As this year ends, U.S. President Joe Biden signed into law military spending of $770 billion. That’s just for the next year alone. The scale of wastefulness and bloated corruption is eye-watering. It eclipses what the United States is willing to invest for overhauling its badly neglected civilian infrastructure and for combating the coronavirus pandemic that has killed far more people in the U.S. than in any other nation.

If there is one thing that portends a historic collapse of U.S. global power it is its pathological addiction to militarism that is hemorrhaging vital resources.

What is also amazing is how this gargantuan deformity in economic planning is presented as somehow rational and normal by the Western media.

Three decades after the Cold War officially ended, the U.S. is setting a new record high for annual expenditure on its armed forces.

Biden’s budget – his first as president – exceeds the record set by the previous Trump administration for military largesse of $740 billion.

So much for wishing humanity peace and prosperity – as is the international tradition at this time of year – when the U.S. allocates such a grotesque amount of resources to the means of war and annihilation.

This obscene expenditure is not in any way conceivably a “defense budget” as it is termed in Orwellian newspeak. It is a dreadful and despicable war budget.

The United States spends more on its military than the next 11 top nations combined. Compared with China ($250bn) the U.S. budget is nearly three times bigger. The U.S. spends over 12 times more than Russia ($60bn) on its armed forces.

Those figures alone tell beyond any doubt which nation is the ultimate aggressor. Yet, farcically, the Western corporate media in Orwellian fashion portray China and Russia as the aggressors against whom the United States is “defending’ the rest of the world.

Biden’s 2022 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), as it is formally titled, devotes billions more to devising new nuclear weapons and to provoke China and Russia. Camouflaged with Orwellian rhetoric, there is some $7 billion for the “Pacific Deterrence Initiative” and $4 billion for the “European Defense Initiative”.

The Biden administration has committed a further $300 million in military support for Ukraine over the next year. This is on top of the $2.5 billion in arms that Washington has plowed into Ukraine since the CIA-backed coup d’état in Kiev in 2014 which brought to power a Russophobic regime.

Next week, U.S. and Russian officials are to hold negotiations in Geneva to deescalate tensions over Ukraine and Europe generally. It is blindingly obvious that the crisis over security has been created by the United States pushing a policy of militarizing Europe against Russia in the form of expanding the NATO alliance all the way to Russia’s borders.

With twisted logic, Moscow is accused of “threatening” Ukraine and European security even though its troops are on Russian soil and it is American weapons that are encroaching on Russia’s territory.

The inordinate military spending by the United States year after year is proof of the source of international tensions.

When the Cold War supposedly ended in 1991 following the demise of the Soviet Union, there was a reasonable expectation around the world for a “peace dividend” to ensue. That is, whereby Cold War militarism would at last give way to peaceful economic development and cooperation. How lamentable the disappointment!

The inescapable fact is that the U.S. economy is a war-driven system. The military-industrial complex at the heart of American capitalism is dependent on massive taxpayer-funded financial subvention. If an economy is driven for war, then it follows that conflicts and wars are inevitable. This is why, 30 years after the supposed end of the Cold War, the United States is closer to starting a war with Russia and China than ever before.

In an insightful interview this week, former United Nations diplomat Alfred Maurice de Zayas condemned what he called the “universal provocation” of the US “war budget”. De Zayas points out that the United States is preeminently guilty of undermining global peace and security. Its relentless militarism compels other nations to spend excessively on defense in order to counter the threat posed by the United States. Both China and Russia have long-proposed multilateralism and “win-win” cooperation. Neither of these nations has threatened the United States. It is always the U.S. with its mixture of paranoia and hubris that constantly portrays others as enemies and existential dangers. Again, that is due to the need for justifying the abomination of American military orgy year after year.

The truth is the United States has been at war against the rest of the world since at least the end of the Second World War. For most of that period, the Cold War, Washington cited the threat of Soviet and Chinese communism. It waged wars in dozens of countries on every continent killing tens of millions of people purportedly in the “defense of democracy and the free world”. How godawful ridiculous is that?

The Cold War was supposed to have ended, yet the U.S. continues its remorseless warmongering. It retreated from Afghanistan this year after two decades of futile war, only to now wind up tensions with Russia and China. The pretexts and excuses change over the decades, but the fundamental story remains the same: the United States is at war with the rest of the world in the vain ambition of exerting hegemonic domination. Arguably, that’s an essential definition of fascism.

But it’s not just against the rest of the world that the U.S. rulers are waging war. They are waging war against their own American citizens. The Washington elite of both parties (comprising the de facto War Party) whistle through a military budget funded by taxpayers that dwarves anything the federal government is prepared to spend on societal infrastructure and decent human development.

Far above any other nation, the U.S. has a pandemic killing nearly 850,000 people so far and there is no end in sight. U.S. rulers refuse to allocate more financial help to the population to defeat the pandemic yet they are planning to spend billions on offensive weapons systems to threaten Russia and China.

The hideously perverse priorities of the United States as demonstrated by its wanton militarism are a portent and ultimate cause of its historic failure. It is a vile disgrace that the apparent solution to its inherent contradictions is to start a catastrophic war. Fortunately, Russia and China are strong enough militarily to not let that happen. And so the outcome we will witness more of over the coming year will be the United States cratering from its own internal corruption.

Earlier this month, Representative Adam Schiff was reported to have doctored a text message between former White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows and Republican representative Jim Jordan in the ongoing investigations of the House January 6 Committee. This report should hardly come as a surprise.

On the House floor, Schiff was confronted by Republican Congressman Jim Comer for peddling the “Russia hoax.” He responded by launching into a tirade of circumstantial evidence that was supposed to prove Trump-Russia collusion. Given Schiff’s most recent ethically questionable choice in the January 6 Commission, it is worth recounting his central role in the collusion investigations.

Schiff was one of the main proponents of the collusion theory from day one. Throughout the 45th president’s tenure, the congressman continuously assured the Trump-deranged media that there was “plenty of evidence” of collusion with Russia hiding “in plain sight”, and that the proof was “more than circumstantial.” Despite substantial evidence to the contrary, he also continued to maintain the legitimacy of the legally abominable FBI application for surveillance warrants on then-Trump aide Carter Paige, one of the main premises justifying the subsequent Mueller investigation.

Schiff was undeterred when House Intelligence Chair Devin Nunes released a memo in 2018 that detailed this corrupt FISA process. Nunes, a Republican congressman also from California, presented damning proof that the entire application was largely predicated on the now-debunked dossier by Christopher Steele—in reality, a political operation funded by the Clinton campaign through research firm Fusion GPS. Nunes’ memo was immediately denounced by the entire Democrat establishment as false, and Schiff subsequently responded with a memo of his own. The latter purported to document the errors of its Republican-derived counterpart.

Naturally, the Schiff memo was the story that stuck for the zealots of the Russia collusion cult in Washington and their media enablers; this, despite the fact that DOJ Inspector General Michael Horowitz would go on to confirm the veracity of the very claims on which Schiff was attempting to cast doubt. The Wall Street Journal previously documented the exact falsehoods in the Schiff memo and the inspector general’s refutations here.

When Schiff was called out by Comer on the House floor, the former launched into a series of “Are you aware?” questions that were ostensibly meant to maintain support for the Trump-Russia thesis (outside of the Steele Dossier). Yet Schiff’s statements are still based on, to use his own words, mere “circumstantial evidence.” It is worth considering Schiff’s reasoning behind each claim:

“Are you aware that the president’s campaign chairman, Paul Manafort, met with an agent of Russian intelligence and provided Russian intelligence with internal campaign polling data, as well as strategic insights about their intelligence in key battleground states?”

The “agent of Russian intelligence” to whom Schiff is referring here is Manafort’s longtime Ukrainian business associate Konstantin Kilimnik. According to the Washington Times, the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence’s final report on Russian election interference—a more than 900 page report of which Kilimnik and Manafort are central focuses—states that Kilimnik was “a Russian intelligence officer.” Manafort’s lawyer responded to the accusation by claiming that there are classified documents that would, if released, prove this to be false; however, if Kilimnik is indeed a Russian asset as stated by the Senate report, then he “may have been connected to the GRU [Russian state intelligence service]” responsible for hacking into the DNC in 2016.

In the second part of his statement, Schiff refers to Manafort’s providing polling data to Russian intelligence (Kilimnik, on the presumption that he is a Russian agent). The Mueller report had already cast doubt on this being connected to “Russian interference,” however, as the meeting in which this transaction took place is purported to have happened only after the reports of a Russian cyber attack had already been released by the U.S. media. Collusion would thereby be assumed only on the evidence that Manafort had an ongoing relationship with Kilimnik, and must have subsequently known about the latter’s speculative ties with the GRU and its attempt to influence the U.S. election. Circumstantial indeed.

“Are you aware that while the Trump campaign chairman was providing internal polling data, that Kremlin intelligence was leading a clandestine social media campaign to elect Donald Trump?”

In 2020, the Senate Intelligence Committee released a report defending a 2017 intelligence community assessment that there was “unprecedented Russian interference in the 2016 U.S. Presidential election.” The report finds that the essential task of the Russian interference was to sow discord in the United States, primarily through social media posts and advertisements that were aimed at denigrating Hillary Clinton and undermining trust in U.S. democracy.

This is in part contrary to the 2018 House Intelligence Committee report, which found that the intelligence community’s assessment on “Putin’s strategic intentions” were insufficient. When viewing the various posts, advertisements, and accounts (examples available for download from the House Report here) attributed to Russian intelligence agents, it is evident that there was a clear intention to sow discord; however, the sheer number of social justice posts related to racial equality and police brutality seem to suggest that the Russian influencers may have sought social tension as the goal in itself, rather than a means to get Trump in particular elected.

Regardless, Schiff’s two statements together allude to the notion that Manafort was giving polling data in battleground states to Kilimnik, ostensibly all in an attempt to then have Russian hackers specifically target voters in politically purple areas.

“I am aware of President Trump’s son meeting secretly in Trump Tower New York with a Russian delegation with the purpose of receiving dirt on Hillary Clinton, which the Russian delegation represented was part of the Russian government’s effort to help elect Donald Trump in 2016.… And when asked about that secret meeting, both the president and his son lied about it.”

Donald Trump Jr. did indeed meet with Russian lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya. The meeting is reported to have been short and fruitless, with then-candidate Trump having had no knowledge of it. Although this is not illegal, it is ethically questionable, even given the fact that politics is indeed a dirty game; however, it also incidentally sheds light on another strange development in the Trump-Russia saga. Veselnitskaya is documented as having met with Fusion GPS co-founder Glenn Simpson just hours before the Trump Tower meeting, and then again after. Recall that Fusion GPS is the Clinton-financed firm responsible for compiling the Steele Dossier, seeking to tie Trump to Russia. While Trump Jr. meeting with Veselnitskaya under the pretenses of getting dirt on a political opponent may not be considered honorable (even though that was the very mechanism working against Trump at that exact moment), the surrounding circumstances raise just as many, if not more, questions about Clinton corruption as they do Trump collusion.

Although not mentioned by Schiff in this specific instance, also consider his maintaining the guilt of Trump’s National Security Advisor Michael Flynn. In another supposed tie between Trump and Russia, Flynn was caught in a carefully set perjury trap arranged by James Comey’s FBI. Comey actually bragged in an open forum about his taking advantage of the hectic Trump transition—which unelected bureaucratic forces and Obama holdovers mobilized to make as difficult as possible—to get agents into the White House and attempt to interrogate various officials, of whom Flynn was foremost.

Schiff is not unique in his views among the Democratic Party or its political allies in relation to the Russia narrative, and no one can question the congressman’s determination in investigating corruption stories related to Trump—regardless of how scant or shoddy the hard evidence that the allegations are based on may be. It is important, however, to consider the circumstances he presents in support of his ongoing belief in collusion, as it is telling of how the congressman treats evidence that is politically inexpedient to his predetermined conclusions. This is relevant given his central position on the House January 6 Committee, and may have very real consequences for the fate of the American citizen’s upon whom the latter’s deliberations are focused.

theamericanconservative.com

By William ASTORE

Where are you going to get the money?  That question haunts congressional proposals to help the poor, the unhoused, and those struggling to pay the mortgage or rent or medical bills, among so many other critical domestic matters.  And yet — big surprise! — there’s always plenty of money for the Pentagon. In fiscal year 2022, in fact, Congress is being especially generous with $778 billion in funding, roughly $25 billion more than the Biden administration initially asked for.  Even that staggering sum seriously undercounts government funding for America’s vast national security state, which, since it gobbles up more than half of federal discretionary spending, is truly this country’s primary, if unofficial, fourth branch of government.

Final approval of the latest military budget, formally known as the 2022 National Defense Authorization Act, or NDAA, may slip into January as Congress wrangles over various side issues. Unlike so much crucial funding for the direct care of Americans, however, don’t for a second imagine it won’t pass with supermajorities. (Yes, the government could indeed be shut down one of these days, but not — never! — the U.S. military.)

Some favorites of mine among “defense” budget side issues now being wrangled over include whether military members should be able to refuse Covid-19 vaccines without being punished, whether young women should be required to register for the Selective Service System when they turn 18 (even though this country hasn’t had a draft in almost half a century and isn’t likely to have one in the foreseeable future), or whether the Iraq War AUMF (Authorization for Use of Military Force), passed by Congress to disastrous effect in 2002, should be repealed after nearly two decades of calamity and futility.

As debates over these and similar issues, predictably partisan, grab headlines, the biggest issue of all eludes serious coverage: Why, despite decades of disastrous wars, do Pentagon budgets continue to grow, year after year, like ever-expanding nuclear mushroom clouds? In other words, as voices are raised and arms waved in Congress about vaccine tyranny or a hypothetical future draft of your 18-year-old daughter, truly critical issues involving your money (hundreds of billions, if not trillions, of taxpayer dollars) go largely uncovered.

What are some of those issues that we should be, but aren’t, looking at?  I’m so glad you asked!

Seven Questions with “Throw-Weight”

Back in my Air Force days, while working in Cheyenne Mountain (the ultimate bomb shelter of the Cold War era), we talked about nuclear missiles in terms of their “throw-weight.”  The bigger their throw-weight, the bigger the warhead.  In that spirit, I’d like to lob seven throw-weighty questions — some with multiple “warheads” — in the general direction of the Pentagon budget. It’s an exercise worth doing largely because, despite its sheer size, that budget generally seems impervious to serious oversight, no less real questions of any sort.

So, here goes and hold on tight (or, in the nuclear spirit, duck and cover!):

1. Why, with the end of the Afghan War, is the Pentagon budget still mushrooming upward?  Even as the U.S. war effort there festered and then collapsed in defeat, the Pentagon, by its own calculation, was burning through almost $4 billion a month or $45 billon a year in that conflict and, according to the Costs of War Project, $2.313 trillion since it began.  Now that the madness and the lying are finally over (at least theoretically speaking), after two decades of fraud, waste, and abuses of every sort, shouldn’t the Pentagon budget for 2022 decrease by at least $45 billion?  Again, America lost, but shouldn’t we taxpayers now be saving a minimum of $4 billion a month?

2. After a disastrous war on terror costing upwards of $8 trillion, isn’t it finally time to begin to downsize America’s global imperial presence?  Honestly, for its “defense,” does the U.S. military need 750 overseas bases in 80 countries on every continent but Antarctica, maintained at a cost somewhere north of $100 billion annually?  Why, for example, is that military expanding its bases on the Pacific island of Guam at the expense of the environment and despite the protests of many of the indigenous people there?  One word: China!  Isn’t it amazing how the ever-inflating threat of China empowers a Pentagon whose insatiable budgetary demands might be in some trouble without a self-defined “near-peer” adversary?  It’s almost as if, in some twisted sense, the Pentagon budget itself were now being “Made in China.”

3. Speaking of China and its alleged pursuit of more nuclear weaponry, why is the U.S. military still angling for $1.7 trillion over the next 30 years for its own set of “modernized” nuclear weapons? After all, the Navy’s current strategic force, as represented above all by Ohio-class submarines with Trident missiles, is (and will for the foreseeable future be) capable of destroying the world as we know it. A “general” nuclear exchange would end the lives of most of humanity, given the dire impact the ensuing nuclear winter would have on food production.  What’s the point of Joe Biden’s “Build Back Better” bill, if America’s leaders are preparing to destroy it all with a new generation of holocaust-producing nuclear bombs and missiles?

4. Why is America’s military, allegedly funded for “defense,” configured instead for force projection and global strikes of every sort?  Think of the Navy, built around aircraft carrier strike groups, now taking the fight to the “enemy” in the South China Sea.  Think of Air Force B-52 strategic bombers, still flying provocatively near the borders of Russia, as if the movie Dr. Strangelove had been released not in 1964 but yesterday.  Why, in sum, does the U.S. military refuse to stay home and protect Fortress America?  An old sports cliché, “the best defense is a good offense,” seems to capture the bankruptcy of what passes, even after decades of lost wars in distant lands, for American strategic thinking.  It may make sense on a football field, but, judging by those wars, it’s been a staggering loss leader for our military, not to mention the foreign peoples on the receiving end of lethal weapons very much “Made in the USA.”

Instead of reveling in shock and awe, this country should find the wars of choice it’s fought since 1945 genuinely shocking and awful — and act to end them for good and defund any future versions of them.

5. Speaking of global strikes with awful repercussions, why is the Pentagon working so hard to encircle China, while ratcheting up tensions that can only contribute to nuclear brinksmanship and even possibly a new world war as early as 2027?  Related question: Why does the Pentagon continue to claim that, in its “wargames” with China over a prospective future battle for the island of Taiwan, it always loses?  Is it because “losing” is really winning, since that very possibility can then be cited to justify yet more requests for funds from Congress so that this country can “catch up” to the latest Red Menace?

(Bonus question: As America’s generals keep losing real wars as well as imaginary ones, why aren’t any of them ever fired?)

6. Speaking of global aggression, why does this country maintain a vast, costly military within the military that’s run by Special Operations Command and operationally geared to facilitating interventions anywhere and everywhere?  (Note that this country’s special ops forces are bigger than the full-scale militaries of many countries on this planet!)  When you look back over the last several decades, Special Operations forces haven’t proven to be all that special, have they? And it doesn’t matter whether you’re citing the wars in Vietnam, Iraq, or Afghanistan.  Put differently, for every SEAL Team 6 mission that kills a big bad guy, there are a surprising number of small-scale catastrophes that only alienate other peoples, thereby generating blowback (and so, of course, further funding of the military).

7. Finally, why, oh why, after decades of military losses, does Congress still defer so spinelessly to the “experience” of our generals and admirals?  Why issue so many essentially blank checks to the gang that simply can’t shoot straight, whether in battle or when they testify before Congressional committees, as well as to the giant companies (and congressional lobbying monsters) that make the very weaponry that can’t shoot straight?

It’s a compliment in the military to be called a straight shooter. I suggest President Biden start firing a host of generals until he finds a few who are willing to do exactly that and tell him and the rest of us some hard truths, especially about malfunctioning weapons and lost wars.

Forty years ago, after Ronald Reagan became president, I started writing in earnest against the bloating of the Pentagon budget.  At that time, though, I never would have imagined that the budgets of those years would look modest today, especially after the big enemy of that era, the Soviet Union, imploded in 1991.

Why, then, does each year’s NDAA rise ever higher into the troposphere, drifting on the wind and poisoning our culture with militarism?  Because, to state the obvious, Congress would rather engage in pork-barrel spending than exercise the slightest real oversight when it comes to the national security state.  It has, of course, been essentially captured by the military-industrial complex, a dire fate President Dwight D. Eisenhower warned us about 60 years ago in his farewell address.  Instead of being a guard dog for America’s money (not to mention for our rapidly disappearing democracy), Congress has become a genuine lapdog of the military brass and their well-heeled weapons makers.

So, even as Congress puts on a show of debating the NDAA, it’s really nothing but, at best, a political Kabuki dance (a metaphor, by the way, that’s quite common in the military, which tells you something about the well-traveled sense of humor of its members).  Sure, our congressional representatives act as if they’re exercising oversight, even as they do as they’re told, while the deep-pocketed contractors make major contributions to the campaign “war chests” of the very same politicians.  It’s a win for them, of course, but a major loss for this country — and indeed for the world.

Doing More With Less

What would real oversight look like when it comes to the defense budget?  Again, glad you asked!

It would focus on actual defense, on preventing wars, and above all, on scaling down our gigantic military.  It would involve cutting that budget roughly in half over the next few years and so forcing our generals and admirals to engage in that rarest of acts for them: making some tough choices.  Maybe then they’d see the folly of spending $1.7 trillion on the next generation of world-ending weaponry, or maintaining all those military bases globally, or maybe even the blazing stupidity of backing China into a corner in the name of “deterrence.”

Here’s a radical thought for Congress: Americans, especially the working class, are constantly being advised to do more with less.  Come on, you workers out there, pull yourself up by your bootstraps and put your noses to those grindstones!

To so many of our elected representatives (often sheltered in grotesquely gerrymandered districts), less money and fewer benefits for workers are seldom seen as problems, just challenges. Quit your whining, apply some elbow grease, and “git-r-done!”

The U.S. military, still proud of its “can-do” spirit in a warfighting age of can’t-do-ism, should have plenty of smarts to draw on.  Just consider all those Washington “think tanks” it can call on!  Isn’t it high time, then, for Congress to challenge the military-industrial complex to focus on how to do so much less (as in less warfighting) with so much less (as in lower budgets for prodigal weaponry and calamitous wars)?

For this and future Pentagon budgets, Congress should send the strongest of messages by cutting at least $50 billion a year for the next seven years.  Force the guys (and few gals) wearing the stars to set priorities and emphasize the actual defense of this country and its Constitution, which, believe me, would be a unique experience for us all.

Every year or so, I listen again to Eisenhower’s military-industrial complex speech.  In those final moments of his presidency, Ike warned Americans of the “grave implications” of the rise of an “immense military establishment” and “a permanent armaments industry of vast proportions,” the combination of which would constitute a “disastrous rise of misplaced power.”  This country is today suffering from just such a rise to levels that have warped the very structure of our society. Ike also spoke then of pursuing disarmament as a continuous imperative and of the vital importance of seeking peace through diplomacy.

In his spirit, we should all call on Congress to stop the madness of ever-mushrooming war budgets and substitute for them the pursuit of peace through wisdom and restraint. This time, we truly can’t allow America’s numerous smoking guns to turn into so many mushroom clouds above our beleaguered planet.

tomdispatch.com

On December 6 the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, otherwise SIPRI, released a report showing that “arms sales increased even as the global economy contracted by 3.1 per cent during the first year of the pandemic.” Then in an ironic counterpoint next day The New York Times reported that the House of Representatives had “overwhelmingly passed a $768 billion defence policy bill” which among other things, “put the Democratic-led Congress on track to increase the Pentagon’s budget by roughly $24 billion above what President Biden had requested.” As the Times noted, the allocation of additional money caused concern to the many people who had hoped that Democratic control of the House would ensure at least a modest reduction in Washington’s vast military expenditure.

To put the amount of 24 billion dollars in perspective it is illuminating to bear in mind that the U.S. aid budget for international assistance in the Covid crisis is one-sixteenth of what the Congress cynically over-allocated to the nation’s military. As indicated by the State Department, “The United States has continued to demonstrate its global leadership in public health and humanitarian assistance in the face of the COVID-19 pandemic… Since the outbreak of COVID-19, the U.S. Government has announced more than $1.5 billion [for] emergency health, humanitarian, economic, and development assistance specifically aimed at helping governments, international organizations, and non-governmental organizations fight the pandemic.” The allocation covers “more than 120 countries.”

It so happened that the defence policy bill went through Congress on the same day that President Biden, the comparatively parsimonious military spender, had a video conference with President Putin in which, as the White House stated in a media release on December 7, the U.S. stance concentrated on “the deep concerns of the United States and our European Allies about Russia’s escalation of forces surrounding Ukraine” to which U.S. military aid now totals over 1.5 billion dollars — just a bit more than its international Covid assistance.

Much of the cash being doled out by Washington is directed to the myriad of military equipment manufacturers, called ‘defence contractors’ which is a bland and inaccurate description for a group of highly-skilled specialists who reap enormous profits by making weapons to kill people all over the world. In another irony, one report brought attention to the fact that one of the manufacturers’ associated businesses, Analytic Services Inc, got into the top ten of the hundred most profitable government contractors “thanks in part to the Army’s $7.1 billion Covid-19 expenditure.”

Bloomberg notes that “In fiscal 2020, defense contract spending hit a record high of $447 billion – representing nearly two thirds of overall federal contract spending. It’s an impressive growth trajectory that we’ve been tracking for years. Pentagon spending surged by $140.6 billion between fiscal 2016 and 2020, with a $42 billion increase in the last year alone.” These sorts of figures are difficult to put in perspective, but one illustration is that $447 billion dollars is approximately equivalent to the Gross Domestic Product of Norway or Ireland. We’re talking big money.

And the weapons’ manufacturers make sure that the big money continues to roll in through various techniques, one of which is the simple and most effective expedient of giving generous donations to Senators and Members of the House of Representatives in Washington. The sheer cynicism of the manufacturers is hard to credit, but one example of their down-to-earth, get-it-done approach to making political contributions to lawmakers was their attitude following the armed assault on the U.S. Capitol when, as reported by Defense News (DN), there was “a pledge by dozens of American corporations in the aftermath of the January 6 insurrection to suspend political contributions, some specifically targeting Republicans who rejected Donald Trump’s election loss.”

DN quoted the spokesperson for BAE Systems as saying that “In response to the deeply disturbing violence at the U.S. Capitol on January 6th, our U.S. political action committee has suspended all donations while we assess the path forward.” It didn’t take too long for the path to be assessed, because “BAE began to reverse course on March 30 and has since given $195,000 to Democrats and Republicans alike. Its employee-supported Political Action Committee gave $15,000 on April 30 to the National Republican Senatorial Committee, led by one of eight GOP senators who voted to decertify election results: Senate Armed Services Committee member Rick Scott, of Florida.”

The amounts of money given to lawmakers is staggering, with Open Secrets figures indicating that in this financial year Lockheed Martin gave them almost a million, while approximately half a million was provided by each of General Dynamics, Raytheon, General Atomics, Intelligenesis Inc, Northrop Grumman and L3Harris Technologies. Other amounts were far from inconsequential, and although the list is too long to publish there are some individuals who stand out in the receiving line.

Democrat Representative Adam Smith of Washington State, who holds the extremely influential position of Chairman of the Armed Services Committee, states on his website that “One of the major challenges our military faces right now is dealing with the rapid pace of technology, is getting the Pentagon to better and more quickly adopt the innovative technologies that we need to meet our national security threats. Those threats are very real.” Now this may well be so, but it would be slightly more reassuring if Mr Smith had concentrated on reducing unnecessary military spending rather than insisting that his pet project, “affordable housing legislation”, was included in the Annual Defence Bill. It would also be comforting if Mr Smith of Washington, as Chairman of the Armed Services Committee, refrained from taking donations from political action committees of commercial enterprises directly associated with providing goods and services to the Pentagon.

Open Secrets details that in fundraising for 2021-2022 Mr Smith has so far received just under half a million dollars, of which Kratos Defense & Security Solutions gave him 50 thousand and L3Harris Technologies handed over 10 thousand. Nobody is saying that Mr Smith will immediately or even at any time seek to bend rules or in some other way favour those businesses who gave him money. But the question remains as to just why do all these mega-rich enterprises consider it right and proper to hand out cash to politicians? They are in the business of making money, after all, and it is unusual for any business organisation to allocate funds for other than improvement or investment. Proceeds and profits are the name of the game.

There are some positive notes to be heard in the intriguing world of political donations, and one of these concerns Representative Andy Levin who voted against the Defence Policy Bill because although he supports “having by far the strongest military in the world and the good-paying defense jobs in my district that protect our troops . . . I cannot support ever-increasing military spending in the face of so much human need across our country.” It can hardly be coincidental that there is no mention of donations from military industries in his records, but legislators like Mr Levin are few and far between, and although the world is awash with Covid, and there are so many real and urgent problems for Washington legislators to deal with, the manufacturers of weapons and providers of services to the military machine are continuing to profit and to keep the politicians on side. The money rolls in, but it is a strange and murky scene.

By Paul STREET

Who can ever forget the brilliant oratory of Joe “Nothing Would Fundamentally Change” Biden two nights after Election Day last November? “Democracy is sometimes messy,” Joe “No Empathy, Give Me a Break” Biden said two months before Donald Trump’s wild-eyed marauders would descend on the US Capitol. “It sometimes requires a little patience. But that patience has been rewarded now for more than 240 years with a system of governance that’s been the envy of the world.”

What wise counsel! “Patience, underlings, your globally unmatched democracy will hear your cries!” What came over those Hunger Marchers and Sit-Down Strikers in the 1930s? What was Rosa Parks thinking when she refused to get up from that bus seat? Surely the great Black American escaped slave and abolitionist Frederick Douglass needed to be more patient and feel more rewarded when he offered these bitter and impetuous reflections on July 4, 1852:

Fellow-citizens; above your national, tumultuous joy, I hear the mournful wail of millions! whose chains, heavy and grievous yesterday, are, to-day, rendered more intolerable by the jubilee shouts that reach them…At a time like this, scorching irony, not convincing argument, is needed. O! had I the ability, and could I reach the nation’s ear, I would, today, pour out a fiery stream of biting ridicule, blasting reproach, withering sarcasm, and stern rebuke. For it is not light that is needed, but fire; it is not the gentle shower, but thunder. We need the storm, the whirlwind, and the earthquake. The feeling of the nation must be quickened; the conscience of the nation must be roused; the propriety of the nation must be startled; the hypocrisy of the nation must be exposed; and its crimes against God and man must be proclaimed and denounced.

What, to the American slave, is your Fourth of July? I answer: a day that reveals to him, more than all other days in the year, the gross injustice and cruelly to which he is the constant victim. To him, your celebration is a sham; your boasted liberty, an unholy license; your national greatness, swelling vanity; your sounds of rejoicing are empty and heartless; your denunciations of tyrants, brass fronted impudence; your shouts of liberty and equality, hollow mockery; your prayers and hymns, your sermons and thanksgivings, with all your religious parade, and solemnity, are, to him, mere bombast, fraud, deception, impiety, and hypocrisy—a thin veil to cover up crimes which would disgrace a nation of savages. There is not a nation on the earth guilty of practices, more shocking and bloody, than are the people of these United States, at this very hour.

Go where you may, search where you will, roam through all the monarchies and despotisms of the old world, travel through South America, search out every abuse, and when you have found the last, lay your facts by the side of the everyday practices of this nation, and you will say with me, that, for revolting barbarity and shameless hypocrisy, America reigns without a rival

Will we ever break the taboo that protects the United States’ absurdly venerated 18th Century United States slaveowners’ charter – the national constitution that William Lloyd Garrison, accompanied by Sojourner Truth, and Henry David Thoreau, called “a covenant with death and an agreement with Hell” and then burned along with the 1850 Fugitive Slave Act outside Boston on July 4, 1854 – from the radical democratic criticism and replacement it has long deserved?

Blocking a “Marxist” Reform

The examples are endless of why Garrison’s “covenant with death” needs to be transcended if the nation is going to have any chance of achieving popular sovereignty, the US Founders’ ultimate nightmare.

Two among many possible instructive lessons are staring us in the face right now: the blockage or dilution of Biden’s moderate Build Back Better bill (B4) and the likely coming Supreme Court undoing of women’s constitutional right to an abortion (already abolished in the giant state of Texas and seriously rolled back in many other Bible, Lynching, and Gun Belt states) next spring.

A super-majority, 66 percent of the American citizenry supported the original $3.5 trillion B4, which can’t get through the “Tear Down Better” Congress without some major amputations.

The measure’s high popularity made sense. Absurdly denounced by the ridiculous Republifascist Senator Mark Rubio (Rf-FL) as an attempt “to create a socialist, almost Marxist-type economy”[1], the measure may have fallen far short of socialist requirements but even an unabashed Marxist like myself has to admit that it contained many desirable benefits for ordinary Americans: :

+ A large infusion for Pell Grants (federal college tuition grants for low-income Americans).

+ Childcare and universal pre-K, including a provision to keep the cost of childcare at or below 7% of most families’ income.

+ Two years of free community college for all students, regardless of family income

+ Extended child tax credits.

+ Medicare expansion to include coverage of dental, hearing and vision services.

+ Slashing prescription drug prices by permitting Medicare to negotiate drug prices.

+Comprehensive paid family and medical leave

+Climate change mitigation, including a “clean electricity performance program” to expand renewable energy, enhanced forest conservation, incentivization of electric vehicles and residential weather-fitting, among other things.

While the corporate media and right-wing and centrist politicians constantly chirped about different dollar figures – Biden’s original $3.5 trillion, $2.3 trillion, Demublican Joe “Party Boat” Manchin’s $1.5 trillion – the truth is that the measure would have cost the public nothing: it was to be paid for with modest increases in taxes on the nation’s absurdly under-taxed rich. And, as few in the “mainstream” imperialist media will mention, the B4’s ten-year so-called price-tag was less than half the vast corporate welfare largesse the federal government grants on a cost-plus basis to opulent high-tech “defense” (war and empire) firms in the form of the giant Pentagon system.

There’s no mystery about why the measure was so popular. It advanced real and desperately needed help for tens of millions of Americans and would have paid for these benefits with an overdue (if historically small) increase in taxes on the nation’s parasitic upper classes in a grotesquely unequal nation where the top thousandth had nearly as much wealth as the bottom 90 percent even before the pandemic increased the insane upward concentration of American net worth.

So NOT a “Democracy”

So why can’t the B4 be enacted in its original and modestly progressive form in “the world’s greatest democracy”? The first thing smart liberals and Democrats who pay attention to the news will tell you is that (nominally” Democratic US Senators Manchin [$-WV] and Kyrsten “What Not to Wear” Sinema [$-AZ] are opposed to the bill’s so-called price tag (unmentionably only for the rich) and the Democrats only have a one-vote margin in the Senate. The second thing such informed Americans will say is that the Manchin (the #1 collector of political money from the coal, oil and gas, and mining industries in the 2021-22 election cycle) and the major Big Pharma funding recipient Sinema garner giant campaign contributions from corporate interests (led by Big Carbon and Big Pharma) opposed to the bill’s “big government” provisions.

Both observations are true. But Manchin’s corruption goes deeper than political finance: a recent report shows that he “earns” $500,000 a year from coal stock dividends. Like many members of the “permanent political class” today [2], he’s not just a whore – he’s an oligarch. (One really must wonder how to calculate the carbon footprint of this planet-cooking parasite’s coming eternal damnation: it promises to be one of the hottest on record.)

At the same time and more to the point of this essay, there’s a deeper historical and institutional problem that rarely receives proper attention from commentators and activists: the nation’s “system of governance” – to use Biden’s phrase – isn’t democratic.

It isn’t democratic at all. And this goes back to the beginning of the country, decades before Frederick Douglass delivered his brilliant and righteous 1852 speech on “What to the Slave is the Fourth of July.”

Democracy is not what Biden’s beloved 240-year-old “system of governance” was ever about. And this is not just because the nation’s plutocratic political rulers are corruptly enmeshed with 21^st century corporate and financial lobbyists and bankrollers. Much of the difficulty goes back to the nation’s aristo-republican Founders and their purposefully and brilliantly democracy-crippling slaveowners’ charter.

The Absurd House

Look at the US Congress. Its lower body, the House of Representatives, is so badly gerrymandered rightward that the Republicans have a good shot of becoming the majority there again in 2023 even though the Republican Party is viewed with approval by just a little over a third (37%) of the populace while the Democrats are approved by nearly half (48%).

That’s absurd. Forget for a moment that neither of these capitalist and imperialist parties deserves support from any decent human being. One of the nation’s two major and viable political parties gets a thumbs up from nearly half the citizenry and the other such party is endorsed by just more than a third of the populace and the least popular (by far) of the two organization is poised to take back the House of Representatives in 2022/23. Ridiculous, right? But it cannot be understood without factoring in the anti-democratic role of gerrymandering and racist voter suppression conducted at the state level under the rules of a national charter and government that have long granted states remarkable autonomous power to set state and national district lines and other key election and voting rules.

The Absurd Senate

It gets more pathetically idiotic – from a democratic perspective at least – in the upper branch of Congress. How do the Republicans happen to control half of the extremely powerful US Senate and enjoy a good chance of regaining a majority there in 2023 or 2025 when their party is approved by just a bit more than a third of the populace? And how are the malignant, fossil-fueled reptile Manchin and the sartorial comedian (and onetime Naderite-turned corporatist) Sinema (who had the mind-blowing chutzpah to fly back to her home state for a fundraiser to vacuum up contributions from companies who oppose the B4 even as the measure was being deliberated upon in Washington DC last week) able to become darkly pivotal historical actors in the first place?

It isn’t just about campaign finance, corporate media, and other forms of political class corruption. Almost nobody talks about a big sick historical elephant in the room here: the further extreme violation of the elementary democratic principle of one person, one vote by the assignment of two US Senators to every state regardless of population size. This “democratic” absurdity is fully constitutional, for the nation’s revered 18^th Century Covenant with Death grossly exaggerates the Senate voice of the nation’s whitest, most reactionary, Republican, evangelical, patriarchal, armed, racist, and proto-fascistic regions. Get this: if bright blue California had the same population-to-US Senator ratio as bright red Wyoming, it would have at least 130 representatives in the upper body of Congress. If progressive Brooklyn were a state and US Senators were apportioned there with the same populace-to-Senator ratio as red Wyoming, the New York City borough would have 9 U.S. Senators.

Due to “a growing population shift from the agricultural interior to crowded corridors along the coast,” the brilliant left constitution critic Daniel Lazare noted five years ago, it had by 2018 become mathematically possible to “cobble together a [Republican] Senate majority with states that account for just 17.6 percent of the popular vote.” (And, by the way, the bright blue District of Columbia is home to more people of Wyoming.  It is absurdly denied voting representation in either the House or the Senate.)

The US Senate is loaded with giant de facto “rotten boroughs” that abhorrently inflate the power of the nation’s most reactionary sections. If the Senate were apportioned in accord with the nation’s popular geography, a bill far more progressive than the 4B would pass the Senate with ease and “centrist” snakes like Manchin and Sinema would be beside the point.

(Wild iconoclasts might further ask why we have a bicameral legislature, with an “upper house,” in the first place. What is that about? Most at least nominally democratic countries are quite naturally unicameral. The US Senate, like the British House of Lords, functions as originally designed: an aristocratic check on the more plebian lower house of congress/parliament.)

“The Peculiar System That Emerged”: The Absurd Slaveowners’ Electoral College

The absurdity bleeds over into the nation’s preposterous, Monty Python-esque Electoral College method of installing imperial, ruling class presidents. Two hundred and forty-three years into its “envied” experiment in “democracy,” the United States does not elect its chief executive on the basis of a national popular vote! Because it is weighted heavily by the slaveowner constitution’s reactionary Senate apportionment regime, and because it rewards Elector slates on an all-or-nothing state-by state basis (if a candidate wins Texas by a single popular vote he or she gets all of the state’s 38 Electors), this democracy-flunking “college” requires a Democratic presidential candidate (incumbent or not) to significantly out-perform his or her Republican opponent in the popular vote to win (or keep) the presidency. Since it is technically irrelevant to win California by five million instead of five hundred votes under the winner-take-all formula, that candidate must give far more heed to right-wing and “moderate” opinion than would be required if the nation’s presidential elections were based on (imagine!) a popular vote. Along with other factors, including of course political finance and corporate control of the mass media, the undemocratic Electoral College tilts presidential candidates (including incumbents who want a second term) to the right and away from majority progressive public opinion. Demented Republican maniacs who lost the popular vote have occupied the world’s most powerful office for 12 of the last 22 years thanks to this idiotic regime. One of those maniacs was an at least instinctive fascist and a vicious pandemicist. He may come back for a second, potentially terminal reign of destruction in 2025, his re-matriculation coming in no small part thanks in part to the august Founders’ brilliant 18^th Century college.

(Try to explain the Electoral College to someone from another country, my fellow US-American – it’s hilarious. “How absurd,” foreign correspondents say: “And they call that democracy? Seriously?” Envy indeed!)

The Electoral College traces back to the holy Founders’ need to keep the early republic’s southern slaveowners on board. As law professor Wilfried Codrington III noted in The Atlantic two years ago:

‘The delegates to the Philadelphia convention had scant conception of the American presidency—the duties, powers, and limits of the office. But they did have a handful of ideas about the method for selecting the chief executive. When the idea of a popular vote was raised, they griped openly that it could result in too much democracy. With few objections, they quickly dispensed with the notion that the people might choose their leader.

But delegates from the slaveholding South had another rationale for opposing the direct election method, and they had no qualms about articulating it: Doing so would be to their disadvantage. Even James Madison, who professed a theoretical commitment to popular democracy, succumbed to the realities of the situation. The future president acknowledged that “the people at large was in his opinion the fittest” to select the chief executive. And yet, in the same breath, he captured the sentiment of the South in the most “diplomatic” terms:

There was one difficulty however of a serious nature attending an immediate choice by the people. The right of suffrage was much more diffusive in the Northern than the Southern States; and the latter could have no influence in the election on the score of the Negroes. The substitution of electors obviated this difficulty and seemed on the whole to be liable to fewest objections.

Behind Madison’s statement were the stark facts: The populations in the North and South were approximately equal, but roughly one-third of those living in the South were held in bondage. Because of its considerable, nonvoting slave population, that region would have less clout under a popular-vote system. The ultimate solution was an indirect method of choosing the president, one that could leverage the three-fifths compromise, the Faustian bargain they’d already made to determine how congressional seats would be apportioned. With about 93 percent of the country’s slaves toiling in just five southern states, that region was the undoubted beneficiary of the compromise, increasing the size of the South’s congressional delegation by 42 percent. When the time came to agree on a system for choosing the president, it was all too easy for the delegates to resort to the three-fifths compromise as the foundation. The peculiar system that emerged was the Electoral College.’

As historian Carol Anderson shows in her important new book The Second: Race and Guns in a Fatally Unequal America, “The [slave] South had no problem in walking away from the [1787-88] Constitutional Convention and the United States” if it didn’t get what its ruling slaveowners wanted, including the right to count three-fifths of their slaves’ populations towards the determination of how many representatives they could send to the lower house of Congress and an amendment guaranteeing state militias designed and managed to crush slave rebellions. (Even during the so-called American Revolutionary War, Anderson shows, southern slaveowners were willing to sacrifice national independence if necessary to block the military enlistment of Black Americans for fear that armed Blacks might take up their weapons against slavery.)

Designed to appease southern slaveowners, the US Constitution (William Lloyd Garrison’s “agreement with Hell”) and the rest of the nation’s astonishingly archaic governance structure, inherited from the time of Louis XVI, now helps appease neofascism and is setting us up for a remorseless return of the white nationalist Amerikaner Party of Trump to full national power in 2023 and 2025.

Judicial Review

It is true of course that the morally criminal conduct of reptilian politicos like Joe “Coal Stock” Manchin and Kyrsten “Drug Lobby” Sinema is related to the political dollars they rake in from capital – from corporate interests, business lobbyists, and other deep-pocketed political investors. But this money-politics corruption is inexplicable without reference to Joe MBNA Biden’s treasured 24-decade “system of governance.” Noxious prostituted real or wannabe dollar Dem oligarchs like Manchin and Sinema can only become swing-vote policy royalty and thereby boost their political finance profiles (election investment is all about impacting policy in the funders’ interest) because of the absurd level of disproportionate minority rule power the reactionary Senate apportionment system grants the nation’s rightmost major party.

At the same time, the Slaveowners’ Constitution grants an absurdly high level of Simon Says policymaking (and policy-breaking) “judicial review” power to the US Supreme Court, an aristocratic appointed-for-life body that has ruled in two key decisions (Buckley v. Valeo in 1976 and Citizens United in 2010) that there can be no serious government limits placed on the “free speech” right of concentrated wealth to influence (purchase) American elections and thereby shape (dominate) US policy. What current House member Jamin Raskin (D-MD) and his onetime fellow Harvard Law student John Bonifaz once cleverly labeled “the wealth primary” – the requirement that one either possess great wealth or access to it to run a viable campaign for higher office – is not an act of God. It’s an act of policy enforced by the absurdly powerful US Supreme Court, invented by the US Founders as one of many aristocratic checks on the menace posed by their ultimate enemy, democracy.

The Supreme Court, endowed with God-like powers of judicial review – the sacred high temple of democracy that ruled in 1857 that African Americans were not and never could be citizens of the United States. What a glorious and sage example of benevolent wisdom that was, clear proof that Joe “Come on, Man” Biden is right about the wonderful rewards that accrue to those who patiently let the glorious American “system of governance” work its egalitarian wonders. Just what was it about that marvelous system of popular self-rule that Frederick Douglass couldn’t wrap his mind around five years before the Dred Scott decision?!

So What if 62% Percent Support Roe?

Speaking of the Supreme Court, it seems likely that it will soon reverse Roe v. Wade and thereby eliminate women’s constitutional right to receive abortions. This will impose forced motherhood and de facto female slavery across the United States (The ridiculously powerful high court has recently signed off on the full abrogation of Roe in Texas by refusing to intervene against a toxic Christian fascist bill with national mercenary and vigilante reach analogous to the 1850 Fugitive Slave Act). So what if 62% of Americans want to keep Roe intact? The Supreme Court has an absurd 6-3 Republican majority, far to the right of the US populace, achieved through fully constitutional means: the appointment of high court justices (including three selected by the malignant pandemo-fascist beast Donald Trump) by right-wing Republican US presidents who were installed by the Slaveowner Constitution’s anti-democratic Electoral College system and approval by a US Senate that badly overrepresents the nation’s most reactionary regions and states. Constitutional Simon Says! Yet more reward for patient faith in a glorious democratic “system of governance” that has made the world green with envy for 240 years!

Still Slaves to the Constitution

The US Founders’ holy Covenant With Death was only passed through a grotesque series of bargains struck with the South’s merciless, arch-racist owners, exploiters, and torturers of Black slaves: the putrid Three-Fifths Compromise (letting the slaveowners count three-fifths of their slave populations towards the size of their delegation in the US House of Representatives), the Fugitive Slave Clause (granting slavery extra-territoriality by stating that fugitives from slavery must be sent back to the South if captured in the North), continuation of international slave trading for two decades, the Senate apportionment regime (which significantly over-represented slave states relative to the nation’s free population and electorate), the Electoral College, and the Second Amendment, upon which slaveholders insisted to assure themselves of a fighting force willing and ready to suppress slave insurrections.

Two hundred and thirty-three years after its ratification, we are still slaves to the undemocratic US Constitution in a very concrete institutional sense, with disastrous outcomes for ordinary people and livable ecology at home and abroad. The story of how and why this crippling aristo-republican slaveholders’ document has survived as the nation has moved from merchant capitalism to industrial and corporate capitalism, through America’s rise to global hegemony, and into the current neoliberal (and perhaps neofascist) era is a topic worthy of further investigation. The astonishing, highly atypical durability of this 18^th Century charter has yet to find its critically inclined historian, but it seems clear that the nation’s underlying class dictatorship of capital has seen fit to retain this horse and buggy era deed with the Devil since it is still paying dividends.

Don’t get me wrong. The class dictatorship of capital compromises and indeed crushes genuine popular sovereignty in all “bourgeois democracies” (an arguably oxymoronic phrase unless it is understood to mean democracy for capital), regardless of form. But the American constitutional order –Joe Biden’s “system of governance” that has supposedly been “the envy of the world” for 240 years (89 of which were marked by Black chattel slavery) – is quite distinctively reactionary, canceling even modest reforms considered mainstream and centrist in other rich capitalist nations. It ought to be considered long past its expiration date. Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema richly deserves the worst imaginable earthly and spiritual punishments and capitalism must be radically replaced with ecosocialism on the path to communism, but national charters and governance structures matter and the US-American charter and structure is now and has long been an indefensible and authoritarian atrocity leading us to disaster in numerous ways I have only partially touched upon here.

Special Nullification Measures Still Required for Republifascists

And yet all this is not enough for the Nazified Republicans of 2021. Future US historians, should they exist, may someday marvel at how determined the nation’s rightmost major party, the neofascist Republicans, are to rig the constitutional game even further in their own favor through next generation gerrymandering, voter suppression, and (now) blunt election denial and nullification. The forefront of the Trump party’s current assault on bourgeois electoral democracy is the constitutional art and science of not counting votes, throwing out votes, overthrowing elections, and preventing the certification of Electoral College slates that don’t go Republikaners’ way. Red states are currently and all-too constitutionally moving not just to suppress and gerrymander Democratic votes but to cancel, deny, de-certify, and nullify them. It’s all meant to be done “constitutionally” with no street thugs, repression, and bloodshed required – at least not until people take to the streets to protest the coming theft of the 2024 presidential election.

Republican plotters see January 6^th and the broader multi-pronged attack on the 2020 election (the Capitol Riot was a last-ditch Hail Mary in this assault) as an exhibition game, a practice run, and a warm-up. It’s just a prologue to something far more sophisticated and serious in 2024-25. No more Beer Hall Putsches for these openly authoritarian white nationalists. They are getting all their legal and constitutional ducks in a row, coordinating election-theft and vote-nullification strategies between the state and federal levels. The table is being set for a new shot at fascist consolidation, American style, all quite “constitutional” in design. The fascist mob and gendarme violence will come after the election is expertly pinched by red state governments, the US Congress (which should be back in Republican hands), and perhaps the disproportionately right-wing federal courts.

Clearly the Amerikaner Party of Trump (the Republican Party) does not see the Founders’ charter as sufficient to guarantee the final solution they crave. Extra vote-suppressing and (worse) election-nullifying measures are required in their view because of demographic changes underscored by the 2020 Census – non-Hispanic white Americans’ declining share of the US population on the road to become a minority of the nation by 2050 if not before. Having moved from the neo-Nazi margins to the mainstream center of Republican media-politics culture, Fascist Replacement Theory (FRT) [3] is intimately linked to the Big 2020 Election Lie in fueling the coming right-wing coup of 2024-25.

“We Need the Storm”

Slavery was ended and basic civil and voting were first constitutionally (and inadequately) extended to Black Americans only through the revolutionary war and southern reconstruction that southern slaveowners’ intransigence forced on Abraham Lincoln, 180,000 Black Union Army soldiers, Ulysses S. Grant, and Congressional Republicans between 1861 and 1877. Frederick Douglass’s 1852 words were born out: “We need the storm, the whirlwind, and the earthquake.” It took a Civil War that claimed 750,000 lives to amend the Founder’s holy slaveowners’ charter in some all too historically incomplete and transient accord with democratic principles. Here we are now on the precipice of final societal and ecological collapse being inflicted on the nation and world by capitalism-imperialism, a system with no single greater national headquarters than the imperial United States. Calm patience with “our” (their) 240-year-old “system of governance” should be the very last thing on our political and moral agendas

There are no non-radical resolutions of the dilemmas facing this fatally unequal nation. The current trajectory is toward the radical right path of constitutionally consolidated and then repressively enforced and ecologically disastrous neofascism that imposes ruinous capitalist oppression. The only viable alternative is a radical people’s eco-socialist revolution that fully confronts the underlying class dictatorship of capital and struggles to put humanity on the path to many-sided liberation from all forms of oppression other than those imposed by natural existence itself.

We don’t need kayak-paddling beggars trying to speak truth up to Manchin’s power yacht. We need the storm that sinks his vessel in the turbulent seas of an actual revolution. We need the whirlwind. We need the earthquake. We need “the radical reconstruction of society itself” that Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., identified as “the real issue to be faced” shortly before his execution. Maybe the attempted imposition of neofascist female slavery (forced motherhood) in the world’s most powerful state can be a spark.

Endnotes

+1. This led Paul Krugman to cleverly quip that the Communist Manifesto called for “Workers of the world [to] unite to spend 1.2% of GDP on popular programs over the next decade!”

+2. University of Kentucky history department chair Ronald Formisamo’s latest book is titled American Oligarchy: The Permanence of the Political Class (University of Illinois, 2017). By Formisamo’s detailed account, U.S. politics and policy are under the control of a “permanent political class” – a “networked layer of high-income people” including Congressional representatives (half of whom are millionaires), elected officials, campaign funders, lobbyists, consultants, appointed bureaucrats, pollsters, television celebrity journalists, university presidents, and executives at well-funded nonprofit institutions. This “permanent political class,” Formisamo warns, is taking the nation “beyond [mere] plutocracy” to “the hegemony of an aristocracy of inherited wealth.”  It: “drives economic and political inequality not only with the policies it has constructed over the past four decades, such as federal and state tax systems rigged to favor corporations and the wealthy; it also increases inequality by its self-dealing, acquisitive behavior as it enables, emulates, and enmeshes itself with the wealthiest One Percent and .01 percent …[It engages in] the direct creation of inequality by channeling the flow of income and wealth to elites [while]… its self-aggrandizement creates a culture of corruption that infects the entire society and that induces many to abuse positions of power to emulate or rise into the One Percent …[and as it] contributes to continuing high levels of poverty and disadvantage for millions that exceed almost all advanced nations.”

+3. Special thanks to the clever English professor Clark Iverson for this play on the white nationalist right’s bogeyman “CRT” (Critical Race Theory).

counterpunch.org

We need to clear some things up before they get any further out of hand, as the Dems insist on making this stuff every day’s front page. For starters, please stop saying “Reichstag moment.”  Also there was nothing even close to a coup on January 6, and those who fan the flames claiming we were “close” to a coup, overthrow, losing our democracy, etc., have evil designs on freedom and we should not listen to them. Done.

If the aliens flying around Navy ships were to stop long enough to listen to a couple of hours of “news,” they could easily believe Trump is still president, or at least still running against Biden. The MSM has him dominate the news, typically by recycling stories from his time in office, even recently reviving that he is a Russian asset. When Grandpa Simpson and Kamala “Silent Shadow” Harris tottered into the White House, they became president. Done.

Some 500 protestors taking selfies inside the Capitol building is a tantrum not a coup. Among other things, a coup must have some path towards success, in this case, preventing Joe Biden from becoming president. The rioters at best might have delayed the largely ceremonial counting of the Electoral College votes until the next day which would not have been a coup, or forced Congress to meet at Starbucks to do its job, also not a coup. Done.

Not done. The latest addition to Coup Cannon comes from then- and somehow still- Chairman of the Joint Chiefs General Mark Milley, apparently auditioning for a retirement job as a CNN analyst. Milley was so shaken Trump might attempt a coup or take other illegal measures after the election he and other top officials planned to stop Trump. Neither Milley nor any of the others actually spells out what Trump might have realistically done in some Calvinball-like way to make said coup happen. Milley’s Strangelovian performance art is based on nothing but the spittle running down his chin. American soldiers have been required to refuse illegal orders at least since Biden wore diapers, so Milley’s histrionics are just that.

Milley nonetheless felt “growing concern” after Trump placed “loyalists” in positions of power after the November 2020 election, replacing both Defense Secretary Mark Esper and Attorney General William Barr. He feared based on his own sizable gut these moves “were the sign of something sinister to come” (Update: Nothing sinister came.) Milley failed to recognize all presidential appointees are “loyalists” and somehow Trump did not replace Milley, who clearly had not read his oath recently, especially the part about taking orders from the civilian head of government.

In fact, if anyone is a threat to democracy it is nutjobs like Milley, who feel free to weave in and out of answering to the Commander in Chief based on their personal “concerns.” The general’s tough love for the Constitution apparently did not include the right to assemble, as he referred to a pro-Trump march protesting election results as “the modern American equivalent of brownshirts in the streets.” Dems now want to make a hero out of a man who feels his judgment is superior to the Constitution.

While Milley was rewriting 230 years of military prudence in late 2020, Paul Krugman of the NYT wrote there were “substantial odds America as we know it will be damaged or even destroyed” by the election (Update: it was not.) He told us to “expect violence from Trump supporters, maybe lots of it, both to disrupt voting on Election Day and in the days that follow” until Trump “stops counting of absentee ballots, claims massive fraud, and probably tries to get the Supreme Court to overturn the result” (Update: that did not happen.)  Elsewhere in the Times’ bunker, Thomas Friedman said America today reminded him of the Beirut at war with itself he covered as a cub reporter (Update: Beruit was way worse.)

Over at The Nation they simply assumed Trump would illegally remain in power. The writer’s real concern was “we have the moral high ground. But we don’t have, frankly, the military leadership in place to direct a guerrilla campaign against an illegitimate regime. We don’t have a government-in-exile waiting to take power. We don’t have international allies. We don’t have an underground network of spies and saboteurs. . . but we can lay our bodies down in front of the tanks.” Any hope for the rule of law? Nope. “The Supreme Court too is, fundamentally, an anti-democratic institution run by people who are not subject to the popular will of our diverse society.”

The Nation should not have worried about having to go Red Dawn unarmed. General Milley said “They may try [a coup] but they’re not going to f**king succeed. You can’t do this without the military. You can’t do this without the CIA and the FBI. We’re the guys with the guns.” An interesting take on where power lies in a nation whose founding document begins with We the People…

Milley’s real plan was to prevent Trump from using the military in a coup by using the military in a coup against civilian leadership to gun down American citizens. CNN reports after January 6 Milley feared an attack on the presidential inauguration, telling senior military leaders: “Here’s the deal, guys: These guys are Nazis, they’re Boogaloo Boys, they’re Proud Boys. These are the same people we fought in World War II. We’re going to put a ring of steel around this city and the Nazis aren’t getting in.”

But Milley is also a liar, claiming publically at the same time “I foresee no role for the U.S. armed forces in this election process. We will not turn our backs on the Constitution of the United States” while planning his Ring of Steel (it sounds better in the original German, Ring aus Stahl.)

Our observer from Mars might be confused. As far as a threat to democracy, it is General Milley who was preparing to disobey the Constitution and take a patriot-sized dump on his chain of command. It is progressive porn rag The Nation telling their readers they will fight a guerrilla war against other Americans, and that the Supreme Court, the third branch of government, is an antidemocratic institution. Who again is the threat? Trump’s out of office; Milley still holds command of the entire U.S. military.

And so to the Reichstag. With as little knowledge of history as they have of coups, the MSM turned the Reichstag fire into shorthand for everything they fear Trump would do but somehow never did. The 1933 Reichstag fire was a false-flag arson attack on the home of the German parliament in Berlin. The Nazi Party used this as a pretext to claim communists were ready to overthrow the elected government. Left out of the current misuse of the analogy is Hitler had already become Chancellor before the fire. More importantly, missing when trying to connect 1933 to modern America, is a full lack of context.

Hitler had already achieved power, transparently on promises to conquer the world, implement the Final Solution, and all sorts of other Mein Kampf stuff. He had announced plans to abolish democracy via the Enabling Act, which gave him power to pass laws by decree without the involvement of parliament. That next step needed an excuse, a trigger, to crack down, not a prime mover to seize power. The Germany around him was also over ripe for change, having been humiliated in WWI and suffering near-crippling unemployment and inflation. Historically Germany had had only a few years’ taste of a wimpy democracy, and a long history of autocracy. No matter how dramatic someone wants to portray Trump’s non-actions, none of what never happened came within miles of what the real Nazis did.

If there was no coup on January 6, and no possible road to a coup, why are we still talking about all this? We should be mocking those who have no basic understanding of current events, never mind history. But we are still talking about all this (with Nancy Pelosi’s deck-is-stacked “investigation” looming) because the Biden agenda is stalled. He has decreed a few things that undecreeded a few things Trump decreed, but is unlikely to make much progress on all those promises of infrastructure, immigration reform, or student loans. Inflation is at a 13 year high even as gas prices eat away at what’s left of our middle class. There is no vision to end the COVID panic. The social justice and culture war issues which dominate Democratic mindspace seem even more flaccid with Trump out of office. So what do Democrats have left to run on?

Trump. The Democratic message for the midterms and beyond is Trump, coups, January 6, white supremacy, racism-a-go-go, militias, domestic terrorism, a veritable Nazi renaissance. Dems have little else but fear of things that never happened to work with, and hope to milk the “But at least we’re not Trump” cow one more time. So get ready to party like it is 2020. And just wait for #Reichstagification to start trending.

wemeantwell.com

This weekend, a bipartisan group of senators crafted a $1 trillion measure to repair and expand the nation’s roads, bridges, ports, airports and broadband. Last week, this trillion-dollar infrastructure plan got a green light from 17 Republican senators, including Sen. Mitch McConnell.

Just seven weeks into his presidency, Joe Biden signed a $1.9 trillion COVID-19 relief bill. Among the largest spending bills in history, it was passed without the vote of a single Republican.

The plan sent direct payments of up to $1,400 to most Americans, extended a $300 per week unemployment insurance boost until Sept. 6 and expanded the child tax credit for a year. It also put $350 billion into state, local and tribal relief.

This weekend, a bipartisan group of senators crafted a $1 trillion measure to repair and expand the nation’s roads, bridges, ports, airports and broadband. Last week, this trillion-dollar infrastructure plan got a green light from 17 Republican senators, including Sen. Mitch McConnell.

Boasted Biden: “The Bipartisan Infrastructure Deal is the largest infrastructure bill in a century. It will grow the economy, create good-paying jobs, and set America on a path to win the future.”

Up next is a $3.5 trillion measure to remake America, which is also to be enacted without GOP support via a process called “reconciliation,” which enables the Senate to pass measures with a simple majority.

This $3.5 trillion measure would expand social and environmental programs, extend the reach of education and health care, tax the rich and take on the challenge of the century — climate change.

Among programs funded are universal prekindergarten for all 3- and 4-year-olds, two years of free community college, clean energy mandates for utilities and lower prescription drug prices. Medicare benefits would be expanded and amnesty extended to millions of illegal migrants.

All that is needed for its enactment into law is a Democrat majority in Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s House, the votes of the 50 Democratic senators and the signature of Biden.

After effecting passage of his $1.9 trillion COVID-19 relief package, if Biden gets the $1 trillion infrastructure proposal and the $3.5 trillion package, he will have enlarged federal spending by $6 trillion.

This would constitute the greatest leap forward toward socialism of any American president, with Biden’s only rivals being previous record-holders Franklin D. Roosevelt during the 1930s’ New Deal and Lyndon B. Johnson’s Great Society in the 1960s.

If Biden succeeds in getting it all, this would not only be a quantum leap toward European-style socialism. It would cross a divide for America, from which history teaches us there is no return.

“A billion here, a billion there, and pretty soon you’re talking real money,” said Sen. Everett Dirksen in the 1960s, when he was leading a badly outmanned Republican minority in the Senate after the Barry Goldwater defeat.

Today, we talk not about billions but about trillions, and that $6 trillion in spending Biden is reaching for translates into more than six thousand billion dollars.

As of today, however, neither the infrastructure bill nor the $3.5 trillion omnibus bill is a done deal, with the former looking more probable than the latter. But if both are passed, they would create new records and new realities for the U.S. government.

The federal debt would exceed the U.S. economy for the first time since World War II. The deficits for this year and last, roughly $3 trillion in each year, already exceed any past deficits since World War II

Passage of the $3.5 trillion omnibus bill would constitute a quantum leap in the number of Americans dependent on the federal government for the necessities of life.

It would increase America’s ratio of tax consumers to taxpayers.

It would be tantamount to an admission of belief that the real engine of economic growth in America, the truly indispensable provider upon whom an ever-expanding share of the population of the nation depend for food, rent, health care, education and cash income, is the government of the United States, not the American free market system.

As for the Republican Party, the conservative party of lower taxes, balanced budgets and free market solutions to social problems, the fiscal debate will be over in a way it has never been before.

Passage of that $3.5 trillion omnibus bill would represent the triumph of Great Society liberalism over Reaganite conservatism.

In his first inaugural address, President Ronald Reagan declared that government is not the solution to our problems. Government is the problem.

In his State of the Union address in 1996, President Bill Clinton seemed to concede the triumph of Reaganism over liberalism and socialism:

“We know big government does not have all the answers. We know there’s not a program for every problem. We have worked to give the American people a smaller, less bureaucratic government in Washington. And we have to give the American people one that lives within its means.

“The era of big government is over.”

In 2021, Biden and his party are saying: Clinton was wrong to concede Reaganism its victory. When there is a big crisis in the country, FDR was right: Big government is the solution.

If the terrain looks unfamiliar, that is because we are crossing a new continental divide. We are entering Sen. Bernie Sanders and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez country.

buchanan.org

It is interesting to observe that the many atrocities carried out by Israel and its surrogates in Lebanon and Palestine through the years, which have killed thousands of civilians, have not aroused the ire that is being witnessed as a result of the recent attack on Gaza, which killed less than 300. That many of the dead were children and infrastructure in the already devastated Strip was deliberately targeted explains part of the anger, but there is something more fundamental brewing. People, even in the brainwashed United States and Britain, are tired of Israel’s brutality and have become immune to the excuses made for it by those in power. How many times can Nancy Pelosi repeat “Israel has a right to defend itself” when television viewers can themselves see the disparity of the punishment that is being meted out to Palestinians who have virtually no means of defending themselves? And how can Joe Biden and his cast of foreign policy imposters continue to assert that Israel was attacked when it is clear to many that the Jewish state deliberately provoked the fighting by its encouragement of armed mobs of settlers marching through Palestinian neighborhoods and calling for “death to Arabs,” not to mention the home demolitions and expulsions taking place to make room for Jews and the deliberate disruption of religious services at the al-Aqsa mosque on one of Islam’s holiest days?

In truth, Israel’s track record since it was created is not good. More than 800,000 Palestinians were expelled during the state’s founding, still more since the West Bank and Golan Heights were “acquired” in a war of aggression in 1967, and an estimated 100,000 Palestinians and Arabs have been killed by its army and police since 1948. The attack on Gaza last month featured the deliberate targeting of homes that wiped out entire families. Meanwhile, the much reviled “terrorist group” Hamas was established in 1988 with the support of Israeli intelligence to undercut the authority of the PLO, but now its alleged “extremism” serves the Israeli government as a useful tool to discredit the entire Palestinian freedom movement. Ironically, of course, Hamas has now morphed into the national liberation movement for the Palestinian people.

There have been large demonstrations in Western cities demanding Palestinian rights and an end to the oppression, though little of that has been reported in the U.S. media in particular for the usual reason, i.e. organized Israel Lobby pressure combined with Jewish ownership and management of many media outlets. The uncritical relations that most Western capitals have with Jerusalem, based largely on fear of being labeled anti-Semitic, are being scrutinized more than ever. In the U.S., Harvard Professor of International Relations Stephen Walt has called for an end to the “special relationship” with Washington because “The benefits of U.S. support no longer outweigh the costs.” Actually Walt is wrong as the so-called benefits received from completely uncritical support of Israel NEVER outweighed the costs to the United States.

And ordinary working people are also beginning to share the outrage. Last week the longshoremen’s union in Oakland refused to unload a ship belonging to the Israeli Zim line while other unions have passed motions condemning the Israeli apartheid state. There have been calls to extend the boycott of Israeli products to include the businesses owned by those Jewish billionaires who are known to be major supporters of Israel and its lobby. Black spokesmen have observed that their tactical “alliance” with Jewish groups that excuse the brutal Israeli behavior towards the Palestinians is not any longer acceptable.

Even the national media took a step back as they covered the recent slaughter of Gazans. The new New York Times correspondent in Israel Patrick Kingsley has to everyone’s surprised delivered some remarkably honest reporting. In short, overall, the tide may be turning.

Perhaps the clearest indication that the love affair with Israel might be ending comes from the U.S. Congress, where the mudslinging over a foreign policy issue has reached an intensity not seen in many years. Israel’s surrogates and most Jewish groups have joined in the fray, responding fiercely to criticism of Israel that actually appears to have gained some traction. The latest smearing of critics of Israel began in response to a comment by Congresswoman Ilhan Omar, who questioned Secretary of State Tony Blinken during a June 7^th House Foreign Affairs Committee meeting, asking what the State Department response would be to the International Criminal Court’s investigation of alleged crimes by the Taliban and the U.S. in Afghanistan as well as Hamas and Israel in the Gaza conflict.

Omar, who came to the U.S. as a refugee from Somalia, followed up with a tweet asserting that “We must have the same level of accountability and justice for all victims of crimes against humanity. We have seen unthinkable atrocities committed by the U.S., Hamas, Israel, Afghanistan, and the Taliban.” She included the video of her questioning and stated that “I asked @SecBlinken where people are supposed to go for justice.” It was a good question, forcing Blinken to lie about how they could obtain accountability by resorting to Israeli and American rule-of-law in the courts.

The friends of Israel quickly struck back. A joint statement signed on by twelve Democratic Party congressmen who self-identified as Jewish, accused her of “Equating the United States and Israel to Hamas and the Taliban is as offensive as it is misguided. Ignoring the differences between democracies governed by the rule of law and contemptible organizations that engage in terrorism at best discredits one’s intended argument and at worst reflects deep-seated prejudice. The United States and Israel are imperfect and, like all democracies, at times deserving of critique, but false equivalencies give cover to terrorist groups. We urge Congresswoman Omar to clarify her words placing the U.S. and Israel in the same category as Hamas and the Taliban.”

Congressman Brad Sherman, a senior member of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, signed the joint statement and also issued one of his own: “It’s not news that Ilhan Omar would make outrageous and clearly false statements about America and Israel. What’s newsworthy is that she admits Hamas is guilty of ‘unthinkable atrocities.’ It’s time for all of Israel’s detractors to condemn Hamas. And it’s time for all those of good will to reject any moral equivalency between the U.S. and Israel on one hand, and Hamas and the Taliban on the other.”

Republican House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy also got into it, tweeting “Rep. Omar’s anti-Semitic & anti-American comments are abhorrent. Speaker Pelosi’s continued failure to address the issues in her caucus sends a message to the world that Democrats are tolerant of anti-Semitism and sympathizing with terrorists. It’s time for the Speaker to act.” The National Republican Congressional Committee also demanded that Omar be stripped of her House committee assignments due to her anti-Semitism and three GOP House members issued on Monday a press release condemning Omar and her associates for “trafficking in anti-Semitic rhetoric” and “inciting anti-Semitic attacks.” One of the three, Representative Michael Waltz of Florida, also dubbed the so-called Squad group consisting of Omar and her friends the “Hamas Caucus.”

Omar tweeted a response for her Democratic Party critics, writing that “It’s shameful for colleagues who call me when they need my support to now put out a statement asking for ‘clarification’ and not just call. The islamophobic tropes in this statement are offensive. The constant harassment & silencing from the signers of this letter is unbearable.” Omar was supported by Rashida Tlaib, a Palestinian-American from Michigan, who tweeted “I am tired of colleagues (both D+R) demonizing @IlhanMN. Their obsession with policing her is sick. She has the courage to call out human rights abuses no matter who is responsible. That’s better than colleagues who look away if it serves their politics… Once again disappointed in my colleagues quicker to condemn @Ilhan than they are to condemn the human rights abuses of the apartheid state of Israel.”

Fellow progressive Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez added that making Omar a target for genuine threats was not a way to resolve the issue. She tweeted “Pretty sick & tired of the constant vilification, intentional mischaracterization, and public targeting of @IlhanMN coming from our caucus. They have no concept for the danger they put her in by skipping private conversations & leaping to fueling targeted news cycles around her.”

Omar did in fact receive death threats. She described one of them in a tweet: “Every time I speak out on human rights I am inundated with death threats. Here is one we just got. ‘Muslims are terrorists. And she is a raghead n*****. And every anti-American communist piece of s*** that works for her, I hope you get what’s f***ing coming for you.’”

Nevertheless, something like an apology was forthcoming from the outnumbered Omar who surrendered to demands for clarification with an assertion that she was “not [making] a moral comparison between Hamas and the Taliban and the U.S. and Israel. I was in no way equating terrorist organizations with democratic countries with well-established judicial systems.” This led too something like forgiveness from the upper echelons of the Democratic Party, led by Pelosi, who responded “Legitimate criticism of the policies of both the United States and Israel is protected by the values of free speech and democratic debate. And indeed, such criticism is essential to the strength and health of our democracies. But drawing false equivalencies between democracies like the U.S. and Israel and groups that engage in terrorism like Hamas and the Taliban foments prejudice and undermines progress toward a future of peace and security for all.”

Omar has often been in trouble with powerful Jews in the Democratic Party as well as with her party’s senior management. The House even passed a resolution in 2019 that was aimed at her, condemning anti-Semitism, racism and Islamophobia after she described the Israel lobby as a “political influence in this country that says it is OK to push for allegiance to a foreign country.” She also was attacked for tweeting that American political support for Israel was “all about the Benjamins,” described as anti-Semitic because it implied that some Jewish oligarchs with names like Haim Saban and Sheldon Adelson were using money to buy influence. Both of her comments were, of course, completely correct.

The back and forth over Gaza is revealing in that it shows how Israel’s real power operates in Congress, shamelessly with Jewish congressmen openly demonstrating their ultimate loyalty to Israel to include grossly misrepresenting the reality that exists currently in the Middle East. That reality is that Israel is essentially an invasive colonial power that has stolen identity and nationhood from the original inhabitants of the region, continues to regard them as chattels with no or limited rights, and uses its military might enhanced by the United States to mete out punishment directed against them as it sees fit. Israel is the only nation that commits war crimes on a regular basis as it frequently attacks its neighbors, most particularly Syria, without so much as a squeak coming from the United States.

When the occupied and abused Palestinians object and fight back to the best of their ability as they did from Gaza, which they are entitled to under international law, they are massacred and described conveniently as “terrorists.” No, Israel might be considered a form a democracy for Jews but the non-Jews ground down under its heel have a much different perception. Nor does its judiciary protect non-Jews as its rule of law is only designed to protect Jews. The United States is a similar faux democracy in that its politicians are so easily bought and manipulated, and it too had committed its share of war crimes in Afghanistan and Iraq. So Ilhan Omar was right on all points, but still she had to surrender to the force majeure of Israel and its host of allies in the U.S. Congress.

Mark Twain once wrote that “It could probably be shown by facts and figures that there is no distinctly native American criminal class except Congress.” Some developments over the past several weeks would certainly support that judgement if one regards a country’s legislative body as a mechanism intended to benefit the public that it is elected to serve. The hypocrisy of America’s two major parties is something to behold, with corruption at a level that is rarely attained in most third world countries.

Recently there have been some appalling cases that underline how far the American Congress has separated itself from any tangible national interest if one excludes getting rich and reelected, in whichever order one seeks to go about that. One of the best at getting rich and reelected in spite of not having two brain cells to rub together is the esteemed Maxine Waters of California, who has starred in her recent attempt to inspire an angry mob to get more “confrontational” if the murder trial of Minneapolis policeman Derek Chauvin were to go the wrong way through a failure to convict.

Now bear in mind that we Americans live in a no-fault no-accountability society, where no one is guilty of anything unless he or she is caught red handed and has no protectors in place to deny that anything at all happened. As Maxine has plenty of defenders because she is black, a woman and, most of all, a Democrat, it should have been expected that in her case a call to riot by a congressman would be treated as a non-event, and so it proved when the GOP made a feeble attempt to censure her for her behavior.

As Maxine represents part of California, her appearance in Minnesota was little more than race baiting with a threat of violence thrown in. Attempts to characterize it as free speech on her part ignore the fact that she is a government official, paid for generously by the taxpayer, and a call to violence by one part of the citizenry directed against both the legal system and another constituency cannot be considered acceptable. It is indeed impeachable.

One has to wonder who paid for Waters’ Minnesota trip and marvel at her audacity when she asked for and received an armed police escort for her own safety as she traveled to and from the airport. Perhaps her calls to de-fund the police were on hold until after she completed her travels. It is also important to realize that due to the seniority afforded by her 29 years in office she is, in spite of her lack of anything describable as patriotism of even integrity, part of the House Democratic leadership. She’s Chief Majority Whip, has been the chairperson of the House Black Caucus, and is the ranking member on the House Financial Services Committee. Never before has anyone attained so much having so little to offer.

But the story does not end there, which is where the true mendacity of the U.S. Congress comes to the surface. When the Republicans rightly attempted to censure Waters it was inevitable that the recent impeachment of President Donald Trump for the use of incendiary language when addressing a crowd at the Capitol on January 6^th would come up, but the Democratic Party leadership was having none of that. The Hill reports that shortly before the Waters censure vote, rather than accepting that the two offenses were of a kind, House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer instead delivered a threat, warning the Republican leadership that forcing a roll call on censuring Waters would make it more difficult to justify not taking similar action targeting Republican members of Congress. “This makes it harder, however, not to proceed on numerous [similar] resolutions on my side of the aisle” he said.

So the game is on under new rules. The leadership of the Democratic and Republican Parties have declared that they will impose punishment, including censure, suspension and even expulsion, on House and Senate members who defy the consensus on appropriate behavior, which itself has become heavily politicized.

The first Republican who is likely to feel the wrath of the Democratic controlled Congress is Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia. Representative Jimmy Gomez of California has already circulated a draft letter renewing his earlier effort to expel her from Congress. Gomez cited Greene for her alleged promotion of violence against other members of Congress. In his letter he included her promotion of “Anglo-Saxon political traditions” as yet another justification for her expulsion from Congress. The “Dear Colleague” letter begins with “[E]veryone – including House Republican leadership – knew this stunt was nothing more than an effort to promote white supremacy in the United States Congress.” He, of course, also claimed that she was engaged in the “brazen promotion of anti-Semitism and racism.” Somehow the anti-Semitism tag always seems to make it into these documents.

Gomez’s expulsion resolution already has 72 Democratic co-sponsors. House Democrats as well as 11 Republicans had already voted in February to strip Greene of her committee assignments over her alleged past endorsements of violence against Democrats and embrace of conspiracy theories to include suggesting that some mass shootings have been staged.

Greene, for her part, has tit for tat submitted a resolution to expel Waters based on her encouraging supporters to harass Trump administration officials when they made public appearances in 2018 while also saying a year earlier that she would “go and take Trump out tonight. “This is nothing new from Maxine Waters. She has been inciting violence and terrorism for the last 29 years,” Greene said in a statement.

Despite the current wave of lawmakers introducing measures to formally sanction each other, it seldom occurs that the House actually takes such a drastic step. Only 23 lawmakers have been censured in the House’s history and only five were expelled, mostly for actual criminal behavior. Nevertheless, the new environment condoning punishment of colleagues in Congress is only just gaining momentum and the Democrats clearly have the whip hand with their control of both houses of Congress and the presidency. To be sure, free speech is the most important liberty guaranteed in the Bill of Rights of the Constitution of the United States, but the right of legislators to call on citizens to break the law up to and including the destruction of that very government that pays them and gives them their status has to be challenged. Say what they will when they are out of office, but when they take that oath of loyalty to the constitution it means that they are pledged to support all of those structures and safeguards that that foundational document has established.

By Aaron MATÉ

As a senior House Intel investigator and Trump administration official, Kash Patel helped unearth critical misconduct by the intelligence officials who carried out the Trump-Russia probe.

In his first extended interview since leaving government, Patel tells Aaron Maté that still-classified documents expose more malpractice, as well as major evidentiary holes in the pivotal — and largely unquestioned — claims of a sweeping Russian interference campaign to elect Trump in 2016.

According to Patel, the release of these critical documents was “continuously impeded.” “I think there were people at the heads of certain intelligence agencies who did not want their tradecraft called out, even though it was during a former administration, because it doesn’t look good on the agency itself,” Patel says.

Among the tradecraft that Patel criticizes is the hastily produced and highly consequential “Intelligence Community Assessment” of January 2017, as well as the FBI’s reliance on Crowdstrike — the DNC contractor that generated the Russian hacking allegations despite later admitting, behind closed doors, that it lacked concrete evidence.

Patel also discusses other aspects of his time in the Trump White House: a secret mission to Syria; Trump’s record on foreign wars; and the January 6th riot at the Capitol.

Guest: Kash Patel. Former senior government official in the Trump administration, where he served as senior director for counterterrorism at the National Security Council, and chief of staff to the acting Secretary of Defense. Previously, Patel served as a top investigator on the GOP-led House Intelligence Committee, where he was instrumental in exposing US intelligence misconduct in the Trump-Russia investigation. Also served as a national security official in the Obama-era Justice Department and Pentagon.

Read more:

Aaron Maté’s July 2019 report on the flaws in Mueller’s claims of sweeping Russian interference: “CrowdstrikeOut”

HPSCI March 2018 report: “Report on Russian Active Measures”

Aaron Maté on Crowdstrike’s secret admission of no “concrete evidence” in Russian hacking claims:

“Bombshell: Crowdstrike admits ‘no evidence’ Russia stole emails from DNC server”

“Hidden Over 2 Years: Dem Cyber-Firm’s Sworn Testimony It Had No Proof of Russian Hack of DNC”

VIDEO

TRANSCRIPT

 AARON MATÉ: Welcome to Pushback. I’m Aaron Maté.

Joining me is Kash Patel. He is a former senior official in the Trump administration who served in several top roles, including as the Deputy Assistant to the President, the Senior Director for Counterterrorism at the National Security Council, the chief of staff to the Acting Secretary of Defense, and previously he served as a top aide on the House Intelligence Committee when it was chaired by Republican Devin Nunes, where he was instrumental in exposing US intelligence conduct behind the Trump-Russia investigation.

Kash Patel, welcome to Pushback.

KASH PATEL: Aaron, thanks so much for having me. Really appreciate you doing this. Let’s have some fun.

AARON MATÉ: I appreciate the opportunity. You had a front row seat to several major stories of the Trump era. I want to start with Russiagate because that’s where I first heard of you. You helped expose the conduct of intelligence officials who carried out the investigation, including the instrumental role of the Steele dossier and the surveillance warrant on Carter Page, the former Trump campaign volunteer. And I want to get your response to actually how the media portrayed you, because when you were discussed in media accounts in several outlets, it seemed like it was a requirement to describe you as someone who was working to discredit the Trump-Russia investigation. I want to just get your response to that, how you saw your role behind the scenes, and your overall thoughts on the Trump-Russia investigation itself.

KASH PATEL: Well, thanks for allowing me the opportunity to speak about it like that. I don’t think anybody has ever really asked me to do that, so I really appreciate it.

So, I went on as a senior staffer for the House Intel Committee and not in Devin’s personal office. And long and short of it was, I didn’t really want to go over to The Hill, but Devin had said, ‘Hey, somebody with your background as a public defender and a national security prosecutor and knows how to investigate and take depositions, we sort of need someone to run this investigation.’ At the time neither of us thought it would get much coverage. We were just, like, we’ll do the investigation, we’ll make a report and we’ll put it up in Congress for the records, and that’ll be that. But I guess we were both really wrong on that one.

As the investigation unfolded, and the agreement I made with Devin, I said, ‘Okay, I don’t really want to go to The Hill, but I’ll do the job on one basis: accountability and disclosure. Everything we find—I don’t care if it’s good or bad or whatever from your political perspective—we put it out so the American public can just read it themselves.’ And he agreed to that right away. So, I said, ‘Okay, then we’re up and running.’ But then the media came in and, I think the first portrayal of me in the media, because my name as a staffer was leaked, which is generally verboten, unheard of, but was leaked, and they called me a genocidal dictator in that article—Torquemada—and I thought that was—I don’t know how to even describe that—but I felt really upset that my family name was being portrayed as someone who had killed thousands of people during the Spanish Inquisition.

AARON MATÉ: Huh, huh.

KASH PATEL: That was the first big, breaking news story. I don’t know if it was big; it was just the one that put my name out there, which I also was not expecting any of the media to be on me personally, as a staffer. That was a little surprising.

AARON MATÉ: And what were you actually doing behind the scenes, then, that you think would have elicited this attack on you?

KASH PATEL: Well, running types of investigations are hard enough when you’re a public defender with limited resources. So, I analogize going over to Congress and running an investigation in a similar fashion. When I was at DOJ [Department of Justice], you have all the resources in the world and it’s really cool, but Congress has limited capabilities. We had a limited budget and limited authorities, so I sort of went back to my public defender role and I said, ‘Okay, look, the first thing we got to do is line up key witnesses that we’re going to eventually interview. But before that we have to acquire all the relevant documents from the government agencies so that we can ask these witnesses about them and know what we’re doing before we get into the room.’ So, it was a document acquisition first step, and then, a sort of parallel track, lining up witnesses that we would ultimately interview, and I think we interviewed maybe 70 under oath, ballpark.

AARON MATÉ: And do you remember what revelation it was that made you first realize that there was some serious malfeasance going on behind the scenes, when it comes to the conduct of the intelligence officials who ran the Trump-Russia probe?

KASH PATEL: Well, it’s a combination of things, if you’ll allow me.

So, as a terrorism prosecutor at main Justice, I had personally worked on FISA applications myself, for a number of prosecutions successfully, and having done that work, I know how labor-intensive and detailed it is, and how much disclosure requirements you have to present to the FISA court, but also to the federal judge overseeing the case, ultimately, itself. So, I think the first time I read the Steele dossier was maybe a month or so after it came out, and it just seemed pretty sensational. And what I told folks was, ‘Look, the purpose of a FISA application is to go up on someone and surveil them who you think is basically working for another country against America.’ And Carter Page was the crux of that dossier, and I said, ‘This is really easy to prove or disprove.’ The big thing that made Carter Page in the dossier a quote-unquote “agent” of a foreign power was his meetings with high-level Russian officials and then bartering, as the dossier put it, for a 19-percent stake in the biggest gas company in Russia if he would help them, the Russians, trade once the Trump administration got in. Now, I told the members on House Intel if that were true, he’s definitely an agent of a foreign power. That’s the crux of the matter, so that’s where we started.

AARON MATÉ: And when you found out that the FBI was citing the Steele dossier in its surveillance applications to spy on Carter Page and listing Christopher Steele as quote “Source #1” and “credible,” what was your response, and how did you try to go about getting that out to the public?

KASH PATEL: Well, it was just sort of a Search Warrant 101, okay? So, we found out who the source is, let’s look at the source documents and the credibility of the source; that’s just basic Investigative 101. Getting those documents was another story. That was a whole different challenge that DOJ thwarted for a long time, but, ultimately, we were successful.

I think the big breakthrough was a combination of things that happened over the course of obviously many months, and we’ll condense it here. But once I found out that the Steele dossier itself was used in the FISA application, it was a huge red flag, because I was, like, this is not how we do FISA applications. And, also, this information is incredibly salacious, and some of it was just so easily disproved, such as the hotel room that they said the salacious engagement with Trump and others had occurred. Well, if you do some Investigative 101, that hotel doesn’t exist with that room in Moscow, period. And you would think an investigator like Christopher Steele, a human guy spy for the British government for so many years with Russian expertise, would get that little fact right.

The other thing was they had placed at the time Trump’s lawyer on a trip in Prague. I think it was Prague. And I said, ‘This is really easy. We just get the toll records for travel and see if the guy was ever in the Czech Republic or not.’ Turns out, he never left America during that time period. So, these credibility issues started to arise, and I said, ‘If we’re having problems with these easily disprovable facts, what about the heart of the matter?’ And that’s what we turned to next, with trying to get the documents and the sourcing of the whole Steele dossier.

AARON MATÉ: And the public became aware that it was the Clinton campaign and the DNC that was paying for the Steele dossier, in late 2017. When did you find this out?

KASH PATEL:  Was it late 2017? Yeah, your timeline’s probably right. So, what we had to do was, through our investigations and our team, we were able to piece together the sort of players involved in this whole Steele dossier thing. And the Fusion GPS came out. The individual at DOJ, Bruce Ohr, came out; then we tied that to his wife’s work, Nellie Ohr, who we were sort of shocked to see involved in all this. So, these things we started really getting going on our investigative techniques and started to unveil the facts. And, ultimately, I told Devin one thing. I said, ‘Look, when you’re a prosecutor, you follow the money.’ Terrorism Financing Cases 101. This is really easy stuff, so I said, ‘Hey, let’s follow the money.’ But the difficulty was, I wasn’t in federal court. I wasn’t a DOJ prosecutor; I was at Congress with limited powers. So, I told Devin, I said, ‘Okay, give me one bank subpoena for this bank and let’s see what’s behind the curtain, and if I’m wrong we’ll just stop the investigation.’ And luckily, we got that bank subpoena, but that ultimately took us to federal court because Fusion challenged the validity of the subpoena, and now we obviously know why.

AARON MATÉ: So, I think by now the collusion allegation has been pretty much debunked. Few people actually still hold on to it except the most diehard adherents to Russiagate.

But I have a lot of questions about the other aspect of this, which is this allegation of a sweeping and systematic Russian interference campaign which has not been undermined nearly to the extent that the collusion aspect has. And the obvious question for me, even without looking at all the evidence, is that given that collusion was essentially a scam, what else about this was a scam as well? So, you looked at the intelligence used to advance these allegations of Russian meddling. Was it convincing to you?

KASH PATEL:  That the Russians were interfering with the presidential election or that they were doing so for the behest of one candidate over another?

AARON MATÉ: Let’s start with that they were conducting a sweeping, comprehensive interference campaign to install Trump in the White House.

KASH PATEL:  I would say the evidence did not bear that out. Now, it’s the Russians, they’re always interfering in our cybersecurity infrastructure, in our intelligence apparatus, and they will always look to get a leg up in our election cycle. So, were they involved in interfering? Sure. It’s what they do to us, period. Anyone who says otherwise has never really been in the game and understands how it works, or it’s just really making stuff up. I didn’t see this systematic, sweeping level of infiltration to pick one candidate over the other. We didn’t find that kind of hard evidence. We did find them meddling in a lot of places, of course.

AARON MATÉ: So, when it comes to the question of Russia interfering to specifically install Trump, that was an area where your report, the March 2018 HPSCI [House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence] report took issue with some of the intelligence communities’ findings, when the US government, in the last days of the Obama administration, put out this Intelligence Community Assessment [ICA] in January 2017, which said that Vladimir Putin ordered this campaign of interference to install Trump. Your committee identified what it called “significant intelligence tradecraft failings.” Can you give us a sense of what those failings were?

KASH PATEL: Sure. Unfortunately, one of the documents we tried to get out during the Trump administration was that document you’re referring to.

So, the ICA was this investigation put together in a span of two to three weeks, led by John Brennan, and in two to three weeks you can’t have a comprehensive investigation of anything in terms of interference and cyber security matters. But they put it together, so we went and looked at it and looked at the underlying evidence and cables and talked to the people who did it.

We, on House Intel on the Republican side, actually put out a report, a highly classified report on the tradecraft used to make the Obama-era ICA that was made public. We wanted that underlying report made public, but we were continuously impeded in our efforts to do so by members of the Intelligence Community themselves, with the same singular epithets that ‘you’re going to harm sources and methods.’ And that was what was thrown in my face the entire time, when we were talking about Christopher Steele before he was Christopher Steele, and all the underlying methods.

And I just highlight that because we didn’t lose a single source, we didn’t lose a single relationship, and no one died by the public disclosures we made, because we did it in a systematic and professional fashion. And that’s what part of the media said would be impossible to do, but we did it, and we wanted to do it for our ICA. But that was, unfortunately, the one report which speaks directly to the issue you’re asking about, that’s still sitting in a safe, classified, and unfortunately, the American public—unless Biden acts—won’t see it.

AARON MATÉ: President Trump, though, had said that he was going to order a full declassification. Did he ever signal that he wanted that particular document released?

KASH PATEL: I don’t know if he personally singled it [out]. I know it was included in a list of documents that Congress was seeking, or some members of Congress were seeking, to have declassified. And I know that list made its way to the White House, and I also know that, I think, on the one of the last days he did declassify a bunch of material, but I still have not seen that.

AARON MATÉ: Right. That was a so-called binder of documents that have not come out yet. Who are some of the key officials who blocked the release of this material?

KASH PATEL: I think it was…look, when you’re calling out the FBI and DOJ, like, one person is calling them out to say, ‘You guys screwed up one of the biggest consequential investigations of this era,’ I think it’s right for them to take your word with caution. So, it was more of an institutional pushback, and then, ultimately, when you were able to peel back the layers and show Christopher Wray and show Rod Rosenstein that these documents in fact existed and then asked them to produce them, they would start to see the shortcomings of the FISA application and the investigative process and the Steele sourcing at the FBI.

And so, it was a repetitive process, one that even led Rod Rosenstein to threaten to investigate me because he got so annoyed at me for whatever reason, and I’m not really sure what he would investigate me or Congress on, but he made that threat, and that was widely reported.

It was just unfortunate to see the Deputy Attorney General who, at that point, was basically the Attorney General because Jeff Sessions was aside [recused] on all matters. We were having private internal discussions, and I just said, ‘Why don’t you just go get me these Bruce Ohr 302s [FBI interview reports], and if they don’t exist and they don’t say what I’m saying they’re saying, then you can say, “Hey, Kash, you’re totally wrong.”’ Well, it turned out that the Bruce Ohr 302s did exist and it took me a long time, but America finally saw 75 percent of them unredacted.

AARON MATÉ: And Bruce Ohr, for those who don’t know, is a former Department of Justice official who, even after the FBI terminated Christopher Steele as a source, he continued to act as essentially a liaison between Steele and the FBI.

KASH PATEL: Yeah.

AARON MATÉ: Let me ask you about this core assessment in the Intelligence Community Assessment of January 2017 as we discussed—that Putin ordered this campaign specifically to install Trump. It’s been reported that the main source for that judgment was this supposed mole inside the Kremlin who worked for the CIA, and that this mole, after some media reports actually was … he left Russia and came to the US and he was outed as living outside of Virginia. It’s been said that he had high-level access inside the Kremlin. Based on what you’ve seen, are the reports about the mole and his supposed high level of visibility into the Kremlin, are they credible?

KASH PATEL: So, unfortunately, I’m sort of in a bind on this one still, with all the classified information I looked at and the declassifications we’ve requested but have not yet been granted. So, through your great public reporting and investigative work, a lot of people have continued on, and I think rightly so, to get to the bottom of this. But until the ICA product that we created and some of the other documents are finally revealed, if I start talking about them, then I’m probably going to get the FBI knocking at my door, and I don’t really want that right now—or ever.

AARON MATÉ: Fair enough. Alright, I’m going to try one more angle of this, then, which I realize falls into similar territory, but I think it’s worth mentioning because some of it has been also made public.

CrowdStrike is the private security firm contracted by the DNC that generated the core allegation at the heart of all this: that Russia had hacked the DNC and stolen emails. Then, almost three years later, we get last year this declassification of a transcript from Shawn Henry, the CEO of CrowdStrike, testifying to your committee in December 2017. And he said that actually CrowdStrike had no evidence that these supposed Russian hackers actually took any data off of the server. So, essentially CrowdStrike had no evidence that Russian hackers had stolen the emails that CrowdStrike in public was accusing them of stealing.

CrowdStrike’s reports were used for the FBI’s investigation, and the FBI also relied on CrowdStrike’s forensics in terms of investigating and looking into the DNC server. What can you tell us about CrowdStrike’s credibility? Do you think that they relayed credible and accurate information?

KASH PATEL: I think CrowdStrike, as a private company contracted by the DNC, basically did the job that they were hired to do, but that doesn’t necessarily mean they served the American public well. They weren’t hired by the American public; they were hired specifically by a private company to look at their servers.

Where the FBI got it wrong—and James Comey admitted this—is that they, the FBI, who are the experts in looking at servers and exploiting this information so that the Intelligence Community can digest it and understand what happened, did not have access to the DNC servers in their entirety. The FBI only received—and for some outrageous reason agreed to having CrowdStrike be the referee as to what the FBI could and could not exploit and could and could not look at. Now, Shawn Henry, being a former FBI agent under James Comey, knew that, and I believe totally took advantage of the situation to the unfortunate shortcomings of the American public, and we were only able to have the FBI look at a piece of the cyber security hardware infrastructure for the DNC rather than all of it, which is what the FBI always does.

So, that was one of the most frustrating things to me, that the FBI, one, permitted that, and two, never went back and got the server so they could look at it. But I do think Shawn Henry testified that day accurately, that CrowdStrike didn’t have any information to support those claims that you were talking about.

AARON MATÉ: Which then leads me to question the claim itself, because it was CrowdStrike that generated it, and I think it’s a scandal that instead of us hearing back in December 2017 that the firm that generated this allegation didn’t have the concrete evidence for it. We had to wait nearly three years to find that out after so much had unfolded and so much hysterical fearmongering about Russian interference had happened.

KASH PATEL: Yeah, I think you’re totally right. And look, we wanted those depositions and those things out and declassified immediately after we took them, and we were thwarted in that ability, too, to do that. If you recall, we had sent all 60, whatever, transcripts to the DNI under then-DNI Coats just to do a quick classification check, and the Office of Director of National Intelligence under Dan Coats never processed or advanced those deposition transcripts until actually Rick Grenell and I got to the DNI and completed the work.

AARON MATÉ: But, by the time Grenell was in there, you had Adam Schiff now heading your committee—and I imagine he was not very receptive to releasing those transcripts.

KASH PATEL: Exactly. And that’s a great fact that you point out: Congress had switched majority/minority positions then, and the power to release the transcripts, even after we returned them, rested with the new chairman Adam Schiff, who, whatever your politics are, didn’t want some of these transcripts to come out. And that was just extremely frustrating because the whole purpose, as I said in the beginning, was accountability and release for the American public, and everybody should have been able to read every single page of those transcripts.

AARON MATÉ: Since we’re on the topic of Schiff, let me ask you quickly, when you see Congress reprimanding Marjorie Taylor Greene for pushing QAnon conspiracy theories, you witnessed Adam Schiff pushing Russiagate conspiracy theories, reading even the Steele dossier into the Congressional Record, including those Carter Page insane allegations that you mentioned before, about Carter Page being offered a stake in the Russian state gas company.

Adam Schiff: Carter Page, back from Moscow, also attends the convention. According to Steele, it was Manafort who chose Page to serve as a go-between for the Trump campaign and Russian interests.

AARON MATÉ: What are your thoughts on that, seeing Greene reprimanded for pushing conspiracy theories, but not Adam Schiff?

KASH PATEL: I think it’s a perfect example of why the American people have such little confidence in Congress’s abilities to do much of anything these days. It’s so infiltrated with partisan politics that people don’t know what to believe, and that’s why the only thing that I wanted to do there was to, instead of me writing stuff that I found, why not just let everybody read it, the way I found it, with a few protections here and there for some certain national security measures? But those are minimal redactions, and I asked that of everybody across the board, whether it was against people in President Trump’s universe or people at the DNC, or whatever. I said, ‘You guys have agreed to testify. We found documents pertaining to your work here. Everybody should read it.’ And that was just an argument that Congress wouldn’t let me win.

AARON MATÉ: I want to ask you something else about your March 2018 HPSCI report. There’s a very interesting line to me. You’re talking about the judgments that were inside that January 2017 Intelligence Community Assessment, the one that was put out in the last days of the Obama administration.

The report says the judgments, quote, “were mostly well reasoned, consistent with observed Russian actions, properly documented, and—particularly on the cyber intrusion sections—employed appropriate caveats on sources and identified assumptions.”

That line stood out to me because it suggests to me that when it comes to this core allegation of Russian cyber intrusions, that the evidence was not overwhelming, that there were caveats and identified assumptions. Am I right to infer from that, that when it comes to the attribution of Russian cyber meddling, that there were some qualifiers here and that the evidence was not overwhelmingly concrete?

KASH PATEL: Without speaking to the underlying intelligence, I think you’re absolutely on the right path to infer those things, because you smartly picked up on the verbiage that the IC uses a lot of times to qualify its reporting, but especially reporting of that volume done at that speed. And that’s the reason we undertook to investigate the ICA, too, as a piece of the Russia investigation, because we felt that report put out to the American public deserves scrutiny, the same scrutiny that the FISA application process received, and we created a whole separate report for it. And I really hope one of these days that report becomes public, because I think you’ll find a lot of things in that report that are facts that cannot be disputed by the IC, and that would lend a lot of credence to the things that you’re saying now.

AARON MATÉ: So, why do you think Trump didn’t let this get out? Because he had the authority to.

KASH PATEL: I don’t know if I would characterize it as whether or not President Trump let this out or not. I think there were people within the IC, at the heads of certain intelligence agencies, who did not want their tradecraft called out, even though it was during a former administration, because it doesn’t look good on the agency itself.

And again, that’s not castigating an entire agency. We’re not disparaging the entire FBI because of Peter Strzok and his crew of miscreants, where the same thing goes for the Intelligence Community. Just because I think John Brennan had four or five folks work on the ICA, if I remember correctly, if they did some shoddy tradecraft, the American public has a right to know about it in an investigation involving the presidential election.

And there were just the same barriers you run into. When we tried to declass just the Nunes memo itself, it’s institutional pushback, and then singular pushback at high levels because they didn’t want those disclosures to happen on their watch.

AARON MATÉ: Another question on this front: Guccifer 2.0 was this internet persona who the US Intelligence Community later said was actually a front for Russian intelligence, and the FBI and Robert Mueller strongly suggested in their indictment of Russian intelligence officers that it was Guccifer 2.0 that provided the stolen Democratic Party emails to WikiLeaks. Fast forward, though, to Mueller’s final report, and he includes a caveat that actually he has no idea how these emails made their way to WikiLeaks and actually they could have been transferred in person by hand. Do you have any sense of the sourcing behind this claim about Guccifer 2.0 being a front for Russian intelligence, and is it also something that we should be looking at with skepticism?

KASH PATEL: I think it’s something you should definitely be looking at with skepticism. It’s not something that we had time to focus on when we were doing the Russiagate investigation. It wasn’t one of the things that we were able to encapsulate within our sort of guidelines for purposes of investigation, and it sort of came up later. And by that point the handoff to Mueller had already happened, and so there was that cutoff date as to what we could and couldn’t look at. And once Mueller was announced, there was that spring cutoff timeline of the date of his March-April appointment; nothing past that that he was looking at was anything we could look at. But that doesn’t mean you guys can’t or shouldn’t.

AARON MATÉ: Well, speaking of which Mueller, very strangely, I think, chose not to interview Julian Assange, who was at the heart of all this because he released the stolen emails. Was there ever any discussion on your committee about interviewing Julian Assange?

KASH PATEL: I think there was. But remember, you have Robert Mueller whose special counsel is under the authorities of the Department of Justice and FBI. Big Government versus Congress and a Congressional investigator and his committee. To do those things and to make those asks is a very different request than coming from the Executive Branch of the United States government, and that’s the problem we ran into a lot of times. The FBI and the DOJ can ask and subpoena you guys and work with the heads of foreign governments to do so, but Congress’s ability to do that is much more limited.

AARON MATÉ: If you could release just a handful of documents, just say two documents that you think would give the public a better window into the real story here, what would they be?

KASH PATEL: The ICA report that HPSCI did, on the ICA itself. That, for sure, has been at the top of my list for far too long. And the other thing I would say, twofold: one, the entire subject portion of the last Carter Page FISA, and two, in conjunction with that I would release the underlying source verification reporting basically that they used to prop up that FISA. And then the American public can see what a bunch of malarkey it was that they were relying on. And not only that. It’s okay to make a mistake in a search warrant or pleading because that work you’re doing is so hard, but to intentionally make it is just something the American public needs to know about and read for themselves and make their own determination as to why their government allowed this to happen, knowingly.

AARON MATÉ: I want to move on to other aspects of your time in government. It was reported last year that you took part in a secret mission to Syria to try to broker the release of Austin Tice, the US journalist who has been held hostage there. It’s unclear what his status is, whether he’s even still alive. Let me just actually ask you that, do you think Austin Tice is still alive?

KASH PATEL: Hostage rescues are one of the most difficult and probably most rewarding parts of the job, when I was running counterterrorism for President Trump. You get to know the family so well that you just learn not to publicly comment on those matters about their loved ones because it’s just too painful, whatever the answer is. And I reserve my comments on those matters for Mr. and Mrs. Tice, in any efforts we made to get Austin.

AARON MATÉ: Can you tell us anything about your discussions with Syrian officials, what they were asking from you, their level of openness to having talks with the US government?

KASH PATEL: Sure. I mean, look, that didn’t happen overnight. One of President Trump’s priorities was, go get American hostages home, and I think we got over 50, 53-ish hostage/detainees back from 20-some countries, maybe. Maybe a little less.

But Austin Tice had been missing for going on eight years, and we had made no headway, really, on it, so we made it a priority. We started working with our counterparts in the region, and then that trip was almost 18 months in the making, and we finally were able to land a meeting in Damascus. Because I told them, I said, ‘I’ll come see you. You send someone who can represent President Assad directly because I can represent President Trump directly on this matter, and let’s go sit down.’ And they said, ‘Okay, come to Damascus.’

And I don’t know if they thought we would show up or not. But we did, and we were very clear. We said, ‘Look, I understand I’m not getting Austin home on this trip, but I would like a proof of life. What would you like in return for that?’ We had very frank conversations, and they said, ‘We want x amount of movement for the United States military and troop stuff,’ and this and that. I said, ‘Look, all of that’s on the table. We can discuss all those things. I need a proof of life.’ And they said they would take it back to Assad, at which they did. I know they did that. And then, I think, shortly thereafter I switched over to the Department of Defense and tried to continue that mission. But that one was one I just, unfortunately, didn’t succeed on.

AARON MATÉ: President Trump on the campaign in 2016, he was critical of US interventions abroad. He criticized the war on Libya, he criticized the dirty war in Syria, but his record in office did not do anything to reverse all this. And I think actually one could argue that he escalated it. What do you make for the gap between what he was saying on the campaign trail and then what he did in office?

KASH PATEL: I probably disagree with that because we did end three wars, three and a half, and that was what he campaigned on and we…

AARON MATÉ: Where? Which wars?

KASH PATEL: Well, we’re down to zero in Somalia, we’re down to less than 2,500 in Iraq. I won’t discuss the troop numbers in Syria, but it’s the lowest we’ve ever been, and we should hit zero in Afghanistan by 1 May unless the administration alters that trajectory. So, to move that amount of manning from decades of in-country fighting, we did that pretty expeditiously, and that’s something I think I’m pretty proud of, that we ended or drew to a near end so many theaters of war. Not all of them, unfortunately, but a lot of them.

AARON MATÉ: In Somalia, though, haven’t US troops just basically moved next door?

KASH PATEL: Well, yeah. Sort of. Without discussing exact troop locations, we’re no longer in Somalia with a big troop presence, and we are always going to counter terrorism in any form. And al-Shabaab, being one of al-Qaeda’s biggest affiliates, based solely out of Somalia. We, of course, are going to lend help to our forces in Kenya, which is one of our biggest partners in East Africa.

So, if you talk about moving troops from Syria to Iraq versus moving troops from Somalia to wherever, you move them to where you have more reliability, are closer to the actual fight, and your capabilities to counter the terrorist threat is greater, not less. And that’s the line of effort that we took to execute in places like Iraq, Syria, Somalia, and East Africa.

AARON MATÉ: What about the Saudi war on Yemen? Obama greenlit that war. It caused a humanitarian catastrophe—some call it a genocide. There was the ongoing risk of famine, a cholera outbreak. Why did Trump escalate US support for that?

KASH PATEL: I don’t know. The Saudi piece has never been my forte, so I’d just be speculating if I was speaking to that.

AARON MATÉ: Was there talk of ending it?

KASH PATEL: The Saudi component or the Yemeni component? Sorry.

AARON MATÉ: The support for the Saudi war on Yemen.

KASH PATEL: There was always talk of decreasing our support to any theaters of war. The problem with the Yemeni portion of it is, as you know, the Houthis are in Yemen, so that’s Iran’s proxy, and it’s one of al-Qaeda’s bigger branches, too, that bases out of Yemen, that poses a threat to American interests. So that was the balance that they had to strike with that conflict, and it’s a tough one. There are three different governments running around in Yemen. There’s two different…three different foreign terrorist organizations. Well, two now that Biden removed one as the label as a terrorist, and that conflict’s going to go on. It’s one, I do think, we need to monitor because Iran is involved, and they simply don’t like us.

AARON MATÉ: All right, we’re going to have to debate Yemen another time, because I have a much different view.

But let me ask you, finally, what did you make first of Trump’s claims that this election was stolen, and were people advising him that what he was saying was not grounded in fact?

KASH PATEL: I’m not going to speak to what people were advising him on about that, because the election stuff was never my job. My job was to head his counterterrorism program, run his DNI, and then, ultimately, help run his Defense Department. So, I stayed out of all that stuff. That never came to me.

AARON MATÉ: And what do you think explains what happened on January 6th? Do you think that…I mean, who deserves blame here for what happened?

KASH PATEL: That’s not for me to cast. Unfortunately, people died, Americans died, policemen died, which is just one of the greatest tragedies you can have. The Capitol was broken into, which is just a symbol of our democracy.

AARON MATÉ: But what about claims or allegations or suspicion that the Pentagon slowed a response? They did not answer the calls for the National Guard quick enough, and that even that this was deliberate. I mean, that is the suspicion of many people, that there was a deliberate attempt to let that mob happen on the part of even White House officials, possibly even President Trump.

KASH PATEL: I mean, that’s an extended conversation for another day. But I will politely say that that is totally, factually false. Having assisted Secretary [Christopher] Miller running the Defense Department, we put out a very public timeline for our response. We basically quelled the situation at the Capitol so that the United States Senate could go back and certify the presidential election. From the time the incident began, in less than five hours they were voting to certify the presidential election again. We—and the Capitol Police admitted this—went to the Capitol Police beforehand and said ‘Hey, do you need any help?’ They said, ‘No.’ And we, the Department of Defense, cannot lawfully send in the National Guard unless there is a specific request made by the mayor and/or a federal agency, and none were made.

Once they were made—and a caveat to that is Secretary Miller and I had gone to President Trump days before January 6th, and he had authorized 10,000 National Guardsmen throughout the country in case there was any unrest, so he had already authorized the action. The governors and the mayors still had to ask for it, and once they did in the DC area, just to give you an anecdotal example, we activated from a cold start the fastest augmentation and mobilization of uniformed military troops in the DC area since World War II, and we put 24,000 boots on the ground in less than 48 hours. I don’t know who’s saying we slow-rolled anything, because these are Guardsmen, they’re not active-duty military, and we have to pull them out of their daily lives, train them up, get them up and then deploy them, and employ them. And I think we did that. And I think the record will show with extreme alacrity that we’re very responsive because of the severity of the situation.

AARON MATÉ: Kash Patel, former senior official in the Trump administration, thank you very much.

KASH PATEL: Thanks, Aaron. I appreciate it. I had fun.

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