Background Briefing: April 18, 2019
Why the Mueller Report Will Only Scratch the Surface
We begin on this day of the release of the Mueller Report with an assessment of the orchestrated attempt to cover up Donald Trump’s complicity with the Russians and his obstruction of justice in plain sight given that the Republican hack chosen to do the job, William Barr has already tipped his hand allowing Trump to claim exoneration. Roger Morris, who served on the senior staff of the National Security Council under Presidents Johnson and Nixon, until resigning with Anthony Lake over the bombing of Cambodia, joins us to discuss the narrow constraints Mueller has been operating under and the absurdly hollow incessant claim by Trump of “no collusion” when there is no way that the GRU and the KGB and its successor agencies the SVR and FSB would leave their fingerprints on an operation to hurt Hillary Clinton and help elect Donald Trump. While proving “collusion”, not to mention treason is a very high bar, little wonder Mueller could not prove conspiracy against the United States by Trump and his associates because that is not how a security state headed by a former KGB colonel operates. There were no clandestine meetings and no messages exchanged at dead drops, rather Trump was a “trusted contact” in KGB parlance who would do what they want without even knowing he was working for them. A perfect ”useful idiot” who might well get away with the crime of the century.
Why the US Intelligence Community Wants Assange
Then we talk with one of the country’s leading experts on national security William Arkin who is writing a book on how to end the era of perpetual war. He joins us to discuss his article on what is behind the arrest of Julian Assange which both the Daily Beast and The Guardian refused to print. We will discuss how the repeated failures of the vast American Intelligence establishment to keep its own secrets secure is at the heart of the need to punish Assange. Although Bradley Manning was able to steal a huge trove of classified documents, then Edward Snowden stole a thousand times more of even much more highly classified top secret documents, then Joshua Adam Schulte stole the CIA’s Vault 7 trove of top secret hacking tools, nobody blames the intelligence agencies and they are rewarded by billions more of taxpayer dollars showered on them to fix their mistakes. This is not to say Assange and Snowden are blameless and that the Chinese and Russians end up benefiting from our intelligence agencies loss of control of their secrets. But on this day when it is unlikely justice is being done by our Attorney General we offer up a link to a thread by the Yale historian Timothy Snyder of a timeline of the extraordinary number of documented connections between Trump and the Russians who have financed and promoted him to the highest office on the planet.