Deep Dive: The CIA and My 2016 Game Theory Thread

Welcome back to Game Theory Today. I am Eric Garland. Exciting stuff going on. Two grand juries have reportedly convened. One in the Southern District of Florida, the other in the district of Washington DC, to hear evidence about a conspiracy by the former director of the Central Intelligence Agency, John Brennan, to interfere with the 2016 election using his intel agency. The smoking gun is reportedly from Brennan’s testimony to Congress several years ago when he said that the CIA had nothing to do at all with the the so-called steel dossier, that fake intelligence product that was cooked up by retired MI6 officer Christopher Steel. Newly declassified documents from the office of the director of national intelligence show that Brennan was almost assuredly lying about that.

Brennan, the CIA did include the Steel Dossier as part of an annex to support a controversial early 2017 report that stated, contrary to very recent reporting, that Putin had a , 2 secondsspecific plan to support Donald Trump through cyber attacks and other intelligence operations. Uh, that was , 10 secondsnot supported just weeks before. All of the sudden, Brennan comes in with his crew and says it is supported. And that , 17 secondssupport apparently was the steel dossier. Brennan lied under oath about this and so he’s facing prosecution as , 24 secondswe speak. These grand juries are probably going to get at something much larger. They seem to be targeting a grand conspiracy by numerous actors in , 33 secondsmultiple agencies to sabotage the entirety of the first Trump administration.

So, this is about to be , 41 secondsone of the largest conspiracy prosecutions in history and almost assuredly the most important. Okay, guys, it’s about to get really , 49 secondsinteresting around here. This steel dossier grand jury stuff very much interests me because it involves me. Cuz , 57 secondsI got involved by accident. For those of you who know about my writing uh on Twitter about intelligence, you probably , 4 secondsknow that some nine years ago, I blew the lid off Trump Russia. Between the time CIA director John Brennan and , 12 secondsDirector of National Intelligence Jim Clapper tried to imply that Donald Trump was directly supported by Vladimir , 19 secondsPutin, days before their intelligence product was leaked to the press.

I almost single-handedly , 27 secondsopened and broadened the discussion about Russia’s attack on the 2016 election by reaching millions of people through Twitter in my 127 tweet game , 36 secondstheory thread. And this appears to have interfered with a larger plan by among others Russia, John Brennan, the head of , 44 secondsthe CIA, Representative now Senator Adam Schiff, Hillary Clinton, and many others to delegitimize the Trump presidency , 52 secondsbefore it even began. My reputation has been under assault for years over this matter. And these grand juries might , 59 secondshelp us all get to the bottom of who did what at the CIA, Office of Director of National Intelligence, and the FBI.

And , 6 secondswe could get a timeline as to who did what and when. For example, we know now that in September of 2016, up until the , 15 secondselection, the intelligence community had concluded that Russia was probing our election infrastructure. They were doing their normal disinformation operations, , 23 secondsbut they didn’t have any particular goal to put Trump in office and in fact were likely expecting like pretty much everybody else a Hillary Clinton , 31 secondsvictory. Then Trump won and the world panicked which got really interesting. , 37 secondsWe now know that on December 11th, 2016, a meeting was called at the White House to create a new intelligence community assessment about Russia’s role in the , 45 secondselection.

The spy agencies had just published one and given it to the president, I believe, the day before, December 8th. Its conclusion was that , 54 secondsPutin wanted to cast doubt on our election, that it wanted political chaos, and that it probably hacked some machines, but that Russia lacked the , 1 secondcapacity to throw the entire election to Donald Trump or any other candidate. , 7 secondsThey held a top secret meeting on December 9th, 2016. Brennan Clapper and others at that meeting decided that this , 15 secondswasn’t good enough. That they wanted a report to be made public before Trump took the Oval Office, a report that said , 23 secondsessentially that his election was Putin’s fault. , 28 secondsThen they took actions to produce a report that reached such a conclusion even though the intelligence , 34 secondsdid not support it.

But before they could do that, I got involved by accident and really without a plan. , 42 secondsAbout 48 hours after they had this top secret meeting at the White House on a Sunday afternoon, December 11th, 2016, I took what I had been learning from my , 51 secondscolleagues in intelligence all that year. And I produced 127 tweet thread, which substantially mirrored the , 59 secondsintelligence community assessment delivered to the president of the United States days before, albeit a lot broader , 5 secondsand a lot looser with more context about Russian intelligence, how it works, and the years leading up to the election. I started with the idea that Russia was , 13 secondsalways messing with American elections and our democracy and everyone’s democracy.

And I said that Russia ha , 21 secondsRussia had a plan to use Trump if Trump won because Russia was always tactically flexible about these matters. And I also , 29 secondsconcluded that Russia didn’t expect Trump to win. They assumed Hillary would take the White House. I also stated that it would be weird and wrong for the CIA , 37 secondsto jump into the race for Hillary Clinton. 9 years later, there are a few takeaways. My unclassified analysis apparently mirrored the classified , 45 secondsanalysis that’s now been made public of the actual intelligence community. Yay. , 50 secondsRussia had been messing with us. They wanted chaos and they expected Hillary to win and they planned to use Trump more or less no matter what happened.

, 58 secondsAnd while I said the CIA should not be messing around in our elections in our thread, that is apparently exactly what Jim Clapper and John Brennan were doing. , 8 secondsthe very second I was writing it. So, at this moment, there are grand juries convened for at least John Brennan and , 16 secondsat least about his lies around using the Steel Dossier in the classified intelligence community assessment about , 22 secondsRussian interference. Now is when we need more clarity about what happened because this is about to become a very , 30 secondspolitical issue. Many Democrats, especially the ones who are implicated in this, such as Adam Schiff, Eric Swallwell, they’re going to frame this , 38 secondsas a vindictive prosecution going back after a bunch of old news to punish Trump’s political enemies.

And you know, there there’s something to that. It’s , 46 secondsgoing to look like that. That looks like it’ll be a subordable position. After all, Trump is the guy who went around chanting lock her up at his opponent in , 55 seconds2016. Then he got impeached twice. Then he got indicted after he was out of office. Then he got reelected. and now his political enemies are in the barrel. , 2 secondsSo, I see where everyone’s coming from. , 5 secondsBut this prosecution is necessary because this stuff should never happen again to any political party. American , 14 secondsspies should never be involved in American elections. and the CIA , 21 secondsapparently got involved in the 2016 United States election trying to color at the very least the outcome of that , 29 secondselection and thus color the next election.

So whereas the intelligence community and guys like me concluded that Russia attacked our election and , 38 secondsalso that Trump had a number of Russian assets around him especially that Paul Maniffort Russia didn’t make Trump , 45 secondspresident. John Brennan and his crew worked the media to create the impression that Putin made Trump , 54 secondspresident on purpose. Thus, Trump owed Putin a favor at a minimum. And the only , 2 secondsguys who would know that would be the CIA. They’re the only ones who would be able to accurately assess what’s going on in Russia. But they can never be the , 11 secondsones to run with the story for reasons of how the agency is set up. The CIA can , 18 secondsnever be involved in US elections because they are a clandestine service that serves directly unlike other , 26 secondsagencies like the FBI.

They directly serve the president of the United States at any given time. So we can’t have the , 34 secondspresident using spy agencies to hurt the next president because the spies work directly for him and that would make our , 44 secondscountry exactly like Bellarus or Usbekiststan which is ironically what the Russians have been trying to do to us for a hundred years. , 55 secondsFor a century, Russia has been planting assets in the United States, to commit environmental crimes, to torture our , 2 secondsprisoners, to otherwise act like Russian officials so they can point at the United States and say, “See, there’s , 12 secondsreally nothing special about this country or its people.” This is the most Soviet operation possible.

And thus, , 20 secondswhat John Brennan and Jim Clapper did was very Russian. whether or not that was their intention. Because publishing , 28 secondsthe false conclusion that Putin preferred Trump and that Trump owed him a favor and by giving those false , 35 secondsconclusions to the public, both through these classified documents that made it to other politicians or information that , 43 secondswas apparently leaked directly to the media, those men jammed the CIA into the fabric of America’s elections, which is , 50 secondswhat the Soviets always dreamed of. And that issue needs unpacking no matter what political party you happen to like. , 58 secondsThis week, I’ve done a lot of videos on this topic already.

There’s a video on how the Steel Dossier is a complete fraud from top to bottom that doesn’t , 6 secondslook like any serious intelligence product. So, for everybody out there this week saying, “Oh, the the Steel Dossier was fine. Nobody ever disproved.” No, no, no. Everybody , 15 secondsserious knows that this was crap, so let’s move on. And I’ve done a whole hourong video that’ll analyze that top to bottom from the fonts to how it’s , 22 secondswritten. Everything’s in there. It’s crap. I also analyzed the John Durham report which concludes that not only , 29 secondsthat the Steel Dossier was a hoax, but that implies that it was likely produced by agents of the Russian regime. Its , 36 secondsmain sources were Igor Donenko and um Chuck Dolan, the former head of the Massachusetts Democratic Party, who was , 44 secondsworking provably on paper for the Kremlin itself.

So, I’ve already looked at a bunch of this, but there’s a bunch , 53 secondsmore that we still need to get to. Was super intel dorky, which actually makes me happy. Ironically, the CIA under John Ratcliffe has , 2 secondspublished a full trade craft review which analyzes how the December 30th to Jan 6th uh 2017 ODNI analysis of Russian , 12 secondsinterference was produced and specifically how it failed to adhere to established intelligence reporting , 19 secondsstandards and critically how they snuck the turd of the steel dossier into the classified annex and then pretended that they didn’t use it. , 29 secondsThe director of national intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, has declassified whistleblower reports as well as emails from Admiral Reich Mike Rogers, the , 36 secondsformer director of the National Security Agency about concerns from multiple professionals that the conclusions pushed by Clapper and Brennan were not , 44 secondssupported by intelligence reporting from all the various agencies.

, 49 secondsSenator Chuck Grassley has declassified the classified annex of the John Durham final report about the production of the Steel Dossier, which included , 57 secondsintelligence possessed by the Obama administration during the 2016 campaign that indicated that Hillary Clinton’s campaign was most likely cooking up a , 6 secondsstory to frame Trump with the help of the FBI and CIA. And we now know part of that effort to be called the Steel Dossier. , 14 secondsSo, we’re going to be doing this in chapters. First though, I want to start with some material that is decidedly not classified, has never been classified, , 22 secondsand which is possibly why you’re watching this video to begin with.

That material will be a review of my December 11th, 2016 viral Twitter thread, which , 31 secondscovered what I believed at that time, what honest intelligence professionals believed about the Russian attacks on our election, how it implicated the then , 40 secondsincoming Trump administration, and how it meant America was in deep trouble. I think it’s going to help the average , 47 secondsviewer, the average citizen see what I wrote back then and maybe to understand why it upset the apple cart so much. Not , 55 secondsjust for the Russian intelligence services who were under understandably upset that I was bringing millions of people, regular Americans, just how , 3 secondstheir scams worked, but also for the Israelis, the Chinese, and sadly for corrupt elements within the United States government, apparently at its , 12 secondshighest levels.

As a lifetime career intelligence analyst, I regularly revisit what I wrote on that Sunday back in 2016 on a somewhat regular basis. I , 21 secondshave learned a ton since that day. The whole world has. Sorry about that. Uh I mean, we’re basically at war with Russia , 28 secondsnow. So, I go back regularly to check up on what I was thinking on that fateful day and how it compares with what we’re looking at today. Now, this matters , 36 secondsbecause the Game Theory thread kicked off an enormous firestorm, but it wasn’t exactly clear just who was pissed off with me. Hundreds of articles in major , 45 secondsmedia came out of nowhere to write about a spontaneously written tweet thread by a largely unknown intelligence , 54 secondsprofessional.

and huge botn nets came out swarming on Twitter and on other social media platforms to defame its , 1 secondauthor, yours truly, and to discredit the idea that Russia had any impact on the election whatsoever. Now, back then, , 9 secondsI would have said it looked like Russia and Israel were particularly upset with my thread. But today we know that John Brennan, Jim Clapper, Hillary Clinton, and their confederates had their own , 17 secondsmotivations to attack my writing and my voice because they were already executing a plan to characterize Trump , 24 secondsand Russia before he took office. So to fully understand the steel dossier in context, I think we need to go back to , 31 secondsmy 2016 thread, look at just what pissed these guys off so much and then we can look at behind the scenes at the CIA and , 40 secondsthe FBI and then to the prosecutions that we’re about to see because I think it all makes sense when you put it all together.

To understand the context of , 49 secondsJohn Brennan’s actions for which he might be prosecuted, I think we have to review the timeline of the election in terms of Trump and Russia. , 57 secondsJune 16th, 2015, Trump takes his famous escalator ride and announces his candidacy as a Republican candidate for , 5 secondspresident. October 2015, the private intelligence firm Fusion GPS, originally financed by so-called right-wing , 14 secondsbillionaire Paul Singer and ultimately by the Hillary Clinton campaign, starts to research Trump, Paul Maniffort, and , 20 secondsothers with regards to Russia. They are the guys who end up employing Christopher Steel to compile a dossier. , 29 secondsIn December 2015, Trump characterizes Vladimir Putin killing journalists and dissident in Russia as Putin being a , 37 secondsstrong leader of his country.

In March 2016, Trump names Paul Maniffort as his , 44 secondscampaign manager, even after Maniffort has done work directly for the Proputin Party of Regions in Ukraine. , 53 secondsApril 2016, the Clinton campaign through Perkins Kooi law firm attorney Mark Elias takes over the Steel Dossier , 1 secondproject from Paul Singer. In in July of 2016, man, all hell breaks loose. Trump , 8 secondstalks about potentially lifting Obama’s sanctions on Russia for invading Crimea. , 14 secondsTrump also said that he thought Russia would be rewarded by America’s press corps if they had a copy of Hillary , 21 secondsClinton’s emails. By the way, I had to go back. My own memory. I had some memory bias. I thought that he was , 28 secondstalking about that Russia would be rewarded for finding Hillary’s emails in general, which kind of made it sound , 36 secondslike Trump was inviting the Russians to hack our election.

In fact, what he’d said was the press corps would love that , 45 secondsillegally obtained material, which is a pretty different different statement when you think about it. One is inviting the Russians to attack us. The other is , 54 secondsaccusing the press corps of working with the Russians. This Trump guy, his his statements in retrospect are very , 1 secondinteresting and you need to go back to see them in their totality. I find them to be more interesting now than they , 9 secondswere back then. And they were pretty interesting back then. Other stuff that went down in July 2016, Trump told George Stephanopoulos of ABC News that , 17 secondsPutin won’t be invading Ukraine. write it down.

And he was asked directly by ABC News, “Hey, have you ever done business with Russians?” He’s like, , 25 seconds”Yeah, sometimes.” He admitted to making over $50 million on a deal selling a Florida home to Dimmitri Robovv, who was , 34 secondsa Russian oligarch. He also said, “Yeah, I probably sell uh condos to to Russians in Florida or wherever else, whatever. , 41 secondsI’m in the real estate business. Sure, I do it, but I don’t owe them any money.” The Clinton campaign began opining both , 48 secondspublicly and privately that Putin was supporting Trump. Campaign managers like Robbie Moo were making these , 57 secondsimplications in public. And we now have emails among some of the executives who worked for the Clinton campaign that they were , 6 secondstalking about not just Putin supporting Trump, but that they thought that they should publicize the allegations that , 13 secondsPutin was supporting Trump.

Privately, the press corps was beginning to discuss the existence of what we now know as the , 20 secondsSteel Dossier. And around this time, the FBI opened up a an investigation called Crossfire Hurricane and began to , 28 secondsinvestigate Carter Page, who had volunteered to work for the Trump campaign through a FISA warrant, even , 34 secondsthough Carter Page was a CIA asset spying on the Russians for our government, not an asset of the Russian , 42 secondsgovernment. Uh we have text messages from that time showing prosecuting attorney Lisa Paige uh writing to her , 49 secondsthen paramore/boyfriend uh special agent Peter Stro who did counter intelligence for the FBI stating , 56 secondsthat it was her goal to keep Trump from being president.

October 2016, the Russian stuff keeps going. Russian front Wikileaks dumps propaganda all over election for the , 7 secondssecond time that year. Trump declared that he loves Wikileaks. , 12 secondsAt the debate, Clinton calls Trump a puppet of Putin directly and he says, “No, I’m no puppet. You’re the puppet. , 19 secondsPuppet. Puppet. Puppet. Puppet.” Slate published a fraudulent story about Alphab doing business with the Trump , 26 secondsOrganization that was cooked up entirely by the Clinton campaign with some other bad actors. The New York Times said the , 33 secondsFBI was investigating Trump but found no links to Russia. Then we skip ahead to November 2016. Trump wins. , 44 secondsThe following week, Putin awarded Trump the Kasac of Russia award, their highest civilian award for non-Russians.

, 51 secondsUm, nobody stepped up to work for the Trump White House. At first, everybody looked off in the middle distance and finished all the alcohol and robbitasen in the house. [snorts] Lindsey Graham and John McCain got together to yell about Vladimir Putin and everybody was in a fugue state. , 9 secondsDecember 7th, 2016, the intelligence community was working on a new president’s daily brief examining the potential impact of cyber hacks on the , 18 secondselection results. DNI Clapper’s office developed talking points based on the PDB’s findings. foreign adversaries did , 27 secondsnot use cyber attacks on election infrastructure to alter the US presidential election outcome and that we have no evidence of cyber , 35 secondsmanipulation of election infrastructure intended to alter results.

Very specific statements. This is the state of play , 42 secondsDecember 7th, 2016. December 8th, 2016, IC officials discussed the the draft , 49 secondspresident’s daily brief which found that Russian and criminal actors did not impact recent US election results by , 57 secondsconducting malicious cyber activities against election infrastructure. And the group also decided that the the PDB , 4 secondswould be published the following day due to high administration interest. So they have a big meeting about this. December , 12 seconds9th, 2016, the Obama White House gathered top cabinet officials for a National Security Council principles committee meeting. So you had Jim , 20 secondsClapper, the director of national intelligence, John Brennan, Susan Rice, John Kerry, Brian McKan, Attorney , 28 secondsGeneral Laura Lynch, Andy McCabe from the FBI, not Jim Clone, Andy McCabe.

, 34 secondsVery interesting. And Averil Haynes, who was, I believe, deputy director of national intelligence. , 41 secondsThe assessment will address the following questions. This is the uh the order of business. December 9th, 2016. , 48 secondsHow did Moscow seek to influence the US presidential election in 2016? What tools did they use? One, hacking. Two, , 55 secondsleaks. Three, cyber activity against voting systems. Four, media spin, trolls, fake fake news. Five, domestic , 3 secondsRussian intelligence efforts. And why did Moscow direct these activities? What have the Russians hoped to accomplish? , 11 secondsSo that’s the ninth. They’re they’re they’re they’ve got answers already. , 15 secondsThey already have an assessment of what Russia’s been up to.

The presumption here on the ninth is that’s not good enough. And it’s not clear what else , 23 secondsthey’re going to get. These things take a few minutes, people. And this is in the tradecraftraft review by John Ratcliff’s office at at the CIA right , 31 secondsnow that these guys tried to rush a multi-month process through to before , 38 secondsTrump took office. It’s nerdy. It involves standards of time frame and pressure and stuff that really only top , 46 secondslevel intel nerds really care about. But it matters cuz these guys, they speak with a very powerful voice. And they , 53 secondsconspired to take that voice and move it into public and give [clears throat] it to the American people without any context , 1 secondas to what they’d be looking at.

This is why we don’t have our spy agencies report to the American people about the , 9 secondsoutcome of our elections. Not only is it kind of on its face inappropriate, it’s not clear that the American people would , 16 secondsknow what they’re being told because this is stuff that vanishingly few nerds care about. That’s why we don’t do it , 25 secondsamong many other reasons. So that’s December 9th, 2016. They’re like, “All right, guys. We’re going to do a new , 32 secondsdifferent intelligence community assessment. Even though we have one that doesn’t say that Russia changed the the , 40 secondsoutcome of the election, that doesn’t say that Trump was elected because of Vladimir Putin, but they’ve kind of decided that they’re going to reach a , 48 secondsdifferent conclusion that Trump has really been working with the Russians and colluding with their government the whole time.

, 56 secondsAnd that the [snorts] Russians played a major impact. It played a major role impacting the election. That’s the 9th. , 5 secondsDecember 11th, 2016. , 7 secondsUh I drop my kids off with their mom. I got a few hours and I just start uh writing on Twitter because everybody’s panicking and they’re like, “Garland, what are we going to do? What’s the , 16 secondsworld going to do? What are the spies going to do?” I’m like, “What do you want spies to do about it? That’s not what they do. You don’t like this Trump guy? Like, you know, you should have argued with your uncle harder at , 24 secondsChristmas and Thanksgiving. I don’t know.” So, I had my ear to the ground on what was happening with the whole Trump , 33 secondsthing, who was working with his administration, which was bizarre for weeks, like nobody wanted to work with , 39 secondsthis guy.

And I was slowly uh I was collecting up all this information about kind of what the Russians had done, what , 47 secondsthey hadn’t, and where we were left with all this. And it was very alarming cuz we had like foreign agents all over the , 54 secondsplace. and um they clearly had some impact on the election and this guy was about to take office and it kind of looked like they had a lever over him. , 3 secondsSo I went public 127 tweet thread. We’re going to go through that thread on this video and I went from having 5,000 followers , 11 secondsthat afternoon to 33,000 the next morning and now I have a quarter million. That thread got 5,000 retweets. , 19 secondsMy Twitter exploded. , 22 secondsNow this part’s important.

And I’ve never revealed this before. December 13th, 2016, one of Jim Clapper’s , 29 secondscolleagues called me personally and asked me if I’d be willing to stop making public statements. I declined. , 39 secondsThe comment from that intelligence executive was negative when I declined. , 45 secondsMore soon. December 14th, 2016, intelligence community officials again leaked to the media. this time claiming that IC officials believe with a high , 54 secondslevel of confidence that Russian President Vladimir Putin was personally involved in the US election hack. , 3 secondsRewind to the 9th. Nobody had that conclusion. There was no support for it. , 9 secondsNobody had said high confidence, which is a a very important statement.

, 13 secondsSomebody in the intelligence community goes to the media and says, “No, no, no. , 16 secondsIt’s in the bag. We have it already.” January 6th, 2017, the intelligence community published assessing Russian , 24 secondsactivities and intentions in recent US elections, the analytic process and cyber in incident attribution. This was , 31 secondsbased in part on the steel dossier, now confirmed by declassified documents from the ODNI from this year. In this , 40 secondsdocument, the director of national intelligence pushes a conclusion [clears throat] partially based on the steel dossier that Russia wanted to , 48 secondselect Trump without substantial new information that would justify it.

Very, very naughty. , 56 secondsJanuary 10th, 2017, the digital news outlet, which doesn’t exist anymore, BuzzFeed, publishes the Steel Dossier , 4 secondsjust as the intelligence community assessment is discussed under oath in front of Congress by Brennan and Clapper. , 11 secondsSo, the media and Congress then engaged in an unusual two-front war with this steel dossier stuff. On one front, , 18 secondsDemocrats led by Adam Schiff investigated Trump, accusing him of collusion with the Russian Federation. , 26 secondsThis led to the Mueller investigation, which resulted in the prosecution of a number of individuals, but not President , 33 secondsTrump. And on another front, the same media outlets published a series of defamatory articles about me, accusing me of trafficking and conspiracy , 41 secondstheories, only then to turn around and repeat stories written by other authors in the same vein about the Steel Dossier , 48 secondsand its conclusions.

So, okay, why did these guys try and destroy my reputation? I think we need to go back , 56 secondsto my 2016 thread and see how it holds up in general, but see how it differs substantially , 5 secondsfrom what Clapper and Brennan were pushing. Cuz I think that was the problem that I posed for the Russians, for their friends, and for these , 14 secondsintelligence officials who had made the very distasteful decision to involve themselves in the 2016 election and beyond the 2020 election. , 25 secondswhat I said represented the intelligence community and what they said defrauded the intelligence community. Happy stuff. , 34 secondsI’m sure I won’t get in trouble for this. Let’s go. Okay, we’re going to have fun looking at the uh the thread from 2016.

I do because it’s written in , 42 secondskind of a fun style. I don’t normally drop fbombs and other profanity in my intelligence writing. It was a first for me and it was incredibly successful. , 50 secondsApparently, people want potty language with their national security analysis. , 54 secondsWho knew? It was a brand new niche. I didn’t know it existed. It was kind of fun to dig it out myself. , 1 secondUm, looking back at my game theory thread and now looking at the declassified documents from the ODNI about Clapper and Brennan, I think I see , 9 secondswhy they attacked me. The steel dossier was a story that didn’t just implicate Russia, which always attacks our , 17 secondselections. It made Trump out to be in Putin’s pocket, which was not supported by the evidence.

The game theory thread , 24 secondstalked about domestic and foreign actors betraying America. It said that Russia would use a Trump victory and talked , 31 secondsabout Russian cyber activities, but it did not say I did not say Russia made Trump president or even that they expected his victory. In fact, I said , 40 secondsthey didn’t expect it. In other words, my game theory thread represented the same basic assumptions and conclusions as the classified assessments uh of the , 49 secondsintelligence analysts throughout the community throughout 2016 until that fateful December 9th, 2016 meeting where , 58 secondsthey decided to reach totally different conclusions. Then when my thread got famous, I apparently represented a , 5 secondscompetitive voice, one that would potentially cast doubt on what Brennan and Clapper were trying to push out to the media.

Evidently, I was not just a , 14 secondsthreat to Russia and its intelligence services, but to dirty spies within the US government. And that was not clear to , 21 secondsme until Tulsi Gabbard and John Ratcliffe topsided these documents about whistleblowing and intelligence nerd , 28 secondstradecraft review. Brennan and Clapper took actions that were against the ethos of real intelligence professionals, and , 35 secondsthat is what I represent. Thank you very much. So, we’re going to look at my 2016 game theory thread from Twitter to , 43 secondshighlight exactly why Brennan and Clapper were working so hard to give the media another impression about what , 50 secondshappened with Trump and Russia.

I think even in unclass even using unclassified sources, the information was out there , 58 secondsmore or less about what was going on with Donald Trump and Russia that he had Russian assets all over him as a whole lot of people at certain levels in uh , 6 secondsNew York and California and Washington DC did and kind of always do. Uh but he wasn’t working for them directly. , 13 secondsHowever, he had a bunch of creepy guys working for him that you know wouldn’t normally be included in a presidential campaign. Hey, that’s very interesting. , 21 secondsBut it doesn’t mean he was in their pocket. And if, as Speaker of the House, Mike Johnson has said, maybe he wasn’t allowed to say it or authorized or , 29 secondswhatever, if Trump was a highle FBI informant the whole time, if he was like doing a special deal with Jim Comey the , 37 secondswhole time, not to try and mess up Hillary Clinton, but to catch a bunch of dirty Russians at the highest level, that would be deeply interesting, and , 45 secondsthat would color a lot of the decisions he made.

It doesn’t get his Russian asset friends off the hook at all and didn’t a lot of them [clears throat] got prosecuted by our friend Robert S. , 54 secondsMuller III, but it might get Trump out of trouble and he’s the one everybody voted for. So that’s why this all kind of matters. So there was the information , 3 secondson the ground that people like me with an intelligence background without being read into a classified file. So I’m not breaking the law. You could, if you had , 11 secondsa certain sensibility, look at what’s happening going, I think I see what’s happening here, as I did, and then come out publicly and go, “Hey, everybody, , 19 secondssince the news is not doing a good job and our politicians are freaking out, I’m going to tell you what I think.

I’m going to come out of the shadows.” Since , 26 secondsI had never really talked about my national security analysis, it was kind of a one of the it was on the secret menu at Starbucks, if you will. I never , 35 secondsreally talked about it. So, I came out and I started talking about it and it sold like free chicken and coke, you know. Uh, anyhow, , 44 secondswe’re going to go back over this thread and see what it is that these guys didn’t like that they had to knock down , 51 secondsso hard because it’s not that far off from what they were concluding on how gross some of this stuff was, how Russian and borchy this stuff around , 59 secondsTrump was. It just failed to make the conclusion that Trump was working for them.

And doing that before the man even , 7 secondstakes the oval office after he’s been elected by the American people. Well, there’s a lot of heavy implications there, especially since it’s coming from , 15 secondsthe CIA, who we do not want making comments on our elections. So, let’s go. , 20 secondsThe famous first tweet thread. I’m now hearing this meme that says Obama, Clinton at Al are doing nothing. just , 29 secondsgave up. Guys, it’s time for some game theory. Now, game theory does not refer to Nash equilibrium and the prisoners , 37 secondsdilemma. It was a misnomer. I I was just going off the top of my head and I was thinking of strategic simulation or , 44 secondstabletop gaming at the Pentagon.

That’s where, okay, we’re going to play this scenario out. Imagine like a game of , 52 secondsRisk or Civilization. You’re going to play uh the Mongols. You are going to play the French. you’re going to play the Romans. And you go around the table and you go, “Okay, they do this with real countries. They’re going to do this North Korea, Japan, China. Okay, a nuclear sub goes down in in the sea of whatever.” You play the North Koreans. , 11 secondsYou play the Japanese. You play the Chinese. I’m going to play NATO. You go around the table and go, “I’m going to do this.” And you go, “No, I’m going to do this. Well, I’m going to do this.” , 18 secondsAnd you have your classified briefing books in front of you that a bunch of intel nerds put together that tell us the latest classified intelligence about , 26 secondswhat these actors want in the world.

And then you go around the table and you play for a few hours and they take down , 34 secondseverything that happened like, “Oh, we well we nuked Tokyo. Okay, so we nuked Beijing or whatnot.” And we test our , 42 secondsassumptions by playing against other strategists who are going to work as hard as they can to try and get the Chinese what they want out of this situation, what the North Koreans want , 50 secondsout of this situation. We we play as hard as we can. We see who got what in our simulation and we write it all down. , 59 secondsAnd that very nerdy almost Dungeons and Dragons approach to the Pentagon uh informs policymakers about what , 7 secondsoperational plans they should be making in the advance for potential futures.

, 11 secondsThis is my specialty, future scenario production. So I was thinking about the theory of strategic tabletop gaming. I , 20 secondsjust said it’s time for some game theory. And like a lot of things that go viral or uh otherwise become famous, it was not intended to do so. And the , 28 secondseconomics community freaked out and said, “That’s not Nash equilibrium.” Yeah, you’re right, fellas. Go back to your nerd cave. It was not economics. I , 35 secondswas talking about Pentagon tabletop gaming. You caught me. Moving on. , 41 secondsActor analysis because I’m thinking about a strategic tabletop game here. , 46 secondsThe Russians enter the game with a broad objective, flexible tactics, and several acceptable outcomes.

, 54 secondsNote the time stamp on this. 3:30 p.m. December 11th, 2016. , 59 secondsUh, all of this gets written down in about an hour and a half. And as I start writing on Twitter, increasingly my notifications start exploding to the , 7 secondspoint I have to turn them off permanently. Thousands upon thousands of uh, oh, I forget what they were called at that time. Likes, retweets, comments. , 17 secondsThey’re all flooding in as I’m writing it. I realize I’ve hit the nerve. I realize people need to know about this stuff. So, I just keep writing and , 26 secondswriting and my tone gets a little more serious as time goes on. I had no idea what the response would be and I , 34 secondscertainly had no idea what the impact would be on my life or I wouldn’t have done it, let me tell you.

But here we are. This subversion can take many , 41 secondsforms. Driving wedges between US Commonwealth, Euro intel collection, that’s the US, the UK and and the , 48 secondsEuropeans intelligence collection break up NATO and create chaos. So in general, what is it the Russians want on any , 55 secondsgiven year? What do they use the KGB and its successor agencies for? They want to mess up Western countries sharing , 3 secondsintelligence with each other. They want to keep us from trusting each other. , 6 secondsThey want generalized chaos. And however they do it, they don’t care. , 11 secondsThe game has been developing for many years is asymmetrical and much cheaper than building a decent aircraft carrier.

, 19 secondsFun fact, Senator Mark Warner of Virginia later on answered some question at a at a at a press gaggle saying, , 26 seconds”Well, they do this because it’s cheaper than building a decent aircraft carrier.” I was like, “I’m not even going to sue you over royalties. Thank you for using that.” I think it’s an an , 34 secondsefficient way of talking about how these pipsqueak shitty c countries end up smacking us even though we have all the nukes and aircraft carriers is they do , 44 secondsthis other stuff that’s really tricky cuz it’s cheaper and easier than building an aircraft carrier and they’re better at it than us. So, in terms of , 52 secondsasymmetrical warfare, it’s a brilliant strategy.

And we have been slow to catch up because there’s way more money in in , 1 secondbuilding aircraft carrier systems than there are in making sure that your intelligence is really good. That’s why the Russians have beat us even though , 9 secondstheir country sucks and their economic system sucks and everything about them sucks to this day. Plus, the Russians , 16 seconds rule at covert Always have. Ask a cold warrior. Mucho respect for our adversaries. They do clever work. Thought it then. Thought it all throughout my career. Think it today. , 27 secondsThey’re better at it. At us. They’re better at this stuff than us. Respect the Russians or they will make you , 36 secondshumble. And they have even since I’ve written this.

So, still respect. Also, they can off. Postcommunism. , 44 secondsThey the Russians are reduced to drunk uncle status in the global balance of power. mouthy, smart, degraded, much reduced in stature. It’s the 90s. , 54 secondsRussians as people are civilized, artistic, enamored of brilliance and tragedy, and generally proud and should be. They do not like this. , 4 secondsFrom this position launches an initiative from an old hand at the KGB, now solidified in influence. Subvert for , 11 secondsthe throat. Go big, go hard. Man, that is the Russian ethos in this stuff and , 18 secondspretty much in everything to a tea. Go big, go hard, go aggressive even when you have nothing behind you. You will probably get rewarded for it , 26 secondsstrategically.

And the guy behind that, Vladimir Putin, was a trained KGB officer. He specialized in East Germany , 34 secondsand the Stazzi. He is an aggressive old hand. Respect him or he will humble you. , 40 secondsWhile the West is frivolous and lazy and posthis, that’s a that’s a crack at Francis Fukuyama, the end of history. While the , 48 secondsWest is frivolous and lazy and post history, the clever take advantage. And here begins our present story. , 56 secondsLet’s skip ahead to Wikileaks. , 59 secondsBrilliant. Ingratiate the left into this anti-establishment distrust of Western intel. , 7 secondsGeorge W. Bush and Dick Cheney being sllovenly reckless idiots. The moral authority of Iraq and in US intel is nil instep journalists.

, 19 secondsNow, I admit this is not super coherent because I I I skip from the 2010 to 2013 era of Wikileaks , 28 secondsum and its operation to get the left to distrust intelligence to back to 2001 2 and three about George , 38 secondsW. Bush and Dick Cheney. And remember, I did not have a plan. I’m writing this basically stream of consciousness. So, I did not have this in categories or , 45 secondsbrackets. I had no plan. So, I’m just setting up the context of how Wikileaks kind of became part of our , 53 secondsconsciousness. This this supposed international journalism group that comes in and just happens to specialize in hard drives from the Pentagon, which , 1 secondwe would just call and have in grand juries espionage, right?

So, instep quote journalists or spies obviously. , 11 secondsthough obvious to me America had been so propagandized for 3, four, five, six years about Wikileaks that oh they’re , 18 secondsjournalists when they’re le by the legal definition they’re not journalists they are not journalists um you know they do not have a country that they adhere to. , 28 secondsThey do not have a printing press that they adhere to. They are just there to run computers to operate espionage against mainly the United States. Not , 37 secondsreally desperates. They they really didn’t do a lot of um uh journalism against North Korea, now did they? Nor , 44 secondsagainst China. No, they they specialized in Western democracies.

Uh how Russian is that? Pretty easy to to guess, even , 51 secondsif you’re not an intelligence uh professional. But here we are, several years of the US media saying Wikileaks is journalists. They’re clearly not journalists. , 1 secondStealing hard drives from US intel and dumping them to foreign agents. That’s snicker journalism. Free speech, roof mau. , 10 secondsOh, and such grand characters, so well-run. Manning, Glenn Greenwall, so righteous yet fragile and feisty. Try a , 19 secondsTwitter war with Glenn. Now, fun fact, I had been beefing online, not his main antagonist, but I had uh been taking on , 27 secondsGlenn Greenwald since this Wikileaks stuff had been going on, but especially once Edward Snowden uh departed from Moscow with a bunch of stuff from the , 35 secondsNSA.

And Glenn is a real nasty character. In fact, he woke up the next morning after this thread and called me mentally ill and started defaming me , 43 secondsand, you know, retreated to his hidey-hole down in Brazil. Oh, you Philistine, you just hate journalism. , 49 secondsSigh. Swig something strong. And Moscow must have been doubling over then. OMG, , 56 secondsthat worked so well that the piesta resistance was next. Snowden, booya, the big game, NSA, Prism, Spasm. , 6 secondsGlenn uh Glenn Greenwall supported Snowden walking out from the NSA and saying the NSA has this program called , 14 secondsPrism where they get all our stuff. So that I’m I’m basically drawing a trend line. Not not very well uh but between , 22 secondsuh Bradley then Chelsea Manning uh obscinging with hard drives uh from the Pentagon to Snowden walking out the door , 31 secondsuh talking about the NSA.

Um that this basically this operation from Wikileaks to appear like journalists had been , 38 secondsintensifying uh over the years here and now was kind of at a critical point. Incidentally, the NSA was about the only agency that , 46 secondsthe Russians took seriously. But then this earnest young man, he tells the truth. , 53 secondsDid you know your toaster is spying on you? The government. It is everywhere. It’s everywhere. They spying on allies. , 1 secondAll bad. Snowden had said that we were we were spying on on the Germans and that allies shouldn’t spy on each other, which if you know anything about the spy , 9 secondsgame, you know that’s ridiculous. We all spy on each other and we warn each other if something bad’s going on in the other person’s country.

It especially helps if , 17 secondsyou’ve got a problem with like a political candidate that’s really working for this other country, which is the exact system that Christopher Steel , 25 secondswas trying to take advantage of. That thing that Christopher Steel did is actually pretty typical, but it’s not used in public and it’s not made so , 33 secondspartisan as it was. That was the problem. Not just that we had one one of of our friendly allies spy agencies , 41 secondswatching our back like, “Hey man, that guy hangs out with this guy. We got pictures from over here.” That’s actually really orthodox and it’s , 48 secondssomething you want. And it’s something that Ed Snowden and the Wikileaks people were crapping all over.

They’re like, “Yes, don’t warn each other about who in , 57 secondsyour midst are traitors because spying on allies is bad, guys. I mean, if you’re a spook, this is a joke.” But I , 5 secondsput it in the context of what had just transpired with intelligence and the Iraq war. Interesting because John Brennan and Jim Clapper were involved in , 14 secondsthe production of fake Iraq war intelligence as well. So it wasn’t their first rodeo with this stuff. , 21 secondsStill hung over from the rotten venality of the Iraq war and Bush’s perversion of the intelligence community is reliable. , 28 secondsWikileaks journalisms the NSA. , 32 secondsDon’t you call it something else. hard drives from the NSA is journalism.

Even when you take the files to Brazil, honest ask Glenn. , 41 secondsAnd then automagically, our man Ed ends up what’s this now in Russia? Well, they are such welcoming folks. How nice. , 51 secondsLangley and Fort me run out of bourbon in about 3 hours. And every intel guy in Russia is drunk, dancing on the desks, and laughing. , 59 secondsAnd the left, holy adorable Batman. Uniswaki matty pon. How dare you suggest untowarded Russian involvement journalisms. , 10 secondsNow uniswaki mattipon is a is the motto of the order of the guarder in Britain. , 16 secondsIt’s old French for be ashamed he who thinks ill of it. Has to do with a guarder falling off a woman’s leg and , 25 secondsthe the king stepping down to put the guarder back on her leg just to help her out from an embarrassing uh wardrobe malfunction.

and he when the court , 33 secondssnickers at the king, he turns around and says basically, “How dare you look ill at this? I’m just trying to do the right thing.” So, that was an overly , 41 secondssophisticated comment here. But it’s Twitter. It’s the It’s the middle of the afternoon and now I’m rolling. The the notifications are paying in. I realize , 49 secondsI’ve got some form of an audience, so I’m just letting out the fishing line. Just having some fun here. Journalisms. , 55 secondsUS intel snorts all of the Robbitasen in the DCMDVA area. Putin calls Snowden a weird guy. Moving on to the current , 2 secondschapter. I’m assuming that most of the intelligence community did not think much of of uh Snowden turning up in Moscow and Putin says, “Yeah, he’s a weird guy.” I mean, it it is what it is.

, 15 secondsI’m making a joke about the Robbitasen, but I don’t think American spies were too happy about the whole situation. , 21 secondsBack over to the right now. Meanwhile, at the Fox Nation forums, the other part of this impressive op is percolating. , 27 secondsthe buttress of the alt right. , 31 secondsOnce upon a time, Dan Rather chased Nixon around a room asking him questions very harshly and the notion of the evil , 38 secondsmedia elite was born. That really is, I think, the um the exodus and genesis of people saying it’s the liberal media , 47 secondsbecause Dan Rather went after Nixon and they’re like, “This whole thing against Nixon involves the Washington Post. It involves CBS News.

They are against the , 56 secondsRepublicans instead of maybe they’re just bad at their jobs for other reasons. They’re corrupt for other reasons. No, no, no. They’re specifically it’s the Democrats who run , 4 secondsthe media versus the Republicans. This is where I think the image got started. , 10 secondsSee, because Nixon got impeached, that meant the media was in on it. Wapo, New York Times, traders, we look bad. And the media hate begins. Never mind that , 19 secondsto know something in Topeka, somebody’s got to send you a newspaper or a radio signal or whatevers. The media is lying. , 26 secondsNow, it’s true. Highle journalists and editors don’t always see the world like Johnny Lunchpale in Missouri.

True facts, but trouble. , 35 secondsRepublicans decide to create a whole new layer of think tanks and media outlets in the 1980s dedicated to the other side. The think tanks have a point of , 44 secondsview, but some are quite good. KO in particular, Heritage came up with what is now Obamacare. American Enterprise , 51 secondsInstitute, two out of three. I used to live next to AEI, the American Enterprise Institute. I was roommates with one of the guys who worked for Bill Clint Bill Crystal during the run-up to the Iraq war. And I heard firsthand that they were lying about all the Iraq war intelligence. So, two [snorts] out of , 8 secondsthree. I do not like KO or Heritage too much at all, but AEI isn’t even in the running.

But then the media play comes , 15 secondsin. The cranky, insane tent pastors on AM radio get a makeover. They become legitimate, embraced. , 22 secondsMagnates, Rupert Murdoch, start investing in outlets. Brand new pundits get huge audiences yelling about the way , 30 secondsthings ought to be, parenthesis for white people, a reference to Missou’s Rush Limbbo. And it’s more successful than free chicken and beer. The money , 39 secondsflows, the ratings swell. An Australian stats a TV network in the US. , 46 secondsWhat develops is an attractive, well-produced, alternate universe. You no longer need an alternate take. You , 52 secondshave alternate facts. Yes, Kellyanne Conway stole alternative facts from me.

, 59 secondsI don’t know that specifically, but when she was talking about how many people actually showed up for Trump’s inauguration, she talked about we have , 6 secondsalternative facts. I’m like, ah. Now, I wasn’t going to sue Mark Warner uh for for using cheaper than a decent aircraft , 13 secondscarrier, but I had serious threats about suing Kellyanne Conway for 4 seconds. , 18 secondsThen Randy Rainbow did a super funny video about alternative facts, and I decided to let everything transpire and let the universe unfold as it should. Al , 27 secondsGore mutters and bores his way out of a presidency in a race against a guy who spoke English like he learned it from Rosetta Stone. And now the stage is set , 36 secondsfor a metastasis of batshit, nuttery, jingoism, and irrational autocratic fervor.

A party becomes a cult. That’d be the GOP. , 47 secondsSeptember 11th, 2001 occurs. A bunch of guys are in DC who couldn’t wait to go to Iraq. And the right-wing media is shiny and tuned up. , 57 secondsWe go kick a bunch of barbarian ass in Afghanistan as well. We should have. , 1 secondThey were beating women and destroying Buddhas. them. , 5 secondsBut then the axis of evil speech and all the analysts in DC I know collectively go, “Oh, they’re not serious, are they?” , 14 secondsBill Clinton spent most of his years pounding the living snot out of Hussein. , 19 secondsDude built anything funnyl looking. In came the Rockets. , 23 secondsThere was this one concerning nation state for most and hint it’s in Asia.

, 28 secondsThe other threat was non-state actors which played out. Now what I meant is at a high level the strategic intelligence analysts were saying we’ve got two main , 36 secondsthreats against the United States. A nearpeer strategic competitor in Asia which means China and non-state actor networks which means , 44 secondsal Qaeda. In fact, I knew a guy who had a meeting on September 12th, 2001 to try and reorient the Pentagon away from , 53 secondsChina and a little more onto these these shadowy nation state actors. Uh based on what happened the day before , 2 secondsthat meeting, the meeting never took place. But those are the kinds of people I knew in Washington DC at that time. , 8 secondsAnd one thing was for certain, people were interested in the nearpeer uh Asian competitor.

They were interested in the shadowy networks. Ain’t nobody was interested in Saddam Hussein. , 19 secondsAnd now head desk. They’re going to Iraq with intel. Goddamn it. God , 25 secondsdamn it. This is going to suck. Said smart people. , 30 secondsAnd there’s the entire right-wing think tank and media machine blaring, careening, gloating from the government itself and from every outlet. How dare you be skeptical? We have agencies. , 41 secondsIntel. It’s secret. Do you want more planes in your nostrils up your butts? Be patriotic. , 47 secondsAnd god damn did those media outlets sell a lot of ads for trucks, painkillers, pharmaceuticals, and financial services. , 54 secondsMany earnest patriots also pointed out uh there are apparently no weapons that could have blown up Cleveland in Iraq.

, 1 secondSo, but now this whole thing has morphed into tribalism. Yes, they did too find weapons of mass depression. You suck , 9 secondsbush rocks, What I mean to say is it got very very heated. We went to Iraq. Some of us , 17 secondssaid, “I don’t think that they’re a threat and we were told to shut up and then we went in and turned out there really wasn’t um weapons the way we were , 25 secondstold by Jim Clapper at the National Geospatial Intelligence Agency and Don Romfeld and others.” And then we were , 32 secondstold we weren’t patriotic enough because we weren’t supporting the administration in their war that they cooked up. And there a lot of propaganda going on. , 41 secondsAnd Coulter comes on TV to talk over B-roll of rusty munitions that we sold Hussein ourselves and said, “Well, look, there they are.

Total propaganda. , 53 secondsAmerica looks like Our intel services take a hell of a beating and Iraq’s invasion, which was basically unplanned, results in chaos.” I skip right ahead to 2005. Katrina Bush , 7 secondslooking out the window. confused. But hey, in intel news, the NGA, National Geospatial Intelligence Agency, helps critically. , 17 seconds2008, the housing ponzi we used to get out of the dotcom bust 9/11 era recession has now gone pear-shaped, , 25 secondsutterly nuclear. America’s banks, the only other thing than other than movies and video games we do reliably, all , 32 secondsthe bed simultaneously. That’s a reference to Neil Stevenson’s Snow Crash. For you ultra nerds, if you’re both a sci-fi nerd and an Intel nerd, maybe you get what I’m saying there.

, 44 secondsWe then elect a cappuccino colored president whose middle name is Hussein. , 47 secondsThe right goes completely over the cliff into insane. They start the Tea Party. , 54 secondsRemember Boston Patriots? Something something. Tea Party. Nothing matters. , 58 secondsTake it all back. Yeah. [screaming] I was in Washington DC and they would have their their events uh on on the mall and we called it the spell check , 6 secondsfestival. Uh my favorite being get your government hands off my Medicare. I just didn’t even know where to start with that stuff. But it was it was very , 14 secondsexciting. You had a lot of poofyhaired women from Texas coming up with their badly spelled signs. The Tea Party, you know, it was it was good all-American , 22 secondsfun, right?

This political movement, meaning the Tea Party, happens when the only thing Obama has really said with conviction is fired up, ready to go in , 31 secondslate November 2008. But on George Washington’s grave, this has gone too far, and the entire right-wing media , 39 secondsgets its next several of years of revenue locked. , 44 secondsNow, we’ve got a really, really fertile field in which former KGB agents can make a long play. and Moscow gets to , 53 secondswork. So, I’ve set this whole field up that you had, I’m not saying Russia’s behind it, but you have all this , 1 secondpolitical chaos, and Russia loves that stuff. We’re divided. Russia loves that stuff. And after the blow up of 2008, , 9 secondsafter the economy was on its knees, now Moscow has got stuff to work with.

, 15 secondsThey’ve also collected up all these assets from their Russian mafia, from uh the oligarchs and desperates and the former Soviet countries. They have , 23 secondscreated a global network with billions upon billions of dollars and they can fund their spies to do all kinds of , 31 secondsthings. And I say that’s when they get to real work, man. , 36 secondsNow going back to 2009, America is at this weird nihilist place, which is one thing for France and Russia, but not for earnest Midwesterners who are a gape. , 46 secondsNow the American left has got some juice back, but the right is just apoplelectic from pure suffering. Both are ripe for subversion. , 55 secondsThe left is out of love with American business and military-industrial complex.

The right foams at the mouth against legitimate government. And the , 3 secondsguys who have been twisting minds from Vladivosto to Havana have been are get back to work building an alt media structure. , 14 secondsWe’ve already covered the genius of that whole Wikileaks op on the left. Score. , 19 secondsNow for the perversion of the former formerly nationalist right. Note that I’m implying that both left and right , 28 secondshave been attacked by Russian intelligence because the Russians, they do the whole spectrum. They don’t leave anything on the table. It’s no fun if , 35 secondsyou don’t control both sides of the conversation. And whereas some people in the intelligence community might be implying that the the Republicans have , 44 secondsthe Russia problem.

I’m saying no, no, no, no. Everyone probably has the same version of problem here. Jesus tap dancing Christ. There’s a black dude in , 52 secondsthe White House living there. It is not hard to convince southerners that this is insane, but put in a little elbow grease on the internet forums and soon you can have the northern John Adams type conservatives as well. A whole generation of disaffected Rush Limbbo fans, we listened and dittoed so hard. , 9 secondsWhy is there a black dude there? Is ripe for picking. In addition to alt finance sites, , 16 secondsuh that’d be zero hedge and Russia today a new TV network. They start infiltrating social media disclosure , 25 secondsbecause I’m mouthy all the time like this.

Russia Today has had me on as a guest. They prop up US subversives and they don’t edit you. Yeah, I’ve done a , 34 secondsfew uh done a few rounds on Russia Today and Alazer and reported back what I saw. , 40 secondsFun fact, Alazer and RT just let me talk. US media almost always wants some hand in the final product before booking you. , 50 secondsIronic. No, but from 2009 until the 2016 election, a madness is being brewed and poured down , 58 secondsthe throats of increasingly hysterical Americans. When you embibe from this potion, everything is awful and everyone , 5 secondsofficial is lying to you. Only other members of the cult are with you. , 11 secondsUS media, which is complicit in many of our problems, is portrayed for the extremists as conspiratorial liars all the time.

formerly sane members of US , 20 secondssociety sounding like my schizophrenic grandfather who said government was keeping him from his mission. Only the government knew that the archangel , 29 secondsGabriel was sending him to find the next Jesus. So cut it out CIA. Stop it, giant conspiracy. All of that was a personal disclosure I’ve never discussed in , 37 secondspublic. Uh my grandfather passed on in 2008. Uh he was nuttier than Chinese chicken salad. He officially had a , 44 secondsparanoid schizophrenia diagnosis. And he did believe that the Archangel Gabriel had dispatched him to find the next Jesus. And he told people that he , 52 secondsthought the government was trying to stop him. So I’ve heard crazy in my life.

Uh I really have. Uh but very much literally when you start hearing people that you know not to be mentally ill to start sounding like this, it’s like, huh? Okay. In other words, it’s highly ironic that I get accused of conspiracy , 8 secondstheory when I I literally have a lifetime experience sorting out the difference between literal paranoid conspiracies and actual analysis of , 17 secondsgrand conspiracies, the kind that go before grand jury. So, uh, we’re all about to learn something here. And then people you knew from functional daily , 25 secondslife started talking that way. people with car dealerships, dentists, regular folk, they started with conspiracy, especially after 2012, because damn it, , 34 secondsthere shouldn’t be a black dude.

Two two terms. No. Remember all your conservative your conservative friends and family? Remember them at , 42 secondsThanksgiving? Especially like after Barack Obama won again in 2012. Like remember Thanksgiving that year. Do you remember everything that happened 2013 , 50 seconds14 during Ferguson? All this that there was two terms of a black president and his middle name was Hussein. just the world was awful and everything was the , 58 secondsrush the cockpit election. Everything was hysterical. That was their tone, which is part of why I’m using all these , 1 minute, 5 secondsthese all caps. I wasn’t excited. I wasn’t hysterical when I was writing this. I I was I was trying to model some what I think other people sounded like.

, 1 minute, 15 secondsThey were not very rational as they discussed American politics. , 1 minute, 19 secondsThey’re all in on it. The corporations, the media the government, except for my Medicare. Don’t touch that. All of them. , 1 minute, 26 secondsA cabal called the pentavaret, the queen, the pope, the giddies, the Rothschilds, and Colonel Sanders before , 1 minute, 33 secondshe went tits up, which is a direct quote from Mike Meyer’s brilliant comedy, so I married Married an axe murderer. Uh, at , 1 minute, 41 secondsthis point, it’s been an hour of writing, my computer’s going nuts. I I kind of break the fourth wall. I say, “If you have an unfollowed by now, one, , 1 minute, 49 secondsyou’re nuts.

Two, thank you for indulging my So, I married Married an Axe Murder reference. , 1 minute, 54 secondsMoving on. Let’s finish the story. I realize I got the audience. For some reason, people are listening to counter intelligence grand theory. Let’s go. The , 2 minutes, 3 secondsconspiratorial fever at about 108 degrees. We begin the 2016 election against everything holy in 2015. , 2 minutes, 10 secondsRepublicans debate over 712 times, discussing topics such as who hated Obamacare more and who had a large penis. Jesus, that happened. , 2 minutes, 20 secondsThe Democrats all debate who’s going to get out of Hillary’s ways, Hillary’s way first, except for Vermont’s own Bernie Sanders who gets popular.

I’m from Vermont and have known Bernie forever. , 2 minutes, 31 secondsSo, I’m very surprised, but everyone kind of likes it. Hillary wins anyhow. , 2 minutes, 35 secondsAnd now the target for electoral mischief is enormous. Hillary is the most known quantity in America with huge , 2 minutes, 42 secondsbackstory. Creating a conspiracy narrative around the Clintons is like creating a southern narrative around NASCAR and grits. , 2 minutes, 50 secondsNow with Trump as the non-conformist, not like all the other rotten paragon, the Russians go into overdrive. , 2 minutes, 59 secondsThe Russians didn’t create Trump. Only New York City and American gullibility could have done that. But they’ve got a sweetheart outcome.

Trump, a is , 3 minutes, 8 secondsprobably unlikely to take the whole enchilada. But that’s perfect. If he gets close enough, he can cry unfair forever. , 3 minutes, 17 secondsAmazing scenario for Russia. Instead of Russia today, they get an institutional nihilist chowder head with American , 3 minutes, 25 secondscredentials. They butter him up. Hell to hear many telev on him. But anyhow, they invest in his , 3 minutes, 33 secondsstuff. He was there in 2013. They have alver. , 3 minutes, 38 secondsNote what I’m saying there to hear many tell of it. They have compromod on them. , 3 minutes, 43 secondsI’d heard about the steel dossier in the summer of 2016. , 3 minutes, 47 secondsI’d heard friendly reporting.

British had been trying to established that Trump had some more serious stuff going on. I’d even heard some like gross stuff , 3 minutes, 56 secondsabout a hotel room. This is basically the Steel Dossier. That made it to me. , 4 minutes, 1 secondSo, by the time I’m writing this thread up, nobody has seen a copy of the Steel Dossier, but I knew what it was. So it was not just a CIA classified product. , 4 minutes, 13 secondsThank you very much. And no, it was not serious intelligence reporting. They had been giving this to journalists. They had been giving this uh to people who , 4 minutes, 21 secondswere not read into the file. They were they were spreading it far and wide. So far that my you know my desk I had some version of it, right?

, 4 minutes, 33 secondsAnd I knew that he was there in 2013 for the Miss America stuff. So, I conclude the Russians have a lever. How much of a , 4 minutes, 41 secondslever? I don’t know. I’m certainly not saying the Russians own him. I’m not saying that they made him president. I , 4 minutes, 48 secondsdidn’t say that. I thought that they thought they would make him president. I said they have a lever. , 4 minutes, 55 secondsIf on the off chance Trump actually, and who could guess this, wins, then wow, they’ve got quite an opening. , 5 minutes, 3 secondsEither way, on the run-up to November 2016, Russian involvement was as subtle as a fart in a space suit. Scroll down my timeline for details because as these , 5 minutes, 12 secondsstories about Trump and Russia came out, I covered it because dude’s running for president.

He’s talking nice about Vladimir Putin. That is not a good sign. , 5 minutes, 19 secondsI noticed it. Bunch of other people noticed it. The USIC had its hair on fire. This situation was incredibly , 5 minutes, 25 secondsdangerous. A paranoid US faction backing a rogue with ties to Russia. I think that that states it accurately and I , 5 minutes, 33 secondsthink it’s still true. Okay. Jesus. At long last, back to my initial premise. , 5 minutes, 38 secondsWhy didn’t Obama and Clinton do something? Jesus, what can you do? You come out and have the CIA enter the , 5 minutes, 46 secondsgoddamn race for Clinton. True or not, we look like some weird cryptofascist state. , 5 minutes, 54 secondsOr you let the Ruskies laugh and taunt and infiltrate Facebook with magillions of propaganda tales for idiots.

Just let , 6 minutes, 2 secondsthem run around. Do you come out the day after this totally weird smelling abomination of an election with all of its technical difficulties? , 6 minutes, 13 secondsDo you tell America the day after the election that Russia spearfished all of our think tanks in brazen fashion? , 6 minutes, 20 secondsHillary, for her part, gives a brief and all too calm speech and goes hiking. Probably the best move on the board. , 6 minutes, 27 secondsObama welcomes Mr. Trump in an intense welcoming welcome to the White House, Mr. Big Winner Guy. Welcome, fellow American. Trump looks like he swallowed , 6 minutes, 36 secondsa goldfish and stares at the floor a bit too long, as if maybe a joke has gone too far.

In the next month, a small band of propagandists run in a circle and try , 6 minutes, 44 secondsand look like they’re forming a government. It’s ungainainely. , 6 minutes, 48 secondsAnd now it’s December 11th. Trump says he don’t need no stinking intel agencies. Russia blames Ukraine. , 6 minutes, 56 secondsA lot of Republicans staring in the middle distance except for McCain and Graham who are not having this I salute you gentlemen. And here we are, , 7 minutes, 4 secondsAmericans, hopefully soon united. This isn’t a partisan issue. Obama isn’t late to the party. People are doing their , 7 minutes, 13 secondsjobs. If you think any of this is easy, you’re ignorant and delusional. , 7 minutes, 18 secondsTonight though, I write to you with great hope.

This may be America’s finest hour as we act together with unshakable , 7 minutes, 26 secondsresolve to deal with enemies, foreign and domestic. We have done so in the past and come out stronger, more just, , 7 minutes, 33 secondsmore pluralistic nation. We will do so now. And for me, or die trying. , 7 minutes, 41 secondsAmerica is the steward of a genius system entrusted to flawed stewards whose descendants seem to act on the , 7 minutes, 48 secondsright side of history. This system is not rotten, not beyond repair, not exiled from the future. We have been , 7 minutes, 55 secondsinfiltrated by agents who would drive us mad. , 7 minutes, 59 secondsThis is a nation built on civilization, humanity, and reason, rejecting the febrial superstitions of the past.

It must stand and will. , 8 minutes, 9 secondsWe are at present in a place of danger where some of our fellow citizens have forgotten our most cherished values. We’ve been here before. , 8 minutes, 18 secondsAmerica reluctantly but dutifully recognizes its internal contradictions and failings. Slavery, racism, , 8 minutes, 26 secondsinternment, classism. The genius documents that gave rise to noble American sentiments were themselves authored by those who failed them. , 8 minutes, 35 secondsLooking at you, Thomas Jefferson. , 8 minutes, 38 secondsWe spilled the blood of our brothers to resolve the contradictions of slavery and then abandoned the project while killing Indians. Americans proclaimed , 8 minutes, 45 secondsthe equality of all men while treating women as cattle and all non-whites as lesser.

We are indeed hypocrites. , 8 minutes, 53 secondsBut to be American is to accept that unflinchingly and to soldier forth for future re generations and do better. , 9 minutes, 1 secondGodamn it. There are those who admire us in worldly cynicism. To anchor us in a world where our in institutions betray , 9 minutes, 9 secondsforever, where values perish. And to be American is to face that intellectual, moral, and spiritual assault with the , 9 minutes, 18 secondsunshakable devotion to something more lofty. And when that loftiness fails, as it so often does, to be American is to , 9 minutes, 26 secondsseize it again and again, knowing that our creator desires progress. This is all off the top of my head, folks.

I was just feeling the moment. , 9 minutes, 36 secondsThe progress demanded by our creator can be achieved by immigrants and natives, skeptics and believers, the elite and , 9 minutes, 42 secondsthe humble alike. That is America. That is the promise that Americans often ignore and which more cynical nations would defile for their own gain. That , 9 minutes, 51 secondsAmerica will last long after I have died, long after new people have picked up the torch. , 9 minutes, 57 secondslong after we betray it again as we will. , 10 minutes, 1 secondBut America will go on even if by another name unless all who have heard her name are extinguished. This is just , 10 minutes, 9 secondsthe locust of promise.

America came from the olive groves of Italy and the shipyard of Plymouth and the islands of , 10 minutes, 16 secondsthe Philippines indivisible. America came from the Torah and Voltater Kandid and Adam Smith and Zen Cohens and Greek , 10 minutes, 24 secondsmathematics and rooms poetry. America is all these things and should yet another absolutist demagogue, foreign or , 10 minutes, 32 secondsdomestic, sees her, it will be far from the end. Now is a time for patriots. , 10 minutes, 39 secondsIt’s also Sunday afternoon. I’m going to get a beer and watch football. God bless America and all nations. , 10 minutes, 46 secondsSo, that was the game theory thread in its full context. On December 9th, uh Jim Clapper, John Brennan, they go in , 10 minutes, 55 secondsto the Obama White House and they decide they’re going to come up with a story that departs from the intelligence , 11 minutes, 2 secondscommunity’s existing reporting, which is that Russia gets up to this stuff.

They did some cyber stuff. Trump has won. Uh oh well, America picked a president. , 11 minutes, 12 secondsEveryone’s kind of surprised those guys decided that that wasn’t enough. That this was going to be a , 11 minutes, 19 secondsstory about how Russia picked Trump, that it was on purpose, that Trump now owes them, and it was going to color , 11 minutes, 27 secondswhat everybody thought about his presidency to come. two days after they have this meeting, I step out in the , 11 minutes, 34 secondsmiddle of uh traffic and just go, “Let me do the equivalent of an intelligence community assessment from a completely , 11 minutes, 41 secondsunclassified, uncontrolled um perspective.” And it hit with the public.

It went to millions of people. I , 11 minutes, 48 secondswas attacked immediately. The attacks have never really stopped. And my questions are, were they attacks against me and this thread? Were they part of , 11 minutes, 56 secondsthe same grand conspiracy that tried to attack the Trump presidency? I spent so many years attacking Trump myself. It would be highly ironic if Trump and I , 12 minutes, 5 secondsended up being attacked by the same group of people. But hey, it’s the spy game. There’s weird stuff of foot. So, grand juries are convening. Subpoenas , 12 minutes, 13 secondsare going out. Indictments will probably fall in the months to come. It’s about to get really interesting. More game theory is on the way, folks.

Thanks for , 12 minutes, 23 secondsspending this time with me. And uh stay curious.