Episode 39: Aaron Maté on Senate Intel Report, Julian Assange and Election 2020

Journalist Aaron Maté, a leading critic of the 4-year Russiagate affair, dissects the Senate Intel committee's final report on its inquiry into the subject.

Maté is especially critical of what he calls, the "farcical" conclusion that Roger Stone and Jerome Corsi—not only had advance knowledge of the explosive Wikileaks publication of the Podesta emails—but directed its founder Julian Assange on the timing of its release. He decries some of progressive media personalities who have subscribed to and promoted the contrived and wild Stone-Corsi-Assange nexus conspiracy theory. In addition, Mr. Maté blasts  the committee for its conscious decision not0 to interview Mr Assange as an essential witness.

In the second half of the interview, Maté laments the missed opportunity of the democratic party to focus on the economy, health care and education, rather than investing its future success on its obsession with the Russiagate investigation. He also challenges Joe Biden's reactionary, neo conservative foreign policy record and the Democratic party's presidential nominee’s defense of his son Hunter's lucrative lobbying contract with a Ukrainian oil company suspiciously achieved after the then VP’s key role in a Ukraine coup. However, in Maté,  like other leftists Cornel West, Angela Davis and Noam Chomsky, , makes it clear that he supports voting for Biden in order to avoid the disaster that  another 4 years of a Trump presidency would wreak on the U.S. 

Throughout the interview  Maté, a longtime defender supporter of Assange, excoriates the MSM for not circling its wagons in defense of the internationally acclaimed Wikileaks founder and editor.