Transcript
A (0:01)
Welcome to the Pod Force One podcast. I'm Miranda Devine. Today we're joined by the lawyer and Internet sleuth who broke open Russiagate, Hans Munke. He's author of Swift Boating America. Hans Munke, thanks so much for joining us on podforce One. And I first got to know you from afar because of your amazing Twitter and now X podcast posts in which you and a handful of other, I guess we call them, Internet researchers on the side, people like Steve McIntyre, people like you who have now written books and become quite famous because of your discoveries on a whole lot of mysteries and scandals that the media has failed to fully investigate for various reasons. I think it's because the media sort of become so, so much of it, the mainstream media, political, rather than investigating anything that might damage their side of politics. But so thank you for coming and tell us you're, I think, best known, or I knew you best for your revelations on Russiagate on the Russia hoax. So can you tell us just the broad brushstrokes of the Russia hoax and how you got involved?
B (1:22)
Sure, yeah. Thanks for having me. And you're absolutely right. If the media had done its job, we wouldn't be sitting here right now. My Twitter account would be tiny. I wouldn't, might not be even be on Twitter, and I'd just be, you know, teaching law and kind of living my, my old life. And that all changed because the media did not do their job. So Russiagate is a. Well, it began as a Hillary Clinton campaign smear. So the Clinton campaign, like all campaigns, kind of do some opposition research and they want to come up with some kind of plan as to how to attack their opponents. So in early 2016, the Clinton campaign hatched this plan that they were going to cast Donald Trump as a Russian agent. And that's really all it was. And we would have never heard about it again had Hillary won. Yes. So they tried and there's multiple instances within 2016 when again and again they try and push this hoax into the media. Trump has connections with Russia and a Russian bank, and there's these Russians and so on, and they ran some ads, but it didn't really take off. But anyway, everyone expected her to win and then she didn't win. And that's when things became very, very nefarious. Because that's when the government co opted the hoax.
A (2:37)
Right. Repurposed it to cripple Donald Trump's presidency.
B (2:42)
Exactly right. So, and this we can trace it right back to November 8, 2016, the day that Trump won because on November 9, the infamous Peter Strzok, the agent over at the FBI who was investigating Trump for a supposed Russia collusion, which was a hoax, and he knew it was a hoax, but nonetheless, he started texting his paramour, Lisa Page, and we have those text messages about now. They're going to have to spring their plan into action and you know how horrible it is that Trump has won, and so on. And of course, that plan was to co opt the Hillary Clinton campaign smear. So then it became the government pushing that idea. And by the government, I mean the CIA, James Clapper, who was the DNI at the time, Director of National Intelligence, of course, the FBI. Obama himself was involved with many of.
