Malcolm Nance On With Stephanie Miller
How We Tracked Down Russian Money

Malcolm Nance is on with Stephanie Miller to explain how our intelligence agencies tracked down Russian money that was used to pay Afghans to kill US soldiers on Putin’s hit list.

This interview is a great exploration behind the scenes of intelligence and diplomatic circles. Culminating in how the information is prepared for Presidential briefings. He always gets more in depth with Stephanie than on MSNBC panels and Joy Reid. I believe this is how the conversation went.

Stephanie Miller:

Good morning awesome dance good morning, Malcolm Nance.

Malcolm Nance:

I’ve, actually secreted myself on the Hudson River waterfront, trying to calm myself down from all the F’ery, the only way I can put it, that has been transpiring over the last few days.

Stephanie Miller:

Yeah. I know I don’t even know where to start. I’ve been saying all morning. So this latest story. The data on the financial transfers between bolstered suspicions that Russia offered bounties. In the intelligence, I don’t know, in the legal business. This is, it’s hard evidence, right? In the intelligence community. Obviously I mean they’re deliberately, even to Republican lawmakers, trying to present this yesterday as disputed intelligence.
You know, because sometimes you don’t know right if the intelligence you get from detainee interrogations is true, but this this to me seems like this was the hard evidence to back this up that made it. That’s, why it was in the presidential Daily Brief right?

Malcolm Nance:

Let me spy-splain how things transpire. You do a special operations mission. You kick down some doors. You storm a mud hut. Where you know that a Taliban paymaster is at, and you capture, everyone who’s inside the room. You start your SSE sensitive site, exploitation mission. That’s what we call it when we root through everything they have and you’re, expecting to find a few hundred thousand dollars of old, you know, rupees and Pakistani rupees and a few, maybe a few hundred dollars in new US bills, and you pull out a packet from the ground and inside is ten million brand new US dollars that you should not find in a place like this.

Tracking Russian Money- Nance On The Trail

You interrogate the people and you find out that this money was given to them by an intermediary. When you follow that intermediary. You find him crossing the border to Tajikistan and going to the Central Bank of Tajikistan and you determine that all those $ 100 bills, because we track every one of those serial numbers, comes from an account which had money transferred to it by an onion. A private military contractor or a subsidiary Russian organization that is linked to the GRU.
So now you watch that money electronically. An SA starts getting involved, Treasury Intelligence starts getting involved. We start going after the phones of the people who were actually seen in there. The people who are involved in the transactions in Moscow and you confirm that that money came from Russia, but then you talk to those prisoners again and they go, yeah. Well, you know we were offered a thousand dollars. Ten US brand new US hundred dollar bills. Because that’s all they’ll handle is $100 US dollar bills, and every time we kill an American,this guy pays us out of this account. Otherwise we just get our bag of you, know, oatmeal and a share of goat and that’s what our salary is. So it makes sense for us to go out and kill more Americans so we can have this sweet sweet cash.

Then US intelligence, now having traced it all the way back to Russia, will then build up a picture of all of its attacks and go back and re-interrogate people and check to see were these attacks paid for out of this special fund. Usually when you tell somebody that you’re gonna let them go, or you’re gonna go easy on you. At that point, it’s, not his money, so they generally tell you the truth. That’s how we got this picture. I had heard this story. I had heard the story that Russia was sending weapons from Tajikistan to Afghanistan in 2017, and that was confirmed by the commander of US forces in Afghanistan, general Nicholson in 2018.

When he went on NBC News and said Russia has a pipeline of weapons going to Afghanistan, but you can’t always sustain that pipeline. So the easiest thing to do is send over money, because that gets results, and this story now from John Bolton was well-known in the White House in 2019.

Stephanie Miller:

Well, thank you. As you said this weekend, Malcolm, these are lies. There’s, special reporting communication systems for very eminent, every critical threat intelligence that gets these reports to the desk of the president or into the president’s hand, 24/7, 365 in no more than 10 minutes. I mean there is no plausible way, Is there, that Trump didn’t know about this.

MalcolmNance:

No. Here’s how that community, you know every agency, has a flash traffic system. Flash traffic means the highest possible movement and critical information system. A critical information warning system that goes directly to the president.
From the moment you recognize the criticality of the threat. One of those reports would have been. “We are capturing weapons from Russia that we have tracked across the Tajik border. They are funding the Taliban.” That would have been one of the flash traffic messages that went to the president. Now, once you get that sweet, sweet money captured and you find out that this stuff is going through Tajikistan and it’s now being distributed, that is the sort of information the President must know.

He must know it because it changes the entire geopolitical dynamic between Russia and the United States. If you care about US soldiers, if you don’t care about US soldiers, you stick it in your pocket and then you invite Vladimir Putin to join the G7.
So I’m pretty sure Donald Trump got that message within 10 minutes of recognition, and let me define this. Recognition could have been after the CIA analyzed it for six months after the Special Operations Command captured two more caches of money. Whenever they finally decide, hey this thing’s real. That’s when the president would have had this flash communication brought to him. Because again, it would change the the political dynamic between Russia and the United States.
If confirmed.

Stephanie Miller:

Malcolm you said again on TV. You said, I always say this about Trump relationship with Putin. When you owe money to your bookie, you talk nice about him, I mean here we go, as you also said.
How did you say it? You said, hang on a second. That any President, any normal, United States, President, would have been livid, right? I mean you said That Trump doesn’t seem remotely upset. If no one briefed him, which I don’t believe for a second, but you said you’d, think he’d, be livid. Unless he’s lying. I mean seriously, he still has not condemned Putin or this or them right? Only condemn the media as usual.

Malcolm Nance:

You could be the nicest most milquetoast president in American history. You could be Jimmy Carter and say what. I’m gonna pray on this, and I’m gonna have a discussion about that with my National Security Council staff.
But first I’m calling in the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and then I’m gonna call the Director of National Intelligence the director of CIA and director of NSA and we’re gonna have a powwow. I want to know if this is true. Because if it’s true and you’ve confirmed at least one hit that killed three Marines. We’re, going to be having a discussion about this. Whether you make a diplomatic note, whether you withdraw your ambassador to the United States Whether you decide to do any myriad of things which do not involve kinetic warfare, or asymmetric warfare against Russia, or a direct confrontation internationally. You’re, going to do something, right?
There’s, not a person here. Every one of us who is listening to this show is more qualified to be president than Donald Trump, because we would safeguard the lives of our service members.

Stephanie Miller:

So somebody tweeted, Malcolm Nance, for DNI under Biden, and you said I’m better qualified than the current bunch of incompetents. I mean, That’s, the other thing we had literally true, we of course, but we had Chairman Schiff on yesterday, Malcolm, and he said the right people weren’t in the room. It wasn’t intelligence professionals like you, it was political, appointees and hacks that were deliberately trying to mis-inform even Republicans by saying: oh, yes, the intelligence, it was raw. Then these financial data transfers happened and it wasn’t raw anymore. It was to the PDF level correct?

Malcolm Nance:

Here, look, but you have to understand. Let me define for you again, do a little more spy-‘splaning between raw and processed intelligence, analyzed intelligence. When we kick that door down and we drag all those people out and we write up those initial reports and we stack that money there and you have Pictures of guys lying on top of tables in their underwear and body armor, with that ten million dollars.. I’ve, actually seen that that’s, the fun we have in the field.
I actually sat on a billion dollars.

Stephanie Miller:

Sorry, you in your underwear just popped in my head and I lost my train of thought. Go ahead.

Malcolm Nance:

Oh, I wear what we call Ranger panties, which are running shorts. But that’s raw intelligence and then, when that information goes up to the joint analytical cell or the theater analytical cell in Bagram, Air Force Base in Afghanistan. It starts becoming processed where they fuse together.
They do fusion intelligence. They put together all of these parts and you get a multi-dimensional multi sourced product. That is sent to the Defense Intelligence Agency and then to the CIA and Director of National Intelligence, and they analyzed it and Then they fuse in what the CIA agents in Tajikistan have been getting.
What US diplomats have been hearing in Moscow, what the Treasury Department is actually seeing, based on their NSA intercepts of Bank transcript, and then CIA and DNI create a product. That has all sources. That is finished intelligence product.
So these finish, as I understand it, multiple finished intelligence products went to the National Security Council staff. None of that’s raw. Right, all based on a rumor or or a find, and they’re dancing around that word, and the word briefed, to mislead us.

Stephanie Miller:

Thank you and yet Malcolm. Can I get your take too on this? Because, again, all these stories end up just being worse and worse and worse by the news cycle. Than we thought they were right and I tend to believe Bolton’s timeline on this.

I don’t, know about you, but our friend AG at Mueller She Wrote said in March. Trump was briefed that Russians were paying Afghans to murder US troops. He also fired the DNI and gutted the National Counter-terrorism Center in March. Oh, and for the first time since 2006, the DNI threat report was kept from public and Congress.
In March I mean, like you always say coincidence, takes a lot of planning there’s. All I mean is this has the smell of another full-on cover-up of stuff that he’s known, for God knows how long, doesn’t.

Malcolm Nance:

For those of you who haven’t read my book: The Plot to Betray America.

The paperback edition is coming out in a few weeks and I upgraded it. I updated it right to just before this scandal and it’s, just packed full of all of those things. You just said every time over the last four years that he is compromised national security. It’s plain as day, and it’s, more plain that he does it for two things. Love of money and love of Putin. You could you know. I actually have to apologize to Benedict Arnold, at the end of my book. I know, really, because Benedict Arnold at least served the nation and almost lost his leg. Fighting the British and then turned strictly for money.

Stephanie Miller:

Yeah right! Trump has always been a traitor.

Malcolm Nance:

You’re right yeah, but he had the note. He actually had the honor to write George Washington and tell him. Donald Trump is going to come off like another General. General Charles Lee, the guy who lost the Battle of Monmouth. 46 years after that war ended the revolution ended. They found a letter of his giving the British the battle plan to defeat George Washington. So I suspect, when Trump’s out of office, the documented treason will actually be found and it won’t, be pretty. We’ll Have to send people to prison.

Stephanie Miller:

Thank You Malcolm. We just talked to Glenn Kirchner about that, but what’s, but can I just one last one because I’m as concerned as I’m sure you are with this election. Lev Parnas tweeted, want to get your take on live Parnas, tweeted. Russia has infiltrated election systems, but just has yet to leverage those hacks. They have not largely planned for a large vote-by-mail effort.
Hence, why Trump is scared of voting by mail. It’s also why he’s, scared of a large deficit he shows in the polls. You always give it, but after scaring the living bejesus out of us, you always give us hope that we can overcome this. We can overcome the massive amount of help we know he’s going to get from Russia, and God knows where else and voter suppression, right?

Malcolm Nance:

We can – and you know what? We’ve, already seen good examples of this. We have to blow the margins out. That means right now, every one of you who is listening to the sound of my voice. I want you to personally identify five people who have not voted. That you will take to the polls on Election Day, particularly if you’re in a blue state, I mean a red state. That could be a swing state like Texas, like Georgia, like Florida, Ohio. Those states we have to win to blow this away. There was an election map that said that if it could be held today, Joe Biden would win 400 electoral college votes.
We have the capacity to do this, but this is going to be one of those, I’m staying in line till midnight. Like the old black woman in Georgia.

Stephanie Miller:

And praying to my Nürnberg Prosecutor, daddy, that this is a bigger landslide than Goldwater Miller in ’64. I think he’ll be rooting for that. Malcolm real, quick speaking of which dearly departed you tweeted, my deepest sympathy goes out to Rob Reiner his wife, Michelle and family for the loss of their dad Carl Reiner. We all loved him as an artist. A patriot and a voice of reason in an age of unreason. I have to say, I was hesitant to write yesterday because you know, the day of is always and Rob was kind enough to write back.
And I just said that, on behalf of all of us cuz, so many of you, you know, obviously our Steph-head family a because he- I just. I said, what a kind, wonderful, brilliant man he was and son. Just you know, I can’t say enough about them as a family and as Patriots right?

Malcolm Nance:

We know him personally and we love them and I feel sorry for them, and Carl was an amazing person. I and unfortunately you know he. He was a patriot right to the last day.

Stephanie Miller:

Yes, yes, tweeting right up yes to 98 years old, but I was gonna, say Malcolm what up what a life well-lived right. Married to love of his life for like 65 years, you know, wonderful, family and son, amazing career. You know talk about, just a patriot and again a life well-lived

Malcolm Nance:

So well. If his tweets can be retweeted because they all they will live eternal for us, and let me tell you I know he would appreciate this comment.

I wanted to say it yesterday. He still owes me lunch, him and Mel Brooks owe me a lunch

Stephanie Miller:

All right, love! You, honey! Talk to you next week.