Russia is seeking a legally binding pledge that NATO will stop expanding east, including to Ukraine. If the US refuses, is war next? Scholar and author Richard Sakwa analyzes the growing Russia-Ukraine conflict and how Russiagate fueled it.
As a top investigator on the House Intelligence Committee, Kash Patel helped uncover the Clinton campaign’s funding of the Steele dossier and the FBI’s extensive and deceptive reliance on it.
Patel joins Aaron Maté to discuss Steele’s new attempt to defend his discredited work via a softball interview with ABC News. Patel also addresses the key role of newly indicted Clinton lawyer Michael Sussmann in hiring and overseeing another heavily influential Clinton campaign contractor, CrowdStrike, the cyber-firm behind the foundational allegation that Russia hacked the DNC. “CrowdStrike is one of the biggest culprits of the Russia fraud,” Patel says.
“For some reason, for the only time in FBI history that I can think of, they allowed an outside non-government entity to referee. That is, to go in and seize the servers of a target of an investigation and let a third party, CrowdStrike, referee what the FBI could and could not have access to.”
The story builds on previous disclosures including a May 2020 exposé by The Grayzone’s Max Blumenthal, which revealed that the CIA was working with Republican mega-donor Sheldon Adelson and the Spanish security firm UC Global to target and surveil Assange in London’s Ecuadorian embassy.
Isikoff and Aaron Maté also debate Russia’s role in the Assange controversy, particularly the allegation that Russia stole Democratic Party emails in 2016 and gave them to WikiLeaks.
A new open-source study concludes that Syrian insurgents carried out the Ghouta sarin chemical attack in August 2013. The explosive findings add to a growing body of public evidence that undermines US-led efforts to blame the Syrian government, which almost led to US military intervention.
Hundreds of people were killed and thousands were wounded when sarin rockets hit multiple sites in the Syria area of Ghouta on August 21, 2013. The US and its allies publicly accused the Syrian government of responsibility, and President Obama threatened to bomb Syria in purported retaliation. But Obama ultimately pulled back after reaching an agreement with Russia to destroy Syria’s chemical weapons arsenal.
A growing number of suspects in the assassination of Haitian President Jovenel Moïse have US ties. At least one is a former DEA informant and several have received U.S. military training. Scholar Jemima Pierre of The Black Alliance for Peace discusses the unfolding mystery surrounding Moïse’s killing and the context of longtime US, foreign intervention and neocolonialism in Haiti.
The US government is continuing to seek the extradition of Julian Assange even though a critical witness in its indictment has admitted to fabricating key claims. Bjartmar Alexandersson, the Icelandic journalist who broke this story, discusses the explosive confession of US witness Sigurdur “Siggi” Thordarson.