Ray McGovern on Loud and Clear (03/28/2017)

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 "Loud and Clear", broadcast March 28, 2017.

Transcript excerpt runs from 18:22 to 35:35.

File link: https://sputniknews.com/radio_loud_and_clear/201703281052023939-trump-tax-plan/

BRIAN BECKER
The on-going anti-Russia witch hunt, or investigation, shows no signs of letting up, accusations of hacking, surveillance, and interference, are being hurled from every direction, how can we make sense of all of this? We are joined, in studio, by Ray McGovern, he is an activist, and a former CIA analyst, whose writings can be found on Ray McGovern dot com. Welcome back, Ray McGovern.

RAY MCGOVERN
Thank you, Brian.

BECKER
It appears that the House Intelligence Committee is now investigating two things: allegations of hacking by the Russian government, and leaks from government agencies. Talk about what it is that they're investigating, what's the significance of it, and, of course, for our broader audience, again, even though we've done this before, what's the difference between a hack and a leak, and why does it matter in this case?

MCGOVERN
Well, in this case, the president of the United States, outgoing, Barack Obama, admitted, two days before he left office, that, as he put it, the intelligence community _conclusions_ about how, "Russian hacking", got to Wikileaks, is "inconclusive". [laughs] If the intelligence community conclusions are inconclusive with respect to how Russian hacking got to Wikileaks, that's a pretty big gap. If they can't prove- it shows that the government doesn't know how, if, or when, Wikileaks got it from the Russians, and the reason they don't know that is because they didn't get it from the Russians, they got it from a leak. And a leak is something where you take a thumb drive, you put it in a machine, you download the information, you physically take it to Julian Assange or one of his lieutenants, and that way you keep it off the network, knowing that the network, the internet, is monitored, ironclad, and everything that passes over that network, the NSA, ipso facto, intercepts. If NSA only has, as they put it, in one of those meager memos, "moderate confidence", whereas the FBI, the CIA have "high confidence", the Russians did all this, well, what does that mean? Well, it means that the only agency that is capable of proving or disproving that, can't even say "high confidence", so it says "moderate confidence", which means it's using a SWAG factor, in the army we used to call it, Scientific Wild Ass Guess.

BECKER
Ray McGovern, the Guardian reported last Friday that Donald Trump's embattled former campaign chairman, Paul Manafort, "has volunteered to be interviewed by the House inquiry into alleged connections between Trump and Russia." That's the words of the Guardian. What do you make of Manafort's role in all of this, is he a scapegoat, or is there more to it?

MCGOVERN
I think they're hunting Manafort, but I think it's a dry well. Everything he did, cannot be connected, to my knowledge, to all these charges against Trump, and so he's offering himself up, not as a sacrificial lamb, but just as a guy who did a lot of business, a lot of stuff that businesspeople do, and that he's been unfairly connected with this, this witch hunt. You know, Brian, the real thing here, and the real crux of this matter, and the most important thing, is that the intelligence community, or the ones at the very top, the ones who know, for example, that everybody's monitored, including the president of the United States, including the chief of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, including all people, and that that information is available to the FBI, the CIA, and to the Defense Intelligence Agency, _raw_. Not encrypted. Not minimized. Not masked. They have access to it raw. Now, [Devin] Nunes didn't know that.

BECKER
Nunes is the Republican chairperson of the House Intelligence Committee.

MCGOVERN
Mmmmhmmm. Now, I was speaking out of my own experience, and the experience of an expertise of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity, that won't quit. Okay? The former NSA people tell me that everything is collected, that's what you call dragnet, that's what you call bulk collection. And so, my interpretation of that, and it's mine, I think it's based on this information. It has to do with this. When Chuck Schumer, the Minority leader in the Senate. When he said to Rachel Maddow, he said, you know, "Let me tell you, Donald Trump's being really dumb." His words, Schumer's words. "You take on the intelligence community, they have six ways from Sunday, to get back at you." Now, he added, "So, even for a practical, supposedly hardnosed businessman, he's been really dumb to do this." Well, Nunes, that is Representative Nunes, Congressman Nunes, from California, was able to smoke out a truthteller in the intelligence community, that's the way I interpret this, and he [the truthteller] said, "You're being lied to, six days from Sunday [sic]. Let me give you documents, but I need a secure place to do this." And, as we know from the press, Nunes met with someone, the evening before he let this information out, and he got information that I interpret as being so explosive, that they couldn't call the White House, and say, "Mr. President, you're being monitored!" Because that call would be - guess what! - monitored! [laughs]

So, he took himself over to the White House, and he deprived his Democratic colleagues, who are leading this witch hunt, from the opportunity to sabotage what he needed to tell the president, as a responsible congressman. That's what I think happened. He did tell the president. That's going to come out in the wash now. It's going to come out, that this information was not minimized, or was not masked, _and_ worse still, that John Brennan, head of the CIA at the time, made sure that information got to the New York Times, made sure it got to the Washington Post - not to the Wall Street Journal! The Wall Street Journal complained bitterly that Brennan's only talking to the New York Times, what's going on here?! So, this was an underhanded attempt to use the intelligence community to sabotage Trump. First, to prevent him from getting elected by the electoral college, if you can believe it. And you should believe it, because it's true. And then later, to sabotage his administration, first and foremost, to explain why Hillary lost. It was the Russians. And then, number two, to prevent any progress toward detente with Russia. There's no real obstacle to that detente except these crazy Democrats in league with the McCainiacs, and the Lindsay Grahams of this world. It's a bizarre situation, I almost think that someone put something in the water, here in Washington.

BECKER
Devin Nunes, the Republican head of the House Intelligence Committee, the committee that's overseeing these hearings. He went to the White House and he spoke to Trump, directly, personally, as you put it. In person. Confirming, in fact, that Trump, or Trump associates, or both, had their comments or their discussions or their communications surveilled. And, of course, this all emanates from, and became important politically, because Trump had said, "I just learned that Obama was tapping my wires." And then the FBI, and the CIA, in congressional hearings, said that there's no evidence, or they've seen no evidence, they used language that allowed them to skirt about whether in fact it was true or not. They just sortof said, "Well, we don't know, or to the best of my knowledge," but anyway, it sounded like a denial. That's where this emanates from.

MCGOVERN
Well, you know, with all apologies to lawyers, and I come from a family of lawyers, I think Shakespeare was probably right. [laughs] In _The Merchant of Venice_. Let me quote the head of the FBI, this was at the House hearing, last week. "With respect to the president's tweets about alleged wiretapping, directed at him, the prior administration has no information that supports the tweets. We have looked carefully, inside the FBI and the Department of Justice. We have no information that supports the tweets, that he was wiretapped." Okay? Wooooah. Wiretapping went out with the Edsel Ford, for godssakes. Nobody wiretaps anymore. It's blanket surveillance, such as was revealed by Ed Snowden, Bill Binney, and the rest of the old NSA alumni. So, these quotes about wiretapping, of course, it is legally correct, literally, but it has no relevance to the current situation. And Nunes himself, to his credit, Representative Nunes had said, "Look, let me be clear. I've been saying this for several weeks. 'We know there was not a physical wiretap at Trump Tower. However, it's still possible that other surveillance activities were used against presidents Trump and his associates.'" We now know that that was true, again to his credit, Nunes invited people to come out of the woodwork. [Nunes:] "Anybody who knows anything about this, come and tell me!" You know? Wonder of wonders, somebody did. That's what's at the White House. Now they know. That this is, well this is J. Edgar Hoover on steroids, it's against the law, it's against the 4th Amendment to the Constitution, and, you know, it's sorta like the German Stasi, in a dreamworld.

BECKER
Ray McGovern, I want to make it clear for our audience, that you are not a longtime supporter of Donald Trump. In other words, your comments are not because you are pro-Trump. In fact, when you were interviewed on my show, in the past, you not only showed your disapproval of many of Donald Trump's policies, but you also discounted that the Russians actually, or the Russian government, say, necessarily favored Trump. You said, I think, sortof to paraphrase Ray McGovern, "Maybe they would prefer the devil they know, to the devil they don't know." I think I'm paraphrasing you more or less right. In other words, there's no evidence...not necessarily of collusion between the Russian government and the Trump government, but not necessarily that they're all big Trump supporters, or certainly Vladimir Putin. Go ahead.

MCGOVERN
That's sortof a good paraphrase. What I said is, I think...well, I've been watching Soviet leaders, and Russian leaders for over fifty years now, that's a long time. So I think I know something of how they look at the world. And they look at the world, first and foremost, as to how they can defend Russia and the Soviet Union from a nuclear conflict. Now, as they looked out, and they saw Donald Trump, during the campaign, _bragging_, bragging about how unpredictable he is, and then, at the slightest affront, taking gross offense, and lashing out, [laughs] violently, I mean, I can see Vladimir Putin sitting there in the Kremlin, saying to his friends, "Wooooow. Unpredictable! Wow! Lashes out without- This is just the guy I want on the American nuclear button. This is gonna be great!" Gimme a break! Now, that's the whole major premise of this thing. They wanted Trump to win. If they did, if they thought he was going to win, Putin was the only person in the world who thought he was going to win. But if they wanted him to win, it's a leap of faith that I just see no cogent reasoning behind. And once that is destroyed, the whole syllogism falls apart. If they had no preference, like I did, I mean, that's why I voted for Jill Stein...if they had no preference, well, you know, and if they thought Hillary was going to win, for sure, which everybody else did, it made no sense at all. It made no sense at all to do the kind of things that they were charged with doing. And, you know, we know, we know enough about NSA's capabilities to say, if somebody sent a hack over the wire, over the internet, over the system there, it would have been intercepted by the NSA. There was no such thing. So, we are reduced to Rumsfeld's theorem, which was, the absence of evidence is, of course, not evidence of absence.

BECKER
Right. And James Clapper- I want to ask about Adam Schiff, because Adam Schiff is the Democratic Minority Leader of the same House Intelligence Committee. He said, because Devin Nunes went to the White House and talked to Trump, and said to Trump, "By the way, I have information showing that there was surveillance directed against either you or your associates." That that made Nunes compromised. It put a cloud over the entire investigation about possible Russian interference in the U.S. election. Adam Schiff keeps asserting, and I've heard him assert, on NPR and other mainstream media, about the Russian collusion with the Trump camp during the 2016 election, and yet the same James Clapper who you talked about, who was the head of the CIA, said, and it's quoted in the Washington Post, just ten days ago, at the end of a two thousand word article about why there might be collusion, Clapper says "We have no evidence of collusion." Only, again, they were only using the language of overwhelming circumstantial evidence. And what you're saying, Ray McGovern, is if NSA can see every hack, because it has to go out over the internet, to be delivered, they know the signatures, they can see where it's coming from, they can see where it's going to, in other words, they'd have something more than overwhelming circumstantial evidence, they'd have hard facts. But here Schiff, over and over and over again, asserting on public radio and other mainstream media, Russian collusion as if it's a fact. As if it's a proven fact. I mean, that's what's driving this witch hunt. That kind of language, which is permitted, in spite of the fact that no actual evidence has been made available.

MCGOVERN
That's exactly right. It's not an exaggeration to say that Adam Schiff is lying through his teeth. He has no flat fact, proof, that the Russians interfered with the election, okay? So, what do we have here? We have, as we said, a leak, now: we also have an explanation. When Schiff says, "That we know the Russians hacked into the DNC," Democratic National Committee, it may be, that the Russians, like everybody else, tried to get into that very vulnerable system, but the reality is: the reality is, that it was a leak from that system, and we think we know the leaker. His name is...he's a fellow from Nebraska, and his name has come to me right away, he was killed on the streets of Washington, on July 10...Seth Rich. July 10, last year, just about the time the Democratic National Committee was to begin. And just about the time, Wikileaks - not the Russians - Wikileaks released this trove of information. The attention to that trove was immediately diverted to whodiditwhodiditwhodidit. It was therussianstherussianstherussians, and nobody paid any attention to the content of that leak, and the contents showed that Hillary Clinton and the DNC stole the nomination from Bernie Sanders. Pure and simple. The height of irony is, that on the front page of "The Outlook" section of the Washington Post yesterday, there's a- well, Jennifer Palmieri is a worker for the Hillary campaign, and she says, right during the convention, and before the convention, we did all we could to show the Russians did it, the Russians did this. Nobody paid attention to what was in those- Now, if those leaks hurt Hillary Clinton, it was because they were accurate, they were truthful, Julian Assange deals in documents, not in interpretation.

BECKER
Alright. Sadly, we are out of time, Ray, I'd like to keep going, but we will keep going as this investigation unfolds. Fortunately, we'll keep going, the witch hunt will keep going. You've been listening to Ray McGovern. You can read his writings at Ray McGovern dot com. Ray is a former CIA analyst. Ray, thank you so much.