John, I want to give one example of what like a honey tramp would look like, and that's something that happened to me, and pretty so.
Much further here. But do you know what you're going to say, Like, yeah, exactly what.
I'm going to say.
Yes, Yeah, I'm John Cipher and I'm Jerry o'she. I served in the CIA's Clandestine Service for twenty eight years, living undercover all around the world.
And in my thirty three years with the CIA, I served in Africa, Asia, Europe, and the Middle East.
Although we don't usually look at it this way, we created conspiracies.
In our operations. We got people to believe things that weren't true.
Now we're investigating the conspiracy theories we see in the news almost every day.
We'll break them down for you to determine whether they could be real or whether we're being manipulated.
Welcome to Mission Implausible, Jerry. As usual, Adam has boguarded us and left us. But I think if we talk about enough interesting things, since his wife is a big listener, maybe she'll get to them.
Yeah. I was worried about Adam. I thought he might have been involved in the big explosion at the cheese factory in Vermont, because I heard there was debris all over the place. I heard there was debris all over the place.
Yeah, okay, yeah, I get it. Okay, So since it's you and I, let's see. So, is there anything that comes to mind about recently? It was in the press about conspiracy theories.
Yeah. I think it's a conspiracy that there's so many conspiracies that we can't even remember them or keep them straight. But I'll tell you one one really stood out for me for being both crazy and awful at the same time. And I don't know if people have heard about this is it? But it ran in the post and it's something called med beds, and it ties into a whole
bunch of other conspiracies. And basically, if I got this right, the US military or the US government has this alien technology, and with it they've developed beds when our quote military grade, we can put our soul in or advanced senior politicians and it will grow back limbs, and it will cure cancer, and it will help whatever ails you and including aging. But because this technology is so sensitive, it's not available to the average people except and there's some terrible scammers
out there. That are pushing this conspiracy theory and telling people that they have the civilian version of this state somehow, either it smuggled it out or figured it out. And they're charging hundreds or thousands of dollars to these desperate people with cancer or backaches or broken bones, broken spirits, and they're laying them basically in these beds with like lights over them and the bedshakes, and the FDA said,
there's nothing to this. They're basically preying on people who believe in conspiracies, who believe in these alien conspiracies, and I don't know how some of these people sleep at night. Isn't an innocent crise?
Very typical? You just look at the down side of this, now, I see so true. Apparently these scientists are reverse engineering alien science to secure diseases, and liberal billionaires have been keeping it from the public, is what my understanding.
If I read that's exactly right. Yeah.
Don't you see this though, as a good example of bipartisanship among billionaires, because you got Elon Musk and Peter Thiel and Harlan Crowe and David Sex, all the guys on the right, along with the typical left wing billionaires obviously working together to keep themselves healthy and keep it from the public. And if Adam's wife is listening, can pass this on to Edam, maybe he can ask us
questions about it for future episodes. So the three that I just noticed it today when I'm rage scrolling through Twitter is one the QAnon and pizzagate folks are saying that the CIA is behind all of the memes about Vance and Trump being weird. Separately, Tucker Carlson has said that Bitcoin and the Signal messaging app are CIA honeytraps. First, one of the qan on piece of Gate folks talk
about how CIA has brainwashed people. So brainwashing is a thing that's often tied with intelligence and the history, and there is a long and an interesting history there. The Tucker Carlson talking about honey traps, that's also an intelligence term, and I think it's something we can talk about. And then James Comer, the right wing congressman, said that Tim Waltz is a Communist party of China's sleeper agent.
I want to maybe just go to honey traps real quick, because I think that's something that people think CIA does and we don't because it generally doesn't work, and you've gone what it is. Yeah, So a honeytrap is basically you entrap someone in a sexual encounter, right, especially if
it's something that they don't want to come out. If somebody's gay and they travel to some authority on country and they have a tryst with another man or another woman, and then the intelligence service comes to you and says, will you're basically blackmailed with that? Or will tell your wife about this? And generally those things don't work, or they work briefly, the.
Long history of the Soviets and Russians and others right in the cities of doing that. So you show up there, you're working there, someone shows up in your hotel room at night or whatever, or you start a relationship with someone when but it turns out the intelligence service has been choreographing it, and then they come to you and say, oh, you're pregnant, you don't want this to come out.
You need to work with us.
Some US Marines got caught up in this. If you remember in the nineteen eighties.
It's right, loan Tree, that's exactly right.
Our embassies abroad are protected by marine security guards. That's a part of the Marines that they're trained as security guards and they make sure that the classified material and embassies is protected. So they are there twenty four hours a day guarding the area where our classified material is. And it's always been a target because they're young, oftentimes young men also and a women now that a foreign service, the Russians for example, could use to try to compromise
and get in. So there was a story in the nineteen eighties where a young Native American named Clayton Loan Tree was an embassy guard marine security guard at Moscow. But essentially he fell in love with the young Russian and as part of the process, this young Russian woman introduced him to her uncle Sasha. And uncle Sasha, as you can imagine, was a KGB officer who told him that he's going to get all kinds of trouble and if you want to stay with her, you need to
provide us information from the embassy. What do the security guards do, when are they there? How can we And there was a time after Clayton low Tree moved to his next post in Vienna, he went to the CIA station chief and told him what had happened. For a period of time, this was a big issue. We thought that the Russians had actually gotten into the embassy, had broken in, gotten into safes and that type of thing,
all helped by Clayton Loan Tree. I don't think they had gotten that far, but Clayton low Tree certainly was helping the Russians there. And that was a classic honey trap. So this Holmo's name is Violetta and he fell in love with it, and the Russians used that against it.
It was only sort of a honey trip because it wasn't just a sexual encounter. He actually fell in love, right, That was something that was more long. But John, you were in Indonesia for a while, and I want to ask you this story's true. I've never actually asked you this in all these years. So I'd always heard this story that Suharto from fifty years ago, the dictator.
Of actually was Sukarno Sokarna.
That's right. I mixed it up that Sukarno the strong man of Indonesia, that he went to Moscow and he's this old guy and he ends up in bed with two beautiful young women frolicking, right, And when he went
back to Jakarta, I went back to Indonesia. The Russians approached him and this handhanded attempt, they pulled out like all these photographs of him in bed with these women, and he went through them, and the Russians are thinking, ah, we've got him now, and he's like going through and he says, looks at them and says, yeah, I'll have two more of these and give me like this one. And he says, can you blow this one up for me? I want to show my friends, And yeah, that didn't work. Is that true?
That is very true. Sarno was the first leader of Indonesia after World War Two, after the Japanese were in the dutchy s Indies and Indonesia became independent, and he was famously ladies man. In fact, I have a poster here behind me of Shukarna with Marilyn Monroe and he's staring longingly at her. And he took great pride in the fact that he was quite the ladies man, and the Russians tried to blackmail him and it didn't work in this.
So epic fail on the honey trap front. But I do have a story, so I don't want to say the country, but on the honey trap that I know
of a story. I know of an account where a US businessman goes to this country and it's a really repressive authoritarian government and he meets this young woman and they spend the night together and the next day the police show up at his door and they like show a picture of her, and they say, do you know her, and he's like, no, I member as a conceder for he says, we've got pictures of you with her and
the guy you know. As he's talking to the FBI and CIA afterwards, he says, at that moment, I thought, okay, I'm not going to allow myself to be blackmailed. I'm just going to have to go home and tell my wife that this happened, Like, not going to blackmail me. And then they had another picture and they showed her dead, like laying at the bottom of stairs with blood coming out of her head, and they said, we're going to
charge you with murder. She was just found dead, and we've got CCTV footage of her going up into the hotel to your room, coming out, and then she was found dead directly afterwards, and we're going to charge you with murder unless you let us look at your computer for an hour, right, and then we'll let you leave the country. And that's where he snapped. And he was a businessman doing there was some like some really big business deals that they wanted to have a competitive advantage over,
and he did it. And he was so frightened of this take on honeytrap. And when he got out, to his credit, he did go to the FBI and they warned him that if he did this that they would charge him with murder and they would put his name in the newspaper and all the rest of this. And so this was a take on the honey trick that I had and had, but it's pretty frightening.
There's a number of Cold War journalists, American journalists who were trapped in honey traps in Russia in places like that. Some that went came back home and informed the FBI of what happened, and some who didn't and worked for the other side. Okay, I'm a bit old. I'm going to need to go to the bathroom, so let's take a quick break and we'll be back shortly. All right,
welcome back. But you started by saying with honey traps, and we didn't really go into it as we don't do them, And by we meaning the CIA, and I think a lot of people will be surprised to hear that, and I think that's it's in fact very true. Sex is something you could use to either blackmail someone or get them in a compromising position that you could take advantage of. So it'd be surprising why wouldn't we use it?
And it is indeed true that over the years we've learned maybe in the early years of the OSSCI.
Yeah, fifty years ago, the fifties or something like that.
Yeah, but it's stopped doing it for a number is because number one is if you are put in a compromising position and if you are blackmailed, you're going to try to get out of that. And so what we want when we recruit a source is we want someone who is motivated to work for us and stay working
for us and not turn on us. Whereas if you put someone in that kind of situation, yeah, you may get them to do something for you in the short term, but they're always going to be distrusting you and hating you and looking for a reason.
To get out of it.
And of course, just morally in the United States and our laws, it's something that you don't do, but others do it. But when we start with the term honeytrap, we're thinking of this thing of using sex, But there are you know, I can think of law enforcement things where we use traps to catch criminals and things like that, like we tell some criminal that he's won an award or that he's invited to some party, and that person can show up and then be arrested that type of thing.
So there's a way of using deception to trap someone into doing something you want. But in fact, the security services out the CIA doesn't use sex as a trap.
I want to maybe just touch on the positive evolution of the agency. So when we came in the early eighties, early to mid eighties, being gay and so of the CIA was they wouldn't hire you.
And in fact, when you went through the security thing, they would ask you you're going through polygraph that's a regular question, have you had a homosexual relationship?
And yet we did hire a number of closeted gays, including one individual I won't say his name. We all know who is. Who is like one of the most senior guys in the agency. Back when we lived in tear of him, a guy who's involved in Russian things, and the agency changed that thankfully, because that simply led to people being more black mailable by not allowing that. So it's a really positive thing.
That individual was a very powerful individual in the Clindestin Services oversaw all of our activities in Moscow and when I went there it was famously he told all of us. Number one, you're not allowed to date Russians or anybody. Number two, there will be no dancing. He wouldn't allowed dancing because he says dancing leads to sex, and sex leads the potential to be blackmail.
That's not like a Baptist. But the agency has evolved. We have a gay Alliance, Rainbow Alliance inside of the agency and it's I think it's something that's really beneficial because it makes us less mailable. And the key is you have to be open about it.
So as you're hired going through this process, you have to be clear that you're almost going to say that it's not something that you're hiding and therefore another service could potentially use against that you're hiding this. We know what we're going to use it against you.
And we know of certain cases where people who come in as very strict like Mormons or Baptists and their closeted days, and it was years later that they finally came out. John, I want to give one example of what like a honey tramp would look like. And that's something that happened to me, And it was in one of the stands, right, very much controlled by the.
Careful before you go much further here, but do you know what you're going to say? Like, yeah, exactly what I'm going to say, just warning you.
So I show up at a hotel in one of the stands, and as I'm checking.
In or tell people what the stands are.
Oh, the stands is like Kazakhstan, turkmenis Stan, it's the former Soviet Republic.
Well, we're supposed to be diplomats and people who support the United States foreign policy and we call a group of countries the stands because we can't distinguish.
But this was in one of those countries and right where the Russians really held sway. And I show up and I check into this nice hotel or at nice for that country, and in the lobby are like seven or eight clearly Russian women. They're very beautiful and as I'm checking in, you know, you look around, and this one woman catches my eye and as she does, where
our eyes touched, and she like raises her eyebrows. I raise my eyebrows, like hi, and I go up to my room, and sure enough, an hour later, there's a knock in the door, and there she is, and she says, in perfect English, because she's clearly done this before, she says, excuse me. She says, I think we had a moment in the lobby and I was just sort of wondering if I could come in and maybe we could talk. And I said, you know what, I would actually really like to sit and talk with you about what your
life is like. She was clearly Russian, living in this country where the Russians are no longer the dominant ethnic group anymore. I said, but I understand the pressure's on you,
and I really don't think that's appropriate. And I said, look, I just want to let you know that I've got three daughters and they're they're like twelve, ten and eight, I think they were at the time, and I love my daughters, and I know you're the daughter of somebody else, and I want to respect you, and I understand what's going on. But really, you know, as a father, I really don't think it's a good idea. And she like understood and said okay, and she left.
Oh, I know, I can guess what happens next.
An hour later, there's another knock on the door, and of course I thought, oh, it's going to be a dude now, because they're going to think, oh maybe, yeah, that's what I was because I know the story is you say no to the guy and then somebody shows up an hour later with a goat. But that didn't happen. I opened the door and there she is, and she's got T shirts like you know, my daughter's size, and she says, if you don't want to talk, she says,
would you like maybe to buy a T shirt? And it said like you know, Kazakhstan Land of a thousand Mountains or so whatever it was. And I said, you know what, yeah, I will, I'll buy three T shirts. And so I imagine what hippened is she went back and said, nah, he didn't go for it, and they like he said, but he said, he's got three daughters, like maybe he'll buy T shirts for his.
Daughters if we can't. If we can't sit born them to be a spy. At least I can be a little cash off them. If you can't have sex with them, sell them a T shirt. And so my daughters for for a couple of years afterwards ran around with these Kazakh T shirts.
And of course I told my wife like, this was sold to me by someone who wanted to have didn't want to, but it was willing to have, say for money, I say, I'm sure she didn't want to look at me for Christ's sake. So yeah, that was a That was my like one sort of memorable bump with a honey trip. How about you in Moscow?
You must have hit like I said, was in Moscow when you serve there, they obviously have video and audio in your house and they watch you and they follow
you everywhere you go, so they're very carefull. They have psychologists where you try to figure out what is this guy potentially going to fall for, Like if you're there visiting at a hotel, they just throw quickly, they throw the girl at you, then they throw the guy at you, and then they throw the goat at you, and they're all trying to make you so you broke the law.
You did go it is, hey boy.
Because that's one of the things they used to do that they get people like, Oh, you would go down or you'd pay for something, and they'd be go, oh, that's black marketeering you.
This person's going to jail. Now.
You need to work with so anything to try to put you in a bad position. But when you work there, they're trying to do that in a more sophisticated way, and so they're following you and they're trying to pick up what's the best way that would work against you. So I never had the straight girl thing like that, but I think I talked about in a previous episode
about the women I met. They were then after meeting me, they would go and they would threaten their families and threaten them and say that they had to be me. The even report on me and that type of thing.
Staying with the theme of the show, though these are not conspiracy theories, these are real conspiracies. They actually sit down and they have psychiatrists and they're maybe you should just touch on what it means to like have people with audio and video in your apartment, Like they're watching you sleep, They're they're watching you go to the toilet, they're watching your shower, they're listening to every sort of
word and fart that you make. But there's a conspiracy they're hiring against us all the time.
Well, my experience, my experiences is with Russia, but that's always been a key part. So the security service, intelligence services have always played a key role, that maybe the key role in that society. And in fact, it's never really going to turn around until they somehow destroy those security services because they're in charge of everything more important
than the military. And even in the days before the Soviet Union, they had an Institute of Mosca Roka, which is essentially an institute of deception and hybrid warfare, and as we know from our previous episodes into talking about this, they're experts on deception and disinformation and agitation and all these type of things, and so they use them individually against people who visit. Their huge apparatus to control people who come to visit and try to recruit them as
sources or to monitor them. Huge effort in trying to use disinformation and deception to make foreign countries not understand what they're trying to do, or to suborn individuals and other countries. What they call this firehood of falsehoods to push information out there, so you don't know what's real and it's not real or Russian citizen, they just constantly are flooded with this type of sort of false information. So eventually what you do is you just give up
on politics. Since there's no way of knowing what's real and not real, you give up on it. And that helps the Kremlin stay in charge, just because they can put out their word and people are like, I have no way of knowing whether I'm being lied to or not, and there's no way to find out, So I just am going to move away from politics and let the leadership take care of that. They've been experts at that forever, both on the individual level of those of us who've
lived there. They're around the world trying to go after people. We've seen them in fact involved in assassinations recently, and so this is something that's central to the way Russia does its policy domestically and abroad, and so they are very good at it.
And of course everybody else is getting in the game. We've seen that just from the newspaper that the Iranians are now involved in stealing hacking into the Trump campaign, and I'm sure that they will as the Russians did in twenty sixteen and twenty twenty, arguably with Hunter Biden's laptop, not that the laptop was made up, but the way it was amplified and the charges that were made off of it, that the Raetians will probably be trying to do the same thing with the Trump campaign. I think
they'll be interesting to see in October. What October surprises come out, pushed by either the Russians or the Iranians or whomever. It'll be really interesting. I think it's clear that's going to happen. Let's take a break, we'll be right back, and boom, we're back. It's funny because Iran and the Russians are our allies along with North Korea,
and yet they've got divergent goals. I think basically on this coming election, where the Russians I think would like to see Trump win because they've always had a close relationship with him, and just ask his former advisors they could. McMasters just came out out and said, telling his wife that his book that's coming out, he says, the Russians have something on him. I don't understand why it is he just refuses to like say anything bad about them,
even privately. And the Iranians I think would prefer to see Trump not win because I think that they're concerned about his hair trigger finger on the nuclear button, right if.
You remember correctly Trump. When Trump was president, they killed a senior commander in Iraq. He was a going Solimani and that's really money in Iraq, and I think they're looking to get back at him for this. So if you're trying to like get in there and steal things, you essentially get what you can get. But the first thing to do is get that compromising or that material
that you can weaponize in one fashion or another. So sometimes they don't have stuff on the person they want to go after, but they want to They try to use what they have, and.
What they have is it's the grain of truth that they can build a conspiracy or a conspiracy theory around. But I do want to say, and I think this is important for the audience to understand that mind standing is in twenty sixteen that the Russians Cozy Bear and Fancy Bear, the two entities that were associated with Russian intelligence, that they both penetrated both the DNC the Democratic but also the Republicans as well, but they never used any
of what they stole from the Republicans. They only used publicly. That is an exit. They may have used it, that's right. They may have black people who got me there, but that speaks volumes. They stole from both, but they only used it against the Democrats.
Because once you have them, you can use it in a variety of ways. You could go to let's go back to the twenty sixteen things. So you could either use it because you at that case, of course, the intelligence commit community and the Senate report and everybody said they did this on purpose to help the Trump campaign
because they hated Robie Clinton. But then also you might want to use that information just to create friction in chaos in the United States because these are your enemy and if they're fighting each other, they're not obviously focusing
on you. Or you can use these things in another way, a subtle way, like, for example, yeah, if they use it against the Democrats publicly when President Trump was elected, they could say, hey, listen, we had stuff on you too, because of our good relationship, we didn't use that with you. You then have that person like oh, okay, I now know they have something on me, and I have to behave in my relationship with them so that they don't take advantage of this.
But j let me ask you a question something I've never quite understood. Maria Bartona, I got the name wrong. The KGB calm with there by their old name is conspiring against the United States. So they're going to take a lot of resources, time, effort, and risk to take a sleeper agent to put them inside of the United States. And why would they take this young woman and put her up against and insert her into the NRA. But
there was a Routina, Maria boutin Routina. There we go and she was She went into the NRA as a gun control as a Second Amendment advocate, but she also went in as a Russian citizen, where they do have gun control right. And so I never understood why as a conspiracy, why would the Russians target the NRA. Why would they want to have someone inside there. I've never understood that.
You're assuming that was the attention from the beginning. So I think what they did is they had this woman. She they clearly had met where there she said, okay, I'm in an American university and I'm a student, I'm meeting all these people. She was meeting lots of politicians and others around power in Washington and sleeping with a number of them. And as she became friends that she
had ended up having more relationships with Republicans. And I think they were bringing her to events and so I don't know if they planned to get her into the NRA or whether the people she was around brought her and got her into the NRA. And you know, is in a Todales officer Jerry. Once you have a source that has access to things, you're going to every time you meet her, you're going to be asking them what are you learning, what are you doing?
Who are you meeting?
And she goes through things. They probably were finding that, hey, this is actually interesting. The NRA is a place where a lot of right wing people are. They're very angry that this is an issue that causes friction in the United States, and so they were trying to use as best they can. I think they're just taking advantage of the access that they gained through this woman. But I suspect she was probably more It was more interesting to the Russians.
The people she was in touch with than it was the NRA's institution would be my guess.
Being inside the NRA and being trusted there gave her access to a number of high level Republican or.
Should be invited to other events.
Congressman, that's right, I think too. She had a back to the honey trip. She had a love interest as well. There was a CEO that she was certainly involved with.
And some politicians and others. Yeah, she was sweeping with a number of people.
Yeah, that was also a way to set up a number of honey traps.
I would think in intelligence terms, I would call her, instead of a honey trap, an access agent. So when we were overseas and we were working in a foreign country and we're trying to look at the community, the network, who's out there, who's important, who has influence, who can influence, you know, to get into that, it often if we can meet someone who is in that network, who can provide us feedback on what happening and who's there, so that we can figure out who are the people to
go after. So Maria Bettina, there's this Russian woman, she's in Washington. She's very outgoing, She's meet a lot of people she's sleeping with a lot of people. She's in all of these events. That's useful to the Russian embassy. Okay, tell us who you're meeting, tell them who's out there, who are the and they can divert her and aim or in certain ways. Oh this person is very interesting,
why you continue to meet that person? And if that person is someone's interesting enough to them, maybe she could introduce a Russian intelligence officer to one of those people, or she could get into that person's computer at their house while she's sleeping with them and pass that on too the Russians. And so what we call they call
that an access agent. That's a person who is providing us general information about a network or a group of people, to provide us access to others who might be more important. So it's a first step on the chain up to where you want to get.
And this is important too, getting back to stop the steal. So Buttina, who now is? I think she's in the Russian parliament, but according to the media that she was in a romantic relationship with Patrick Byrne, who.
Was the CEO of Overstock A big report.
Yeah, it was a lot of donations to the Republican Party, and he was also at the center of the Stop the Steel movement to overthrow our election. It's only one. It's not a conspiracy theory. It's just a couple of points. Is she's a Russian sleeper agent with a influential donor to the Republican Party who is involved sitting in the Oval Office with Trump trying to figure out how to overthrow our elections. So I guess, if I'm Vladimir Putin,
I've got a sleeper agent inside of the NRA. She moves to burn, she meets other Republican operatives, and now you've got a guy who she is like romantically involved with the bonds of Affection and so forth, with a guy who is sitting with the president talking about how to overthrow the election. For me, that's more than just a conspiracy theory. That is a counterintelligence issue.
She was also a girlfriend of Paul Erickson was a big NRA.
There you go. Yeah, but she got hers in the end, right, she's now a fit. I think she's got her own talk famous she has her own talk show.
And he wouldn't get her on the podcast, and she said, yeah, And she's.
In the Russian Parliament, I think, right, So, I think she did less than a year John and made her fame and fortune bick in Russia.
She was found guilty and she was supposed to be that's like eighteen months in prison and obviously got out earlier than that was sent back.
Arguably, yeah, I think she's definitely an excess agent, but she's also an access agent involved in honey tramps, and arguably those honey traps really worked.
The Russians operate differently. If you're yeah, I think if we had an excess agent, we wouldn't try to get them to sleep with people were interested in. We'd probably try to get them just the friend that I'll go to dinner and report to us.
Right.
Questions are like, sure, go sleep with those guys, tell us their secrets, and we'll.
Find a way to use it against them, right right, right right.
And as Paul Erickson, as you recall, he was also convicted of fraud and thrown in prison and then was pardoned by Donald Trump.
And I think the Senate Intelligence Oversight Committee later came out with a report that she was trying to arrange a link between the Trump campaign and a bad channel to the unclear how successful she was.
That's just the one we know about.
I think the rest of the other sleeper agents, like the ones that the Americans were based on, were much less successful as far as we know. I mean, I wasn't read into the case.
So there's been a war in Ukraine. Europeans and Americans are kicking out Russian intelligence officers and diplomats out of embassies. These are the people who normally run spy cases like we did, and we worked in embassies abroad. So what you do is these deep cover people who are pretending to be Americans or South Americans or Europeans that are
actually Russian intelligence officers. Right, they're still here under granted theyge So if there's an important spy, say there's a spy working in the White House that they're trying to meet secretly, and the Russian intelligence officers and the embassy are kicked out. These people are the strategic reserve who were there to handle those really sensitive cases, and like during wartime, they bury weapons that be prepared to dig up during wartime, or they handle the most sensitive cases.
That so because the FBI conceive he doesn't know who they are, they're not following them.
So there's different level. So Patina was in the US as a Russian. I think she was here was just a student, right, she was a student. And then the Russian who you know, back to the twenty sixteen election, the Russian who met with Don Junior and Jared Kushner saying that initially saying it was the meeting was about at Trump Tower, the meeting that was initially about orphans, and it turned out no, she was saying that we've stolen democratic.
They they had information on Hillary, on.
Hillary's emails, I think that was it. And she said I'm from the Russian government. We're here to commit a criminal act to help the Trump campaign. And they said hooray, and did not go to the FBI. That was arguably another sort of honey tramp, right, because even the fact that they didn't go to the FBI makes them culpable. I'm surprised that they weren't charged with a crime. Kushner
in them. If the Russians came to US and made us a deal saying hey, we've broken US law and we want to rest American elections and so forth, if you know of a crime like that, your honor bound to report us if you know of a murder, your honor bound to go to authorities, and they chose not today.
As I recall from the Muller Report and the Senate report, essentially they did not bring chargers against Don Junior because they just thought he was too dumb and didn't.
Really It's true.
Yeah, she said, listen, we could charge this guy, but I don't think he even understands what he's brought up in. And I think dealing with presidents and presidential elections, our law enforcement system, if we're going to be really careful about those things, and so I think per in retrospect, maybe they were too careful.
And I have to say, because this is important, there's a difference here between what happened in twenty sixteen what we talked about, the Trump Towers and Russia. If you're out there, get me the emails. Trump actually asking publicly for Russian intelligence to break the law, and he already knew that they had and he needed this to get out of the grab by the pussy saying. It came
out the next day. But what the Iranians have taken Apparently, according to the press from the Trump campaign, Politico, the Washington Posts in New York Times. They have not gone to print with that material. They've not used it against the Trump can pain, at least not yet, and the Hairs campaign hasn't used it either. They certainly have that material is available to them from inside the Trump campaign that they can use, and they haven't done it. So I think that's a good thing, and I think it's
hopefully show some growth. But it's very different than how when she was on the other foot, Trump wanted and exploited and used it against the Democrats, and as yet the Democrats haven't used that against me.
And my understanding is they hacked into Roger Stone's emails.
That's right there, the man with a Nixon tattoo on his back.
Like many of our discussions, we ended up going in ways I didn't expect, and we ended up talking about the honey traps.
I think the only way we're going to get Adam back on this podcast is using a honey trap. Right.
So, But so that's all for today's episode of Mission Plausible. Join us next time.
Mission Implausible is produced by Adam Davidson, Jerry O'shay, John Cipher, and Jonathan Sterner. The associate producer is Rachel Harry Mission Implausible is a production of honorable mention and abominable pictures for iHeart Podcasts.