Entrapping the FBI: Podcast with Russ Baker & Matt Harvey

The post Entrapping the FBI: Podcast with Russ Baker & Matt Harvey appeared first on WhoWhatWhy.

The official White House line is that President Donald Trump fired James Comey because the former FBI director mishandled the Hillary Clinton email investigation. While there are many reasons to believe that the actual motive is related to the Bureau’s probe of the Trump campaign’s ties to Russia, Comey’s questionable decision to inform Congress — just days before the election — that the email investigation was being reopened deserves scrutiny.

Over the course of a month, WhoWhatWhy looked into the players and events that culminated in Comey writing the letter and influencing the presidential race. We found a sophisticated, well-funded covert operation that put enough pressure on the FBI director to get him to act.

We published our findings earlier this week in an 8,200-word exclusive. In this week’s podcast, WhoWhatWhy editor-in-chief Russ Baker and journalist Matt Harvey, who wrote the story together with Jonathan Larsen, talk about the plot to create an “October Surprise” and those involved in it — including Rudy Giuliani, Trump’s daughter-in-law, as well as Blackwater founder Erik Prince, right-wing journalists and very likely Trump-supporting FBI employees.

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Full Text Transcript:

As a service to our readers, we provide transcripts with our podcasts. We try to ensure that these transcripts do not include errors. However, due to a constraint of resources, we are not always able to proofread them as closely as we would like and hope that you will excuse any errors that slipped through.

Jeff Schechtman: Welcome to Radio WhoWhatWhy. I’m Jeff Schechtman.

There are those events that are inflection points that change history. Last week, Hillary Clinton made the argument that the FBI’s reopening of her email investigation changed the outcome of the election. Days later, in one of his longest and most detailed statistical analyses ever, Nate Silver provided the supporting argument that Comey’s announced reopening of the email investigation did make a difference in the election. Today, we mark day one hundred and eleven of the Trump presidency, instead of the Clinton presidency arguably, because of emails discovered on Anthony Weiner’s computer. How those emails got there and the larger story of the Weiner, Abedin and FBI connection is an even larger story that we’re going to talk about today. It’s a story that shows how fragile and how subject to foul play our democratic process really is. Joining me to talk about it are Russ Baker and Matthew Harvey, two of the authors of yesterday’s 8,000-word story on WhoWhatWhy.org that begins to shed light on the elaborate plot behind the exposure of Hillary Clinton’s emails on Anthony Weiner’s computer. Russ Baker, Matthew Harvey, thanks so much for being here.

Matthew Harvey: It’s a pleasure.

Jeff Schechtman: Russ, I want to start with you. This notion that these emails just showed up on Anthony Weiner’s computer was not just a twist of fate, arguably but really a much more elaborate set of circumstances that may have taken place that really led the FBI to that computer in the first place.

Russ Baker: That’s right, Jeff. In the course of months of looking at that, we began to see indications that, shall we say the public was helped along to this sort of conclusion. We began to see a whole series of events that suggested that there was some kind of collusion on that part of people who wanted Donald Trump to win in terms of creating the interest in those emails, the interest in Anthony Weiner and quite possibly, creating the incident that brought Anthony Weiner together with this young woman that made the whole thing possible.

Jeff Schechtman: One of the other aspects of this, Matt is the degree to which there were constant statements in the weeks leading up to the discovery of these emails on Weiner’s computer, statements from the Trump campaign about an October surprise that would be coming.

Matthew Harvey: I think that was part of an information campaign developed from foreknowledge of this event. How they knew about it is open to speculation. There may have been leaks. Certainly, Giuliani is very close to the NYPD, of course and people in the FBI. That may have been one conduit. He was one of the Trump surrogates, most in front of trying to push this narrative. Erik Prince as well, who has sources certainly in law enforcement. Now, whether these sources were real or not and whether they were telling the truth or not, it seems no, but of course there was the truth that there was something coming down the pipe, but all the rest was speculation.

Jeff Schechtman: One of the things, Russ that’s particularly interesting is going back even further than this incident, that Trump had frequently talked about Anthony Weiner and exposing Weiner as a way to get at Hillary Clinton.

Russ Baker: Yeah. When we read those tweets over the course of several years and in the article on WhoWhatWhy, I believe we’ve embedded some of those tweets and there are links so that people can read the rest of them. Trump definitely appears to be signaling, I think at the time, it started a couple of years ago when Trump started saying Hillary Clinton’s emails and Huma Abedin is her aid and her husband, Anthony Weiner, they know something. How did he know that they knew something? That’s deeply intriguing.

Jeff Schechtman: I want to take this back a little bit to the idea that the discovery of these emails on Anthony Weiner’s computer were really because of a second investigation that was going on into Weiner’s sexting, in this case with an underage girl. Russ, talk a little bit about that. Give a little backstory of it.

Russ Baker: This story emerged last year during the campaign, that Anthony Weiner had been exchanging explicit text messages with an underage girl, reportedly located in a small town in North Carolina. This story got a lot of attention right away because people are interested in Anthony Weiner to begin with. The second part of the story, Jeff is that there is an alleged crime here being committed and the authorities supposedly go to seize his phone and at some point, his computer. Then, we are told that on the computer, they discover Hillary Clinton’s emails. Now, you’ve got the perfect storm.   

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