12/16/24: ABC Pays $15 Million Trump Settlement, Trump Reveals Crypto Bailout, Scott Horton On Ukraine Lies

defamation lawsuit. So the reason why this is so extraordinary is that it almost never happens that you have defamation lawsuits which are settled involving public officials. The reason why is that the bar is so incredibly high to prove defamation Nonetheless, ABC News agreed to this settlement on Saturday after a quote unquote statement by George Stefanopolis that happened on ABC News some months ago with respect to the

Egene Carrol case. Now, if you look actually into the details, the settlement came right before there was a deposition that was going to go through as well as discovery, which would have required Stephanopolis turning over all of his emails, deposition of all the people that were involved in the segment. Now, the reason why, again I think it's just so crazy is the fact that it even got to the deposition

phase is extraordinary. Almost in every other one of these defamation cases it's thrown out, which means that the Trump people had to rise to a bar where they all at least we're able to say to a judge that they could realistically prove malicious intent on behalf of Stephanoppolos.

So again, I know this is complicated and just in plain speak as public as commentators here, whenever we're talking about anybody who is a public official, especially an elected official, for them to prove defamation against us, they have to prove that not only did what we say was wrong, but that we knew it was wrong when we said it, and that we knew we were doing so specifically to harm the reputation of that individual.

public official as a news organization is crazy. You're supposed to fight this thing to the bitterest end to make sure that there is so I think I think you might have been guilty honestly because there's no other reason, or they're just afraid. But I mean, even when we think about quote unquote afraid, I mean think about the precedent that's being set here for defamation. That's no, that's right. That's why they must there's something in those emails that they don't ever want them.

for rape and defamation. Okay, in reality, based on the New York state law at that time, the jury found him liable for sexual assault but not rape. Now, it would have met the definition of rape at the federal level, it would have met the definition of actually the newly revised definition of rape at the New York state level, but did not technically meet that definition at the time. So if he had been one hundred percent accurate with the legal standards, he would have said sexual assault and

not rape. But you see how like how close that is, right, And so yeah, the assumption from anybody would be that in a defamation case, when you're considering that this is a public figure, when you're considering that even the judge in this case said that it would have by this sort of like colloquial parlance, met the definition of rape, just not by the technical New York standard, you would assume that this would be something that they would fight

and that they would ultimately be victorious because the bar is so incredibly high now yours. I think you're right that there are two choices here. Number one is that they had something in Stephanoppolos's emails that was just absolutely terrible, that they didn't want to come out.

that one, because if you think about it. I mean, Trump has been quite outspoken and many of his allies quite outspoken about how they want to go up against their media critics, how they want retribution against their media critics, Steve Bannon going on and threatening Ari Melburn with some sort of investigation, imprisonment, et cetera, et cetera. So I don't think that they want to be I think this

could very well be another example. Basically, like Joe and Mika making their truck down tomorrow lago, they don't want to be at war with incoming Donald Trump administration. Not only are they fearful, but they also feel like they'll be the target of attacks, whether it's some sort of investigation or just Donald Trump's verbal attacks. They'll be subject to that, they'll lose whatever access they have to the White House, and it will impinge on their ability to

like break stories and do their whole thing. And so I think that there's a good likelihood as well that they just were fearful of going into this administration actively at war and in this legal battle with Donald J.

ear at the time and he had spoken differently. Again, like, these are all speculations, but the idea that you would pay off as an incoming president for some of Stephanopoulos's yearly salary shows extraordinary capitulation or extraordinarily liability.

and it does set, frankly, a scary precedent. We have put T three up on the screen, which had some of the reaction online to this, mostly from liberals who were really obsessed, with a lot of US journalists too, Yeah, journalists and liberals and prosecutors too, who were confused by this direction. So you had Norm Ornstein who said, add ABC to the basket of cowards in our media. Democratic attorney Mark Eliots wrote me bent ring kissed and the

legacy news outlets chooses obedience. Reporter Oliver Willis chimed in saying this is actually how democracy dies. Tech reporter Matt Novak said, not good for the rest of us when you do this shit, ABC, But that's probably half the point from management's perspective.

should have settled. He's like, I didn't agree with settling it, but the insurance company forced basically NBC News to settle. I guess that could be a theory. But you know, in this case, at the very least, Stephanopolis and others have not come out and said this was an insurance decision, you know, because even at that time the NBC was significantly criticized for settling that case that involved I forget exactly what it was, either defamation or wrongful dat or

something like that was involved. It was a crazy case, by the way you're going.

can do to change your mind. Because now, after receiving the backing of a bunch of crypto aligned billionaires and wealthy individuals, including Elon Musk, Trump is backing a plan to funnel Smerican taxpayer assets into a scheme to further enrich his coterie of oligarchs through a strategic bitcoin reserve.

In a conversation with Jim Kramer and the New York Stock Exchange, Trump recently confirmed that plan to throw the way to the US government behind bitcoin, placing the volatile speculative asset on the same level as gold and as oil. So how exactly would this all work will centtor Cynthia Loomis, her self a significant bitcoin investor, has become crypto's top proponent in Washington, has sketched out potential details. Basically, in her view, they could pull some creative accounting with the

nation's gold reserves. Those reserves would be marked to current market value. The resulting paper gains would be used to finance bulk bitcoin purchases to the tune of two hundred thousand a year for five straight years. As the Financial Times explains today, the US government's gold is valued a book cost of forty two dollars and twenty two cents an ounce, making it worth eleven billion dollars. At current market prices, it would be worth over six hundred and

fifty billion dollars. So if we've understood correctly, federal reserve banks would be required to remit around six hundred and forty billion dollars the US Treasury, and the Treasury could use those funds to buy bitcoin. Now, this is, on its face, a plan for extraordinary plundering of the public purse, which would result in perhaps the largest upward transfer of wealth in history.

all bitcoin. South Africa, which is considered the most unequal country in the world and has a Genie coefficient of somewhere around point sixty three that pales in comparison to that of bitcoin, which is estimated to be around point eighty eight. Now, the presence of a small group of whales means, of course, that a handful of megal wealthy investors stands to benefit from the US government showing up

with a virtually unlimited checkbook to buy up bitcoin. And it also means that the price of bitcoin, which has little actual value except as a high tech poker chip, can be easily manipulated by a relatively small group of people. Doesn't seem to me like we should be funneling trillions into an asset that can be easily and maliciously manipulated.

Now you may have heard the crypto libertarian propaganda that the great thing about these coins that they fly free of any government manipulation, that they represent some kind of new financial frontier, wild West fortune favors the brave, all of that. So you might wonder why these bitcoin whales would want Uncle sam meddling in their libertarian frontier currency.

Was Ryan Cooper at The American Prospect explains. The truth is these crypto whales have a pretty major issue on their hands, which is, quote, the bitcoin market is exceptionally a liquid The last twenty four hours so roughly a piddling six hundred and sixty thousand transactions in bitcoin and something like seventy percent a bitcoin have not moved at all in at least a year. That is made worse

by how expensive and slow bitcoin transactions are. By way of comparison, Amazon, which has a similar market capitalization, has seen about forty million daily trades of its stocks over the last few days. As Ryan goes on to explain, that means that in order for large bagholders to cash out without totally crashing the market, they would have to lure an unfathomably large number of new crypto suckers into

what is, at bottom, a giant Ponzi scheme. So they came up with a much easier plan, which was to funnel hundreds of millions of dollars into Trump's campaign, along with many other Washington politicians besides of both parties, so that all US taxpayers could be conscripted into the role of,

in Ryan's words, sacrificial lambs to a digital asset slaughterhouse. Effectively, the US taxpayer will be forced to serve as the useful idiot, the hapless bottom tier of the pyramid scheme, allowing the whales to convert their illiquid digital tokens into cold hard cash while we get stuck with the bill. Now, this olive arch thievery is only the beginning of the problems with the idea. However, a bitcoin strategic reserve means

funneling trillions into a famously volatile asset. In twenty twenty one alone, bitcoin surge from thirty thousand dollars a coin to sixty nine thousand dollars a coin, before crashing back down to thirty thousand dollars. The idea of setting up a strategic reserve with an asset that can lose half its value in a matter of weeks is truly insane and contrary to bitcoin lore that it could serve as a significant store of value, function and effect as a currency.

In reality, it has been nothing more than a speculative and non productive asset. Somewhere around twenty percent of the whole market has been lost for good. The primary use outside of speculation appears to be mostly for money laundering, drug dealing, and human trafficking. Why should the US government spend real money on a digital casino instead of I don't know, healthcare, education, infrastructure. The amount of risk involved is honestly wild, and to be truthful, it's only escalating.

In fact, the advance of quantum computers has raised concerns among crypto enthusiasts that these unfathomably powerful computers could be used to crack the blockchain encryption on which cryptosecurity relies. Google, you may have heard this, recently announced that its quantum computer Willow, successfully completed a problem that would take current supercomputers four years to solve than the entire age of

the universe. That breakthrough a loan created enough fear in the crypto markets that it sparked a one point seven billion dollar digital asset selloff. There's also a risk that, is technology advances, bitcoin just simply becomes obsolete, surpassed by superior technologies that evolve in the space, effectively rendering this particular scheme worthless. After all, there is nothing particularly special or durable about Bitcoin was just the first mover in

the field and is the most well known. Think of it this way, of all the things the government could buy, of all the prices it could artificially boost, which is what this is, there is no good reason to pick bitcoin outside of a desire to funnel trillions to your campaign supporters. So basically, a bitcoin strategic reserve is a

world historic billionaire giveaway. Puts trillions of taxpayer dollars at risk, and unlike reserves of physical goods, which can be kept secure through physical security runs the risk of outright theft from.

of New York. They are warning that the increasingly common use of loans to finance crypto purchases has created a lot of exposure throughout the entire financial system. Meanwhile, the Office of Financial Research, another government agency, found a link between crypto holdings and home and auto loans, in indication that low income households are using crypto gains to take out larger mortgages and finance more expensive cars, situation that again could lead to disaster in the event of another

crypto crash. Previous downturns, that damage was pretty relatively limited, relatively contained to just a few uniquely vulnerable banks and of course the crypto holders themselves. Next time it could be much more like the cascade effect that we all move through back in two thousand and eight. In contrary to libertarian propaganda, the crypto industry's goal in Washington is to join the big Wall Street players, and being too big to fail, they look set to get their wish

based on Trump administration picks. SEC chair currently is Gary Gensler, He's been serious about regulating crypto while he is out. Instead, Trump has picked Paul Atkins, a crypto booster who blamed US regulators for ftx's collapse. Instead of you know, brazen fraud.

For Treasury, Trump picked Howard Lutnick. He's another crypto friendly type whose firm has been a leader in allowing clients to use bitcoin as collateral for loans, and Trump's aion cryptos are David Sachs is part of the PayPal mafia who believes that crypto will fulfill PayPal's desire to create

the quote new world currency. Strange goal, I would say for an administration that is supposed to be America first, And indeed, the use case that actually makes the most sense to be for a crypto reserve is not for the US, but for countries around the world. Who would like to undermine US dollar head domeny and evade sanctions.

In fact, that is exactly what is fueling Putin's current interest in bitcoin, and is the concern Trump was gesturing at when he originally called crypto a scam to undermine the dollar. But for us, there seems to be nothing resembling a reasonable rationale. It's just all a smash and grab operation to loot the public purse and further enrich the already wealthy so Sager Strategic Bitcoin Reserve program.

Russia and the catastrophe in Ukraine. And even just looking at this book, at this tome, I would say in a good way, because it's extremely well researched and so detailed. We have quotes up at the top. The most important one to me is detailed by Professor John Meersheimer a personal hero of mine as long as as well as Scott now because of so much of his work. So Scott, thank you so much for joining us.

good commentary about different aspects of it. But I wanted to take you from hw Bush and the end of the Last Cold war and show essentially how American imperial hubris led us straight to the path of future confrontation with the Russian Federation and were really amounted to a self fulfilling prophecy since the very same people who did it were the very same people who warned what would happen if they were allowed to do what they wanted to do.

expanding the NATO military alliance into Eastern Europe. They told the Russians and look, we're going to have We're going to use what had already existed since seventy five, the Conference on Security and Cooperation Europe now known as the Organization the OSSEE. We're going to use that, and we won't have an alliance anymore because there's no enemy. So we'll have a security partnership and you and Ukraine and the rest will all be members of it together with us.

but anyway. Bush also did the Color Code of revolutions and including over through the government of Ukraine in two thousand and four and in two thousand and eight, over the best advice of all of not just the Foreign policy establishment but his own government, the National Security Council, the CIA, the Ambassador, and all of his staff at the embassy in Moscow, and even the Secretary of State and Secretary of Defense Rice and Gates all told Bush not to do it, or at least I don't know

what Rice and Gates told him, but they certainly agreed that it was a bad idea to do it.

offer NATO membership to Ukraine. And by the way, this whole time, even the expansionist hawks, never mind, you know, libertarian non interventionists like me or Ron Paul or something like that, but even people like Brazinski and Kissinger, who were out front in pushing foreign NATO expansion, had always said all along, well, of course, we'll have to make a special case for Ukraine. We'll have to ensconce permanent

neutrality for Ukraine. Will have to come up with the Vienna Austria option or you know, the Finland option for neutrality for Ukraine, just like we had in the last Cold War to prevent not like we had for Ukraine, but like we had for Austria and Finland in the last Cold War in order to prevent a fight over it, because the country is so crucial to Russia, and even though so many of the people, especially in the west of the country really want out from under Russia's domination

and would rather move west. So instead of having a fight to the death over it, we should compromise upfront.

And as we can see, when Bush installed the anti ballistic missile systems, the Russians just increased their number of offensive missiles. Rather than try to reciprocate with their own super expensive and unworkable design, they just made more offensive missiles. But there's another problem, which is their launched from dual use launchers, the MK forty one or the Mark forty one missile launcher, which can also host Tomahawk cruise missiles,

which can be tipped with hydrogen bombs. And this is of course in violation of Bill Clinton's promises in the Founding Act of nineteen ninety seven, where he said, yes, we're going to expand NATO further east, but we promise not to move our military equipment in there.

the so called Revolution of Dignity in twenty fourteen. And people say, oh, you're denying the agency of the people on the ground. Well, look, I mean the reality is Ukraine is a small, poor country and America is the global superpower. So when the Empire drops a few tens or hundreds of millions of dollars into your protest movement, that makes all the difference.

revolution and telling the people America's on your side. She had Senators Chris Murphy and John McCain with her, and they spent tens or even hundreds of millions of dollars on the NGOs that supported the entire carnival to keep the thing going for three solid months until they could get there. First their deal to force the president to agree to new elections, which led to the street puts out, which was accomplished by local Nazi forces on the ground.

And this is another one that's important, and I go through. I beat this dead horse beyond any reason in the book, so I know the burden of proof is on me. I know everyone says that this is all just Russian propaganda, but I think we all. If you went to a government school, even in my era, then you probably have heard of the fact that when the Nazis invaded the Soviet Union, some people in the border countries welcomed them.

Hitler and served him in the war. Then those same forces were supported by the CIA during the Cold War through the end of the nineteen fifties as part of a stay behind type operation. People are probably familiar with Gladio that's in Western Europe, but this is the same kind of thing, supporting stay behind forces during the Cold War.

And then after that the fighting fell apart and ended in the fifties America, the CIA and whatever still supported all the Ukrainian exile groups in the United States and Canada, many of which were founded by Nazi exiles and expats who had escaped after World War Two, and then even beginning in the eighties with Glasnos and Perstroika, but especially in the nineties and then after two thousand and four, uh these groups poured a ton of money in to

re establish all these Nazi militias and to rewrite the whole history of Ukraine, to try to make George Washington and Nathaniel Green out of these guys because they had no real heroes to be the founders of their state. So their heroes are a bunch of Hitler's servant Nazis.

All the costs perpetrating Nazis are the groups that did the putsch that overthrew the government in twenty fourteen and then were put to use fighting the people of the East when they refused to accept the new ku junta in the war, and the Dawnbass when it broke out. So I'll skip Trump and rush Agate for a minute, but we all and I'll just say this about Trump, his own government told the New York Times. You can

read it Keith Guessing and the New York Times. The Quiet Americans is the article, and they say Donald Trump is like the captain of a ship. He's holding the wheel, but it's not attached to anything. And so there was his government had their own Russia policies. We saw with the impeachment and all that. But then I'm rambling on. Wrap this up here. In the year twenty twenty one, Joe Biden's first year in office, he came in and this.

that and the other thing. But you know, over at Harvard, Stephen Waltz said, actually you're applying the wrong model. This is like, you know, these guys that winch of Georgetown and where they have, you know, the textbook formulas already for this stuff. And he says, look, you're going on

the Hitler appeasement model, but you shouldn't be. You should be going on the other page is the spiral model, where the other side actually has real concerns and you could, yes, appease them to use a bad word to prevent a word crisis from breaking out, and it wouldn't be the wrong thing to do, particularly when a country like Ukraine is so much more important to Russia than it is to the United States. And so but they refused to

look at it that way. They looked at it in fact that you see, Biden did nothing but escalate more arms. He had the State Department and Defense Department promise further integration in to NATO and interoperability with our military. They refused to negotiate with good faith when Putin introduced the treaty. They talk about the treaty now like it's completely insane. Oh, he says that we should move all our military forces

back to where there were in nineteen ninety seven. Yeah, but that was the blood oath that Bill Clinton had signed and promised. That's not eighteen ninety seven, that's just nineteen ninety seven. That it wasn't exactly a treaty. I covered this in the book. They refused to sign a real treaty over it. But still that was the promise, and it was not the kind of tree that America should have just signed on the bottom line to.

We don't want to talk about that. The Afghan model from the nineteen eighties where Rambo three helped the mujaiden in al Qaeda fight against the Soviet Union proto al Qaeda then, and so that was what led to the war was Biden said you better not. But he refused to negotiate in good faith or accommodate Russian legitimate security concerns in any way whatsoever.

from a territorial perspective, et cetera. And so that's part of what's been used for people to say, listen, if you don't stop in the Ukraine, he does have these greater ambitions for others to reclaim other parts of Europe that were previously part of the Russian Empire. What is your response to that? Do you think that that desire plays it all into his ambitions and is a reasonable case for people to make on the other side, No.

were left there, right. And so, but the thing is where Russian, where ethnic Russians rights are not in jeopardy, there's not really a conflict, right, So if you look at it from his point of view, and you know, even Joe Biden called them the most pro pro Western Russian president ever, he was doing everything he could to try to integrate with the West, with Europe, with Western Christian civilization broadly defined, and that was of the highest importance.

And so even going back to independence in nineteen ninety one, there was a question whether Russia might actually invade and take the Dawn Bass and Crime back from Ukraine. Right then, it was just the Commis who drawn the line where they drew it back in nineteen twenty one and Khrushchev with PRIMEA in fifty four. But they decided at the time their relationship with the United States of America and the rest of the West was the most important thing,

that was the priority. So the question is really what changed Putin's calculation to make it worth it for him to go this far. And the answer is George Bush and Barack Obama overthrew the government in Kiev twice in ten years.

lack of knowledge, is it a lack of studying? Is it just this sort of superpower arrogance? What do you ascribe this decline too?

than anyone. Is that What really happened was when the revolution blew up in their face and they lost Crimea

in twenty fourteen. Then they invented this whole narrative about how Putin wants to recreate the Empire and recreate the Soviet Union, and that you know, only America can stop him now and all of this stuff, because otherwise they would have to admit that their plan backfire if you listen to the Newland Piot phone call where they're planning who should be the new prime minister and stage managing the entire you know, protest movement.

what he did. But when he talked about listen, if you put these same missile launchers in Arkiv, then you'll have h bomb's ten minutes from Moscow or less.

war and we all die. Do you want to war between Russia and France because that's what you're talking about? And the lady goes, uh, yeah. When you put it like that, it really doesn't make much sense. That's why it's against American law, and it's against the NATO treaty to bring in a new member that has an ongoing border dispute, because it's exactly the kind of conflict that you want to avoid. And anyone could just look at

the map of Europe. We got no business the North Atlantic Treaty Organization on the northeastern coast of the Black Sea. I mean, you thought Turkey was pushing it. At least they're in the med and this makes no sense. And by the way, you know, I quote in my book to ruin the book for everyone. At the end of the I quote Robert Kagan himself, Victoria Neulan's husband, saying, you know what, on second thought, Ukraine doesn't matter to

America at all. The Soviet Union occupied it that whole time and it never bothered us.

They want to break off Kosovo from Serbia, they can do that if they want to break off South Sudan, or if they want to break off northern western Sahara, if they want to give the gol On Heights to Israel and do whatever they want. Oh, but you know, in this case it's different because it's not the Americans doing it.