C&B Talk to the Only American to Work for the WH and Kremlin

CLAY: We are joined now by Michael Caputo, who is the former assistant secretary of Health and Human Services for public affairs under Trump, the only American to work for both the White House and the Kremlin. And, Michael, you have family right now in Ukraine. You are uniquely suited to be able to analyze this situation. What are your family members telling you most recently, what are you hearing from them, are they safe?

CAPUTO: Well, my family… Thanks for having me on, by the way. My family is not in Kiev. They are in an ancillary city. And so, therefore, while they’ve heard some explosions in far-off areas where there were military bases and military storage areas, they have not seen any fighting or heard any real commotion, while people are packing bags and leaving. But just a few minutes ago in their town, air raid sirens went off. I’m really right now just taking a break from trying to evacuate my family from Ukraine to talk to you. This is very, very real for our family.

BUCK: Those evacuations right now, we’ve heard that up to 50,000 people have left Ukraine, mostly I believe for Poland. Some are now trying to make it to Romania. So those are I assume women and children and the elderly who are engaged in those evacuations? Because I think Ukraine has declared that no fighting age male 18 to 60 — which is quite a large span — is able to leave the country. Is that the situation on the ground?

CAPUTO: That’s my understanding — and, frankly, every male I know 18 to 60 won’t even think of leaving. My in-laws, my father and mother, are of more advanced years. Our concern is for their immediate safety. Like most Ukrainians, my father and mother didn’t believe it was going to happen because Vladimir Putin… People ask me, “When is Vladimir Putin going to invade Ukraine?” I always answered: February 27th, 2014! He invaded eight years ago.

And Joe Biden gave them blankets, if you remember, didn’t give ’em anything else, and the West has let Vladimir Putin fester like a boil on the backside of Ukraine for eight years. So when we tried to tell my family, “You guys need to make a plan. We need to get you over here to the United States. You need to get out of there,” they would shrug about it. “You know, he’s been there for a while. He’s been gonna just… It’s all bluff.” But weakness is provocative to a man like Vladimir Putin, and obviously President Biden projects weakness above all.

CLAY: So where do we go from here? Obviously, we’re all rooting for you to get your family out safely. But you were talking about Putin and the weakness that’s being projected by American leadership right now. There’s been discussion that maybe the Baltic states… Finland now is evidently in the crosshairs with Putin. Where does this go from here if you are assessing it? Is he finished in Ukraine, or are there other areas that would then be next on his hit list, so to speak, of places that he wants to try to bring back within the Russian sphere of influence?

CAPUTO: Ukraine is very unique among all nations near and around the border of Russia. I write a lot about this in my book, The Ukraine Hoax, which is available on Amazon. In Ukraine Hoax I talk about how that Ukraine has long been the playground of the globalist elite and their children where people like Hunter Biden could make billions of dollars a year doing nothing because they had influence over the policies that his father, the vice president, who was in charge of Ukraine policy in the United States as vice president. He could influence that.

And he did that on behalf of oligarchs. The fact of the matter is the oligarchs of Ukraine, the oligarchs of Russia have been interacting with the oligarchs of Italy and France and England and the United States for decades now. Decades. And one of the reasons why these sanctions that they’re putting on pollutant right now are so laughable, just laughable… I noticed that they’re not… They’re still refusing to cut off Putin from the SWIFT banking system. That’s a joke, right?

And we’re still not touching the oil and gas arena, which is, of course, whole reason this thing is happening! But at the same time, you look at Germany, who is basically to me, they sound like they’re pro-Putin and in favor of this invasion. And Italy, on their sanctions, they carved out luxury goods so the oligarchs in Russia could still get their Gucci loafers! This is a joke. The whole thing is a joke.

And all about the oligarchs of all these nations — including the oligarchs of America — continuing to make money on the backs of the Ukrainian people, and, by the way, on the backs of the American people. Because all of our gas prices are gonna go through the roof, our inflation is gonna go through the roof. And, meanwhile, the oligarchs of Russia will get their Gucci loafers. Let’s make no mistake about this. Ukraine is the playground of the American globalist elite, including American politicians and our billionaires who are making money and we get to pay for it.

BUCK: We’re speaking to Michael Caputo, former Trump administration HHS official and author of The Ukraine Hoax. Michael, I know you lived in Moscow for seven years, so you have some understanding of the mind of the Russian people from being among them. Two things for you. One, what do you think Putin’s end goal is with all this? And, two, how far will the Russian people go in supporting him toward those goals?

CAPUTO: Well, I’ll tell you, I lived there seven years. I actually worked for the Kremlin, which you can imagine how attractive that made me to the fake Russiagate hoax and the Mueller team. I was practically dating those people for a couple years. Cost me $350,000 in legal fees! And of course, it’s all crap, it’s all fake. I was working for Boris Yeltsin, then president, and I was sent there by Hillary Clinton’s husband, Bill Clinton, to try to help them with their transition to democracy! The situation is very different from the years when I was working in the Kremlin.

There was a democratic government. The people who worked in the presidential administration were public servants. When Vladimir Putin came in, you remember the words of George W. Bush about how he looked in his eyes and he saw his soul and he could work with him. By the time 2005, 2006, 2007 ran around, we realized that it was a totally different place. Vladimir Putin is running a criminal gang — and this is not an exaggeration. The people around him that we call them the siloviki, his close advisers of his, are almost all his former buddies from the KGB — and every single one of them is a billionaire.

Anybody brought in to the Kremlin to work with Vladimir Putin is expected to go ahead and make money on the side. “You get the… You know, I’ll give you the assistant presidential advisory position; you get the aluminum industry. You better go make millions because you kick back money to Vladimir Putin.” That explanation, which I go through in The Ukraine Hoax, is important to understand because this is a profit-making enterprise for Vladimir Putin! This is an oil-and-gas situation for Vladimir Putin.

The people around him expect him to allow them to create a situation where they can all make more money, so he gets the kickback on that money. When I was in Russia, oil was about 17, $18 a barrel. Now it’s $160 a barrel! These people are spending that money just building ugly homes. And, by the way, their children are in all the boarding schools mansions in Mayfair, London, they all hang out in the VIP lounges of Paris. They live in co-ops in Manhattan.

All these people, these oligarchs, these siloviki, these billionaires who are around Vladimir Putin, they should be sanctioned! We should round up their children, their wives, their cooks, and their drivers, and take away their visas and send them packing back to Russia! But we don’t. You know why? Because they own London and because they’re making tons of money for American people on Wall Street. We don’t do it because we’re complicit in it. We have to understand that.

BUCK: Michael Caputo, author of The Ukraine Hoax. Michael, thanks for bringing your expertise to the show today. We appreciate it.

CAPUTO: Thank you very much.

CLAY: Man. I loved that.

BUCK: Fired up.

CLAY: That’s passion!

BUCK: Yeah, he’s ready to go, man. This is the thing. We’re not hearing what the real mentality of the Ukrainian people are right now, not hearing it enough. And everything that I’m seeing is they’re in this fight until they can’t fight anymore. So we’ll see what ends up happening.