Hi, this is Josh Marshall, and this is the Josh Marshall podcast. Today we have a

really exciting interview. You know, we have a lot of great

interviews, a lot of great discussions on this show, but today we're talking to a

guy named John Seifer, who is a retired member of the CIA Cl service which is basically means he's retired

spy from the CIA and not exclusively but one of his main areas of operation kind of specialty was Russia and the former Soviet Union.

So the thing I wanted to talk with him about is I wanted to get a sense of, you know, when we're looking at this stuff with Trump and Putin and Russia, and trying to get a sense of what is going on here.

Clearly, Donald Trump is not, even if we take the most maximal look,

Donald Trump is not a traditional formal spy.

He's not like a Russian agent in some formal sense because he's too crazy and he's too erratic and he's out there saying like oh I love

Putin I want to deal with it it's it's not that so there's it going to be a

spectrum of people who like a Rick Ames or Robert Hansen these kind of high

level intelligence figures who were spies taking money from Russia and giving them our

secrets to people who are just you know kind of do

occasional favors and stuff like that and there's this whole range and I think we

need to understand that spectrum to have a sense of what is going on here.

And to me, there's no better way to get a sense of that spectrum and how these things work by then talking with someone who used to run

agents and do this kind of stuff on our side and also had some involvement with, you know, finding people on our side who were spying for the

Soviets and the Russians and so forth.

So we have that conversation and it was really, David David Tainter my co-host is here.

Hey Josh. What do you think? I mean we we obviously we already talked about it.

Right, we just take the interview. Yeah I found his comments about kind of a range that there is a spectrum of, I don't know, how would you describe it.

Sort of from useful idiot to like controlled asset basically, right?

...