By Coleen Rowley and Real News
May 19, 2017 "Information Clearing House" - Former FBI agent and 9/11 whistleblower Coleen Rowley says former FBI head Robert Mueller, now appointed to investigate the Trump campaign's ties to Russia, participated in covering up the pre 9/11 role of the U.S. intelligence agencies and the Bush Administration, helped create the post 9/11 national security/surveillance state, and helped facilitate the pre-Iraq war propaganda machine
PAUL JAY: Welcome to The Real News Network.
I'm Paul Jay. On Wednesday afternoon,
Assistant Attorney General Rod Rosenstein
appointed Robert S. Mueller to be a special
counsel to investigate the Russia affair,
those, not his words, those are mine, to
look into the whole issue of alleged Russia
interference in the American elections, and
that would also, one think, include a look
into what happened with James Comey, and
James Comey's firing, and his memo and such.
So just who is Robert Mueller? And now
joining us to discuss this is Coleen Rowley.
Coleen is a retired FBI agent, former legal
counsel for the FBI. She testified about the
9/11 lapses to the Senate Judiciary
Committee. 9/11 lapses is generous. This is
what was written for me. I would say 9/11
subterfuge, but at any rate, she's known as
a whistleblower due to her testimony to two
congressional committees that led to an
investigation of two FBI 9/11 failures, and
one would also have to be generous to call
them failures. At any rate, that's another
story. Thanks for joining us, Coleen.
COLEEN ROWLEY: Yes, thanks for having me.
PAUL JAY: So who is Robert Mueller, and what
do you make of this appointment?
COLEEN ROWLEY: Robert Mueller had only been
director for a few days when 9/11 occurred,
so he really didn't have any responsibility
for that, but he also was in charge when
this kind of cover-up occurred, where they
really weren't telling the truth. The FBI
and all the other officials claimed that
there was no clues, that they had had no
warning, etc., and that was not the case.
There had been all kinds of memos and
intelligence coming in. I actually had a
chance to meet Director Mueller personally
the night before I testified to the Senate
Judiciary Committee, and he was more or less
... There was another agent in Phoenix who
had, he had done the same with, trying to
get us on his side, on the FBI side, so that
we wouldn't say anything terribly
embarrassing. And he told me that if I ever
witnessed anything like that again, the
pre-9/11 failures, that I should call him
directly. I should get in touch with him.
He told me this in our office, and yeah,
when you had the lead-up to the Iraq War
where the FBI, actually Robert Mueller and,
of course, the CIA and all the other
directors, saluted smartly and went along
with what Bush wanted, which was to gin up
the intelligence to make a pretext for the
Iraq War. For instance, in the case of the
FBI, they actually had a receipt, another
documentary proof, that one of the
hijackers, Mohamed Atta, had not been in
Prague, as Dick Cheney was alleging. And yet
those directors more or less kept quiet.
That included, like I said, CIA, FBI,
Mueller, and it included also the Deputy
Attorney General at the time, James Comey.
And so when James Comey was appointed to be
FBI director by Obama, I wrote this opinion
piece for The New York Times, and it
appeared the same day of the confirmation
hearing, and I suggested that James Comey be
asked hard questions about why he had signed
off on illegal warrantless monitoring, why
he had signed off on the torture tactics. In
fact, The New York Times even, they didn't
want me to use the word "torture." That was
still, at the time, that was a verboten
term. They wanted me to say "some harsh
interrogation tactics" or something, and we
settled on saying, "which experts believe is
torture," that's how it's phrased in the
op-ed. And then he also signed off, this is
even worse in a way, James Comey defended a
warrantless detention without charges and
without right to counsel for three years of
an American citizen. This, none of our
mainstream news has been going back to what
they think is ancient history, which is what
the Bush administration did initially on.
Both of these figures, Mueller and James
Comey, first of all, they became very close
with each other, because this was in the
first three or four years after 9/11 when
there was essentially a state of emergency
that Ashcroft was signing off every 90 days,
and this was the creation of John Yoo and
those Office of Legal Counsel. They thought
that if you declared it was an emergency ...
By the way, all secretly. The public knew
none of this, that there was this emergency,
but if you declared it was a national
emergency, then you could institute a form
of martial law. And if you see the John Yoo
memos, they say everything that, in times of
war, we don't have a First Amendment. Those
are memos that are written within weeks of
9/11, but it's based on this emergency. So
you get to three years, about three years,
out, and people like James Comey, Mueller,
and some of the new Office of Legal Counsel
lawyers that took over after Comey had left
...
I mean, excuse me, after John Yoo had left,
they started saying, "How long can we keep
saying it's an emergency?" And they said,
"No, we're going to have to stop this," and
that's when that famous hospital room
standoff occurs, where first James Comey
races to Ashcroft's room and stands up to
the Bush administration, Gonzalez and Card.
They arrive, and they try to get a very sick
Ashcroft to sign off on this every 90 days
emergency, again, authorizing a form of
martial law, and Ashcroft, to his credit,
does not sign it. Of course, the other part
of this that people don't know is that not
only did Comey and the other officials go
along with it before that hospital room
standoff, but then they also went along with
it afterwards. They simply found new
loopholes and new legal mechanisms, I call
it pettifoggery, legalization ways of making
the same things happen afterwards.
PAUL JAY: So-
COLEEN ROWLEY: Now, Mueller and Comey both
got undeserved reputations as being men of
integrity. In fact, Mueller, it was
extended. There's a 10-year term for FBI
director, and because he was considered so
beyond reproach, and he had skated so well
between this morass, and of course, some of
this didn't always come out, he was held on
for 12 years. And so, again, these two were
close, and when Comey spoke out about that
hospital room, a lot of people objected to
him and argued with him, and it was Mueller,
I believe, that kept notes of the hospital
room meeting. And so Mueller backed up Comey
for that whole hospital room situation.
PAUL JAY: Coleen, so you look at this
appointment now. Rosenstein appoints
Mueller. Mueller, as you've told me off
camera, is a very good friend of Comey, and
they've worked together for years. Where do
you see this appointment falling down? In
terms of whose side, there's clearly, it
seems to me, Comey has decided to get Trump,
and Trump fired Comey. Trump writes this,
Comey writes this memo, and we know, at
least according to the press reports in The
Washington Post, Comey decides to ... This
memo is not classified. There's several
reports that say that some of the memos that
he would keep after meeting with Trump, he
would make classified. Others were
unclassified. The memo that's in question
that everyone's talking about, which is the
memo that says that Trump asked him to drop
the investigation into Flynn, that memo he
consciously decides to click unclassified.
Now, how do we know there's even a memo? We
know it because Comey has given the memo to
associates. I'm doing question marks here,
or quotation marks, because we don't know
who the associates are. Are they in the FBI?
Are they outside the FBI?
Some of his associates then leak this
information to the Post, apparently also to
The New York Times, apparently also to AP,
which, if the memo's not classified, then I
suppose it's not illegal, I guess. But Comey
made it so, so Comey wanted this memo to get
out, clearly, after he was fired, and now
his buddy is being appointed the
investigator. Is Rosenstein appointing
someone who knows how to be subservient and
do whatever his president wants, or is he
appointing someone who will work with Comey
and others to get Trump?
COLEEN ROWLEY: If you go back to the Obama
administration, both Mueller and Comey were
close with the Obama administration, and so
Obama himself, or people around him, made
sure that the memos that they were writing
from the summer on of the suspicions about
Russia and things like that, they made sure
that these memos were shared widely in the
intelligence community. That's actually been
reported by mainstream news, that there was
a deliberate effort to make sure that this
information got out and would not somehow be
kept secret. And so if you consider that
both Comey and, going further back, Mueller,
were very much aware of that, they worked
with the Obama administration, and Comey,
especially, would just be carrying out what
was already begun before Trump took office.
That's what I think. I think the [S
00:09:53] on associates, and again,
officials, you'll see sometimes the sources
described as officials.
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You
never see them described as whistleblowers,
and I think that's good, that the media does
not describe them as whistleblowers, and I
think there's a lot of indications that
these are leakers, certainly, but that they
are not motivated for having witnessed a
fraud, waste, abuse, or another illegal act,
I think that this is a lot of political
motivation. And maybe they can justify it in
their own heads, and, again, it's more than
one person. I think there ...
PAUL JAY: But where do you think-
COLEEN ROWLEY: ... are people working
together.
PAUL JAY: But what do you think of this
appointment? Is this an appointment ... Like
Mueller, based on what you've been saying,
is more than happy to fudge facts, to cover
things up, and play along, but who's he
playing along with? Because you're
suggesting that maybe this is still the echo
of the Obama administration, that this is
part of the state apparatus that was around
the Obama presidency, and perhaps, a lot of
people have been arguing, including me, that
the people that are so opposed to Trump's
Russia quote-unquote "détente" are people in
the industrial-military complex that has so
many decades, 60 years, invested into an
anti-Russian narrative. Do you think this is
all part of this, or is Mueller someone
who's going to help Trump?
COLEEN ROWLEY: I don't know if he's going to
help Trump or help the deep state at this
point, and probably he doesn't even know,
but Rosenstein, going back to who picked
Mueller, Rosenstein probably knows both of
them very well, Mueller, obviously, and
Comey. And again, he's picking them ... This
is a educated guess. He's picking them
because they have these reputations, whether
deserved or not, for integrity, so that's
what he wanted. He wanted someone that would
be above reproach ...
PAUL JAY: I mean, he's-
COLEEN ROWLEY: ... while Mueller went out in
the highest amount of praise. He was held
over another two years, so for starters,
Rosenstein is pretty powerful right now,
too, vis-à-vis the Trump administration,
because he was the one that was kind of
sullied in all of this, saying that, "It was
your recommendation to fire Comey to begin
with."
PAUL JAY: Oh, he did. He did certainly lay
the groundwork for the firing of Comey.
COLEEN ROWLEY: That's right, but in that
dynamic, Rosenstein gets a little bit of
power himself now to say, "Well, then, now,
I'm going to pick somebody who's above
reproach." Maybe Trump isn't that happy with
picking Mueller, who knows, but I don't
think Trump really would have much of a leg
to stand on if Rosenstein says, "This is the
guy we need." I think Rosenstein was pretty
powerful in this case for a lot of reasons,
and Mueller, if you think about the
standpoint of the public, whatever, may not
be the worst choice. In fact, because of his
background and reputation, I think that a
lot of, certainly bipartisan, would trust
him. Now, if you go back to the deep state
and all of these entities that I think want
to keep the war in Syria and this
rapprochement ...
Again, if you want to give a little bit of
credit to Trump, who I did not vote for and
has a lot of flaws, but one of the things
that I agreed with in his campaign promises,
and now, frankly, he has been carrying out,
he has been meeting with Lavrov and has a
meeting scheduled with Putin. It's in order
to work on the issues of Syria and ISIS so
that there can be some coordination, and so
I actually am for that. I think that we
should give him some credit, give Trump some
credit for that. There are a lot of people
in Washington that this is stepping on their
toes and their profits. This is not the
direction they wanted to go. In fact, if you
heard the debates between Hillary Clinton
and whatever, this was a sore point, and
Trump was criticized for this.
I think some of the motivation, maybe not
all of it, but some of the motivation for
all of this series of leaks from unknown
officials and former intelligence sources,
various ways described, I think that some of
the motivation is actually to put a damper
on Trump's rapprochement or détente with
Russia. And, of course, that goes back to
the foreign policy, a bipartisan foreign
policy that has existed after 9/11, and
Trump actually has gone against that, and I
think that a lot of this is ... Now, how
this will all play out with the
investigation of Russia, I think, is
actually anyone's guess. And the reason I
don't think it's settled is because some
officials, including Feinstein, including
Clapper, I think Comey even one time kind of
talked out of both sides of his mouth a
little bit on this, have said, made
statements to the effect that there is not
enough smoking evidence connecting the Trump
campaign to Russia and meddling to elect
Trump.
I know that they've said this ... In fact,
Feinstein said it to Wolf Blitzer. He asked
her point blank, and she said, "No, there's
no evidence," and this is after she's been
briefed.
PAUL JAY: Right, but there certainly is
smoke and maybe ...
COLEEN ROWLEY: There's-
PAUL JAY: ... fire in the corruption, in all
the financial ...
COLEEN ROWLEY: [Yeah 00:15:20].
PAUL JAY: ... wheeling and dealings of
Trump's inner connections with various
Russian oligarchs, and maybe Comey was on to
that.
COLEEN ROWLEY: Well, this is what's
happened. This is what I and other veteran
intelligence professionals warned, all of
the NSA whistleblowers, warned about from
the start, is, all of this massive data
collection would not be so dangerous, maybe,
for the common person who has quote-unquote
"nothing to hide" except their privacy, but
for officials who are political figures, who
are engaged in this, power struggles in
Washington, DC., getting information about
people, and could be blackmail ... Usually,
it's sex-related, but in this case, it could
be all different things.
PAUL JAY: Well, Petraeus felt that blow.
COLEEN ROWLEY: Yes, but others, too, and if
you go back to the Hoover era, he was able
to control pretty much every president
because he did have information. He
collected information on all of these
figures. Well, this was what we warned
about, going back to this era of J. Edgar
Hoover, where we had massive data
collection. And honestly, it's played out.
With all of the leaks of things, you see
this fear that you have these powerful
figures using different pieces of
information as leverage, even as blackmail,
and all else fails, leak it to the press in
order to get public opinion.
PAUL JAY: Right.
COLEEN ROWLEY: And it's very ... Anyways, I
think that that's one of the dangers of what
we've always warned about with the massive
data collection.
PAUL JAY: Right. Well, my fear in all of
this is that something Trump wants to do
anyway, now he's got enormous pressure to
do, which is to turn his sights on Iran.
He's in Saudi Arabia. He's going to be
working with the Saudis to build an
anti-Iran front. There's nothing like a good
war to make him presidential, as we heard
after this attack on the Syrian base. The
more dangerous this gets for Trump, the more
likely he needs a good war to get out of it,
and then the Schumers, and the Democrats,
and the deep state, everyone's going to be
cheering him on.
COLEEN ROWLEY: Well, maybe he learned the
lesson that they only cheer him on for a
couple of days, that this bombing-
PAUL JAY: A good fight with Iran, they'll be
cheering him on longer, I think.
COLEEN ROWLEY: Well, that's the whole
problem, and that's what James Madison
warned about, that all presidents ... That's
why we were supposed to have checks and
balances on going to war, and of course,
that's long been gone, dissipated, and now
we have many wars, undeclared wars. We don't
even call them wars. So there's underlying
problems here. Absolutely, Trump, to his
credit, has been insisting on some kind of
détente with the nuclear superpowers, and
even China, to some extent. Maybe, who knows
with Iran? It seems like that was definitely
in his campaign rhetoric, that he was going
to look hard at tearing up the agreement
with Iran, but I think the deep state, the
military-industrial, congressional, media
complex, has really been working largely
together.
Whether they actually want to see Trump out
and Pence in, I think they probably would be
happier with someone less independent, who
tweeted less, which would be Pence, and so
that's certainly a possibility, that if they
can get enough momentum here, that they
would prefer Pence, and I think that that
would be bipartisan as well, and absolutely-
PAUL JAY: And that would be even more
dangerous.
COLEEN ROWLEY: Exactly, even more dangerous,
and not for Iran, but for Russia, for China,
for all of these even nuclear superpowers.
PAUL JAY: All right. Thanks for joining us,
Coleen.
COLEEN ROWLEY: Thank you.
PAUL JAY: Thank you for joining us on The
Real News Network.