Oliver Stone Dismisses Bill Maher Questions About Russian Interference: Our Intel Agencies Aren’t Reliable

Director Oliver Stone dismissed a new report on Russian interference during a talk Friday night with Bill Maher.

Maher brought up the Senate Intelligence Committee report on Russia and before he could even finish the question Stone gave a very dismissive hand-wave. Maher continued and said it shows bipartisan agreement on Trump campaign-Russia contacts.

“This guy Konstantin [Kilimnik] who we heard about,” Maher said, “now they are naming him as a Russian intelligence officer. He’s GRU. He was coordinating with Trump’s campaign manager Manafort. And your namesake Roger Stone organized the Wikileaks dump 30 minutes after the Access Hollywood tape came out. You can’t really think that a Russian president — the one that’s in there now — should be able to ratfuck our elections like this, can you?”

“Oh, Bill,” Stone said. “I’ve known you too long, and I think you’re sophisticated enough to know that you have to question everything that comes out of our intelligence agencies. If you haven’t learned that by you, you have a long way to go still.”

“So you think — so they’re lying?” Maher asked.

“The intelligence agencies are not reliable, they’ve been screwing with America going back to the Vietnam War, going back to the Iraq Wars, Afghani wars,” Stone responded. “It’s very hard to find out the truth from them. And everything they publish — the rumors and all of the anonymous sources, the think tanks, the anti-Russia… it all adds up into this ball of wax that becomes enormous. And they have people like you, who are skeptical generally, believing it.”

“They went after Manafort in a way that — it was bizarre,” Stone continued. “He wasn’t that intelligent and he didn’t have that much to say or do about any of this.”

Maher also asked Stone about Aleksei Navalny, the Russian opposition leader who was poisoned recently.

Stone said it requires investigation and added, “We’re in a moment in time when anything about China or Russia is being broadcast loudly to the American people. We have a very effective Western media that does this all the time. You have to go back, and you have been skeptical in the past and asked why do we need enemies?… Why do we want to make this into an issue? Why?”

“People have associated your name with conspiracy. I’ve never seen you that way,” Maher said, briefly mentioning JFK. “But we seem to be in a place now where the conspiracies hide in plain sight with Trump… Even Bond villains only tell their plot to James Bond. This guy announces it to the whole world. He said the other day, basically, ‘I’m screwing with the Post Office so that people can’t mail in their ballots.'”

Stone called Trump a “sad figure” and said he wouldn’t vote for him, but added, “To make our foreign policy dependent on attacking Trump, to get rid of Trump, and creating a Cold War environment with China and with Russia and with other countries, is crazy… They’re looking for everything possible to build up this Russia-James Bond-Dr. No scenario.”

“You think they sit around thinking about Americans all the time? They don’t care,” he added. “You can’t go with the groupthink.”

You can watch above, via HBO.