it was a very strange robbery, because they didn't take anything from him, and guess what? Now, there are well sourced reports, that on his computer, there were thousands of messages exchanged with a...person associated with Wikileaks.

PURYEAR
[inaudible] We're going to have to take a quick break here, but we're going to come back with more on this issue, Ray, so stay with us, and with our audience, stay with us here, on "By Any Means Necessary" on Radio Sputnik, I'm your host, Eugene Puryear, stay with us.

[break]

PURYEAR
And today we're continuing our conversation about this whole issue with Trump and Russia, and the Oval Office, and what may be or not was revealed, we continue to be joined by Ray McGovern, who's a former CIA analyst, and also a political activist, and Ray, we left off on this issue of Seth Rich, and you had mentioned there's a new report coming out this morning, Fox News has it, they have a federal investigator that has corroborated for them, uh, the news that they're- the FBI is- does allegedly have the forensic report with quite a number of emails between Mr. Rich and Wikileaks, uh, it looks like perhaps there's some third party investigative reporter living in London. So, either way, that's another sort of piece of this story that is surfacing, and coming around, that you're, that you're very right, and as many people have suggested it looks more like a leak, and I guess we'll see what happens, but, the other issue that, to me, is relevant here, and you touched on this, it seems a little irresponsible for the Washington Post to even really run with this story, and that's been my problem with a lot of this stuff from the Post and the New York Times from the beginning, is they're taking these anonymous sources, then they're saying these anonymous sources told us these major bombshells stories, but we can't reveal any details of the story, or who the person was, you basically just have to trust us, and, it just sure seems like, what basis does anyone have to sortof believe the particulars of these particular stories, without even more knowledge or information. So, it just seems like the press is playing a role here, that is, if not directly collusive, certainly enabling of whoever is leaking this information anonymously.

MCGOVERN
Well, Gene, I think you're absolutely right. What I call the fawning corporate media, including the New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, are part of the deep state. The Post and the Times do not publish things that the CIA or the White House tells them not to publish. And conversely, they do publish things that are unofficially, anonymously leaked. That's about as...well, that's a prostitution of the journalism profession, it's scandalous, and one cannot depend on the mainstream media for accurate news. Whether it's in a newspaper, or at evening, when you go home, you watch TV news, in the evening. So, that leads us into a really perilous situation. It's worse...and I served in the Soviet Union, in a- before computers, I had to read Pravda and Izvestia every morning, those are the two major party newspapers, and uh, you know the propaganda was bad, but you know what? There was a big difference, Gene: the Russians knew how to read between the lines. They knew that it was propaganda. Unfortunately, the contrast lies in the fact that Americans don't know enough to recognize what's pure propaganda, and what's purposive deception of the American people, and so, they go along with what the mainstream media says, they don't know any better. Now, that has a lot to do with a lot of things, which we won't go into here, but what does that mean? That means before the war of aggression against Iraq, and that's the only proper label for it, when the UK and the U.S. invaded Iraq, on the 19th of March, 2003, sixty nine percent of the American people believed that Saddam Hussein, president of Iraq, played a role in 9/11. A masterful deception of the American people. Sixty nine percent. Now. What would you guess, Gene, would be the percentage of people who believe that Donald Trump owes his presidency to "interference", by the Russians? What would you say?

PURYEAR
Well, it's gotta be at this stage, I don't know, forty sixty percent of people.

MCGOVERN
Yeah, I would guess even higher. There are probably some polls out there, we should look into them. So, what do you have here? You have a situation where most people, especially people my age, and I'm pretty old, don't know how to use a computer to get accurate news. That's why programs like yours and "Loud and Clear" and other programs are so vital. People can find out what's going on. Now, as an example of all of this, let me just go back to, finish up on Seth Rich. Now, when he was killed, a very bizarre thing happened. Just days later, Julian Assange, head of Wikileaks, had an interview with, I believe it was a Dutch TV firm. And this is what he said: "The killing of Seth Rich indicates the risks that whistleblowers take. And, in order to find out who the culprit was, Wikileaks is willing to offer," - I think it was ten thousand pounds, ten thousand dollars, to whoever helps us find the culprit. Now, I said to myself, "Holey Moses, Ray! What's going on here! Julian never, ever, ever talks about his sources. And here he is all but saying, Seth Rich gave him the information about the DNC emails." Which, you know...this is important here, let me just parenthetically throw in here, why were the DNC emails so important?

Well, because the content of those emails indicated, beyond reasonable doubt, that the DNC, Debbie Wasserman Schultz and her crowd, five of whom quit the next day, after they were revealed, they revealed that Bernie Sanders was cheated. Robbed. Cheated. Out of the nomination, the Democratic nomination. Pure and simple, clear. And how did the Russians get in? [laughs] Well, here's how they got in, I know this, two days before the DN- the Democratic National Convention was to, was to take place, is when Julian Assange decided to release these emails. Were they authentic? Of course they were. No one throws any doubt on that. So, what was the problem? Well, they revealed what I just said: that Hillary cheated Sanders out of the nomination. So what are they going to do? Two days before, my god, they have a council of war. And they say, "What is Bernie going to do?" "Oh! And the convention is-" "So, what're we going to do?" Well, somebody says, "I know what we'll do. We'll blame it on Russians." And somebody else said, "Come on, it's not the Russians, it's Julian Assange." "Well, we can say that Julian Assange is working with the Russians!" And then they said, "Oh, that's beginning to make some sense, but what would be...what would be the rationale?" "Oh, come on. The rationale is, that Putin certainly prefers to have Donald Trump as president to Hillary Clinton." Now, Gene, whatever the other parts of that syllogism are, that major premise, that Vladimir Putin would look at Donald Trump, during the campaign, number one, realize that he "never could win", okay? Number two, that he's not only unpredictable, but he brags about it, right? And number three, he lashes out, at the slightest slight, real or imagined, just lashes, completely reckless. So, you're Vladimir Putin, right? And you're saying, "WOW! This guy is really an odd duck! That's precisely the kind of guy that I would like to have his fingers on the nuclear codes! Of course [inaudible] would be great!" Give me a break! You know, I've been watching Russian leaders for fifty four years now. Professionally. In this town. And I can tell you, that...I can tell you it's very very strange, those who argue that Vladimir Putin would have preferred Trump in the first place, particularly as I said before, when it was a done deal that Hillary was going to win. Everybody thought that. Unless Putin is clairvoyant, as well as a pretty adroit politician, he would have thought that- What is the percentages of messing around in the DNC, hacking into their system, and almost certainly being caught. Well, you know, so the whole premise fell apart, but that's how this Russian thing started.

Now, getting back [laughs] getting back to Julian Assange, and and Seth Rich, this is the important part of all this. The Russians didn't hack the DNC, or maybe they tried to, like fifty other places tried to, but the damning email that had Cyrillic on it, in my view, the evidence is pretty clear now. That was not from the Russians: that was from John Brennan. And the fantastic capability he has with his cyber folks, to hack into places, to disguise his own hacking, and attribute it to other people, they call it in the CIA documents, that Wikileaks has not- has now released, they call it "obfuscation". [laughs] That's what they say. You obfuscate the person or entity that hacked in. So. Here we have Seth Rich and he works for the DNC, and he is said by Julian Assange to- well well, he doesn't- he says- Julian says "Well, this fellow- this shows the risks that whistleblowers-" So I'm saying to myself, "My god, why would Julian do that?" And I said, "Well, Ray, _come on_. The guy's dead, right? I mean, Seth Rich is dead and gone a week ago, why not reveal your sources?" Well, turns out I was right. It was a no-brainer, but, you know, a guy who's robbed, and then they forgot to take his wallet, or his watch, or his two thousand dollar necklace, [laughs a lot here] something smells there. Now we have these reports that the D.C. police were told, "Look, don't do- don't do a thorough investigation here, we'll take the computer, the FBI has it." And now it looks like it's going to come clear, what was it, that what really happened, that is, that it was as we suggested, that is Bill Binney, from NSA, who knows all these things, we suggested pretty much ninety percent, back in January, that this was a leak, not a hack, and now we know that the leak, in my view, almost certainly came from Seth Rich, or some of his colleagues. Look at them, they're probably all big supporters of Bernie Sanders. Now, they took a look at the content of those emails and said, "Aw my god, you know this- This is unconscionable! I'm working for an outfit that's- Oh my god, somebody's gotta know about this." [laughs] And so they plugged a little thumb drive into their machine, and you know the rest of the story. So the notion that the Russians were responsible [laughs] for a _leak_, when in reality...I'm sorry, the Russians were responsible for a _hack_, when in reality it was a leak, not only falls down, but now, I think, I'm pretty sure, we know that that suspected hack was not the work of Vladimir Putin, but was the work of John Brennan and the people working with him to obfuscate these things, in a manner, well, in an unprecedented manner given the level of technology that's required to do it this way.

PURYEAR
Yeah. No. For sure. Well, and I think that- one thing that- Certainly the media and others are forgetting, it seems the stakes are extraordinarily high, I mean, obviously, the U.S. and Russia are major players in many parts of the world, the co-operation over Syria, you know, the hundreds of thousands of lives at stake, obviously the issue of nuclear war, obviously the issues on the Korean peninsula where both countries are part of the six party talks. I mean, on so many different levels, it seems like this this this, you know, sortof link-Trump-to-Russia thing, you know, whatever the veracity of any particular claim, that the end result here is it's making it very difficult for there to be any discussion over where the United States and Russia could be co-operating, more productively, because to even suggest anything positive in terms of U.S.-Russia co-operation now is to become some sort of, you know, secret Kremlin agent trying to destroy America.

MCGOVERN
That's right, Gene. And against that, you have a president who thumbs his nose at all this. Who welcomes Sergei Lavrov into the White House, tells him stories, is pictured laughing, backclapping, for which the president is very much under criticism by the mainstream press. Russians? Laughing? Clapping? Inviting them into the White House? They could be spies! [laughs] One of the pundits described Lavrov, or described [Sergei] Kislyak, the Russian ambassador, as "a top spy in the United States". Ambassadors aren't spies! They got about a hundred spies under them, but they definitely don't know what they're doing. Anyhow. What they- What's going on here, is that Trump is erratic, he often shoots himself in the foot, but he was elected. He was elected president. Now, I...my colleagues and I have this thing, about honesty. Okay? Um, if you want to get rid of Trump, well, there are legal ways to do that. Impeachment is the name of the game, you do that. But you don't do that by falsifying evidence. Alright? We have this abhorrence [laughs] for perjury, or for tilting evidence, or fixing intelligence around the policy, as happened on Iraq. And so, if you're going to get rid of Trump, do it honestly. Don't accuse him of playing cozy with the Russians when there is _zero_, and I'll repeat that, there is zero evidence except for pictures of them laughing together, except for all these [laughs] incredibly circumstantial pieces of evidence which don't hold water.

The line is drawn now. Trump has fired Comey...why? In my view, because Comey was part of this cabal, with John Brennan, and with NSA. Why do I say that? Well, look at Comey testifying before the House Intelligence Committee. He says, with great discomfort, "Now, I know we didn't get access to the computers at the DNC, and it would have been better, of course, every one acknowledges that if you do forensics, you should have direct physical access, we didn't get the physical access. We had to depend on the forensics from CrowdStrike." Now, here's the deal. CrowdStrike has not invested billions of dollars in trying to figure out viruses and hacking and stuff. NSA and CIA did. So, it's a very very sophisticated program that Crowd- it exceeded any capability CrowdStrike finding out about it. How about the FBI? Well, you know they've got technicians that are pretty highly trained. They're not as good as the NSA ones, but...if Comey would have said, as he should have, as he's embarrassed to not have done, if he said, "Look, seize those computers, I want you technicians to take a good physical look at them...tell me what you find." Well, if Comey had done that, the chances are very great that his technicians would have said, "Oh, Mr. Comey, you won't believe- you won't believe the sophistication of the program that allows whoever's hacking to obfuscate the origin of the hack, and blame it on somebody else! You know, we can't figure it out, do you want us to go, do you want us to go check with the NSA?" [laughs] Oh, god! So Comey would have said, "Oh no no no, don't do that!" Why? Because it would have blown this whole operation, that as I say, CIA and NSA had worked out over a period of fifteen years, there are seven hundred million lines of code in it. What does that mean?

Well, each line of code costs twenty five dollars, do the math. Okay? So, this is the deep state. This is something that Trump has taken on, and one of the bizarre manifestations of this, is that...when Chuck Schumer, who is the ranking Democrat in the Senate now, was with Rachel Maddow, early in January, he said: "You know, I used to think Trump was a pretty bright guy, but he's done something very foolish." And she says, "What's that?" [Schumer:] "Well, he's taken on the CIA. And the CIA has six ways to Sunday to get atcha. I thought he was a smart businessman, but he's done something very very very foolish." Now. What did Rachel say? Well, what she didn't say was what any person should have said, "Mr. Schumer," or "Senator Schumer, are you saying...are you saying that the president of the United States should be afraid of the CIA? Is that what you're saying?" [laughs] She didn't say that. But that's what he said. Okay? Now, giving hypocrisy a bad name, Schumer is leading the charge for an Independent Prosecutor. Give me a break. So. Bottom line here: Trump has taken on the deep state, I don't know who's going to win. I do know that...in a bizarre sense, that Schumer is right. That most presidents have been afraid of taking on the intelligence community, and if...if Trump insists on doing that, well, maybe Schumer will turn out to have been right. And uh, Trump will have proven to have done something very foolish. We'll have to see. You know, it's really...the denouement is coming, and it's coming quicker than anyone thought. I think because they realize that if they don't blacken Trump, beyond repair, what's Trump going to do? He's going to get his people in places where they can dish out all this stuff on Brennan. And say, look, this is what happened.

PURYEAR
Mmmhmm, no, I think that's very very prescient points as always [sic], that's where we're going to have to leave it, we're going to come back here, after another break, "By Any Means Necessary" on Radio Sputnik, in Washington, D.C., thanks to Ray McGovern, I'm your host, Eugene Puryear. Stay with us.