Swapcast: Kyle Anzalone from Conflicts of Interest and Joanne Leon from Around the Empire. Is the new boss the same as the old boss? We compare the Biden foreign policy to the Trump, Obama and Bush administrations, analyze press conference and announcements from NATO’s Jen Stoltenberg about expanding the number of troops and area of operation in Iraq and freezing any withdrawal of troops from Afghanistan, and more.
Guest: Mohamed Elmaazi. Journalist Mohammed Elmaazi and I had this conversation the week before Christmas just as new exculpatory evidence, audio of conversation between Julian Assange and a State Department official, was released by Project Veritas. We are also now in the final weeks leading up to the court decision on Assange’s extradition from the United Kingdom to the United States and there have been many people, including some pretty influential people, urging Trump to pardon Assange. In our conversation we reviewed some of the events and players and skullduggery over the years since the early days of Wikileaks. Plus there is a bonus episode with our thoughts on whether Assange will be pardoned, who we think are the most influential people lobbying Trump for and against a pardon and how things might play out if Assange is pardoned.
Guest: Mohamed Elmaazi. Journalist Mohammed Elmaazi and I had this conversation the week before Christmas just as new exculpatory evidence, audio of conversation between Julian Assange and a State Department official, was released by Project Veritas. We are also now in the final weeks leading up to the court decision on Assange’s extradition from the United Kingdom to the United States and there have been many people, including some pretty influential people, urging Trump to pardon Assange. In our conversation we reviewed some of the events and players and skullduggery over the years since the early days of Wikileaks. Plus there is a bonus episode with our thoughts on whether Assange will be pardoned, who we think are the most influential people lobbying Trump for and against a pardon and how things might play out if Assange is pardoned.
Guest: Elijah Magnier. We talk about the August 4, 2020 explosion in the Beirut port, details of what happened, political implications, cui bono and more. Elijah has gathered information from Beirut and provided some of that information for the first time in this interview as an exclusive. This is the bonus question for patrons, Ep 175EXTRA Beirut Explosion and Political Implications where we talk about the possibility of the faction aligned with Trump, Netanyahu and Salman wanting to escalate while they can in anticipation of Trump and Netanyahu being out of power in the near future.
Guest: Aaron Maté. Key allegations from the Russiagate conspiracy have now officially collapsed with the release of transcripts from witness interviews that were conducted over the past three years. Now the walls are truly closing in and not in the way the Trump-Russia obsessed media presented it in the past. Key Obama administration officials, under oath, said they had no evidence of collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia. Perhaps the biggest blow was delivered by Crowdstrike, the private cybersecurity firm that served as a critical source on the Russian hacking claim. We now know that Crowdstrike’s president told Congress more than two years ago that it had no real evidence that Russian hackers exfiltrated emails and passed them to Wikileaks. Aaron notes, in an understated manner, that this “raises new questions about whether Special Counsel Robert Mueller, intelligence officials and Democrats misled the public.” At the end of the interview, there’s an extra/bonus segment for patrons on the question of which forces were driving the Russiagate conspiracy. You can find that at Patreon, Episode 166 EXTRA.
Guest: Aaron Maté. Key allegations from the Russiagate conspiracy have now officially collapsed with the release of transcripts from witness interviews that were conducted over the past three years. Now the walls are truly closing in and not in the way the Trump-Russia obsessed media presented it in the past. Key Obama administration officials, under oath, said they had no evidence of collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia. Perhaps the biggest blow was delivered by Crowdstrike, the private cybersecurity firm that served as a critical source on the Russian hacking claim. We now know that Crowdstrike’s president told Congress more than two years ago that it had no real evidence that Russian hackers exfiltrated emails and passed them to Wikileaks. Aaron notes, in an understated manner, that this “raises new questions about whether Special Counsel Robert Mueller, intelligence officials and Democrats misled the public.” At the end of the interview, there’s an extra/bonus segment for patrons on the question of which forces were driving the Russiagate conspiracy. You can find that at Patreon, Episode 166 EXTRA.
Swapcast: Around the Empire’s Joanne Leon and Dan Wright and Foreign Policy Focus host Kyle Anzalone discuss the origins of Russiagate. For three years, we have been fighting to debunk the fake news created about the imagined Russian conspiracy to help Trump beat Hillary. Now, the fake news and false allegations have run dry and some of the faces behind it are being exposed. We discuss the unmaskings and why it is so important.
Joanne and Dan Wright spend another evening while on quarantine / lockdown in New Jersey in a long conversation about Coronavirus, the reopening of states, “contact tracing”, Trump, the Clintons, Anthony Fauci, information from skeptics like RFK, Jr., and we also talk about the Kim Jong Un mystery. This episode is for patrons only but will be unlocked later for the public.
Guest: Maj. Danny Sjursen, US Army (ret.) We talk about two articles that Danny wrote about US vs Iran conflicts over the last seven decades and what he calls a “timeline of provocations and retaliations”. Also we talk about Iran’s history of relative restraint.
Guest: Jeffrey Carr. Dan Wright and Joanne Leon had a reunion conversation with cybersecurity expert Jeffrey Carr to revisit the infamously erroneous Crowdstrike analysis of the DNC hack which they attributed to Russia based on their analysis of an alleged Russian hack of a Ukrainian military artillery app. We also discussed Crowdstrike’s history, its recent mention in President Trump’s phone call with Ukrainian President Zelensky (the same phone call that led to his impeachment for a different reason) and the broader issue of how cybersecurity firms are incentivized to make specious claims concerning attribution of a hack, particularly if it gains them notoriety that leads to more business.
Swapcast with Foreign Policy Focus podcast host Kyle Anzalone, on the withdrawal of US troops from northern Syria and the Kurds/SDF new partnership with Syria with Russia as the guarantor. The Borg freaks out.
Guest: Patrick Lawrence. We discuss President Trump’s relationship with his chosen cabinet hawks, Mike Pompeo and John Bolton and what Lawrence sees as a foreign policy coup by the Bolton-Pompeo axis.
Guest: Daniel Lazare. We discuss the origins of Russiagate, some key questions that we have about the Mueller Report and surprising things that the Mueller Report doesn’t even cover at all.
Scott Horton joins us from Texas to talk about the withdrawal of troops from Syria and Afghanistan. Scott and Joanne offer some cautiously optimistic analysis on Trump’s latest actions on war and foreign policy and how he could use a “Horton’s Rule” strategy to his advantage, outflanking Left and Right opponents with detente and de-escalation. Is there an “only Nixon could go to China” opportunity for Trump and will he deliver on it?
We also discuss the dilemma that Establishment Democrats’ have created for themselves as they assume a twisted political opposition to scaling down wars and now routinely provide unquestioning fealty to the national security state. Lastly, we review William Atkin’s dissenting farewell memo to NBC and the media’s passive acceptance and cheerleading of perpetual war.