 Hi, this is Joe Laurier. Before you watch our latest episode of CN Live, I just wanted to thank you, the viewers and readers of Consortium News for your past generosity in funding our unique website. It was begun 25 years ago in November 1995 by Bob Perry, one of the best investigative reporters in American journalistic history. Bob depended on readers as well for the independence that Consortium News has always had. And during these days of crisis and pandemic and the crisis in journalism with Julian Assange languishing in prison, we ask you to support us through these tough times so that we can continue to bring you these special stories, a unique perspective on news that you won't find in corporate media. Thank you. Welcome to CN Live, season two, episode nine, Russia Gate, who was Gulsiflut 2.0? I'm Joe Laurier, Editor-in-Chief of Consortium News. And I'm Elizabeth Boss. For more than three years now, the American public and indeed the world has been subjected to a lurid tale of Russian skull-duggery, a covert interference in a U.S. election intended to determine the next U.S. president. It was a so-called attack likened to Pearl Harbor in 9-11. This theory of conspiracy rested on three pillars, that Russian GRU defense intelligence agents posing as a shadowy online figure named Gulsiflut 2.0 had hacked into the DNC computers and the email database of Hillary Clinton's campaign chairman. And the Russians gave these emails to WikiLeaks to publish in order to damage Clinton's candidacy. Another pillar was that members of the Trump campaign conspired or colluded with Russians to do this. And lastly, that a Russian troll farm undermined U.S. democracy, divided our country with a hundred thousand dollars. All three pillars have now collapsed. Robert Mueller's report last year found no collusion or conspiracy between Russia and the Trump campaign. Sean Henry, the head of Crowdstrike, testified two years ago behind closed doors to the House Intelligence Committee that there was no evidence of any exfiltration or extraction of material from the DNC computers that they were brought in to look at as opposed to the FBI. And the Russian troll farm accused of dividing the country with a few ads actually demanded discovery in their case against the U.S. government and therefore the U.S. case collapsed. Here to discuss these new developments that have come about in the last few days is Ray McGovern, a former CIA analyst who briefed presidents George H.W. Burch and Monal Reagan, and William Binney, who is a former technical director of the National Security Agency. You're welcome both Bill and Ray to the show. And I want to begin by discussing some new information or a new analysis of the persona of Goose for 2.0 in an article written by Tim Leonard that was published on Consortium News just a few days ago. So I want to turn that over to my co-host Elizabeth Hoss. Ray, Bill, I assume that you've had time to read Tim Leonard's latest article published with Consortium News on Goose for 2. Ray, can I get your thoughts and then Bill, I'd like to have your thoughts as well on that article and the plethora of information that it contains. All I can say is that Tim has delivered a masterful article with technical detail that even a history major like me can understand, okay? He's put it all together. And it's not like it's a bright dawning star for us. Bill Binney and I have been saying from months and months and months that Goose for 2.0 is a fraud, an out now fraud, and we can prove it. The question of exactly who he, she, or it, we use non-sexist language with respect to Goose for 2.0. Who it is, well, you know, it's somebody, look at Cui Bono, who profits, who profits from laying the blame on the Russians. The recent information in Tim Leonard's article includes information that one couldn't believe that Goose for 2 would say like, what about the Russian connection or trying to probe for what, what indeed WikiLeaks had? In other words, they knew because Julian Assange announced it on the 12th of June, 2016, that as he put it, we have emails related to Hillary Clinton pending publication, period, okay? So everybody in the world is paying attention that WikiLeaks had that data. So where does Goose for 2.0 come onto the, well, he comes on three days later. He says, oh, yeah, well, yeah, we, we, we approve of what CrowdStrike has just said. This is a Russian, Russian deal. And I won't belabor the point, but, but Tim Leonard goes into chapter and verse about how this data was manipulated with Russian footprints and everything else to indicate that the Russians hacked. And now we know from testimony in the head of CrowdStrike that the Russians didn't dnc emails. Nobody hacked the dnc email. They weren't exfiltrated as the 35 cent word. They weren't hacked. Okay. It was an inside job, which again, Bill and I have been saying for three years now. Bill, your take. Well, yeah, I think Tim was just adding more fuel to the fire of the Russians didn't really do it. I mean, what we found, of course, was that when the testimony from the, from the DNI came, was released by the DNI of Henry's testimony to the House Intelligence Committee, I mean, he clearly said that we had, we had no evidence that the data was exfiltrated. And yet in public, he was saying the Russians did it. Well, you know, from our point, just from the straight calculations we did in, and we said in our article, the 24th of July in 2017, that the speed was just too great to go across the net. So it had to be a local download. And that was basically what CrowdStrike said. And then we had another whistleblower. I know hasn't been talked about too much publicly. He's talking about a program that was set up by Clapper and Brennan inside CIA. So nobody in the government would know it was running. And that was to spy on anybody they wanted to in the country. And that clearly was, in my view, the way the people who were involved in setting up Goose for Two most likely came from that group. And the reason I say that is because of the Russian fingerprints that were discovered by Tim and group over there in the UK, that were in some of the emails that Goose for Two put out on the 15th of June, that were published by WikiLeaks later as a part of the Podesta batch that did not have these fingerprints. And that told me very clearly that just more ammunition saying it's this group inside CIA because that's the kind of thing that you would expect from a Marvel framework type program that was compromised in Vault 7. And in Vault 7 they also said that that program was used once in 2016. So I think we're looking at that time it was used. So to me, it all points back at CIA as the origin of Goose for Two. I'm reminded of the when did you stop beating your wife question that Adam Schiff asked Sean Henry. Again, Sean Henry, the chief of CrowdStrike, this cyber firm of dubious repute that the DNC hired and paid for just as they hired and paid for Christopher Steele. So what Adam Schiff says is, so Mr. Henry, can you tell us when the Russians hacked those emails? And Henry has to consult his counsel. He would notice, right? As my counsel says, we don't know that they were exfiltrated much less when they were exfiltrated. Sometimes we have really good evidence that they've been exfiltrated, but we don't have any evidence that they've been exfiltrated. So there you go, you know, here's Sean Henry admitting that. Now, this to us is pretty close to proof that if the FBI relied on CrowdStrike, which they say they did, saying it was a top flight organization, which it wasn't, then, you know, the whole foundation of Russian hacking and the chagate fall apart. And so this is a serious thing. I'll just add this, that although we made a big thing out of the transfer rate indicating that it wasn't a hack, but rather it was a download onto a thumb drive, well before that. I remember Bill saying in December of 2016, okay? If it were a hack, ipso facto NSA would have that data. And on the off chance, they didn't have one of our friendly collection allies would have it, okay? That's 99% true, okay? No one would, well, the Baltimore Sun did publish a couple of our bids. So that was December of 16. Then we published this memo on the transfer rate mostly in July of 17. And this indication that the data was indeed saved in a format that had nothing to do with the incident, but had lots to do with a thumb drive. That's called a FAT format. And before I forget what the FAT stands for, Bill, would you take that one and explain? That's a file allocation format. And what it means simply is when this program downloads and indexes data on the thumb drive or a storage device. It modifies the last modified time on each file to the nearest even second. That's all. And so all 35,813 emails from, published by WikiLeaks from the DNC, have their last modified times rounded off to an even second. And to specify for a moment, in 2017 in July, the VIPS memo that you all published was specifically in reference to the NGP van files published by Goose for two. Whereas I know that Bill, yourself and some others have also studied the DNC emails. And that's where we get this discussion of FAT as well. So just so the viewers understand. But I wanted to go back to this concept of the Podesta email attachment that was the Trump opposition report being the document that not only had the Russian fingerprints that Tim's article has discussed and that his analysis has focused on for a very long time, but also was referenced by CrowdStrike in June when it first announced in the Washington Post that, you know, the DNC has been hacked. This Trump opposition document has been stolen from the DNC. Well, as you said, we come to find out that that's a Podesta attachment. Can you comment on the significance of that? Well, as near as I can tell from the last modified time, just looking at those of the Podesta emails, those are mixed odd and even. So that would, that would not necessarily indicate it was downloaded locally, but that it was hacked. So yeah, I don't have any problem with that statement that it was hacked. Ray, do you have any comment on that? Not really. Okay. Another thing that Tim's analysis has always focused on is the kind of agenda and obviously his article recently is about the agenda of Goose for Two and Goose for Two's interaction with WikiLeaks. We know that in a private DM conversation with an actress named Robin Young, Goose for Two's persona had basically suggested that Seth Rich was his source. And then meanwhile in other conversations, you know, Goose for Two is presenting themselves as the source for WikiLeaks. Do you have any thoughts on kind of the angle that this persona seems to have had and which Tim is discussing in this latest piece that he's published? It's really difficult to parse each and every comment in that exchange. But the question, of course, is Cui Bono who profits from the notion that the Russians hack. And that answer is easy. It's the whole group that can try starting with Hillary Clinton herself as a way to disguise or distract attention from what was in those emails. What was in those emails, one will remember, is proof that Hillary and the DNC stole the nomination from Bernie Sanders as they did again this year. So, you know, there was a real major effort to distract attention from it. It was a major distraction, if you will. And they said, why do the Russians do the Russians are Russian and nobody asked, well, what's in those emails? And those emails were very damning. So did those emails hurt Hillary Clinton? Well, I would say for the 0.12% of the American people who are aware of them, well, probably yes. Was that enough to skew the election? I don't think so. So this is really important. In other words, it fulfilled several functions. To disguise the fact that emails said what they did. To give post-election, Hillary and her folks some excuse to have lost. And then probably most important, to put the spike on any effort that Donald Trump had, if he were serious, to improve relations with Russia. I mean, you know, improve relations with Russia. What happens to the Mickey Mat? What happens to the profiteering on all the weaponry? Mickey Mat, by the way, is the military and congressional intelligent media academia think tank complex. Why do I say media? Because media is the cornerstone, all this stuff. And without the media drumming this drum for three years now, most Americans would be open to the suggestion that, well, maybe the Russians didn't hack right now. Right now it's a real uphill struggle. So coming away from this Goose for two story, what do you all make of the fact that the media seems to, you know, in the wake of your various memos, in the wake of Tim's analysis and analysis by other analysts in the field, the media seems to at times almost seem to walk away from the Goose for two narrative and kind of switch it out with other aspects of the Russia gate, you know, saga. What do you feel that the media's kind of status is right now? They just kind of decided to forget Goose for two and walk away from it, or do you think that they're still going to be trying to push this narrative in the history books that the DNC was hacked and that Goose for two was WikiLeaks' source? Well, if I can answer that one first, because I was the one who was called a conspiracy theorist by the entire mainstream media. I think they have a very large crow to eat, you know, because they've been fabricating this story and they know it's been a falsehood from the beginning. They've done no basic research on it, like the investigative reporters are supposed to do. They do not fulfill their obligation under the First Amendment. The constitutions are my vote. I vote to exclude them, you know. They're no longer a part of that. They're a part, a tool of the CIA and the intelligence community and the government. So they no longer serve the people of the United States. So my view is they should be taken out of the First Amendment. I could add a little something here. Yeah, there's a lot of crow to go around. But how many people know about all this? I mean, let's, on the 7th of May, what's today, the 23rd or 24th? On the 7th of May, the House Intelligence Committee released this testimony. Now, thanks to real investigators like Aaron Matei, and we were alerted to it right away because Aaron took the trouble to read the testimony of CrowdStrike's head, Sean Henry. And what does it say? It says that, well, hold on, American people, under oath, I have to admit that there's no evidence that the Russians or anybody else hacked the DNC. Wow. Okay. What do I want to say in here? Well, I don't know. The traction would say 23 minus seven is what, six? So it's more than two weeks that before, since that happened, has the New York Times said anything about it? No. Washington Post? No. Wall Street Journal? I don't think so. L.A. Time? No. So the infinite capacity of the mainstream media, which is the cornerstone of Mickey Matt to not only opfuscate, but completely ignore critical information like this, is really quite striking. I've never seen the like of it. So just as with the Mueller report, where they were all proved either terribly naive or purposefully distracting, now they can just either, will somebody bring this to their attention? Well, we've been trying like hell, but we can't get any air or any print in any of the so-called mainstream media. That's why it's so good for us to have a chance to vent, as I am doing right now, in a forum like this. Great. Did MSNBC report the Henry Remarks? I'm sorry? Did MSNBC report the Henry Remarks? Not that I'm aware of, but I have to. Yes? I'm allergic to MSNBC. I just want to hear you say no again. It was so comforting. But I want to go back to the, you mentioned Henry's testimony that wasn't reported, and he was asked about the date. When was this hacked? I suppose it took place, and that's when he said, well, there was no hack. But then, Adam Schiff, the chairman of that committee, supplied a date. I can't remember exactly. It was April 26th, I think. It was in April. And so, yeah, yeah, I think I remember that. Now, that's the date that's in the Mueller indictment and report that this hack supposedly took place. My question to you, and Bill, is based on what you might know, what do you think Mueller was basing this, his basically his indictment and dates like that, on with that NSA material that could get a hack? Was it the FBI? Who do you think was the basis of this? Bill, shaking your head, you go first. Okay. I'll volunteer. Yeah. In the Rosenstein indictment, he goes through this, good for two guys did this, this did that, and this did that. And people of alleged, they thought that was NSA data or came from NSA. And I quite clearly could say, no, it didn't. And the reason's pretty simple. Anything that NSA collects is classified. And so therefore, what Rosenstein would be doing would be exposing classified material to the public. And he should have been redacted if that was the case. That's the standard procedure. If you expose the classified material, you redact that part. So it also implied methods and sources and methods like how we got it, where we got it from, and things of that nature. So all that should have been redacted if it came from NSA or FBI. Wait a minute. It did not. Wait a minute. I assume it came from a third party like CrowdStrike or some other company. And they made it up. And so therefore, it's basically inadmissible as hearsay. Well, first of all, Rod Rosenstein was the acting attorney general at the time, correct? Yeah. And Rosenstein, you're saying that he, why couldn't the NSA show this to Mueller's team or to Rosenstein and say, you can't say where it came from. You can't give anything away. But this is the facts. And then you just have to make that assertion. Yeah. But he can't publish it in an indictment without redacting it. The indictment did not say the source of that information, correct? It's on the web. Yeah, it didn't. But it said, here, this goes for two days, went in here and did this and that and so on. That would have to be classified if it came from NSA. Right. But I'm saying, how do we not know that the NSA didn't give that to Rosenstein and said, you can't mention your source? Well, it's a violation of a Title 18 law. You know, it's a criminal violation of leaking classified material. Even to the Attorney General. That's what Rosenstein is guilty of. Even to the Attorney General. Exactly. The only one who can declassify is the President. What about parallel construction here? You've talked often about that, allowing the DOJ and then go ahead and build their own case. That's not what happened here though, is it? They didn't build a case. No, it's not a parallel construction. Yeah, that's the point. Now Bill, Ray said they knew they were lying right from the beginning. You went to see Mr. Pompeo when he was the head of the Central Intelligence Agency on the word of the President of the United States, correct? Yep, that's correct. Which means he's looking at the memo, which is quite interesting, your memos. Now Pompeo, you gave Pompeo a chance there to back out of this, which is becoming an embarrassment. How did he respond to you? Well, you know, I told him that his agency and all the other IC agencies were lying to him and the President. Because, you know, they weren't telling him the truth about this. These people know what's going on. And he said he found it hard to believe that the people in his agency or other agencies would be doing that. Well, I mean, it's becoming very clear to everybody that that in fact has been the case and has been the case for a very long time, especially in dealing with this Russiagate thing, not counting the weapons of mass destructions or the Tonkin Gulf affair or anything that have gotten us into wars that were based on lies. So, I mean, you know, he knows it. I think the President knows it better than he does, but he is basically a bureaucrat backing away from it. Did he say he couldn't understand the technical aspects of it? No, in fact, he had two other people who I assume were at least representatives of the technical groups that were involved at CIA. He had them there and they asked me, how did we do the calculations? And I told them, and you know, that was it. Well, the Pompers moved on to Rawamangra against China now. He seems to have forgotten Russia altogether. I want to ask Ray and Bill one question that's always troubled me when I thought about who Guccifer II Borno might actually be. If he was not the Russians, who would benefit, as Ray said? Qui Bono would be Clinton campaign. People in the intelligence community who wanted Clinton to win, who thought that she was going to win. And then I thought, well, why would they then send these emails to WikiLeaks, Hillary Clinton emails that are damaged, clearly damaging, whether or not they influence how much they influence the election we can put aside? But why would they send them? And then in Tim's article, as I was going through it, preparing it for publication, I saw something I'd never seen before, and that is a direct message from WikiLeaks to someone saying, we did not use anything that Guccifer sent us. And I thought about that, if that's a true statement. And in fact, if Guccifer sent stuff, as this gig amount of file, as the Mueller report says, that Guccifer sent to WikiLeaks, could it be that in fact, the NSA knew, somebody in government knew, that WikiLeaks already had all these emails, and that they were made to be sent again by Guccifer in order to create a person that they can pin on the Russians, because they already knew WikiLeaks had this and was going to publish it. So the horse had bolted. And now there was a matter of blaming the Russians for it. Is that possible, Bill? Is that what you think may have happened? All right, I think that's exactly what you hit it right on the head there, Joe. I think that's exactly what happened in the motivation for them doing it. So it just added nothing to WikiLeaks. And so there was no damage done by it from the Clinton side. So I think that that's just, and they knew, by the way, that the the Podesta emails were hacked, but not the DNC. So that didn't cost them anything. Do they know who hacked the Podesta emails? Do they really know? They should, because every packet hacked carries with it, you know, internal addressing to get it from point A to point B in the world. And they're saying, they're saying, they're saying now through Mueller's indictment that it was also the GRU that hacked the Podesta. They should produce the IPs and all of that from the, and all the TCP IP format going with those, those, or whatever format it used that, that were being used to exfiltrate that data. I mean, NSA, NSA covers all the X, you know, there are only certain trans-oceanic cables that surface on the U.S. And those carry all transmissions from foreigners to U.S. and U.S. to foreigners, or foreigners to foreigners through the U.S. So that means if you wanted to get anything that was foreign, tap those points and those points only and you'll get it. But NSA is tapping the entire United States and I've got all the tap points for them, a little over 100 and some tap points that they use inside the 48 states of the United States. So there's no question about them having the data. They should actually have it. If not them, then the British who tap the oceanic cables or the satellites or any of the way to get data across the Atlantic and other countries that are participating with them in Europe somewhere along the line, they've got those packets. So who did it and who were the IPs and where did it come from? Where did it go and when? They know all of that. But you said that's classified. They wouldn't be able to tell us or even the Attorney General. The President can declassify it anytime he wants. Ray, you're shaking your head. Go on. Forensics are not classified. In other words, you know, you can release this kind of information. I would like to go back and just make clear for our watchers or our listeners. It was on June 12th, 2016, that Julian Assange publicly announced, quote, we have emails related to Hillary Clinton pending publication period and quote, that's when everybody knew the DNC was really in trouble because those emails almost certainly show how Hillary stole the nomination from Bernie Sanders. This has happened more recently as well. Now, that's when it started. So everyone knew that those emails were going to be published pending publication. In the event, they were published three days before the Democratic National Convention on 22nd of July, 2016. Now, this gave all kinds of nefarious people at six weeks or so. I forget, you know, do the subtraction to figure out how to explain this terrible revelation of how Hillary and the DC stole the nomination. And so that's when this first two was created like a phoenix. That's why CrowdStrike came right in and said, ah, it's like I got Russian fingerprints or footprints on it. And then did it in the next day. Goose for two says, yep, it sure does. And me, I'm working for the Russians. I mean, hello, how transparent is all that. So what I'm saying is that's the background. But even before that, Bill and I worked on this back in November, December of 2016. And Bill told me and he said, look, there's a difference between a hack and a leak and a leak. It can be done on the thumb drive. And there's no evidence of a hack. Now that was December 2016. We had it published in the Baltimore Sun. Fast forward, December 2017, John Henry says, yeah, Bill Benny was right. There was no evidence of no, no, he didn't say Bill Benny was right. But he said there's no evidence of a hack. So there's a year later. So all this time we've been saying, look, if there was the kinds of information, NSA would have it and there'd be no detriment in its releasing it. So why was that not sufficient? Well, that was not sufficient because of Rumsfeld's dictum. Okay, you remember what he said? The absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. What the Princeton to learn that. Okay. Now, what does that mean? Well, just because we have no evidence of weapons of mass destruction doesn't mean they're not there. So transform that to just because we have no evidence of a Russian hack doesn't mean they didn't hack. Okay. Well, okay. That's what that's where it stood at the December, January, 2016, 2017, until we did our memo in July of 2017, based, thank goodness, on Tim Leonard's good work, the good work of Forensicator, the good work of Skip Folden who ran, ran IT for IBM for many years. We had these outside people that were just really as, as full of integrity as you could imagine. And we, with their help, we published and we told the president, look, Mr. President, it wasn't a hack of anybody by Russia or by anybody else. It was a leak. We can prove it. And by the way, Mr. President, I ought to ask around, find out who Goose for 2.0 is. Now he did. Then CIA director Pompeo, hey, you ought to have Benny in. And the first thing he says to Benny, if, if I have this quote right, Bill was, you should appreciate the only reason I invited you here, Mr. Benny, is because the president told me to. He said, if I want to know about Russian hacking, I need to talk to you. Is that right, Bill? Is that what he said? Yeah, if you wanted to know facts about Russiagate, yeah. Yeah, you have to talk to me. Yeah. That's exactly right. And you told him, his people were lying to him, right? That's right. And he said, I'm going to get at that. No, he didn't say that did he? He's afraid of his own people. He's afraid of his own people because he knows his own people played a role in this. Yeah. There's a whole that John Brennan set up for the cyber warfare. You might, you might say a word about that because you were there, Bill, when that, when that kind of close cooperation between CIA and NSA had its inception. Yeah, it started basically got much closer after 9-11 because they, you know, they were all a playing game and all who didn't do what and who should have done what, you know, and all of that. But yeah, that's when they started really cooperating. But the hundreds of millions of lines of Vault 7 code that we talked about when it came out was basically a compilation of data attacks, different attacks on firewalls, operating systems, servers, switches, so on. Collective from NSA and GCHQ also shared with CIA. So, you know, it's all a collective effort because CIA didn't come up with all that, all that effort over, I would think, a two-year period that they had their cyber attack program running inside CIA, something like that. They could never have come up with all that expertise in that short period of time. So it had to be a transfer of data from NSA and GCHQ to them. Bill, Vault 7's 700 million lines of code sounds like a lot to a history major. Can you translate that into dollars? Yeah, at the time, this is back when I was in there in 2001, source code was, they charged $25 a line of source code. So $25 per line, you know, it's a few billion dollars worth of code. That's a lot, huh? Yeah, yeah. Marble framework, which is the upfuscation tool where they can take Russian, Chinese, Arabic, Persian, and the Korean and lead little telltale signs here and there. That was just part of Vault 7, but still probably up to a three million lines of code, right? Well, a few hundred thousand anyway, yeah. We don't know yet whether it's ever been used, do we? Yeah, it was, once, right? Yeah, but that was, well, that's what you're saying. Well, that was in Vault 7. This came with the announcement, with the WikiLeaks announcement, the memo that they released that they got from the CIA insider said it had been used in 2016. So that's verified. Where? And you're on? Oh, I think we're looking at it with the, I understand that, but they never spelled. I got that, but I don't think they're spelling that out today in that memo. Yeah. That just said it was in 2016. It did say it was used and that's all it said. Yeah, I wonder what happened in 2016. I have no idea. Was there an election or something? Anyway, I want to point out that Sean Henry, when he testified, he was under oath and it was behind closed doors and he thought it would never get out. So when you're in that situation, you're going to probably tell the truth because you don't want to commit perjury and you don't think anybody's going to find out about it anyway, right? And we did find out about it. So that's really interesting. Do you think that John Durham now is, of course, has been appointed by the Attorney General to look into the origins of Russiagate, what we're talking about tonight? Now, we really don't know the whole scope of Durham's investigation, but do you have any idea or do you think he might be even looking into this Guccifer question? Who this was and who may have been behind these hacks or leaks, rather? Big question. We don't know if you do. I do, yeah, because, you know, I mean, it's got to get there. I mean, it's got to be a part of it because it was a part of the Russiagate allegation. Yeah. I mean, that is the origin, the hack, really. Well, the leak was the origin, which Obama couldn't forget whether it was a hack or a leak, either, in his statement. In the same sentence, he used both hack and leak just to cover himself, I guess. So he probably would look at it now. Obama, as Ray has pointed out in numerous of his pieces, Trump has shown a propensity to get very scared when he's faced with having to reveal something that will anger the intelligence services. For example, the Kennedy assassination thing, but this involves him personally. And that couldn't be different because this really damaged him, and he's going into another election. So he wants to turn the tables, obviously, if he could use this against the people who try to hurt him. So Bill, Bill first, what do you think that Trump will make something out of this if, in fact, there are findings by Durham before the election, presumably. And do you think Brennan, you said Brennan earlier we were chatting before we went on the air that Brennan had not been questioned yet by Durham. Can you also talk about that? Well, yeah. Well, I mean, I think they're saving Brennan for the last because they're accumulating more and more evidence every time they investigate things. Like, for example, they're investigating the hammer, which I think is going on right now. In which case, that's the program set up by Clapper and Brennan, according to the whistleblower, that's what he's alleging. These two guys set up this program internally in CIA so that they could spy on anybody they wanted without being known that that was happening. See, for example, if you go like all the unmasking that's being done now, I actually had recommended that they go back and look at the last five years worth of unmasking of people of U.S. citizens inside the country in NSA reporting. And who did that? And that could help him direct the questioning and also, you know, direct him to ask what kind of questions he should ask. So hopefully that's that's what's happening and that that's one aspect of it. But the other is the anytime anyone goes into the NSA database, he, you know, through the IC READS program, CIA can do that without asking anything. But they do get recorded when they do it. So that they're in the network log, there's a record of them coming in and interrogating the NSA database, what they got, where they went, what they took, what they exfiltrated out. So all of that is on the record inside NSA. So if they want to avoid being on the record inside the government that no one in the government could find out what they were doing, they set up their own program internally in CIA in parallel, tapping into the same access points that NSA has, what they already know exists, and pulling that data off in parallel with NSA. So that's how they get the information in this in the from the existing system without doing anything. And in addition to make it look like they're actively coming into the system to do something, you know, can you really exist and they can simply tap in. Are you revealing any classified information right now, Bill? And what you're saying? Well, it's classified by them, but it's on the web. And now, and I informed a hair clapper when he was the DNI, that I did not give up my First Amendment right to talk about anything in the public domain for anybody, Mr. Clapper. Because you're giving classified material to unauthorized persons like me, Elizabeth, even Ray now, and all the people watching and doing the sound isn't jailed for that very thing. So I just wanted to be careful here. But um, listen, both feet ahead there, Joe. Listen, people need to know this is occurring. It's a direct I will point out to Joe, executive order 13526 section 1.7, which governs all classification of material inside the United States government. You cannot classify anything that's evidence of a crime spying on US citizens without a warrant is a crime. And that's what I'm exposing. But you do carry that around in your pocket, like some people do the constant the Constitution that exactly. I'm waiting to get into the federal courts. I put an affidavit into Roger Stone's case and General Flynn's case, trying to get into court to say this kind of stuff, you know, and they won't be in the judges will not let me testify. I wonder why. Now, when you talk about that executive order, I often think that the collateral murder video that Chelsea Manning found on a shelf and then released it. That was not classified. And I wonder if it wasn't classified because it was a war crime, so they couldn't classify it. Right. That's right. That's right. Okay, now I'm going to get to Ray now. Ray, unless you have something to say, because you have repeatedly written in the August pages of conservative moves and have said in various venues that you believe James Comey, former FBI director James Clapper, former DNI and John Brennan, former CIA director, could be indicted for crimes. What crimes? What statutes would they have broken in this story? Yes, Bill has it written down. He's got that on the other pocket. He's got the executive order in the right pocket and the crimes in there. So, Bill, you want to answer that first? Sure. Let me start out with simply violations of the first, fourth, fifth and sixth amendments of the Constitution, perjury with the parallel construction, falsifying evidence in a court, obstruction of justice, hiding all this activity under classification that they try and keep out of the public none, and then Brady violations of hiding any exculpatory evidence from not only General Flynn's case, but all the other thousands of cases they've tried in court falsifying evidence, and conspiracy to frame General Flynn and others, including us, you know, the NSA whistleblowers, and sedition, subverting the constitutional form of government that we've got, and then treason, the disloyalty to kill a sovereign or overthrow the government. This is trying to overthrow the government. We actually went through an attempted coup, and then just outright illegal leaks. So, I mean, that's simply my list and I'm not a lawyer. But they didn't lie to an FBI agent. So, that's all you got, Bill? Well, I'm glad that you were prepared to answer that question, Bill, because I could always answer it. And I'd add the FISA violations. Taking this garbage from Christopher Steele, making it into the justification for at least three of those four VISA appeals. I mean, the abuse of the judicial proceeding, and maybe I'll just say this, that people say to me, now, Ray, come on, give me a break. You're saying that the top intelligence and the top law enforcement officials of our country were playing willy-nilly with the law and the Constitution at the end of 2016, early 70? Yeah, that's what I'm saying. Call the conspiracy. And I said, well, how could that be? And I said, well, don't you remember? I mean, it's only four years ago. Don't you remember that Hillary bound to win? Everyone expected Hillary to be a shoe in? James Callme in his book writes, quote, I was operating in an environment in which Hillary Clinton was bound to win, period, end quote. Well, hello, you're operating in that environment. You're going to take liberties with the law, the Constitution, if you have a conscience, and you're going to do what you can to ingratiate yourself with Hillary so that when she wins inevitably, you get promoted, you're allowed to stay in your jail. Hello, it's going to be great. The only problem was she didn't win, okay? Now comes the real problem for them. We were so sure she's going to win, we didn't take the rudimentary steps to hide our tracks. It's all over our computers and our hard copy of what we did. My God, what would you do now? Well, that's part of the motivation for Russiagate. You distract everything. You vilify Trump and you make sure that it's never uncovered, except there was so much stuff, so much stuff, the dorm now has, that it's coming down to the denouement. So it's pretty easy to explain if you remember that Hillary's going to win. These guys took all kinds of liberties with the Constitution and the law. Now, Bill and I feel sort of, we both took a solemn oath to support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic. And we spent our careers defending against foreign enemies in a pretty sophisticated intelligence environment. We never expected that Bill can speak for himself, but I never expected to be trying to defend the Constitution of the United States from enemies domestic, but that's what we're doing. I checked with law. Does our oath have any expiration date? No, it doesn't. Okay. Well, aren't you tired doing this? We get asked. They say, well, you know, I didn't take this all the most to defend the Constitution of the United States from all enemies, foreign and domestic, until I got tired. Now, Bill and I are of an age where we could easily get tired, but we ain't there yet. And we're going to keep pursuing this. And I'm just delighted that we have a chance to air all this stuff in a forum that might, you know, the people to spread the truth around. And Ray, we've got our grandchildren and others grandchildren to do this for. Yep. Exactly right. Well, Bill, you mentioned Flynn. I'd like to move on to there, unless Elizabeth has a few more questions on Lucifer. Yes, I just have one more aside, really, and that is to return to the fact that one of the really key points that Tim's latest piece discusses is the fact that Goosefort 2 suggested at one time that Assange was connected to the Russians. And I think that that definitely, as Tim points out, that begs the question, if it was, if Goosefort 2 was this Russian hacking operation, why on earth would they suggest that Assange was connected to Russians? And obviously that just is absurd. And that also does seem to tie into this thing where we see the context in which Goosefort 2 claimed Seth Rich was their source. They write around the time that Assange was going on television on Dutch TV and indirectly discussing Seth Rich's death. It's just important to visit that so that our viewers are aware that this isn't simply one angle that this Goosefort 2 persona sort of went forward with. It seemed to kind of morph and change based on whatever the news cycle was doing. And as Tim points out, the consistent thread is that it portrays WikiLeaks and Assange as in a very bad light. I didn't know if you have any other thoughts on that, Bill and Ray. Well, yeah, another way of playing what I call the Wizard of Oz game. Paying no attention to the man behind the curtain, look over there. And it's just another look over there. That's all. We're just trying to keep the public looking in different places. You get rid of that one, get another one, you know, and so on. So it just keeps a don't look at the man behind the curtain, you know. So that's the whole idea. I agree, Bill. And thanks for posing this, Elizabeth. You know, what's really important here is the obvious question. If, as they have Trout Scrake has now testified under oath, there was no Russian hack or no hack of the DNC emails by anybody. Okay. Well, how did they get to WikiLeaks? Now, no one less than the president of the United States, his name was Obama two days before he left office said, you know, the conclusions of the intelligence community with respect to how the emails got to WikiLeaks are inconclusive. He talked hack, he talked, he talked leak. So he wanted to go and I don't know how they got to WikiLeaks. So how did they get to WikiLeaks? Oh, put that thumb drier DNC computer. Well, Elizabeth, you mentioned Seth Rich. And now we know that the FBI did investigate Seth Rich, that they did look into his computer. We have testimony to that effect. And they lied. And the FBI, please, people don't, don't, don't pale before this calculation. The FBI lied and saying they had no records. Oh, Seth Rich. And another FOIA comes in and says, we want this exchange of emails. And all of a sudden, there are lots of things the FBI has with the subject line, Seth Rich, not buried in the text. But so the FBI lied about having about having and they did investigate. There's the focus and there are some lawsuits going on now where again, the truth is going to come out because it would be these people going to know what about all this and the NSA has chapter and verse on all this. You can be sure of that, as Bill has explained. And they're going to either be subpoenaed at the telling the truth or it's going to be more obfuscation. I'm not sure which is going to be the end result. Can I add one thing here about this whole thing? What it really is, is a threat to any free investigative reporting by anybody. And if you look at what they're doing to Julian Assange is to silence the truth. And what they're doing with the mainstream media, since the mainstream media basically is an arm of CIA and the intelligence community and the government, they're taking over all of the information flow to the public. Now, this is one of the fundamental things that totalitarian state do right from the beginning is to censor and control information to the public. And so that's what they're doing. And this is the basic threat. And it's in action right now. We're down this slope to a totalitarian state. And this is one of the main steps they have to take. People need to start to realize that that's what's going on here. And Congress is cowardly. And even the judiciary is involved now, witness the fact that, well, for a while last year, I had subpoena envy, subpoena envy because all my friends like Bill were getting subpoenas right and left. And then I got another one in February. So, Bill, you want to say a word about the intrusive nature of these subpoenas? Well, they wanted anything that they would anyway would touch on their case, right? In any way. And they gave us certain terms and things to do. So I just did a general search for the terms, you know, and I just got a whole bunch of stuff. I mean, I got more stuff than I cared about. I thought, okay, I'll just dump it all on them. So I just gave them all everything I had. I just gave them, you know, and, you know, they, they, I think they're choking, but I also gave them all of the evidence, including the goose or two photographs of the calculations of all the speeds and everything, item by item timeline by timeline, and also all of the last modified times of all of the DNC emails and all of the pedestrian emails so that they had all that basic evidence. And I haven't heard from them since and I've not been allowed to report to, to testify in any court. Okay. So what's that tell you? The judges are involved in this scam too. So we need to get rid of them also. You gave them a lot more than they really wanted to have Bill, right? Yes, I don't know. Yeah. They had two questions. One was all information not already published about what UVIPS have said about a Russian hack and a Russian leak. Okay. And then the next one was very much like it. It was just a elaboration of that. They wanted every all our correspondence in preparing these memos and and coming coming up with our issuances. And they wanted to know, I guess they were looking as I reconstructed Bill, I think they were looking for that email that my old friend Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin sent me, which said, where'd it go, Ray? You wouldn't be doing a great job up for skating what I did in hacking into the DNC. Is that what they were looking for? My God. Well, there ain't no such thing. Of course, it wouldn't surprise me if they if they forced something like that. But as of now, it's just been a it's just been an incredible witness of how intrusive that these these officials can be and asking you to drain your computer of just about everything that mentions certain key words. So that's I didn't have a problem, Ray, because the in my emails that I was basically saying what I thought about the US government, all the crimes they were committing everything. So I was quite prepared to go into court at any time and testify that so but I've never been asked, even though I've submitted affidavits, sworn affidavits into the courts, you know, I still have a I still have the Third Circuit Court of Appeals, considering the unconstitutional lawsuit that I and another fellow have against the US government, that's still going in the appeals court. And we're now writing an appeal to the Supreme Court. So I just wanted to clarify. The subpoenas that you got bill were in the Roger Stone case. Is that correct? In the Seth Rich case. Also in the Seth Rich case, but you were subpoenaed in Roger Stone. It was mostly Seth Rich. I put an affidavits to Roger Stone's case. Okay, the Seth Rich case was the lawsuit by Aaron Rich, that's brother against Edward Topsky. Yeah, and and somebody else I can't remember who it was out to look and see. Okay, all right, so it's the same case. As a reporter, I have subpoena NV2 that I can't use that. We could never use subpoenas. That's the one thing government investigators have that reporters don't have. I'd like to move on to General Michael Flynn, because as I said at the opening, there was been some very interesting revelations recently. The testimonies, not only of Henry, but there were numerous people. It's taking a lot of time to read through all that. Maybe able to do another show, because Clapper testified, a whole bunch of people testified in that House Intelligence Committee hearing behind closed doors. Now the Michael Flynn case, the FBI released on April 30th, I believe around that time, some quite interesting memos. And it appears to show that the Washington field office decided that they had no case against Flynn, having colluded in some way with the Russians or did anything illegal. They didn't even entertain this ridiculous Logan Act, which is never, no one's ever been prosecuted for. It has to do with the private citizen doing foreign policy with another state. And of course, he was the incoming national security advisor. So the FBI tried to shut this down. And somehow miraculously, it was resurrected. And the memos seemed to show that Peter Strzok, who's in the center of all of this, including the Hillary Clinton emails, not the WikiLeaks related emails, but the ones on her servers, he was involved in that too. And he's involved in Flynn. And he's been involved, he was on the Mueller investigative team until he got outed because of this text and how to be fired. So he seems to be saying now in a memo that the seventh floor of the FBI wanted it reopened, even though the field office said to close it. Now I don't know that Washington office memo says close it if the people on the seventh floor weren't behind that. So I don't know what Strzok is talking about. So I want to ask you guys, who's on the seventh floor beside Comey? Is McCabe, the deputy? Does he happen to be there, by the way? Well, the seventh floor in Washington traditionally talks about the director of the FBI, the director of the CIA, or maybe NSA has eight floors. They have eight floors. It's the eighth floor in NSA. But what's important, Joe, is that the investigation was supposed to be closed. This guy did his work. He looked from the Washington field office. He said, hey, there's nothing here on Flynn. Close the investigation. Now, the FBI apparently isn't very efficient because that's something that Washington and the shuffle was in somebody's inbox. And for a day or two, they didn't close it. And then you have Schiff saying, is that closed yet? And I think it was his, Paramore says, no, no, because it was a screw up, but a, but a godsend, a godsend screw up. It didn't close it. So now the seventh floor wants to not reopen it, just continue it. And they went ahead and they framed them. You know, I know Flynn and I know a son. And I know a human aspect of being a father and a son. And if I were coerced into admitting to something that I didn't do to prevent my son from going to jail, well, I'd do it. And that's what Flynn did. What you're saying is Ray, that first of all, we should set this, that there was two phone calls, the first believe from his vacation spot in Dominican Republic. Michael Flynn had with Kislyak, the Russian ambassador at the time. And in that conversation, there was supposedly some collusion that took place. The field office said there wasn't, it was clear there wasn't. We now know that Flynn asked the Russians not to retaliate to Obama's latest tranche of sanctions against Russia. Many of those were based, by the way, on Russiagate. And that's an interesting question. If the Russiagate case is over, why are those sanctions still on? But that's all of this, hold on the story that we can get into. So there was nothing found untoward in that conversation. There was no quid pro quo there. He simply asked Russia not to retaliate and Russia did not retaliate with the sanctions. And he also asked, on behalf of Israel, who had asked him to go there, would you please veto this UN Security Council resolution that the Obama administration had made known that they would abstain on, in other words, let it go through, which would declare Israeli settlements or colonies in the West Bank to be illegal, which they already clearly were under numerous other resolutions. So Obama was doing something, I think, to get back in Netanyahu. We really couldn't stand because in the outgoing administration decided let it go through. We're not going to block this one more critical resolution against Israel. And Flynn asked, just like would you please veto that? And Russia did not veto it and it went through. That's all that took place that we know pretty much in that conversation. So as Ray said, they set him up to try to lie. Bill? The FBI also had access to two separate programs inside NSA that have the exact recordings of those conversations. One of them was the Stellar Wind program, which is the bulk acquisition. And there was another one that's been going on for quite some time that I can't really talk about. Why don't you talk about the other stuff before? Go ahead. Well, this one is really not in public domain. I can talk about anything in public domain, Joe. That's right. Now, it's interesting you said that because I just saw on Fox News, which for years I've never believed a word of, but now I actually listen to when it comes to the Russia date stuff. And it was reported that this was only an NSA recording between Kislek and Flynn, but the FBI did it. Therefore, no unmasking would have been necessary. Masking, of course, is when the NSA records a foreign person, but there's also a U.S. person involved in a conversation where they're not legally allowed, so they have to hide that person's name. And there is a process where people in government can ask for that name to be revealed or unmasked. Do you know about that, Bill? Is that what you were just alluding to? This was an FBI tap, and not only an NSA one. Let me clarify anything that NSA does domestically inside the United States. They do it in cooperation with the FBI. So, FBI is in cooperation with them, and they've got direct access to all the collected results through the IC reach program into the NSA databases. The FBI doesn't have to mask U.S. citizens. No oversight, Joe. None at all. Right. No attempted oversight by the FISA court. No attempted oversight by the intelligence committees. Nobody's looking at it. But the FBI does not have to mask U.S. persons, correct? Wherever they are. No, they get it directly out of the database, right? So that whole unmasking thing, that's just my point in this story, in my view, but it needs to be clarified for what exactly, why were all these people asking, including Joe Biden, apparently? Because they don't have direct access to the NSA database. But they can get the FBI document, can't they? They get the name. Well, they get the reporting from NSA. So if anybody's name was mentioned in a report from NSA, that was a U.S. citizen. They don't have a warrant on them. They must minimize. And so they basically blank out their names. Ray, why did all these people, Susan Rice, Samantha, power up in New York at the UN? And Biden, why they all want to know who would talk to Kislet? Well, it's very true, Joe. If you look at the timing here, right after the election, all manner of people were asking for unmasking of Flynn. Four top officials from Treasury. Treasury? Okay. Well, what was that all about? Well, they were trying to get Flynn on his links with Turkey and the work that he'd done to Turkey. And he hadn't been, I guess, completely upfront about being a representative of Turkey. But there are all manner of things they wanted to get Flynn on. The more important question was, why? Now, let me try to explain. Flynn knew where all the bodies were buried. It was going to come in to be the National Security Advisor. And they couldn't possibly purge all the files. They couldn't possibly delete or set fire to all the files. Flynn was the ever-present danger, my God. And not only that, but he talked with Trump about maybe having a more decent relationship with Russia. Wow. What's the reaction of the Mickey mat? And particularly that cornerstone, the media to that. So it's all very explainable. And then later, on the 29th of December, that conversation with Kislyak was revealed to whom? To the CIA's best pundit, David Ignatius, in the Washington Post. That's a felony. Sure, it's a felony. Now, for the perspective here. Back in the day, when Bill and I were on active duty, so to speak, at least CIA, when it got some really sensitive intercepted material, and it involved not only a US citizen, but maybe an allied country, we didn't get the whole smear. What did they use? They didn't use blackout. There are easy ways to find out what's under the blackout. They took a razor, okay? They took a razor and cut out that thing from a copy. That's what you got. That's how seriously they took this injunction that came out of the church hearings and all, not to spy on American criticism. Now, it's 29 people, including the vice president himself, asking NSA, oh, you know, I want that thing about what Flynn said to so-and-so. Maybe we'll get something on him, and then we, of course, we know how the FBI set him up by visiting him four days after Trump took office and telling him, you don't need a lawyer. No, no, no, we're done. And then saying, doesn't look like he lied, but then saying, oh, maybe he lied. And I mean, it's so atrocious. It's so, well, it's so obvious what they are trying to do that I'm glad that he has a good lawyer now because she stuck it to this judge. And in my view, the superior judge, the appellate judge, will finally do what's necessary and throw the case out. Now, the FBI interview, which included Peter Struct, did not tell Flynn that they had the transcript, that they'd known exactly what he'd said. They kept that from him because as Colleen Raleigh, the former FBI special agent who wrote in a piece of conservative news said, was it had they mentioned they had the transcript, he'd want a lawyer there, right? So they just thought it was a friendly chat. Colleen also points out that Struct later, he did the interviewing and the other agent with him took the notes, the other agent then took his notes, wrote up the 302, the official form that will wind up in a courtroom as the FBI statement, Struct edited that, which again, was completely against the procedures. And to go back to the sun. It's falsifying evidence. Falsifying or altering evidence, right? Yeah, that's evidence. That's right, that's evidence in a courtroom. And then why people keep saying the Russia Gate True Believers, why did Flynn lie? The FBI, if he didn't do anything wrong, well, as Ray pointed out, it seems that Mueller or somebody in Mueller's team got to him and said, if you don't plead guilty to this minor infraction that almost never charged as Colleen pointed out, we're gonna go after your son. And if that's true, that is about, that's pretty dirty, isn't it? That's a KGB Gestapo attempt approach. Same thing, exactly the same thing. One of the techniques that helps them on all this, Joe and Bill, as Colleen Rowley has explained to me, is that the FBI, since the days of J. Edgar Hoover, has never been required to tape testimony like that. They use a 302. What's a 302? Handwritten notes by the interviewer, which can be massaged by his boss or his friend. And some part of the record handwritten notes, when just as easily you could record it. So the FBI, so disingenuous and all this stuff, it's been allowed to not put these things and so they play fast and lose with whatever somebody says. And that's part of the problem, not only with Flynn, but with all manner of investigations. Bill? Yeah, I agree with that. I just think that the entire FBI needs to be restructured and revamped and maybe a certain number of people have to take a walk. And the same is true with the entire intelligence community and all those agencies down at least four levels of management. Those people need to take a walk. From the top. Yeah. From the seventh floor. On down. Now, Trump has a way of exaggerating things we all know and Gray and I had an exchange about this. I'm being a little bit more careful maybe about claiming that Obama was in on this whole thing on Flynn. We know that he had this meeting. There's some difference. Sally Yates, who was the acting attorney general as well, right at that time, said that people cleared out of the room. And Obama told it was Comey was there. Yates was there. I'm not sure who else was there. That's it. Comey and Yates, that they were going to look into Flynn about the thing we've just been talking about. And Obama was saying go buy the book and don't have to tell me anything else. Because of course the president should both stay away from law enforcement. In fact, Trump said the other day, I'm the chief law enforcement officer. That's not my understanding. He's the commander in chief of the troops, but not of law enforcement. You should not cross that wall with the Department of Justice, which he's done. Now, maybe Yates was wrong because Susan Rice has written a member to herself that's been getting a lot of airplay on Fox, in which she three times says that Obama said do buy the book. Now, first of all, I write emails to myself, so I don't know why people make a big deal out of that. I do it all the time. But it could be that Yates was wrong, that maybe Rice was still present, that she hadn't left the room yet. But that doesn't really matter. What is the evidence either Bill or Ray has that you think Obama was directly involved in this Flynn case, or in any other aspect of a Brennan operation, or any other part of the Russiagate tale that was being spun? I was asked this. Yeah, Bill, go ahead when you go first. Okay, Pompeo asked me that question. And I said, well, look at who's involved. It's FBI, NSA, CIA, Department of State, Department of Homeland Security, and the DOJ. And the only place those come to a point where they can be orchestrated in order to do something is at the White House. So my impression is, although I can't prove it, that Obama was the orchestrator of the, not necessarily one who designed it or executed it, but the one who ordered it. Ordered. Go ahead, Ray. I can add to that. I agree with Bill. There is some circumstantial evidence of a pretty persuasive kind. It's a change between Peter Struck and Lisa Page, the attorney for the deputy president of the FBI, McCabe. And she pretty excitedly says, Peter, I've just been asked to prepare talking points by, because the POTUS, president of the United States, quote, wants to know everything we're doing, period, end quote. Date, September 2nd, if memory serves, 2016. Well, hello. The whole context was Russiagate. If he wanted to know everything that they were doing, and McCabe was telling him or Komi was, well, he certainly had some knowledge of it. The other thing I'll say is this. Many people have said, and I believe, this is probably the case, that Brennan was the overall archbishop here. He was the overarching leader of this escapade. Now, if that's the case, we know that Brennan had this kind of hold on President Obama. We know that from multiple sources and multiple indicators, for example, when Brennan was trying to resist the publication of the Senate Intelligence Committee report on torture, on DIA torture, Obama bent over backwards, sent his chief of staff to all the meetings to upfuscate, to delete, and prevent it from being published. Now, why would he do that? I don't know. I mean, hello. He was going out of office anyway, but Brennan had this hold on him. Now, the last thing I'll say on this is that it's no secret in Washington how the secret national security state, the deep state, if you will, how much power it has. John McLaughlin, who is acting director of the CIA last November, shouted out, thank God for the deep state, because we show the president the parameters into which he can fit his policy. Hello. So what I'm saying here is that when Trump was still president-elect, think back to 3 January 2017, Chuck Schumer asked Rachel Maddow, I got something to report, maybe come on your show, I'm just assure Chuck. So they're on the show, and Rachel says, oh, Senator Schumer, you said you have something really important to say. She says, yes, Rachel, it's about president-elect Trump. You know, I thought he was a smart guy. Businessman would know which fights to pick and all, but he's done something very foolish. Oh, what would that be, Chuck? He's crossed the intelligence community, and they have six ways from Sunday to get back at you. He's done something very, very foolish. Now, you think that was a coincidence? I don't. The 3rd of January 2017, on the 5th of January, Obama and all these other people that you mentioned before got together in the White House to see how they're going to arrange this campaign against Trump. On the 5th of January, they plotted this visit of Flynn, but they also got their final instructions on how to play the intelligence community assessment, which had been done under Brennan and Clapper's direction. Now, what did that assessment say? It said that Puchin said, hack into the DNC, get those emails to me. We want to help Trump, okay? Now, it didn't happen. That doesn't matter. That's what the memo said. The very next day, Clapper, Brennan, Comey and Rogers from the NSA descend on Trump Tower to brief the president, okay? And they say, Mr. President, we have this assessment, and sorry, but it says that you wouldn't be president without the Russians helping you a lot. And that's what it says, and it's going to be published. It actually is published today. And then Comey says, gentlemen, I have something even more sensitive to discuss with the president. Could you leave us alone? Could you leave? So they leave. Then Comey says, Mr. President, this is very awkward. I don't know how to do this, but there's this dossier. And it's scurrilous. It's all that. We can't confirm all of it, but it's out there. The press has them. It says that you're coveted with prostitutes in Moscow. It says all manner of things. Just so you know, Mr. President, it's out there, it's this dossier. Now, Trump, he's a newbie. He hadn't been in Washington very long, but if that were I, I would have said, Mr. Comey, go clean out your desk. I know what you're doing. This is Shad Gehoover on steroids. We have this material, Mr. President. Oh, just so you know, just so you know. Get out of here, clean out your desk. You're gone. So now that I become president. Instead of that, he tried to control them, try like a real estate broker to get them on his side and all that kind of stuff. And it was months later that he had a fire room. So what I'm saying here is that the sphere of the deep state didn't really occur to Trump right off the bat. He should know enough now, but I think he's still scared. And whether he'll let Barr and the U.S. Attorney and Connecticut Durham, who's investigating Russiagate, whether they'll let them go ahead with indictments against these guys that Trump is fond of naming, Brennan Clapper, Comey. If they decide that indictments are warranted, will Trump chicken out like he has in the past? He's thrown doonus under the bus. Well, I don't know, but I'm afraid he will. Now, Bill, you're waving a piece of paper. Is that a... That's the statutes. Those are the statutes that Bill says they broke. Before Bill, you get in there. I just want to make two points. One, when Ray, you referred to that text message from FBI lawyer Lisa Page to struck that Obama, she was told Obama wants everything, that we're doing the corporate media at the time, reported them as being in regard to the Clinton server issue, totally independent from Russiagate. You pointed out to me that that was closed by Comey at that time, and then later reopened when the Wiener laptop was looked at. So you believe that the corporate media was wrong or misleading on purpose, that he was really Obama referring to the Russiagate stuff that we've all been discussing right now. And the other point I want to make before I turn over to Bill is clear that from consortium news's point of view, and I believe all of us, you made me, I don't know about Bill, because Bill may have voted for Donald Trump and said so, but we are certainly not supporters of any party. We don't support Trump, or we didn't support Clinton. We don't support Biden or Trump. That's not our role. We are critical of all the parties, and we find that what intelligence community services can do to undermine and to meddle in domestic politics, to undermine a political process is more frightening because it could last longer than whatever Trump may or may not have done in his policies, of which we disagree with almost all at consortium news. But we are more worried about the intrusion into domestic politics of intelligence services, which are going to be there long after Trump is gone or the next administration, and future candidates for presence can be meddled with them. That's what we find to be graver, Bill. Yeah, I would just add that if Barr and Durham don't start filing all these charges, or some of them against people who are high up in the Obama administration, we can say that they're bought in and that we no longer have a Department of Justice, we have a Department of Just Us continuing, and the Us doesn't include the vast population of the United States. It's only a selective elite view in the mostly democratic part. Yeah, and I would say this too, when Trump coined the phrase Obamagate, that was about 10 days ago now. Yeah, well, close. Did you see the mainstream media? My God! First that's Russia Gate, then it's FBI Gate, Deep State Gate, oh no, Obamagate. And so one of these smart young reporters asked Trump's new spokeswoman, President Trump was talking about crimes. What kinds of crimes we did? To my great surprise. She said, well, yeah, I have the listing here. You want me to read it? So she reads out six crimes, and then he says, well, yeah, but no. And then she reads four more, and they're the ones that Bill read. So, you know, Obamagate is real, and it's much more real than Russia Gate. And that's going to be the sticky wicked. Now, I think Barr, Bill Barr, the Attorney General was smart enough to keep his sights, okay? Now, probably he could easily prove Obamagate guilty knowledge, Biden himself. But, you know, why go that far? If he gets Comey, if he gets Brennan, if he gets Clapper, these people who deliberately played fast and loose with the Constitution of the United States, that suffices. But the real danger is that he won't, what Bill says, will have it forever. You have like Nixon, okay? This is like Nixon. Yep. Well, I was interested in you say that, because that's a heavy charge to make against Obamagate. He was like Nixon, who had the IRS ordered his enemies, he got involved, and all kinds of things he should have. What happened with the IRS here? And what did they do with the Tea Party and the Occupy Group? The religious organization is trying to get 501c3. What did they do to them? Oh, okay, you know. It was so low. Yeah, that's right. Well, you know, it might be that Barr is saying, he doesn't want to give the appearance that he's politicizing this by going after political leaders like Obama or Biden. But he's going to go after the heads of agencies, maybe, like Clapper, Comey. But Joe, this is a real simple question. Did they violate a law? If so, which one? If they did, charge them. Well, it's simply put, but it is more complicated than that, isn't it, Ray? Well, you know, if you look back just 13 months, okay? At Devin Nunes, head of the House Intelligence Committee, said he was forwarding eight criminal references to the Department of Justice. Of course, they had to go through the White House first, right? Now, he pretty much named the names and there are a lot of people that we've just been talking about. What happened to those eight criminal referrals 13 months ago? Well, I don't know, but it seems to me that the President chickened out. They didn't go anywhere. They didn't get down to the Department of Justice. So the question now is, will that happen again? Or will Durham and Barr and the President ticked off as he is and with all these other uncertainties and needing to take the offensive, whether he'll follow through this time? If he does follow through, there's going to be a real constitutional issue here. If he doesn't follow through, the Constitution is torn to thirds. Well, Ray and Bill and Elizabeth, if you have a last question, that might be a good place to end this. But the shredding of the Constitution in the balance because we don't know what's going to happen. Whether Durham will in fact recommend indictments, whether Trump will go through it or not. Russia Gates story in terms of its credibility is pretty much over. But the story overall is not over because the investigation into it continues. And we looked into some of those aspects, including Lucifer 2.0, the Michael Flynn saga, whether Obama was involved or not. The Steele dossier came up. And we did that discussion today with Ray McGovern, former CIA analyst and presidential briefer. And Bill Binney, former technical director of the National Security Agency. And these two guys know a thing or two about the intelligence services. And we really appreciate that they came and lent their expertise to us today. And we'll give another final word to Ray. Yeah, I just want to make a point of thanking Tim Leonard, the excellent piece that you edited and posted two days ago, Joe, that goes through the dissection of who this Lucifer 2.0 is. We don't know who he is. And we asked the president to find out back in July of 2017. I wonder if the president even knows who Lucifer 2.0 is. But the time is, he ought to find out. Well, I second that. And I did very little editing of Tim's piece, but I was very happy to publish it. Again, thanks, Ray. Thanks, Bill. And thank you, Elizabeth. This concludes our episode nine of season two of CN Live. And we thank you for joining us. And join us again for the next show. Get out your notebook, please, Mark.