Speaker 1: All right, welcome to the show.
It's my last day in the bunker for a little bit and there is much to discuss.
And you know, this first story I'm going to talk about, there's sort of some risk to even
talking about this story because the issue of Donald Trump and Russia has become so weaponized
and so distorted and so partizan and toxic and tribal, it's become so disconnected from
the actual facts that we know that there is a risk to even bringing this issue up again.
But there is news that continues to fill out the story and our understanding of what took
place before and during the Trump administration.
And we learned some important things over the weekend about coordination between the
Trump 2016 campaign and Russian intelligence.
And since we've covered the story all along, it would be weird if I didn't tell you that
there is new information and there are some in my audience I know who referred to the
story as Russia Gate and referred to me as a Russia greater conspiracy hoax.
Whatever, whatever the terms now are on the story.
But my my core audience, who has been with us, you know, at least back to 2017, knows
that my position on Trump Russia was there will be no personal collusion found between
Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin at a personal level.
There's not going to be any smoking gun video of Trump and Putin planning anything with
regard to Donald Trump's candidacy.
But it looks like a duck and it sounds like a duck and it walks like a duck.
Something approximating a duck is probably there.
And indeed, we had more than a dozen indictments in the Mueller probe.
There was communication and coordination between Trump and Russia, including through WikiLeaks
as an intermediary.
Paul Manafort in touch with Russians regarding polling and the campaign and on and on.
It was never going to remove Donald Trump.
Go back to my videos from April of 2017, where I made it clear Trump was never going to be
charged or end up in prison as a result of whatever it was he did or didn't do with Vladimir
Putin.
Because I don't I don't want to say no one believed, but our show was not saying they
will be caught having done anything.
But it was likely all along a combination of Trump being sort of a useful idiot, not
even realizing how his mere candidacy, his mere presidency, helps Russia's goal of destabilizing
Western democracies for their gain.
And some of the people around Trump were actually in touch with Russians and coordinating.
So, OK, there's a new report, and this is a Treasury Department deport report, which
now quietly in twenty, twenty one years after the entire fiasco with Trump already gone,
confirms that Donald Trump's 2016 campaign was sharing information with a Russian intelligence
officer.
Full stop.
That's the story during the 2016 election.
Russian and Ukrainian political consultant Konstantin Kilim Nick, we've mentioned this
name before, was providing Russia with so-called sensitive information on polling and Trump
campaign strategy.
KMB Nick, quote, sought to promote the narrative that Ukraine, not Russia, had interfered in
the 2016 US presidential election in 2018.
Kill him.
Nick was indicted on obstruction of justice charges for his unregistered lobbying work
related to Ukraine.
But this same Treasury report now spells out that KMB Nick had been coordinating with Donald
Trump's campaign chairman, Paul Manafort, during the 2016 election.
The Treasury report refers to kill him as a Russian intelligence officer.
Donald Trump's campaign manager, church campaign chairman for a period of time, was coordinating
with a man now regarded as a described as a Russian intelligence officer.
And Manafort repeatedly shared internal campaign information with KMB Nick.
As Mother Jones writes, Manafort passed inside info from the Trump campaign to kill him.
Nick kill him.
Nick gave it to Russian intelligence, which at the time was mounting a covert attack on
the 2016 election to thwart Hillary Clinton and help Donald Trump.
That's collusion.
Now, it isn't the cartoonish scenarios that some dreamed up Trump secretly meeting with
Putin personally, but it is Trump's campaign chairman scheming with a Russian intelligence
officer as Russia was publishing derogatory information about Trump's opponent, Hillary
Clinton, and preferred Trump over Hillary.
We don't have to get all dramatic.
We don't have to get hyperbolic.
They were working together.
That's it.
It's simple.
Meanwhile, at the same time, kill him, Nic was trying to use Paul Manafort and through
him use Trump to advance Vladimir Putin's interests related to Ukraine.
This isn't unique.
Many countries try to do this.
Many of them just aren't as good as Russia at doing it.
And many countries don't have someone as vulnerable and naive and ignorant as Donald Trump and
the people that Donald Trump put around him.
And it really went both ways.
So for those who will react to this with like an OK, so what type of approach?
Imagine for a moment that it was revealed today, for example.
It just hasn't happened.
But imagine imagine we learned today Joe Biden's campaign manager was in regular contact with
Chinese intelligence officers throughout the 2020 election, including unreported meetings,
passing internal Biden data and strategy to Chinese operatives who, by the way, were working
on a campaign to hurt Donald Trump.
How do you think people would be reacting right now?
Fox News would be calling for the removal and imprisonment of treasonous traitor Joe
Biden, period.
And then also remember that the Mueller report basically said the same things as the Treasury
report that we now have.
It used different language.
But just before the Mueller report was released, Donald Trump's hatchet man, Attorney General
William Barr, put out that four page propaganda letter claiming to summarize what was in the
Mueller report, but not actually summarizing it, coming up with a completely different
non actually empirically based assessment of what was in the report.
So that led to the nationwide bogus exoneration tour that Donald Trump went on.
And the rest is sort of history.
So that's the latest.
It's not really a surprise to anyone who has been paying attention and it will be ignored
by those who are convinced there was never anything there.
But I think that people who followed the story soberly and closely from the beginning would
not be shocked, nor nor would we think that it would be out of line with what was going
on at the time to get this report from the Treasury Department.