Fact-Checking the New York Times' ＂Daily＂ Podcast's Disinformation-Filled Russiagate Episode, with Michael Shellenberger and Aaron Mate
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Summary
On this episode of The Daily with Michael Barbaro, Michael Schmidt joins us to talk about the latest in the Russiagate scandal, and we have a special guest on the show to help explain how the media got it wrong.
Transcript
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employee benefits to learn more. Canada Life. Insurance. Investments. Advice. Welcome to the
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Megan Kelly Show, live on SiriusXM channel 111 every weekday at noon east.
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Hey everyone, I'm Megan Kelly. Welcome to the Megan Kelly Show. When I woke up Wednesday morning and
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checked my podcast feed, I saw the New York Times' The Daily Podcast, which I often listen to.
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And they had finally gotten around to covering all of the Russiagate revelations that we've been
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doing on this show for weeks. Host Michael Barbaro brought on the New York Times investigative
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reporter Michael Schmidt. I thought this is going to be really interesting because he is the reporter
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that we've learned James Comey used for leaks through his Columbia law professor friend. Comey used
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his Columbia law professor friends to leak to Michael Schmidt. And I remembered that Schmidt won
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a Pulitzer Prize for his Russiagate reporting. So I thought, okay, they've got a few things to
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acknowledge up front. And then let's hear what he has to say about all this stuff. Of course,
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shockingly, the Times did not acknowledge any of that in its episode. None of it.
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That he is personally involved in the controversy, that he is part of it because the media acting like
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lapdogs, taking what we now know was flimsy at best and let's face it, false intelligence,
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and slapping it on the pages of their magazines and newspapers without checking in an effort to
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smear Donald Trump is one of the biggest media scandals of all time. And I would think if you're
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running the Times and the Daily, Schmidt is probably realistically the last person you would want to
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platform as the expert on this, given the fact that he's personally coming under fire daily on the
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podcasts and the websites that are actually bothering to cover this new scandal. But no,
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they platformed him like he was truly a trustworthy, the trustworthy, one might say, expert on Wednesday,
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and once again, misled their audience about everything on this scandal. Here he is on a different
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broadcast. This is over on MSNBC. And he decided the podcast was just so good, he needed to go on MSNBC to
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promote it. And he chose to do that on the show of his wife, Nicole Wallace, who's an MSNBC anchor,
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who committed yet another sin of journalism by not acknowledging her relationship, i.e. her marriage
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Gabbard or CIA Director Radcliffe or Kash Patel, they go out and they make these massive claims
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that they say truly unlock the Russia conspiracy. And, you know, they're hoping, apparently,
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at least it looks like that, that their supporters aren't going to go and read the actual materials
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that they're putting out. But when you read them and study them and look at them, they're not what
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they claim to be. But at the same time, they're making massive claims. You know, Tulsi Gabbard making
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claims of treasonous criminality by Obama and his intelligence community officials, but not doing that
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based on anything that really moves the ball in terms of proving that conspiracy.
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Okay, well, unfortunately for Mike Schmidt and Nicole Wallace, we did read all the documents
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and so have our guests. And we're going to take a deep dive today to fact check everything he got
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wrong on The Daily, which is the most watched podcast, news podcast in the country. I mean,
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this is absolute negligence by The New York Times. Joining me now, Michael Schellenberger,
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founder of the Public News Substack, and Aaron Maté, an independent journalist who covers the
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What are the new technologies that will change aviation?
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Well, hydrogen would be one for sure if we got there. I mean, hydrogen is not just a alternative
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in global aviation. Join me, Chris Hadfield, on the On Energy podcast. Listen wherever you get your
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podcasts. Guys, welcome back. Good to be here. Thanks for having us, Megan. So let's start right
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at the beginning. Mike Schmidt goes on The Daily, again, this is on August 13th, this Wednesday,
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and tries to characterize the controversy while completely ignoring certain really important
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facts. Let me just play this out for you and then we can react.
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For the Trump administration, this is all about the original government investigation into Trump
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and Russia, dating back to the 2016 campaign. I think we need to go back to that investigation,
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which I know you covered very closely. Just remind us of the very basics of that investigation
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and its conclusions and why the Trump administration remains so fixated on it.
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In the aftermath of Trump winning the 2016 election, it was widely understood that Russia
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had meddled in the campaign. Obama, faced with that reality, ordered his intelligence community
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to conduct an assessment, essentially a determination to understand what Russia had done and why it had
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done it. The intelligence community comes to a series of conclusions, which they lay out in a document
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that was released in the final days of the Obama administration, just before Trump was about to take
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over. And they find that Putin tried to hurt Hillary Clinton and help Donald Trump while undermining America's
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Okay, guys, here's my own observation on this, and then I'll get you guys to weigh in.
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Faced with the reality, faced with the reality that was widely understood that Russia had meddled in the
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campaign, right? Like, already just assumes facts, not in evidence, right? Like, everyone knew that the
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Russians had interfered and faced with this very difficult reality. Obama really had no choice but
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to order an investigation, to order an assessment, a determination to understand what Russia had done,
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which is not at all what actually went down. And then to talk about it as they reached a series of
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conclusions and they lay them out in a document. No, it doesn't cover any of the infirmities
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underlying those conclusions, nor the intentional manipulation, Aaron, that Obama did to try to make
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sure this whole process reached a certain conclusion with, in particular, the before and after of what the
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intel community we now know was about to tell him on Russia, then his involvement, then the complete change
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in what was actually reported. None of that in Michael Schmidt's summary of what we're about to
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hear. Correct. He's just following the Russiagate playbook when it comes to how the corporate media
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covered this story of parroting a narrative while ignoring all the countervailing facts. And as is the
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case here, there are plenty of new countervailing facts that he is just simply pretending don't exist.
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If you read the recently declassified House intelligence report that reviewed the January
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2017 intelligence assessment that was put out by James Clapper and John Brennan, they pointed out
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that every single thing that Michael Schmidt said about Russian interference and the preference for
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Trump was wrong. And it was wrong because Brennan and Clapper simply cherry-picked a very small amount
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of intelligence and ignored all the other intelligence that undermined their narrative.
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So for example, on the claim that Russia interfered to help Trump, the House intelligence report points
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out that that was based on a fragment of one sentence which had an unclear meaning. Somebody said
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that Putin was counting on Trump winning. And that came from a Kremlin official who had second-hand
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hand access. So basically, that conclusion that underpinned the intelligence community assessment that Putin
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wanted Trump to win and was trying to help him win was based on a fragment of a sentence that could have
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been interpreted in multiple different ways. And that came from someone who was relaying hearsay.
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And the intelligence community assessment, meanwhile, ignored all the other intelligence that they had
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received, including that Putin had said very clearly he didn't care who won, because no matter who won
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the election, he expected the same policy from Washington. So that's an example of Michael Schmidt and
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all of his colleagues at the New York Times simply just ignoring the evidence that undermines their
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The complete absence of pointing out the chronology. December 8th, they were set, we now know, to receive
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a presidential daily brief that, if anything, downplayed Russia's involvement. And then there
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was this critical meeting with all the top intel officials that, per Obama's chief of staff, released
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direction to Clapper. And we saw it in writing. The next day, they said, per the president's direction,
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we're going this other route. They went an entirely different way. And the very next day, the news
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media then ran, including Michael Schmidt's newspaper, with the new narrative, which was Russia tried to
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help Trump. We are now starting to get a really clear picture in which what the Russiagate hoax was,
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was basically a disinformation effort created in concert by the intelligence community, the CIA,
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the FBI, most dramatically, with some concerns raised by the NSA, which are interesting, along with the
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New York Times and the Washington Post, to create the perception that Donald Trump had committed treason
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and was a puppet because he was controlled by Russia in a sex blackmail operation. That incredibly
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outlandish conspiracy theory was promoted by the New York Times and the Washington Post, along with the CIA
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and FBI over years. And so what you're seeing in the Michael Schmidt podcast is just a continuation
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of that disinformation effort aimed at, first of all, we now know, achieving either impeachment
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or criminal prosecution of Trump. And ultimately with the goal of not, of either removing him from
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power or disabling his ability to govern and be reelected. If I can make a quick point about Michael
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Schmidt, he has been a key actor in this disinformation campaign from the start. He authored, he co-authored
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a report in the New York Times, February 14th, 2017. I can't believe the story is still up, but it speaks
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to just the complete corruption of journalism during the Russiagate era. February 14th, 2017, the headline
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in the New York Times was, Trump campaign had repeated contacts with Russian intelligence.
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And what it says is that the first line that phone records intercepted phone calls to the member of
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Donald Trump 2016 campaign and other Trump associates had repeated contacts with senior
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Russian intelligence officials in the year before the election, according to four current and former
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American officials. So Michael Schmidt and the New York Times were alleging very early on that the
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Trump campaign was talking to senior Russian intelligence officials throughout the election.
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OK, it's an extraordinary allegation. There's zero evidence to support it. They talk about phone
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records, intercepted calls. Where are these calls? There's nothing. Even Jim Comey had later testified
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that it wasn't true. Peter Strzok, the lead FBI agent on the Trump Russia probe, according to his
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declassified notes, there was no evidence to support this. But Michael Schmidt and the New York Times
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have never corrected this because they were part of this disinformation operation. And the fact that that
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story is still up and the fact that people like him can still speak or pretend to speak with authority
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on on the Russiagate story, it just underscores how there's been zero accountability so far,
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It to some extent, it makes me feel some empathy for readers of the New York Times and watchers of
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MSNBC. I mean, at this point, they know what they're getting. So not too much empathy. But I'm just saying
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that there is a level of trust between the Times and its readers. And they're they're truly being it if it
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appears willfully misled by the Times and its reporters. And there's just no accountability
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for the mistakes that they've made. And that mistake is a charitable word to none whatsoever.
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They're they they want their audience to be deluded about this. And their audience is deluded about
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this. OK, let's let's go through it because there's a lot of themselves a polluter like they gave
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themselves a polluter for this. So what are you going to do in that situation? You just got to
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down. Yeah, you can't you can't give it back. You don't want to give it back. All right. Here is the
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next claim that we wanted to fact check number two. She releases a classified report that was
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written by Tulsa House Republicans in Trump's first term that claims that Putin was not trying
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to help Trump and hurt Hillary Clinton. So a report that takes real issue with this pretty central finding
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of the Obama intelligence conclusion that Putin wants Trump to win. Correct. But it's really important
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to note that this report was written by a bunch of hardened Trump partisans in the House and it stands
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alone. No other serious entity that has looked at this question, including a massive bipartisan
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investigation in the Senate, comes to the claim that these House Republicans did. OK, so, Michael,
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it's partisan hacks who did the House intelligence report, which we just now got our hands on so it can be
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dismissed. But Senate Intel report stellar, untouchable and 100 percent supports our findings.
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So let's tout that one. We've seen the Senate Intel report touted over and over again by these
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Russiagate hoaxers trying to defend themselves. Thoughts on that? Yeah, I mean, look, I think I think
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people should take the time to read that House report, the HIPC report. It's called HIPC after the
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acronym, the House Committee on Intelligence, the Oversight Committee. It's devastating. I mean,
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it goes through the full body of intelligence that was cherry picked essentially by Obama's CIA
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director to create that intelligence community assessment. Schmidt's just being deliberately
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deceptive. I don't know how else to say it. It's hard for me to believe that he's he honestly
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thinks that after reading either the House report or the CIA tradecraft memo that Ratcliffe just released.
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Mm hmm. The Senate Intel Committee, Aaron, acknowledged that it was limited in what it
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could do. It acknowledged that its power to investigate did not include search warrants
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or wiretaps and that it fell short of the FBI's abilities. They said that while the committee does
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not describe the final result as a complete picture, we believe this volume provides the most comprehensive
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description to date of what happened. So they they were saying they weren't saying everything
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we're saying here is bullshit, but they were saying we acknowledge we've been limited in what
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we are able to do. And since this was issued, you and others have pointed out there were other
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deficiencies with the Senate Intel Committee report that is now being touted as the gold standard by people
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like Schmidt. If the Senate Intel report is the gold standard, why does it exclude all the evidence
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that the HIPSE report, the House Intelligence report uncovered? Why are we just learning about
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all that evidence? Like, for example, the fact that the key judgment of Putin preferring Trump was based
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on a fragment of a sentence that could be interpreted in five different ways. Why didn't the Senate
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intelligence report tell us any of this stuff? It said the Senate intelligence report essentially was
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a rubber stamp. If you speak to anybody in Washington who's familiar with how the Senate
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Intel report was produced, it was Senator Mark Warner, a Democrat who was running the show. And he was
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gung ho on the issue of Trump Russia collusion from the start. He had a lot riding on a report validating
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it. And another thing happened where Senator Richard Burr, who was the Republican co-chair of the Senate
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Intel Committee. He got sidelined because of some corruption allegations. Senator Marco Rubio,
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who was then had to put his name on it as the Republican chair, he should answer, why did he go
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on with Mark Warner? Because now we're learning from the HIPSE report that's just been declassified
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that the Senate Intel Committee ignored key intelligence. We learned so many incredible
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things from HIPSE. We should have learned that from Senate Intel if it was credible. So if you just
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compare the two reports, if one report has all this evidence that the other report, the Senate Intel report,
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doesn't address, it's pretty clear to me which one is more credible.
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Yes. And that, so, but Michael Schmidt dismisses all of that by saying, oh, these are hard partisans.
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These are a bunch of Trump affiliated hard partisans in the House. So he dismisses the House report,
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Well, look, even if that's true, even if these were all Trump partisans on the HIPSE report,
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first of all, you also had Trump partisans in Senate Intel, but yet they missed so much of what HIPSE
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produced. So that's a glaring fact right there. And second of all, look, even if they were all
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Trump partisans and that was their aim, the fact is either the facts that they uncovered are true or
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they're not. And no one's disputing the facts that they uncovered. No one's disputing that John Brennan
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and James Clapper handpicked five people under Brennan's direction to write the January 2017 report.
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No one's disputing that the key finding of Putin preferring Trump and aspiring to help him win was based on a
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fragment of a sentence based on a Kremlin source who only had second access to Putin.
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No one's disputing that John Brennan and James Clapper excluded all the intelligence they received,
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including from sources who had direct access to Putin, from Putin saying that no matter who won
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the election, he didn't care because he expected the same result.
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The report offers essentially a different opinion from what the Obama administration came to.
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Essentially says the House intelligence. You guys said Putin wanted to do one thing.
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We believe Putin didn't want to do that. But there's nothing in that report like an email from
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Obama to his intelligence community saying, I don't care what the evidence shows.
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We need to get Donald Trump. That proves or shows or raises even questions about a larger treasonous
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conspiracy. Michael Schellenberger, thoughts on that one?
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I mean, you know, we don't know too much more about Obama's role than we did before,
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but we do know that on December 9th, he held that meeting to basically require with all of his
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intelligence and security agency heads to to do that intelligence community assessment that would
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come out in January 2017. And we also know that exact same day that the New York Times and Washington
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Post had conversations with multiple sources, according to them, who reported that, in fact,
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the Russians had helped and wanted to help Trump and help help Trump win the election.
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So, you know, for an administration that was famously cracking down, supposedly, on leakers,
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the Obama administration was part of creating this disinformation in early December.
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Can you trace it to Obama? I mean, of course, it's like he's it's like they created he's creating a
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steel man, like he's sort of saying there's no smoking gun. Well, there almost never is a smoking gun.
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It's not even relevant because, you know, you we the Supreme Court already decided with Trump that you
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can't prosecute a sitting president. So I think that it's all a distraction from the basic picture
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here, which is that partisan actors in the intelligence community, in the mainstream news
00:22:47.780
media worked together to create a false perception. And you can argue and it's interesting to ask. It
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may not be that important, but to what extent they knew what they were doing. I mean, I think from
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obviously a legal perspective, it does matter. But that is what was happening over a long period of
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time. And certainly the intelligence analysts who were involved in creating the intelligence
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community assessment, they knew that something was wrong. And they did oppose putting the Steele
00:23:14.420
dossier in the ICA. And both the FBI and the director of the CIA, Brennan, were demanding it.
00:23:20.680
So, you know, so that's Obama's relationships, a little bit of a red herring.
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So this is my problem with that statement, Aaron, that it is not just that the House Intel Committee
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had a different opinion than what Obama's team had. It's that the House took a deep dive into the
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conclusions that were offered by Obama's Intel team and found that they were utterly unsupported.
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It wasn't just we see the very same evidence differently. It was you don't have the evidence
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you claim that you have your key judgments like that Putin interfered to help Trump are totally
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unsupported. You misled us in this document, the January 17 ICA, about how strongly you believe this
00:24:12.680
and about the evidence that you were basing these conclusions on.
00:24:16.140
Yes. And what they also point out is that Brennan's own analysts also disagreed. And Brennan simply
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cherry picked the conclusions that he agreed with. My colleague at Real Clear Investigations, Paul
00:24:27.900
Sperry, years ago reported that Brennan personally overruled two senior experts when it comes to
00:24:33.960
Putin's intentions. And the HIPSE report confirms that. So it's not only that the HIPSE report looked at
00:24:39.820
all the underlying intelligence and just showed that there was nothing there to support Brennan's
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conclusions, they also show more evidence that Brennan overruled his own people. So it's just
00:24:50.160
more evidence that this idea of an intelligence consensus is just such a lie, especially since we
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also learned, as I discussed last time I was on with you, that in September 2016, the FBI and the NSA
00:25:01.720
were dissenting on the core Russiagate allegation that Russia hacked and leaked Democratic Party emails.
00:25:08.260
And now we know nearly nine years later, thanks to Tulsi Gabbard's declassification, that the FBI and the NSA
00:25:14.040
dissented from John Brennan and said, we have low confidence in that allegation. And more about that has come
00:25:20.220
out just in recent days, which I think we'll get to, but it just underscores me.
00:25:24.600
Can you speak to it now? Because we didn't cover it actually on the show this week, but it just came out that
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Clapper was putting massive pressure on, on them to just get this done. He just, he was like, if we're
00:25:36.600
going to have to, you know, skip the normal protocols to get this done before Obama leaves office is what
00:25:43.000
he was really saying. Um, and Trump comes in, then that's what we're going to have to do.
00:25:49.180
It's an extraordinary, uh, release that just came out from Tulsi Gabbard. And I encourage people to read
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it because unlike most Russiagate material, it's not very long. It's only two emails, but what it is,
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it's December 22nd, uh, 2016, uh, as the intelligence, uh, officials putting out that
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January, 2017 report on alleged Russian interference are rushing to finalize the report.
00:26:08.960
And Mike Rogers, the head of the NSA sends an email to Comey, Clapper and Brennan. And what does
00:26:14.860
he say? He says, Hey guys, uh, I have to relay some concerns I've gotten from my people, which is
00:26:19.960
that when it comes to the, the core issue of blaming Russia for hacking and leaking democratic party
00:26:26.620
emails, we're not being shown a sufficient amount of underlying intelligence. And we're not being
00:26:31.920
given a sufficient amount of time to reach a proper conclusion. And we want to be confident in our
00:26:36.900
conclusion. And then he goes on to say that, listen, if you're just going to put this out in the name of
00:26:40.760
the CIA and the FBI, that's fine. I'll withdraw my, uh, my objections, but if you want our name on it,
00:26:46.960
we need more access and we need more time. Uh, because we're just not confident in the underlying
00:26:52.840
intelligence. It's an extraordinary statement because at that very, because by that point,
00:26:56.720
this is December 22nd on December 9th, you had stories in the Washington post in their time
00:27:01.000
saying that the intelligence community has all agreed that Putin interfered in the election via
00:27:05.940
hacking and leaking to help Trump. And this is now a few weeks later, Mike Rogers of the NSA saying,
00:27:10.880
we have not been shown the intelligence that could help us reach that conclusion. So can you please
00:27:16.460
give us more time and more access? And what James Clapper says is basically, yes, we'll do our best,
00:27:22.220
but, uh, we may have to quote compromise on our normal quote unquote modalities. Uh, and he also
00:27:30.060
says, but it's really important that we're all on the same page. And he even says in the highest
00:27:34.420
tradition of quote, that's our story and we're sticking to it. So he's tacitly acknowledging
00:27:40.260
there that they are basically, uh, that they all need to be on the same page of a scam, but sorry,
00:27:46.060
Mike Rogers, the NSA, which is the premier intelligence agency that will be able to actually reach this
00:27:51.760
conclusion. And I've been putting this out for years that the NSA is the premier agency that
00:27:56.600
could tell us whether or not Russia hacked and leaked the DNC. Cause basically they can see,
00:28:00.280
and they can rewind the entire internet. And the fact that Mike Rogers is complaining there shows
00:28:05.060
that, that low confidence assertion assessment that the NSA and the FBI had back in September
00:28:10.580
had not changed in December. And that all this, this allegation of Russian hacking and leaking,
00:28:15.140
it didn't come from the NSA. It came from the CIA, came from John Brennan and his ally,
00:28:20.160
James Clapper, who were refusing to show the NSA, uh, the basis for that conclusion.
00:28:24.360
And now we know, having seen that house report, why they did not want to show the underlying evidence
00:28:31.360
to Mike Rogers at NSA, because it was quote, one scant, unclear and unverifiable fragment of a
00:28:37.900
sentence from one of the substandard reports, uh, which was the only classified information cited to
00:28:43.880
suggest Putin quote, aspired to help Trump win. It was flimsier than flimsy. And there's,
00:28:50.160
a reason that they were like, Holy shit, we're not going to show him anything. Just go along
00:28:54.360
to get along. Our story needs to be the same. Go ahead, Aaron.
00:28:57.600
Just to be clear. So that, that sentence fragment that was used for the conclusion that
00:29:02.620
Putin aspired to help Trump win. Uh, what Mike Rogers is complaining about in that email, uh,
00:29:07.840
is that he has not been shown the intelligence to blame Russia for the hack and leak. He's saying
00:29:13.220
that like, you have not shown our people. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. Uh, and we don't know what that
00:29:18.980
basis is. All we know is that the FBI at that time was relying on CrowdStrike, a firm working for
00:29:24.620
Hillary Clinton, which had first blamed Russia for hacking the DNC. And we know from other intelligence
00:29:29.780
documents that Tulsi Gabbard has released, they were still relying on CrowdStrike. And we know that
00:29:34.500
back in September, the FBI and the NSA said they had low confidence in that allegation because they
00:29:39.860
were not shown the technical details. And this underscores that two months later, the FBI, the CIA
00:29:45.320
and James Clapper's office were still denying the NSA, the best placed intelligence agency to make this
00:29:51.620
judgment on whether Russia hacked and leaked the DNC. They were not showing them the information.
00:29:55.740
They were not showing them the internet intelligence. Incredible. Okay. Let's keep going. Um,
00:29:59.620
next one. Stop four. She is making this out like the smoking gun that Trump and his allies have been
00:30:06.500
searching for, for all these years. Nothing that she has released backs up her claim of a treasonous
00:30:13.540
conspiracy. But despite that, she sends a criminal referral to the justice department, essentially a
00:30:22.740
letter saying, Hey guys, you really need to conduct a criminal investigation into this.
00:30:30.100
No evidence of a conspiracy. This is kind of related to the one we just did, Michael, where it's like,
00:30:35.460
no, that we don't have a document saying let's all conspire to undermine the Trump presidency by saying
00:30:41.860
it was, it was only made possible thanks to Vladimir Putin. But you do have what we in the law would
00:30:48.200
refer to as a strong circumstantial case showing the series of events that strongly suggest that
00:30:55.880
there was a reversal in what they were going to say about Russia, that it happened at Obama's direction
00:31:01.000
and that it happened thanks to key players being willing to overlook crappy evidence to support their
00:31:07.880
theory and ignore evidence that undermined it. Yeah. I mean, I think that, I think it's just,
00:31:15.000
the reason it's so hard to prove a conspiracy is that everybody already knows what they're supposed
00:31:19.240
to do based on what their position is at any given time. And so I think that by him focusing on that,
00:31:27.880
I think that it's also been a focus of, of some Republicans. I think it's the wrong focus. I think
00:31:34.040
the focus really should be on things like intelligence community reform to make sure that the CIA doesn't
00:31:38.840
interfere in our democracy again. Well, I agree with Michael that a conspiracy case,
00:31:43.320
it just sounds like a tough thing to prove at this point, to bring criminal charges on the front.
00:31:47.080
And I think transparency and accountability is the best way forward as Tulsi Gabbard is doing.
00:31:52.440
The problem with transparency is that you need to have a room, like a minimally honest media
00:31:57.800
to report on it. And Michael Schmidt is underscoring that New York Times refuses
00:32:01.000
to report on all the facts that undermine their narrative. I mean, can we, the irony,
00:32:06.120
he's criticizing Tulsi Gabbard and the Trump administration for pushing conspiracy
00:32:10.360
allegations into the Justice Department without a basis. Does that sound like anything? That
00:32:14.920
sounds to me like the Russia investigation, which was based on the flimsiest tip about George
00:32:19.800
Papadopoulos, a low level Trump campaign volunteer, but based on nothing, they expanded that into a
00:32:25.160
sprawling counterintelligence investigation of first candidate Trump and then President Trump for
00:32:30.600
engaging in a conspiracy with Russia. Did Michael Schmidt ever say that this conspiracy investigation of
00:32:36.520
Trump is baseless and based on no evidence? No. He promoted it and he peddled it by putting out
00:32:42.120
false stories by the people behind the hoax. And I missed a crucial point when I was talking before
00:32:48.040
about this article that Michael Schmidt co-wrote in February 2017, this fake claim that the Trump
00:32:53.880
campaign had repeated contacts with senior Russian intelligence. So Michael Schmidt writes that in
00:32:58.200
February 2017. A few years later, he comes out with a book about Russiagate, as so many of these people did,
00:33:03.080
just trying to cash in on the Russiagate craze. His whole book is about Russiagate. Guess what
00:33:08.760
story Michael Schmidt doesn't even mention in his entire book? He doesn't mention his own story
00:33:13.880
claiming that the Trump campaign had senior had contacts with senior Russian intelligence officers.
00:33:19.400
How are you going to write a story claiming that the Trump campaign was talking to Russian spies and
00:33:24.120
then write a book and not even not even mention your own story because you know it's it's a lie.
00:33:29.560
Has he ever owned up to it? No, of course not. That's incredible. I don't know. I am more
00:33:34.360
bullish on showing a conspiracy legally and otherwise than you guys are. I mean, I I've tried
00:33:39.720
cases and I know how arguments are made in court and you would go in there and you would say,
00:33:45.800
let me take you back to December 8th, 2016, when the intelligence community was getting ready to
00:33:50.760
offer a presidential daily brief that if anything downplayed the role Russia had in the election that
00:33:55.960
the United States had just been through at that time, they looked at it. The FBI said it wasn't
00:34:02.040
going to join that intelligence assessment. And the next thing we knew, the Obama White House had
00:34:06.520
called together all of its top intel officials across the government and with the direction of
00:34:11.560
the chief of staff of President Barack Obama within 12 hours had completely reversed the direction they
00:34:18.520
were going on their Russian conclusions. And how do we know they had reversed? Because there's a memo that
00:34:23.480
says per the president's direction, we're going to do a new assessment. And within hours of that,
00:34:30.440
it hit the media. It hit the New York Times. It hit the Washington Post. They told us what the new
00:34:35.560
directive was. It was Putin interfered to help Trump. Surprise, surprise. Within 30 days, there was an
00:34:44.600
official intelligence community assessment saying exactly that. We'll show you the emails showing there was a
00:34:49.640
rush to get a rush to get it out before the new president, Donald Trump, took office. That's in writing.
00:34:54.680
You can see it right here from Clapper in emails. And all the while, these intelligence officials had been
00:35:00.520
warned, thanks to intelligence leaked to them by the Dutch, that Hillary Clinton had a plot to falsely tie Donald
00:35:08.120
Trump to the Russians. They knew it was coming when it came instead of having their hackles up and dismissing it.
00:35:14.600
Large portions of the government, the ones who were the most partisan, jumped on it, loved it, massaged it,
00:35:21.120
embellished it, and put it in writing and gave it to the New York Times. They undermined President Trump's first
00:35:27.060
term. They changed the relationship that the sitting president of the United States had with Russia. And he has said
00:35:34.240
that himself directly. And if that's not a conspiracy to undermine a sitting U.S. president, I don't know what it isn't,
00:35:41.720
what is one? So that's how I would make the case. Okay, let's keep going. SOT 5.
00:35:47.800
The head of the CIA, John Ratcliffe, puts out a report that also casts doubt on the 2016 intelligence
00:35:57.840
assessment. How so? The report doesn't dispute the central finding of the 2016 assessment,
00:36:07.640
but it takes issue with the tradecraft for how the report was produced. It says that the process was
00:36:16.480
rushed. It says that top officials were far too involved in it. And it says that there was pressure
00:36:23.720
on analysts to reach a conclusion. Thoughts on that one, Aaron?
00:36:28.720
I agree with the chair of the House Intelligence Committee, Rick Crawford, I believe is his name,
00:36:33.200
where he called that report a whitewash. And I agree. I think that that Ratcliffe review treated
00:36:39.420
the CIA report with kid gloves. And it speaks to a problem that, you know, Cash Patel talked to me
00:36:44.780
about a few years ago when I interviewed him, where he just said that, you know, he was struggling to
00:36:48.900
release the HIPSE report during the first Trump term. But many people, including Trump appointees,
00:36:54.960
just did not want to embarrass the intelligence community. Because it's awkward. You're exposing here a
00:37:00.500
massive fraud at the highest levels of U.S. intelligence. And some people, even if they're
00:37:04.920
on the opposing side of the political aisle, just don't want to go there.
00:37:07.580
That key finding, that one in particular that Putin wanted to help Trump, was taken on by the CIA.
00:37:13.080
And in that CIA report, correct me if I'm wrong, they looked at that conclusion, which was central
00:37:18.800
to the ICA, and said, how on earth did you put that in there with, quote, high confidence? That's a lie.
00:37:24.560
You didn't have high confidence behind that. Yeah. And they also singled out John Brennan for
00:37:30.540
basically being biased and for trying to include the Steele dossier. But again, the HIPSE report has
00:37:36.240
the most facts in it, because it shows us all the underlying intelligence that went into this
00:37:41.860
assessment. And if you read that report, how can you possibly walk away defending the intelligence
00:37:46.840
community assessment when you find out all the things that we learned from HIPSE? So again,
00:37:52.200
you know, people will want to point to anything they can, but the information that is most
00:37:56.820
comprehensive that was released by the HIPSE report, because they want to hold on to the
00:38:00.360
narrative that Russia interfered to help Trump. When again, the most sweeping look at that was
00:38:05.100
conducted by HIPSE, which showed us the underlying intelligence. The underlying intelligence simply
00:38:08.860
didn't support it. So Smitsch says to the New York Times audience that Ratcliffe's current,
00:38:13.480
this is the current CIA director, Ratcliffe's report, looking back at that January 17 ICA,
00:38:18.460
does not dispute the central finding of the ICA. Well, I mean, the biggest finding of the ICA was
00:38:24.460
that Putin interfered to help Trump. That was the one they really wanted to help Trump. And it does,
00:38:29.860
it does dispute that. It says, how could you have possibly reached that with high confidence that
00:38:34.520
aspired judgment did not merit the high confidence level that the CIA and FBI attached to it? Unmentioned
00:38:41.800
by Michael Schmidt. Okay, let's keep going, because this is, I think, the big one that we've been
00:38:47.180
waiting to get to. As part of the assessment, the CIA had the dossier, remember that compilation of
00:38:55.820
unsubstantiated allegations dug up by a British spy about Trump's ties to Russia,
00:39:02.980
attached as an annex to the assessment. The assessment was not based on the dossier.
00:39:11.260
It didn't play a role in the conclusions. But what the report is essentially saying is that this
00:39:20.080
unsubstantiated document called the dossier, it should never have been attached in the first place.
00:39:26.820
And because it was attached, it casts some doubt on the entire claim.
00:39:33.280
First of all, note the language he uses to describe the so-called dossier. He calls it
00:39:38.820
unsubstantiated. It's a collection of conspiracy fiction. It's a complete lie. Every FBI effort to
00:39:46.960
verify the dossier just kept leading to the fact that there's nothing here, that Christopher Steele is a
00:39:53.140
fraudster. And Schmidt waters that down by calling it unsubstantiated, as if it still might be true,
00:40:01.800
Yeah, right. It's fiction. It's just complete fiction. It's conspiracy fantasy that Hillary
00:40:10.660
Clinton paid for, which I didn't hear him mention there, and that the FBI relied on. And it's just
00:40:15.720
a complete joke. So that's the first thing. And then also, he says that this was attached,
00:40:21.080
a summary of the Steele dossier was attached as an annex, but it wasn't in the main body. He's ignoring
00:40:26.100
the fact that now we know from the recent declassifications that actually there's a
00:40:32.500
footnote in the body of the intelligence community assessment, and it says, see annex,
00:40:38.760
but by which they mean, see the Steele dossier. So in trying to put forward this idea that Russia
00:40:43.960
was trying to help Trump, they reference in the body of the ICA, not just as an annex,
00:40:48.380
they have a footnote referring you to the annex, which means the Steele dossier is in the body
00:40:53.300
of the ICA. And let me just reiterate what Schmidt claimed. He said the assessment,
00:40:58.180
that intelligence community assessment, was not based on the dossier. It did not play a role
00:41:03.800
in the conclusions. And so first, we are disputing the basic premise there. It effectively is in the
00:41:11.860
assessment. It is referenced in a footnote. The footnote that supports Putin was trying to help
00:41:17.080
Trump says, look at the exhibit, look at the appendix, and specifically look at the dossier
00:41:22.820
that is in the body of the report as the proof of one of the most, or if not, it is the most
00:41:29.520
controversial piece of the assessment, which is Putin did this to help Trump get elected. Keep going.
00:41:34.640
Yeah. And according to these recent disclosures, John Brennan was pushing for the inclusion of the
00:41:39.420
dossier because as he told his counterparts, he said, it just rings true, which speaks to the fact
00:41:46.580
that John Brennan was attached to a conspiracy theory that Trump and Russia were in cahoots and
00:41:51.540
that Russia was trying to help Trump. And of course, Schmidt ignores that. And so if the director
00:41:56.600
of the CIA is campaigning for the Steele fiction to be included and is saying that it rings true to
00:42:02.600
him, does Michael Schmidt really want to argue that a report produced under Brennan's direction
00:42:06.880
isn't influenced by the Steele dossier, especially when it's referenced in the body of the report as
00:42:12.780
a footnote. So he's completely omitting the countervailing facts to undermine his narrative,
00:42:17.420
which is, again, it is the norm. All the analysts, all the Russia experts are like,
00:42:22.000
we can't include this. This is total garbage. Brennan's insisting on it. The FBI is insisting on it.
00:42:27.980
It's in the classified appendix, by the way, which at least 200 people get, but we know leaked
00:42:33.360
like crazy to all the journalists to create the perception that somehow this document was
00:42:37.460
legitimate. We know that that same fraudulent document, this fiction that Aaron describes
00:42:43.760
was used to get the wiretapping, the warrants for the wiretapping. I mean, it's this hugely
00:42:49.800
important document. So for Schmidt to sort of go, oh, it wasn't really important to the ICA.
00:42:54.980
It's just straight up gaslighting at this point.
00:42:57.520
The CIA assessment that we've been discussing that Ratcliffe released says the Steele dossier
00:43:05.220
was used to support the conclusion that Putin aspired to help Trump and reads as follows.
00:43:11.220
Ultimately, agency heads decided to include a two page summary of the dossier as an annex to the ICA
00:43:15.880
with a disclaimer that the material was not used to reach the analytic conclusions. However,
00:43:20.660
by placing a reference to the annex material in the main body of the ICA as the fourth supporting
00:43:25.240
bullet for the judgment that Putin aspired to help Trump win, the ICA implicitly elevated
00:43:30.060
unsubstantiated claims to the status of credible supporting evidence, compromising the analytical
00:43:34.860
integrity of the judgment. The House Intel report, the other, the HPSI that also just came out,
00:43:40.980
thanks to Tulsi, also states Brennan, then CIA director, refused to remove the dossier from the
00:43:46.660
ICA and said, doesn't it ring true? Contradicting public claims by Brennan that the dossier was not in
00:43:53.760
any way incorporated into the ICA. That's what Brennan wants us to believe. We've never incorporated
00:43:57.700
it in the ICA. It was a nothing burger to us. The dossier was referenced in the ICA main body text.
00:44:04.140
This is HPSI telling us the truth. It is referenced in there, as you just pointed out, Aaron,
00:44:08.980
and further detailed in a two page ICA annex. The ICA sourcing errors involving the dossier violated so
00:44:16.420
many intelligence community directives that the text would normally not have passed first line
00:44:21.100
supervisor review at CIA, FBI or other intelligence community agencies. Moreover, the dossier made
00:44:27.260
outlandish claims and was written in an amateurish conspiracy and political propaganda tone that
00:44:32.580
invited skepticism, if not ridicule over its content. Still sticking here with the HPSI conclusions.
00:44:38.200
Two senior CIA officers, one from Russia operations and the other from Russia analysts, argued with
00:44:44.260
Brennan that the dossier should not be included at all in the ICA because it failed to meet basic
00:44:49.580
tradecraft standards. According to a senior officer present at the meeting, that same officer said
00:44:54.980
Brennan refused to remove it. And when confronted with the dossiers, many flaws responded. Yes,
00:45:00.260
but doesn't it ring true? And then you get Michael Schmidt doing cleanup in aisle seven with
00:45:05.120
the assessment was not based on the dossier. It did not play a role in the conclusions. This is so
00:45:12.940
dishonest. It did play a role. It was an important role to support the most important conclusion.
00:45:19.300
And the fact that it was in there in any way in the annex or in that footnote that referenced the
00:45:25.660
annex was extremely controversial amongst the most seasoned Russia experts within the intelligence
00:45:32.480
community, including in the CIA itself. And the reason they were overruled is because the CIA director
00:45:40.700
said it smells true. Where was that in Michael Schmidt's reporting either in the newspaper or
00:45:49.560
sitting on the daily? And what's funny about all of this is if you were someone who was skeptical of
00:45:56.640
all these claims, you know, Russia interfered, Russia hacked the DNC, Trump-Russia collusion,
00:46:01.940
you were called a apologist for Russia, for Trump, a conspiracy theorist. And the line was,
00:46:08.320
you know, how dare, this was the consensus of the U.S. intelligence community. I mean,
00:46:11.700
this was done on serious work. And James Clapper and John Brennan would go on CNN and MSNBC where
00:46:17.060
they worked as on-air analysts and say, you know, this was robust intelligence. Well, now we're
00:46:21.980
getting, like the picture we're getting from all this declassification was that actually, this was
00:46:26.420
just the consensus of a few people, James Clapper, John Brennan, and a few of the partisans. And they
00:46:31.260
have all these people under them pushing back, including, we learned this week, Mike Rogers,
00:46:34.980
the head of the NSA, saying, you're not showing us the intelligence to reach your most important
00:46:39.420
conclusion that Russia hacked and leaked Democratic Party emails, which was the allegation that kicked
00:46:44.260
off Russiagate. When Donald Trump, at his July 2018 summit in Helsinki with Putin, said that he
00:46:51.940
actually, that Putin gave a pretty strong denial that Russia interfered. And he said, I have no reason
00:46:56.980
to doubt him. There was a national freak out. John Brennan said that Trump was nothing short
00:47:02.520
of treasonous, by the way, which is ironic for people not complaining about, you know, Tulsi Gabbard
00:47:08.260
accusing others of treason. Well, this is what John Brennan and everyone was saying about Trump for
00:47:11.140
years, including when Trump dared question the intelligence consensus. It turns out Trump and
00:47:15.700
everybody else who refused to take the word of John Brennan and James Clapper were actually agreeing
00:47:20.440
with all the lower level intelligence officials who Clapper and Brennan overruled.
00:47:26.040
It's, it's, it's just stunning. I mean, it's just, I'll tell you, I, I was one of those,
00:47:32.540
you know, right leaning people who had trust in these agencies for most of my reporting career.
00:47:38.720
I really did. Like I, I, it's stunning. It's still stunning to me to see the veil come down and see how
00:47:43.800
corrupt they were and what liars they were, what partisan hacks. Um, that's, that's a lesson well
00:47:49.180
learned. All right, here's the last one. And this is a doozy too. Uh, SOT 57.
00:47:54.000
The FBI director, Cash Patel, declassifies a piece of intelligence that he claims shows
00:48:02.160
that this conspiracy, it actually originated with Hillary Clinton.
00:48:09.220
That's how vindictive and vicious the former leadership structure here was. They withheld and
00:48:14.240
hid documentation and put it in rooms where people weren't supposed to look. And it's a good thing
00:48:19.020
we're here now to clean it up. And you're about to see a wave of transparency, but are you saying,
00:48:23.300
huh? And what evidence does Patel offer to support that claim?
00:48:27.700
An email between Clinton allies in which they claim that Clinton personally approved a plan to tie Trump
00:48:39.960
to Russia. Hmm. But what Patel doesn't say is that a previous special counsel that was appointed
00:48:49.460
by Trump's justice department to look into the Russia hoax determined that the email was likely a fake.
00:48:58.780
Wow. That Russian intelligence officials had taken a range of hacked emails and made them into a composite
00:49:07.320
that depicted Clinton as the originator of the conspiracy.
00:49:11.600
And presumably the FBI director, Cash Patel would have known that and yet still released it
00:49:21.600
Amazing there. By the way, if you just listen to their express words,
00:49:24.600
you know, in, in a courtroom, you would object that this was improper impeachment of Cash Patel,
00:49:31.060
because first he says it was a fake. And then he says, actually, what they did was they took actual
00:49:36.680
emails they had hacked and created a composite. So it, so the ultimate email he's saying was fake,
00:49:41.900
but he's essentially admitting there, Aaron, that the underlying data was real and was from actual
00:49:48.760
hacked emails. They got, um, when they hacked these entities, like the Soros related entities
00:49:54.760
surrounding Hillary Clinton and the DNC, but your, your thoughts on, on this claim.
00:49:58.520
Yeah. Well, again, the irony, these people are complaining about relying on supposedly fake
00:50:03.120
information when they promoted the steel dossier, for example, which is a, which a collection of
00:50:07.560
conspiracy theories funded by Hillary Clinton. So it's just a bit rich for them to try to claim a high
00:50:12.580
ground here. You know, I've been cautious about these hacked emails. We're told they come from Russian
00:50:18.420
intelligence. Uh, I let's even take that on faith, although I'm not even sure if that's true, but I'm not
00:50:24.860
sure if I take all these emails on faith, you know, Durham is uncertain. He says, I don't know if these
00:50:29.220
are all genuine, if they're partly fake, fully fake. And I think that is, um, the line that, that,
00:50:36.000
that we should take. We don't know for sure if they're true or not, if they are true, it's more
00:50:39.860
evidence of what we already know. And that's my key point. We don't need these emails to know
00:50:44.600
exactly what happened, which was that Hillary Clinton framed Trump as a Russian, uh, agent. I mean,
00:50:49.900
it's beyond dispute months before these allegedly Russian emails, uh, were, uh, written the Hillary
00:50:57.720
Clinton campaign hired Christopher Steele, uh, via Fusion GPS. Christopher Steele put together a bunch
00:51:03.540
of fiction about Trump and Russia being cahoots, Trump being blackmailed by Putin. Christopher Steele
00:51:08.280
funneled his conspiracy theories into the FBI. He meets with an FBI agent in early July. It gets back
00:51:14.220
to the FBI. A few weeks later, the FBI opens up its Trump Russia investigation and uses the Steele
00:51:19.360
dossier as source material. We only learn, I believe in October, 2017, that's when the Hillary
00:51:24.780
Clinton campaign finally admitted that they were secretly funding the Steele dossier. There wasn't
00:51:29.740
a Clinton effort to frame Trump. And that's what the New York times cannot grapple with because they
00:51:34.460
were a part of peddling that conspiracy theory. And all Schmidt's doing here, by the way, the trick
00:51:38.980
he's pulling is he's pointing to a single part of that really large declassified annex and saying they
00:51:45.940
went to the Soros guy. He said it wasn't him. Even in that interview between the FBI and the
00:51:50.680
Soros guy, the Soros guy says that part, some of the emails did sound like him. Um, he didn't say
00:51:56.960
for sure that it wasn't him at all. So, you know, again, it's like, there's so much complexity here,
00:52:01.840
but the big picture remains the same, which is that Schmidt is creating straw men and dismissing them
00:52:07.700
as a way to dismiss this much larger body of evidence. And that really what it shows is just a huge
00:52:13.500
amount of information, uh, potential, potential criminal activity that the FBI decides not to
00:52:18.340
pursue. And instead, you basically creating and manipulating intelligence in order to paint Trump
00:52:24.680
as a Putin puppet in order to get the wiretaps in order to leak that to the media to create
00:52:29.160
disinformation. So everything would just sort of end up snowballing over time.
00:52:33.240
They were agenda driven from the start and they remain agenda driven guys. Thank you both so much.
00:52:39.300
This has been so clarifying, very helpful. And thanks to all of you for joining us today. And
00:52:43.820
this week we're back on Monday with Walter Kirk. See you then. Thanks for listening to the Megan
00:52:50.980
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