Former CIA operations officer Scott Uehlinger, co-host of The Station Chief podcast, joined SiriusXM host Alex Marlow on Tuesday’s Breitbart News Daily to discuss FBI Director James Comey’s testimony before Congress on Monday.
“When you really cut through it and look through all of the parsed words, and clearly they lawyered up with their statements, that, in fact, we really didn’t learn all that much,” said Uehlinger.
“We have the intelligence people such as Clapper and the head of the CIA saying that at no time did Russia basically influence the election and that there is no real ties between the Trump administration and Russia. But then at the same time, we have an ongoing FBI investigation into him – but even Comey himself said things like, ‘The FBI doesn’t have any information that Obama himself ordered Trump to be wiretapped,’” he observed.
“I don’t think that’s the issue here. I don’t think Obama ever gave such a direct order, and they may not be monitoring Mr. Trump, the president, at all. They’re monitoring his associates for ties to Russia. So the way he says things, it’s like he’s being very careful to walk a very thin line,” he said.
Uehlinger said he spent twelve years living in the former Soviet Union when he worked for the CIA, and he speaks Russian.
“I spent a lot of time literally going head-to-head with Russian intelligence. I mean, they were actually, believe it or not, at my wedding. Russian intelligence was invited to my wedding because I was married over in Moldova. I was friends – I was associates – with all of the intel reps in town, and that included the Russians. So I know things Russian,” he said of his background.
“It’s very interesting how you watch the proceedings yesterday: the Democrats, all of a sudden, have a great interest in Russian operations that they never displayed in the past eight years. Well, I was a station chief. They all seem to be shocked at the idea that Russia attempts to influence the election process,” he said.
“Now, of course Russia attempts to influence the election process. They’ve been doing it for fifty years. They’re not particularly effective at it, but they try to sort of – if they can, they do what they can to influence public opinion, and usually it’s ineffective,” Uehlinger explained.
“However, I would wager they’ve been more effective in this past election simply because with the hacks, the WikiLeaks revelations of the DNC emails and such, basically Russian intelligence was doing the job that a viable true media should be doing themselves. In other words, if we had good journalism in this country, those kinds of revelations would have been made,” he contended.
“In this case, the American people had WikiLeaks to provide the information that normal journalists should provide in a normal kind of society – the society we had, let’s say, thirty years ago. That’s unfortunate. But to feign shock that Russia is attempting to do this by the Democrats is very disingenuous,” he said.
Uehlinger found it “ridiculous” that Democrats and the media have hyped their “Russia hacked the election” narrative for six months and counting, without a shred of evidence.
“We’ve seen some leaks, generally by ‘Deep State’ people in the bureaucracy and whatever, who are unhappy with Trump, and they wish to leak this information out,” he added. “However, we have no leaks that actually are the smoking gun of a relationship, a collusion with Russia, because it doesn’t exist. Common sense dictates we would have seen that already had that come to light. It would have been irresistible to be leaked. The fact that it hasn’t been leaked pretty much tells me it hasn’t happened yet.”
“The thing that I resent as a Russian expert, as somebody who worked against them for many years, I resent the fact that for the past six months Russia’s been used as a political football by the Democrats, as a weapon against the Republicans,” he declared. “And this is not a consequence-free environment. There are political ramifications to this. Dragging Russia’s name through the mud unnecessarily is just not constructive for diplomacy. We’ve got a lot of major problems with the Russians, but there’s no point in needlessly antagonizing them, which is what the Democrats want to do and what they have been doing.”
A caller pointed out the similarities between what Democrats are doing today and McCarthy-era witch hunting.
“That’s very true,” Uehlinger agreed. “One difference between McCarthyism, which Democrats love to pull out, and this is that actually McCarthyism – despite the wrongs that were committed – was actually based on some fact. In fact, the government at the time was riddled with Soviet agents. There was actually some fire there, in that smoke. But in this smoke, there’s no fire.”
“That’s actually a quote from the director of the CIA, Morell, who said exactly that, like a week ago,” he added. “It is ridiculous, and suddenly the Democrats have woken up, and suddenly Russia is a great threat. Where have they been for the past eight years, or for that matter, the last forty years? Traditionally, they’ve been apologists for the Soviet Union and Russia.”
Uehlinger argued that the “Deep State” is “not something out of a James Bond film, where people meet at midnight, and you can’t see their faces, and they’re sitting around a table plotting world domination.”
“The bottom line is, under eight years of an Obama administration, the bureaucracy has been naturally polarized,” he explained. “The people who favored the Obama administration have tended to rise to the top. I would estimate at the CIA, it’s probably, let’s say about 65 percent Democrat and maybe 35 percent Republican or conservative.”
“I was a conservative, but I was always out in the field,” he noted. “The people who are walking around in reality, the people who are in the bazaars and markets of the Third World – much as cops are mostly conservative, the CIA officers in the field tend to be perhaps more conservative, whereas your analysts, the Washington creatures, the people who spend their entire career in Washington tend to be more liberal. But there are a lot more of them than people like myself. We’re outnumbered.”
“Also, many people in the Justice Department have said it’s about 80 percent liberal. The bottom line is, these people, they’re empowered by Hillary Clinton and her former administration calling themselves ‘The Resistance.’ They’re empowered by that, and feel more justified in basically blunting or dulling the policies of the president,” he said.
Marlow noted that Breitbart News has traditionally been “a largely, almost overwhelmingly, anti-Russia news outfit,” but now it is supposedly being examined by the FBI for “Russia ties.” However, he agreed with President Trump that better ties with Russia could be helpful in dealing with mutual enemies like the Islamic State.
“We’re not allowed to have a nuanced adult opinion on Russia,” he lamented. “We must declare them evil, if not the most evil thing on the planet, and Putin the most evil person on the planet, or else we don’t pass some sort of litmus test to the Democratic Party and the establishment media.”
“That’s a very good point,” Uehlinger responded. “It’s true. It’s getting to the point that you can’t have an adult opinion about it. I’m waiting for the day when someone tries to throw something like that at me, who dedicated twelve years of his life to helping U.S. security against the Russian threat.”
“In Europe, there was a case, a female Danish newspaperwoman or something, a journalist, and she was criticizing the Danish government’s immigration policies and all. Immediately, the knee-jerk reaction is she’s an agent of the Russians because now, if you say things like, ‘I want to restrict immigration,’ you’re obviously in the pay of Vladimir Putin. That’s insane, and that really is McCarthyism now, that you’re accusing people of a relationship with Russia that never had it because you simply disagree with their opinion,” he said.
“Unfortunately, this merely empowers the Russians. because what we’re doing, we’re setting ourselves up in a society where Putin is able to show that he is, for instance, the defender of Christianity.” He added, “No one in our society will defend Christianity, and so people feel persecuted. This is definitely happening in Eastern Europe. That makes Putin’s siren call of, ‘Look, Russia is the moral country. Russia is the country that believes in Christianity’ – it makes that propaganda ploy much more effective. So the Democrats are delivering us into the hands of the Russians,” Uehlinger warned.
Breitbart News Daily airs on SiriusXM Patriot 125 weekdays from 6:00 a.m. to 9:00 a.m. Eastern.
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