In Final Days, Trump Gave Up on Forcing Release of Russiagate Files, Nunes Prober Says

By Aaron Mate, Feb. 25, 2021
https://www.realclearinvestigations.com/articles/2021/02/25/in_final_days_trump_gave_up_on_forcing_release_of_key_russiagate_files_nunes_prober_says_127267.html

After four years of railing against “deep state” actors who, he said, tried to undermine his presidency, Donald Trump relented to U.S. intelligence leaders in his final days in office, allowing them to block the release of critical material in the Russia investigation, according to a former senior congressional investigator who later joined the Trump administration.

CIA Director Gina Haspel was instrumental in blocking one of the most critical documents, says Kash Patel. It is a House report detailing “significant intelligence tradecraft failings” in the CIA’s assessment that Russia ordered  interference in the 2016 campaign to elect Trump.  [Emphasis added.]

Kash Patel, whose work on the House Intelligence Committee helped unearth U.S. intelligence malpractice during the FBI’s Crossfire Hurricane probe, said he does not know why Trump did not force the release of documents that would expose further wrongdoing. But he said senior intelligence officials “continuously impeded” their release – usually by slow-walking their reviews of the material. Patel said Trump’s CIA Director, Gina Haspel, was instrumental in blocking one of the most critical documents.

Patel, who has seen the Russia probe’s underlying intelligence and co-wrote critical reports that have yet to be declassified, said new disclosures would expose additional misconduct and evidentiary holes in the CIA and FBI’s work.

“I think there were people within the IC [Intelligence Community], at the heads of certain intelligence agencies, who did not want their tradecraft called out, even though it was during a former administration, because it doesn’t look good on the agency itself,” Patel told RealClearInvestigations in his first in-depth interview since leaving government at the end of Trump’s term last month, having served in several intelligence and defense roles (full interview here).

Trump did not respond to requests seeking comment sent to intermediaries.

Although a Department of Justice inspector general’s report in December 2019 exposed significant intelligence failings and malpractice, Patel said more damning information is still being kept under wraps. And despite an ongoing investigation by Special Counsel John Durham into the conduct of the officials who carried out the Trump-Russia inquiry, it is unclear if key documents will ever see the light of day.

Patel did not suggest that a game-changing smoking gun is being kept from the public. Core intelligence failures have been exposed – especially regarding the FBI’s reliance on Christopher Steele’s now debunked dossier to secure FISA warrants used to surveil Trump campaign adviser Carter Page. But he said the withheld material would reveal more misconduct as well as major problems with the CIA’s assessment that Russia, on Vladimir Putin’s orders, ordered a sweeping and systematic interference 2016 campaign to elect Trump. Patel was cautious about going into detail on any sensitive information that has not yet been declassified.

‘Continuously Impeded’ Public Disclosure 

Patel’s work on the House Intelligence Committee, under the leadership of its former Republican chairman, Devin Nunes, is widely credited with exposing the FBI’s reliance on Steele and misrepresentations to the FISA court. Yet congressional Democrats and major media outlets portrayed him as a behind-the-scenes saboteur who sought to “discredit” the Russia investigation. 

Rep. Devin Nunes: Patel said he went to work for the California Republican with a condition: optimal disclosure.

The media vitriol unnerved Patel, who had previously served as a national security official in the Obama-era Justice Department and Pentagon – a tenure that exceeds his time working under Trump. Patel says that ensuring public disclosure of critical information in such a consequential national security investigation motivated him to take the job in the first place.

“The agreement I made with Devin, I said, ‘Okay, I don’t really want to go to the Hill, but I’ll do the job on one basis: accountability and disclosure,” Patel said. “Everything we find, I don’t care if it’s good or bad or whatever, from your political perspective, we put it out.’ So the American public can just read it themselves, with a few protections here and there for some certain national security measures, but those are minimal redactions.”

That task proved difficult. The House Intelligence Committee’s disclosure efforts, Patel said, “were continuously impeded by members of the intelligence community themselves, with the same singular epithets that you’re going to harm sources and methods. …  And I just highlight that because, we didn’t lose a single source. We didn’t lose a single relationship, and no one died by the public disclosures we made because we did it in a systematic and professional fashion.”

“But each time we forced them to produce [documents],” Patel added, “it only showed their coverup and embarrassment.” These key revelations he helped expose include Justice official Bruce Ohr’s admission that he acted as a liaison to Steele even after the FBI officially terminated him; former FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe’s false statements about leaks related to the Hillary Clinton email investigation; and the FBI’s reliance on the Steele dossier to spy on Page. “There is actually a law that prevents the FBI and DOJ from failing to disclose material to a court just to hide an embarrassment or mistake, and it came up during our investigation. It helped us compel disclosure.”

Assessing the ‘Intelligence Community Assessment’ 

For Patel, a key document that remains hidden from the public is the full report he helped prepare and which Trump chose not to declassify after pressure from the intelligence community is a House Intelligence Committee report about the January 2017 Intelligence Community Assessment (ICA); it found that John Brennan’s Intelligence Community Assessment “deviated from established CIA practice”. It remains classified.

The ICA is a foundational Russiagate document. Released just two weeks before Trump’s inauguration, it asserted that Russia waged an interference campaign to help defeat Hillary Clinton. Despite widespread media accounts that the ICA reflected the consensus view of all 17 U.S. intelligence agencies, it was a rushed job completed in a few weeks by a small group of CIA analysts led by then-CIA Director John Brennan, who merely consulted with FBI and NSA counterparts. The NSA even dissented from a key judgment that Russia and Putin specifically aimed to help install Trump, expressing only “moderate confidence.”

The March 2018 House report found that the production of the ICA “deviated from established CIA practice.” And the core judgment that Putin sought to help Trump, the House report found, resulted from “significant intelligence tradecraft failings that undermine confidence in the ICA judgments.”

Along with that March 2018 report, Patel and his intelligence committee colleagues produced a still-classified document that fleshed out the ICA’s “tradecraft failings” in greater detail.
“We went and looked at it [the ICA], and looked at the underlying evidence and cables, and talked to the people who did it,” Patel says. According to Patel, the ICA’s flaws begin with the unprecedentedly short window of time in which it was produced during the final days of the Obama White House. “In two to three weeks, you can’t have a comprehensive investigation of anything, in terms of interference and cybersecurity matters.”

Patel said that still classified information undermines another key claim – that Russia ordered a cyber-hacking campaign to help Trump. The March 2018 House report noted that the ICA’s judgments, “particularly on the cyber intrusion sections, employed appropriate caveats on sources and identified assumptions,” but those were drowned out by partisan insistence that Russia was the culprit.

Constrained from discussing the material, Patel said its release “would lend a lot of credence to” skepticism about the Mueller report’s claim that Russia waged a “sweeping and systematic” interference campaign to install Trump.

That skepticism was bolstered in July 2019 when the Mueller team was reprimanded by a U.S. District judge for falsely suggesting in its final report that a Russian social media firm acted in concert with the Kremlin. (Mueller’s prosecutors later dropped the case against the outfit.)

“We had multiple versions, with redactions, at different levels of classifications we were willing to release,” Patel said.“But that was unfortunately the one report, which speaks directly to [an absence of concrete evidence] that’s still sitting in a safe, classified. And unfortunately, the American public – unless Biden acts – won’t see it.”

Confirming earlier media reports from late last year, Patel says it was Trump’s CIA Director Gina Haspel who personally thwarted the House report’s release. The report sits in a safe at CIA headquarters in Langley. “The CIA has possession of it, and POTUS chose not to put it out,” Patel says. He does not know why.

‘Outrageous’ Reliance on CrowdStrike

Another key set of documents that the public has yet to see are reports by Democratic National Committee cyber-contractor CrowdStrike – reports the FBI relied on to accuse Russia of hacking the DNC. The FBI bowed to the DNC’s refusal to hand over its servers for analysis, a decision that Patel finds “outrageous.”

“The FBI, who are the experts in looking at servers and exploiting this information so that the intelligence community can digest it and understand what happened, did not have access to the DNC servers in their entirety,” Patel said. “For some outrageous reason the FBI agreed to having CrowdStrike be the referee as to what it could and could not exploit, and could and could not look at.”

According Patel, Crowdstrike CEO Shawn Henry, a former top FBI official under Mueller, “totally took advantage of the situation to the unfortunate shortcoming of the American public.”

CrowdStrike’s credibility suffered a major blow in May 2020 with the disclosure of an explosive admission from Henry that had been kept under wraps for nearly three years. In December 2017 testimony before the House Intel Committee showed he had acknowledged that his firm “did not have concrete evidence” that Russian hackers removed any data, including private emails, from the DNC servers. 

“We wanted those depositions declassified immediately after we took them,” Patel recalled. But the committee was “thwarted,” he says, by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence under Dan Coats, and later by Democratic Rep. Adam Schiff once Democrats took control of Congress in January 2018. According to Patel, Schiff “didn’t want some of these transcripts to come out. And that was just extremely frustrating.” Working with Coats’ successor, Richard Grenell, Patel ultimately forced the release of the Henry transcript and dozens of others last year. 

Still classified, however, are the full CrowdStrike reports relied on by the FBI, Special Counsel Robert Mueller and the Senate Intelligence Committee. Patel said their release would underscore Henry’s admission while raising new questions about why the government used reports from DNC contractors – the other being Fusion GPS’ Steele dossier – for a consequential national security case involving a rival Republican campaign.

Doubting Reliability of CIA’s Kremlin Mole 

The CIA relied on another questionable source for its assertion that Putin personally ordered and orchestrated an interference campaign to elect Trump: a purported mole inside the Kremlin. The mole has been outed as Oleg Smolenkov, a mid-level Kremlin official who fled Russia in 2017 for the United States where he lives under his own name. According to the New York Times, some CIA officials harbored doubts about Smolenkov’s “trustworthiness.”

Patel said he could not comment on whether he believes Smolenkov relayed credible information to the CIA. “I’m sort of in a bind on this one, still, with all the classified information I looked at, and the declassifications we’ve requested, but have not yet been granted.”

Patel did suggest, however, that those who have raised skepticism about the CIA’s reliance on Smolenkov are “rightly” trying to “get to the bottom” of the story. “But until that ICA product that we created, and some of the other documents are finally revealed – if I start talking about them, then I’m probably going to get the FBI knocking at my door.”

Will Key Documents Be Released?

On his last full day in office, President Trump ordered the declassification of an additional binder of material from the FBI’s initial Trump-Russia probe, Crossfire Hurricane. A source familiar with the documents covered under the declassification order confirmed to RealClearInvestigations that it does not contain the House committee’s assessment of the January 2017 that Patel wants released. Nor does it contain any of the CrowdStrike reports used by the FBI.

In addition to those closely guarded documents, Patel thinks that there is even more to learn about the fraudulent surveillance warrants on Carter Page. The public should see “the entire subject portion” of the final Carter Page FISA warrant, Patel said, as well as “the underlying source verification reporting” in which the FBI tried to justify it, despite relying on the Steele dossier. By reading what the FBI “used to prop up that FISA, the American public can see what a bunch of malarkey it was that they were relying on,” Patel added. “The American public needs to know about and read for themselves and make their own determination as to why their government allowed this to happen. Knowingly.

“And that’s not castigating an entire agency. We’re not disparaging the entire FBI because of Peter Strzok [the FBI agent dismissed, in part, because of anti-Trump bias] and his crew of miscreants. Same thing goes for the intelligence community. If they did some shoddy tradecraft, the American public has a right to know about it in an investigation involving the presidential election.”

Navalny: A Slim Reed to Lean On to “Punish” Putin

By Ray McGovern

Today proved to be unfortunate timing for NY Times op-ed writer Professor Chris Miller of Tuft’s Fletcher School, who paints an academic veneer onto L’Affaire Navalny, just as Amnesty International downgrades his status.

Miller begins: “After the imprisonment this month of the opposition leader Aleksey Navalny, punishing Russia is back on the agenda.” [Emphasis added.] (See: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/25/opinion/nord-stream-2-navalny.html .) Had the professor done his homework, rather than simply regurgitate mainstream media memes on the misfortune that has befallen the dissident/cum great-white-hope Navalny, Miller could have readily known that Navalny is a weak reed to lean on to “punish Russia”. No matter: On the hallowed pages of the NY Times Navalny has been able to outlive his checkered past — so far, at least.

Amnesty: Delete “Prisoner of Conscience”

Just as Miller’s op-ed was being published, Amnesty International, which had finally done its own homework (better late than never), stripped Navalny of his “prisoner of conscience” status. AI had been bombarded with complaints about his xenophobia — in one video he compares immigrants to cockroaches, and pretends to shoot one (immigrant, not cockroach). Amnesty has now labeled that “hate speech” and found that incompatible with the label “prisoner of conscience”.

Pipe Dream About a Pipeline

Professor Miller suggests that the imprisonment of Navalny “has thrown open the question” of the Nord Stream 2 project, the almost-completed pipeline under the Baltic Sea that is almost complete and will bring more natural gas from Russia to Germany. Miller concedes that “canceling the project as punishment for Mr. Navalny’s treatment (sic) is unlikely to achieve much…”, and concludes with “a simple truth: When it comes to dealing with Russia, there are very few good options”.

There are some good options, but you will not find them discussed very much in the NY Times or, sadly, in academia. These, and related issues were discussed in a less conventional way earlier today when I was interviewed by The Critical Hour.

14 minutes.

Will Biden Fall For Few Further Feckless Sanctions?

By Ray McGovern

The Washington Post and other media, owned and operated by the MICIMATT (Military-Industrial-Congressional-Intelligence-Media-Academia-Think-Tank complex), yesterday beat the drums for more sanctions on Russia. (See, for example, https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/biden-readies-his-first-major-penalties-on-russia/ar-BB1dVg18 and  https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/europe/europe-sanctions-russian-officials-for-navalny-imprisonment/2021/02/22/3cf3418e-7507-11eb-9489-8f7dacd51e75_story.html )

Cuticles Beware!

The owners and operators of major- and minor-league media are biting their nails down to the cuticle.  Could Biden’s immediate extension of the New START Treaty, plus his agreement with Putin on the telephone “to explore strategic stability discussions on a range of arms control and emerging security issues” threaten a thaw in U.S.-Russian relations?  (See:  https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/statements-releases/2021/01/26/readout-of-president-joseph-r-biden-jr-call-with-president-vladimir-putin-of-russia/ )

Perish the thought! No thaw; no detente; no rapprochement.  Oh, the Things That Go Bump in the Night! — things that could complicate the MICIMATT campaign to exaggerate the national security “threat”, in order to justify obscenely high levels of funding for “defense” against an “aggressive” Russia?

Alexey Novichokovich Navalny

So, as we saw yesterday, we can expect the media to exploit to the fullest the imprisonment of Russian dissident Alexey Navalny; and play up the poisoning — my God, poisoning with the dreaded Novichok — of Navalny, and of Skripal before him.

I asked a highly educated, perceptive Russian friend of mine what he thought of L’Affaire Navalny. Here’s his email reply:

When it comes to Skripal and Navalny poisoning, what makes me suspicious is that, while the FSB folks are not angels, why would they use the substance [Novichok] that directly implicates them? It is like leaving your business card at the crime scene.  Besides, how come in both cases the victims miraculously survive from the deadliest weapon?

Not to Forget: Russian Cyber Attacks

At noon yesterday, in a “Breaking News Alert” The Washington Post posted a piece by erstwhile Russia-gate stenographer Ellen Nakishima, saying the “Biden administration is preparing sanctions and other measures to punish Moscow for…malign cyber activity”. She added that the administration is casting the “sprawling SolarWinds cyber espionage campaign … as indiscriminate and potentially disruptive”, justifying punishment of Russia. (See:  https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/biden-russia-sanctions-solarwinds-hacks/2021/02/23/b77039d6-71fa-11eb-85fa-e0ccb3660358_story.html ) Nakishima’s article is front-paged above the fold in today’s Post edition headlined: “U.S. plans to punish Russia for hostile acts”.

One must read deep into Nakashima’s article to be reminded that President Biden has ordered the intelligence community to provide an assessment of the cyber breaches, so there soon may be a more refined and definitive answer.  But no need to wait for that: the Washington Post already knows it was the Russians, because it talks to folks in the U.S. intelligence establishment “informed on these matters” — folks who never ever lie.

Nakashima notes that the Post “reported in December that [unnamed] intelligence officials think the SVR, Moscow’s foreign intelligence service, carried out the intrusions”, but the Trump White House did not want to say so.  And, darn it, Biden won’t say so either — not yet. Imagine! He wants an assessment first. Is he not wise to the ways of the Swamp? In major-and-minor-media-speak, that’s putting the cart before the horse.

Most of the above, plus how the EU and China play into all this, is discussed in an interview I gave to The Critical Hour yesterday afternoon.

14 minutes

All Things Russia

Had a chance yesterday to draw on my Russia-watching experience to share views on sanctions, Ukraine, Navalny, “bounties to kill US troops in Afghanistan”, how media can brainwash the best of friends, Assange, prospects for thaw in relations under Biden.
https://youtu.be/pYcbbvXLAsg

US-Russia, Recent History and Outlook for the Future

Forum: Worsening U.S.-Russian Relations — Reverse Them with New Paradigm, or Face Nuclear War
https://laroucheorganization.nationbuilder.com/forum_worsening_u_s_russian_relations_reverse_them_with_new_paradigm_or_face_nuclear_war
February 13, 2021 1:00 PM 
Remarks by Ray: min 51:32 to 1:06:54. (Text of remarks included below.)

RAY: Thank you, Dennis. It’s a good idea; it’s a very good idea to be discussing these things in this kind of forum. You won’t find any such discussion in what we call “major media” in our country.

Let me do just a little bit of an historical review; it won’t take long.

I’ve always been puzzled to think why Russia and China all of a sudden became our major enemies again. Here’s President George W. Bush, just about 18 years ago:

“Today, the world’s great powers are united by common values. Russia is reaching for its democratic future and a partner in the war on terror. The Chinese leaders? We welcome their peaceful pursuit of prosperity, trade, and cultural advancement.”

That sounds pretty rapprochement-ish, or détente-ish, or let’s live on this planet together-ish. So, what happened? Well, there are a lot of people who make a lot of money producing and selling arms; that’s the short answer. My acronym is no longer just the MIC, the military-industrial complex; I use an acronym that—remember this—rhymes with Mickey Mouse. That’s the way you remember it.

It’s the MICIMAT—the Military-Industrial-Congressional-Intelligence-MEDIA-Academia-Think-Tank complex. Why do I shout (all-caps MEDIA)? Because media is the lynchpin. Without media, you can’t do this. Who owns the media? The MICIMAT. OK. So, that’s the basic thing that we have to contend with. That’s what sort of came to the fore as President Putin started making Russia a repaired country after the devastation of Yeltsin in the 1990s.

So, what would I say next? I would say that despite all the anti-Russian rhetoric, there was one shining moment where Mr. Putin came to Mr. Obama’s aid and pulled his chestnuts out of the fire. I don’t know what motivated Obama, but he didn’t want to have an open U.S. military war on Syria. It’s quite enough to spend billions of dollars on covert actions and funding insurgents; but he didn’t want to be attacking Syria, because he had sense enough to know what that would mean over the longer term.

So, what did he do? When that faux chemical attack occurred outside Damascus on the 21st of August 2013, all hell broke loose. John Kerry said, Bashar al-Assad did this. He said it 25 times in one speech.

What did Obama do? Obama cut Kerry out of the consultations; he went to St. Petersburg for a summit, and he talked to Mr. Putin. Mr. Putin said, look, we can get you out of this mess without a war. We have persuaded the Syrians to give up these residual chemical weapons they have for destruction under UN supervision on a U.S. ship specially outfitted for destroying chemical weapons. What do you think, Mr. Obama? He said, you could do that? He said, yeah. Watch tomorrow. The Prime Minister of Syria is going on TV. Sure enough, that’s the way it worked out.

Now, why do I mention all that? That was sort of the zenith, the acme of a potential détente in U.S.-Russian relations. What happened? Well, we know what happened. We’re talking early September 2013. Five to six months later, the Victoria Nulands of our government fomented what was aptly called “the most blatant coup in history”; it having been advertised on YouTube 2.5 weeks before. And Ukraine was turned into turmoil. After that, there was the MH17, where John Kerry got up and said, we have the information. We know who shot that plane down; we know where it was shot from, and we know exactly when it was shot. We have technical information to prove that.

Well, actually, he never came through with that technical information, and all of our allies in Europe were afraid to ask him. So, what did they use that for? Sanctions, sanctions, sanctions. Our European allies, even though they couldn’t sell their apples to Russia, went right along docilely as sheep, as they usually do. So, that was the zenith; THIS was the low point in U.S.-Russian relations. What follows from that, of course, we all know.

After the Ukraine coup, and you might listen to this, because this may be new to some of you. There’s one intelligence organization in our government called the Defense Intelligence Agency. Sometimes, it acts independently; sometimes it looks at the facts, interprets them, and tells it like it is. Listen carefully to the main conclusion to the December 2015—a year after Ukraine—National Security Strategy of the DIA, the Defense Intelligence Agency.

“The Kremlin is convinced the United States is laying the groundwork for regime change in Russia. A conviction further reinforced by the events in Ukraine. Moscow views the United States as the critical driver behind the crisis in Ukraine, and believes that the overthrow of former Ukrainian President Yanukovych is the latest move in a long-standing, long-established pattern of U.S.-orchestrated regime change efforts.”

How does Navalny fit into that? We can discuss that later, perhaps. This was signed by Lt. Gen. Vincent Stewart, Director of the Defense Intelligence Agency. The date? December 2015. Wow! Somebody told it like it was—like it is. Does anybody have any confusion about why DIA was later frozen out of all these assessments having to do with how bad President Putin is, and how he supposedly orchestrated the defeat of Hillary Clinton?

Does anyone know now, or could kind of figure out why DIA, who had primary responsibility for keeping track of the GRU, which was accused of all manner of evil things, why DIA was frozen out of those deliberations, and the deliberations were limited to a handful—James Clapper’s word—of “handpicked” analysts? Well, DIA didn’t qualify, because DIA had a ridiculous record of telling the truth sometimes..

What does this all mean? This Admiral Richard, who’s blithely shooting his mouth off about the likely use of nuclear weapons, that’s really dangerous. If you read Dan Ellsberg’s book, The Doomsday Machine—well, let me put it this way—if you haven’t read Dan Ellsberg’s book, you really need to! Not only does he talk about the Navy submarine captain, Vasili Arkhipov, who is single-handedly responsible for us being able to be together today, or virtually together. But he talks about during the Cuban Missile Crisis, the former commander of the Strategic Air Command, the fellow who was in the position that Admiral Richard is now in, sent a bomber into Soviet air space. When Kennedy learned about that, he said, “Oh my God!” Right at the height of this thing, SAC wasn’t supposed to do that! Why did SAC do that?

You’ve got to read Dan Ellsberg’s book and see how crazy these guys are. How they think Putin and the Russians are the devil incarnate. That’s how you figure that out. What happened, of course, was that Kennedy tried to slough if off, saying well, you know, there’s always one guy who doesn’t get the word.

But they were on tenterhooks for a while until the Russians said, “Could you tell these cowboy pilots not to do that anymore?” So, there’s precedent for getting right up to the brim. Now, with the timing for response to a perceived attack reduced because of these supersonic weapons and so forth, it’s labil [unstable/delicate/dangerous], as the Germans would say.

Last thing I’ll say is this. Oliver Stone happens to be a friend of mine, and as you know, Oliver has interviewed Mr. Putin more times than most other correspondents. He told me this: He said that after one interview, and this was not recorded, but Oliver remembers it quite distinctly, and you will see why. He said that after one of these conversations, Mr. Putin somewhat exasperated said something along the lines of, “Now Russians are thought of like Jews before World War II” (period, end quote.)

Well, those who have a modicum of knowledge about Jews and their plight before World War II, people who were blamed for just about everything. Well, you can perhaps understand Putin’s exasperation — including Hillary Clinton attributing possible blame to Russia for the Jan. 6 disturbances in the capital of our country—I mean, it’s more than exasperation; it’s a mindset that is inevitable, when you’re the scapegoat for anything that goes wrong.

So, what I mean to say here is that, with Mr. Biden, against all this history, I have a glass-half-full attitude. Why would I say that? Well, number one, he has appointed as head of the CIA, Bill Burns. Bill Burns was ambassador to Moscow; Bill Burns knows the equities, he knows his history. He knows that Moscow, in the person of Sergey Lavrov warned him, explicitly, against trying to include Ukraine in NATO, and Georgia, too. As a matter of fact, his cable, courtesy of WikiLeaks, starts out by saying [adopting Russian accent]: “Mr. Burns, do you know what Nyet means?” [laughs] Burns said, “Yes, well, I think so!” He said, “Well, Nyet means Nyet! and that’s our red line.” No Ukraine admission into NATO, and the same for Georgia.

Now, two months later, NATO approved the beginning of the acceptance of the application of Ukraine and Georgia to become a member of NATO. So, it’s not as though Burns is coming at this as a sort of sophomore. He’s a senior, and that’s a good thing. He knows about the Russians.

In that same cable, I would add, he says in a very undiplomatic way, because you don’t say this to the Secretary of State, because you know where she stands (this happened to be Condoleezza Rice). He says, “You know, the real way the Russians look at Ukraine, look how far Kiev is from Moscow. You know, they have their own strategic interests here.” And sotto voce, “They’re entitled to have their own strategic interests, OK?” So he says that in the cable from Moscow.

So, one thing that Mr. Biden can expect is knowledgeable, hopefully honest assessments from the CIA of all places.

What next? Well, Biden’s quick re-upping to the New START Treaty, five-year extension right off the bat. Now, New START—look, I was in Moscow for the first SALT [Strategic Arms Limitations Treaty] agreement, May 1972. So I know how meaningful these agreements were. This (new START) was the only one left, and instead of fooling around with it, Biden says, “We’re in,” OK?

Now, that move is worth 18,000 Navalnys, and 13,000 pretended bounties, and 6,000 alleged hacks. That’s a big move. And not only that, but as the readout of the conversation between Mr. Biden and Mr. Putin was, from the U.S. side, it said, we agreed that maybe we’d move down this road toward other arms control agreements. Wow!

Now, for the people who see merit in demonizing Russia, that’s a big problem. And Biden will have to deal with that. Whether he can deal with it successfully or not—Trump couldn’t. Obama couldn’t.

But, you know, Biden’s almost as old as I am, for God’s sake! He knows a lot about the misery he caused on Iraq and other things. There’s always a chance for growth; and besides that, he’s a one-term President, so I see that he has more leeway than most people, and that’s why I have a glass-half-full attitude. Give him some time, and we’ll see how things turn out.

Thank you very much.