RUSSIA TODAY: Russiagate – the two-year circus or nightmare (take your pick) – is seemingly settled. Trump says he has been exonerated. But the political left and much of the media do not concur. Where do we go from here and will the investigators be investigated? Doug Wead, William Binney, and Alan Dershowitz join RT's Peter Lavelle.





ALAN DERSHOWITZ: Most FBI agents are wonderful, they devote their lives to protecting us, and I only the highest regard for the typical FBI agent on the street. There was a problem here of leadership, and there were people in the FBI who were determined to make sure that President Trump was not elected president even if that more electoral votes than the other side, and so I think we do have a problem. I think the new director of the FBI, the new attorney general, their first task is to look inside and try to clean up and see what went wrong.

Look there's a lot of blame to go around. President Trump deserves some of the blame, when he fired Comey he essentially invited the appointment of a special counsel. I think it was a mistake to appoint a special counsel, as there was no evidence of a crime, and special counsel should be appointed and less serious and very considerable evidence of crime at the very top, but the firing was inept. In the sense that it would have been great to fire him on day one, when everybody wanted him fired as a result of what he had done in the Hillary Clinton investigation. But firing him in the middle of an investigation provoked people like Rosenstein to seek the appointment of a special counsel.



But the special counsel has not proved to be a worthwhile task. No Americans have been indicted in relation to any alleged collusion with Russia. All the indictments fall into categories that are outside that, so I think the Muller report, in the end, even on the Russian collusion, even thought it came out the right way has not justified what it's done. And then on the issue of obstruction of justice, Mueller just punted, he just refused to decide and that wasn't what his job was. He should have decided one way or another...



BILL BINNEY, NSA WHISTLEBLOWER: We were prepared to testify in front of any of the committees, also Mueller's group. None of them wanted to know about the forensic side, and you know, it was very clear to us the forensics prove that the data from the DNC was downloaded to a storage device and transported for some distance prior to Wikileaks putting it on the web.



Other material that Wikileaks put out didn't show the transfer of data to storage, but the DNC data did show that. So it was a very clear, someone who was very close to the data copied it down to a thumbdrive or CD-ROM of some sort, and then transported it for some period of distance.



But other than that there is another really major problem here with this whole episode of Russiagate, and it has to do with the use of intelligence agencies against political parties and against individuals in the country, this is another violation. This is something that Nixon was guilty of, and he was impeached. Now, these are felonies that are occurring at this level and now we need to get deep into this and find out who did this and go after them...



ALAN DERSHOWITZ: I completely agree, I think the FISA court was defrauded. You can show information to the FISA court which is not particularly compelling as long as you tell the court what the source is and alert it to the weaknesses and the conflicts of interest, but you cannot provide material to the court, claiming it is credible when you yourself know that it lacks credibility.



Particularly the FISA court operates ex parte, they don't hear two sides, they only hear one side, so they trust the government officials to present the whole truth and nothing but the truth, and government officials who presented the application for a FISA warrant failed that test, and I think there ought to be considerations of contempt proceedings, for contempt of court proceedings, initiated by the FISA court against those who may well have misled them...



BILL BINNEY: Also I think all the documents going to the FISA court should be declassified and released also.



Another point I'd make is that the FISA court has known that the government's been lying to them all along, they've known this for decades. The earliest reports of lying by the FBI to the FISA court were in summer 2002, when the FISA court discovered they had lied to them in at least 75 warrant requests. This is nothing new. These people have known they've been lied to all along.



When are these judges going to wake up? If they can't wake up, I think we should dissolve that Article 2 court, I call it, and revert everything to Article 3 courts...



PETER LAVELLE, RUSSIA TODAY: Alan Dershowitz, did you miss all those parties at Martha's Vineyard? Because I heard how you said you were not invited to them because of your political stance here. You also said that you were banned from CNN because you, well I'll use my own words, you didn't say the right things. What does that tell us about how the media played its role in this huge fiasco, which I think its consequences or are still barely even conceived here? Go ahead Alan in Miami



ALAN DERSHOWITZ: I think CNN really misled and defrauded listeners. For months and months in the beginning, I was on debating Jeffrey Toobin, I was on with Lemon, with Anderson Cooper, with Cuomo. I was the only liberal democrat who was saying, wait a minute, the evidence isn't here, the Constitution protects the president's right to punish.



They didn't want to hear that on the air. It was ok to hear extreme right-wing Republicans defend Trump down the line, and extreme people on the left attack him. But they didn't want a centrist thoughtful liberal democrat telling their viewers that this is complicated and this is difficult. So for the last 8 months, they've banned me from their air. And it turns out that the viewers just got a misguided view. They were shocked at the outcome because they had been assured by their pundits that it was gonna be indictments, impeachments, you name it, but the people heard diverse points of view on other channels weren't as surprised. And so CNN really owes an apology to its listeners and to the American public...



BILL BINNEY: For example, when I came out pointing to the forensics, the factual evidence and the forensics of it, they called me a conspiracy theorist, it now it was like I was going against the narrative and therefore they couldn't admit that in public, so they had to deny it and label me as a conspiracy theorist in an ad hominem attack, but the point is that they and they did not want to accept anything except the narrative they were pushing, and several reasons for that, I mean, after a while you have to realize you are going to have to eat crow for the mistakes you have been making. Now how can you avoid that? You try to avoid the shame by diverting attention in other directions, by trying to focus on something else, but in the end, that they crow only gets bigger and you've got to eat more crow.



So, I call these people mentally impaired by their emotions, they have lost any objectivity.



ALAN DERSHOWITZ: Let me offer a dissenting opinion. I don't think this is as much about ideology as it is about money. I think CNN looked at FOX and said FOX is making a fortune, is doing much better than we are, because they're presenting a narrative, although it is a much more nuanced narrative. If we want to make money and sell soap, the best thing we can do is present completely one-sided. So if you're anti-Trump, turn to CNN and you get it all day, 24/7. That is a business decision that has been made, and it tells you what's going on in this country.



It's like rooting for the New York Yankees or the Boston Red Sox.



BILL BINNEY: Yeah, that's right. I am just saying there's another aspect to this. If they can create this Russiagate to the point where they can create a New Cold War, that means trillions of dollars. You're absolutely right, money is a huge driver behind a lot of this.

