by Darius Shahtahmasebi, The Anti Media:

Aaron Maté is a journalist known for his work as a former host/producer at the Real News, Democracy Now, and producer at Al Jazeera English. He is also a contributor at the Nation, who has recently been dedicating much of his column space to debunking claims that the Trump campaign colluded with the Russian government, more famously known as the “Russiagate” scandal.

Maté has become well-known for his fearless and adversarial approach to interviewing guests, especially for his now infamous one-on-one interview with discredited journalist Luke Harding; as well as James Risen, a writer at the Intercept, leading one commentator to describe him as a “beast.”

With the Russiagate narrative once again dominating recent headlines, the Mind Unleashed decided to catch up with Maté for a lengthy conversation to get his take on the most recent developments.

I have seen you get into a lot of debates on Twitter about the Russiagate narrative. What do you say to someone who firmly believes that there is a great deal of publicly available evidence that the Trump campaign had illicit dealings, or colluded, with the Russian government?

Maté:   I will start by saying broadly: if you look on the surface, yeah you might think there is something suspicious going on because you have some cases of Trump-associates meeting Russians and you have emails written, like the one from Rob Goldstone, a publicist, that says the Russian government supports Donald Trump. And you know, you can put all these things together and yeah, on the surface you could say that this looks very sketchy and this looks like there was maybe some conspiracy Trump and Russia.

The problem though is that, especially if you are a journalist, it’s your job to look at the facts. And in the case of Russiagate we have a lot of facts. We have Court transcripts, we have congressional testimony, there’s been a lot of reporting done. And I think the facts are all pretty clear that at least so far, all the facts, as I see them, undermine the prospects of a conspiracy. As I have also said, and I want to stress this, maybe Mueller will uncover some huge conspiracy but so far, it’s not there.

So, I mean, let’s go through some of the key things that are adduced to argue that there is public evidence for a Trump-Russia conspiracy. Let’s take the inciting incident of this entire investigation. It was a volunteer campaign adviser named George Papadopoulos being told in London, or saying that he was told in London, that the Russians had thousands of Hillary Clinton’s emails. Papadopoulos passed on this information to Alexander Downer who was an Australian diplomat, and Alexander Downer relayed this information to his government and that information ended up going to the FBI. And that sparked Crossfire Hurricane, which is the initial FBI investigation into Trump-Russia collusion, and that’s what Robert Mueller inherited.

Well, so, now we know what happened in that case because it has been resolved. George Papadopoulos recently served twelve days in jail in his case for lying to the FBI. Okay, and what happened in that case?

Papadopoulos lied to the FBI about his contacts with the person who apparently told him this about Hillary Clinton’s emails, which is this guy named Joseph Mifsud, who is a sketchy London-based professor. And Papadopoulos didn’t deny to the FBI that Mifsud told him about Hillary Clinton’s emails he just lied to the FBI about the timing of when Mifsud told him. And what Mifsud apparently told him was that Russia had tens of thousands of Hillary Clinton’s emails. And he told him this in the Spring of 2016, before those emails were publicly released. And so, if Mifsud knew about Wikileaks having Democratic Party emails and he was tied to the Russian government then that could be damning. Right?

But, we know now that none of that has panned out. We know that actually the FBI interviewed Mifsud in February of 2017 when he came to the US after Papadopoulos had told the FBI about him. The FBI interviewed him and let him go. He went back to Europe and he’s disappeared since. There are rumours that he’s actually tied to western intelligence agencies, none of that has been confirmed. Certainly, there’s been no evidence at all that he works with Russia. For that reason Papadopoulos was not charged with taking part in some kind of Trump-Russia conspiracy, or being a conduit between Trump and Moscow, which was widely speculated, he was just charged with lying to the FBI about a pretty minor issue which is the timing of his contacts with Mifsud. Papadopoulos says he wanted to protect the Trump campaign because he didn’t want to implicate Trump in looking like he was tied up with Russia stealing emails. Even though in actual fact, as Papadopoulos’ case shows, Trump wasn’t implicated.

So, we have the inciting case of the Trump-Russia investigation turning up nothing. Then we have the Trump Tower meeting. So, that’s where in June 2016, you have a music publicist named Rob Goldstone, he writes to Donald Trump Jr, and he says: hey I know some Russians who have incriminating information about Hillary Clinton and her dealings with the Russians that might be useful to your campaign and this is all a part of the Russian government’s support for Donald Trump’s campaign. And Donald Trump Jr says if this is what you say it is, I love it. So, they have the meeting, and by all accounts the Russian lawyer, Natalia Veselnitskaya, has no incriminating information on Hillary Clinton and she just wants to talk about her effort to repeal the sanctions which were imposed under the Magnitsky Act — which is an issue she has been working on for a long time. By all accounts the meeting ended after 20 minutes. And then Robert Goldstone – the publicist who set up the meeting – he comes out and says well yeah, actually, what I said there in that email was just “publicist puff” – those are his words. Because he just wanted to get that meeting set up for his client – the Agalarovs – the Russians who had told him about the Russian lawyer who had wanted to meet with the Trump campaign.

By all accounts, no evidence has emerged that a Trump-Russia conspiracy came out of that meeting. It is totally plausible that this Russian lawyer, Natalia Veselnitskaya, wanted to talk about lifting sanctions under the Magnitsky Act because that is an issue she has been working very hard on for many years. And by the way, she has working with the firm Fusion GPS, which is the firm behind the Steele Dossier. They hired Christopher Steele, the ex-British spy, who wrote that Dossier alleging a conspiracy between Trump and Russia.

So, the odds that the Russian government is going to set up a meeting in which it colludes with the Trump campaign with the same woman that is working with the firm that ends up accusing Russia of colluding with the Trump campaign is pretty nonsensical. It doesn’t make any sense. If you were going to collude with the Trump campaign you probably would want to find a more discrete way to do it.

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