Aaron Maté is a journalist known for his work as a former host/producer at the Real News, Democracy Now, and producer at Al Jazeera English. He is also a
contributor at the Nation, who has recently been dedicating much of his column space to debunking claims that the Trump campaign colluded with the Russian government, more famously known as the "Russiagate" scandal.
Maté has become well-known for his fearless and adversarial approach to interviewing guests, especially for his now infamous one-on-one interview with
discredited journalist
Luke Harding; as well as James Risen, a writer at the Intercept, leading one commentator to
describe him as a "beast."
With the Russiagate narrative once again dominating recent headlines, the
Mind Unleashed decided to catch up with Maté for a lengthy conversation to get his take on the most recent developments.
TMU: I have seen you get into a lot of debates on Twitter about the Russiagate narrative. What do you say to someone who firmly believes that there is a great deal of publicly available evidence that the Trump campaign had illicit dealings, or colluded, with the Russian government?
AM: I will start by saying broadly: if you look on the surface, yeah you might think there is something suspicious going on because you have some cases of Trump-associates meeting Russians and you have emails written, like the one from Rob Goldstone, a publicist, that says the Russian government supports Donald Trump. And you know, you can put all these things together and yeah, on the surface you could say that this looks very sketchy and this looks like there was maybe some conspiracy Trump and Russia.
Comment: See: Former British Army chief admits Russia is justified in seeing NATO aggression as 'strategic threat'