No, not that Bull Durham.
But since we stumbled into this part of town, maybe a quick reprise would be in order.
Don’t think, just throw – words to live by.
Mark Wauck reprises Bull Durham in an interview with Larry Johnson: https://meaninginhistory.substack.com/p/larry-johnson-on-the-durham-non-report
Today Larry Johnson links at his site to a podcast he did with Chris Farrell of Judicial Watch. The podcast is just over half an hour long, with the first half devoted to the Bull Durham Non-Report and the second half to Ukraine. What I’ll do here is insert a transcript—lightly edited for clarity—of the Durham portion. Then, below that, I’ll insert some tweets of remarks that Johnson also made in a different context regarding the geopolitical position the US finds itself in. It’s a dangerous position, risking WW3, yet most of the country—not just the public but even most of our elected representatives—appear to be oblivious to the changing world stage.
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In what follows, the transcript largely consists of remarks by Johnson, with the exception of a few paragraphs that are labeled “CF”.
A CHAT WITH CHRIS FARRELL OF JUDICIAL WATCH
Our discussion with my reaction to the Durham Report, followed by my update on Ukraine and Jack Teixeira.
https://open.spotify.com/embed/episode/5hdcGVqzB4CKGAjJM2qWnz
LJ shut down his original blog in March, 2017, “for fear the FBI was gonna come after me.” The reason for his fear was that he was prominently stating the fact that the spying on Trump wasn’t just the FBI. British intelligence was involved. Friends inside DoJ told LJ that the FBI was upset with him over that and were “coming after” him.
LJ’s read on the Bull Durham Non-Report:
Durham has confirmed what I was saying 6 years ago. The only good news is that Durham completely blows away the notion that there was ever any evidence to support opening Crossfire Hurricane. Trump was the victim of a political hit job–one that is unprecedented in the history of America.
That said, there’s no accountability. Comey and McCabe skating is particularly egregious. What Comey and McCabe did had an effect not only on domestic policy but also on national security overseas. What they did is directly relevant right now to what’s going on in Ukraine.
Durham really made a big mistake. He pretends that all of this stuff started with the opening of Crossfire Hurricane, without delving into the fact that this operation started at least as early as August, 2015. As it became increasingly apparent that Donald Trump would be the GOP nominee, the Clinton campaign ramped up its activities to go after him. There’s an email from December, 2015, between John Podesta, Clinton’s campaign manager, and a Dem activist named Brent Budowsky. They wrote explicitly about the need to create a “bromance–their words, not mine”–between Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump. In other words, in December, 2015, they were already talking about how they were gonna target Trump with a Russia smear.
Moreover, Durham mentions George Papadopoulos, but no one asks: How did Papadopoulos surface? In August, 2015 Papadopoulos was sitting in London, texting and calling Corey Lewandowski, Trump’s then campaign manager. Those conversations were intercepted by British intelligence. That’s how Papadopoulos was first identified. So what you had going on in 2015 was the CIA and MI6 were passing intelligence to the Clinton campaign, because key individuals in British intelligence had made contributions and were significantly tied to the Clinton Foundation. Durham completely ignores all of that! They pretend that the investigation into the Clinton Foundation and the smear of Trump as a Russian operative is related but not really connected, when they’re absolutely, fundamentally joined at the hip.
CF: Joseph Mifsud and Stefan Halper went unmentioned. British intelligence’s contacts with Papadopoulos and Carter Page in the UK was a manufactured intelligence event that gave the FBI the opportunity to go, ‘Oh look, we’ve got a counterintelligence concern, we’ve got to act on this!’ The whole thing was contrived and a put-up job, and Mifsud and Halper are conspicuously absent [at least by name?] from the Non-Report.
Remember, Papadopoulos was offered a job in London at this institute where Mifsud was associated, but they didn’t run across each other until Spring of 2016. Mifsud was the first one to promote the notion of Russian involvement. So they were clearly trying to creat the predicate for this whole allegation. And that company that gave Papadopoulos a job as an Ass’t VP was an MI6 front! The fact that the foreign intelligence aspects of this–CIA and MI6–are completely excluded from Durham’s report is a black mark on Durham. He knows better.
The other thing they leave out is the whole Seth Rich matter. The matter of the transfer of material from the DNC to Wikileaks–allegedly by Russia–there’s clear evidence that the CIA was involved in that, too. The time that passed between the theft of the emails–on May 25th–it was two weeks later that all of a sudden Crowdstrike–who claims they were monitoring and were completely aware of the Russian intrusion at the DNC from May 1st–they waited until June 10th to shut down the network.
CF: And of course Crowdstrike is a bunch of retired FBI guys who just changed their letterhead and went to work privately.
Actually, one FBI guy and one Ukrainian guy, Alperovitch. Ukraine and FBI–all this is tied together, unfortunately. At least now no one can accuse us of being conspiracy theorists, because it is actually proven by fact. Those who want to deny it are in their own little fantasy world.
CF: The best part of the report, in my opinion, is the twice mentioned August WH briefing where the whole cast of characters, every one of the principals–Obama, Biden, Comey, Brennan, the whole cast–are sitting there and they’re briefed on Hillary’s July 26th decision to launch this phony campaign to try to tie Trump to the Russians. The fact that they were all sitting there together, one place one time, fully briefed up on it, having guilty knowledge, they either helped [the conspiracy] or they didn’t do anything to stop it. That, to me, combined with the January [2017] meeting of the same cast of characters, just before they dispatched Comey up to the Trump Towers to lie and then do reporting on it, those sets of meetings were a stake through the heart of any of the people who would accuse anybody of being a conspiracy theorist.
The other odd thing about that [August 2016] meeting is that a year prior John Brennan set up at CIA Headquarters a Task Force that was not officially named but was sort of informally known as the Trump Task Force. I know that from a friend of mine, a retired senior executive at the CIA. One of his close friends told him, ‘Boy, Brennan approached me and asked me to do this, and I said, No, I don’t want to get involved.’ Brennan was working collecting intelligence on people like Trump. He actually helped facilitate and enable that. His briefing at the WH, pretending, ‘Oh boy, this is what we found out. Geez we’re as surprised as anybody’–he’s covering his own tracks.
CF: [Brings up “a phony and dilettante” who occupies the position of National Security Adviser, Jake Sullivan.] Sullivan was the key quotable guy in the Clinton Campaign story about the Trump Tower server being linked to the Russians, and high volumes of encrypted data going back and forth between Trump Tower and the Kremlin–Sullivan was promulgating and promoting this whole fantasy, quotable on it out of the Clinton Campaign. The same guy is now sitting as the United States National Security Adviser to the President. I mean, it makes my stomach roll over.
Yeah, this country is so poorly served by these people. Sullivan’s only real qualification is as a fabulist–he creates fables one after the other. He will fundamentally lie without regard for the consequences. Sullivan has brought that same conduct to his role as National Security Adviser.
On to geopolitics:
Apocalypsis Apocalypseos
@apocalypseos
“The world order that was established in the aftermath of WWII — with the UN, IMF, World Bank, with the US being the leading power, the US dollar becoming the de facto international reserve currency that all nations wanted to have — has come to an abrupt halt.” — Larry Johnson
12:20 AM · May 19, 2023
“US moral authority has completely disappeared. Both the Republicans and the Democrats are completely corrupted. Our very wealthy and most powerful are not held accountable. The lies are astonishing. Don’t trust anything that the government says.” — Larry Johnson
“These people in Washington think that they’re still in control. Events are taking them in a direction that the US no longer can dictate or control. This failure to understand what Russia was capable of sent the US into a death spiral for its imperial ambitions.” — Larry Johnson
“China no longer believes the US can be trusted. If the US decides to militarily confront China we will lose badly. China will be in a position to sink our aircraft carriers. The US has put itself on a collision course that I fear will bring terrific suffering.” — Larry Johnson
“Russia is going to provide China with the hypersonic missiles that it will need to fend off any attempt by the US to fight China over Taiwan. This US plan to isolate and destroy Russia has completely blown up and Washington has not come to grips with it.” — Larry Johnson
Econophysics2020 