Judging Freedom - Aaron Maté: The FBI and Russia.

Episode Date: January 8, 2025

Aaron Maté: The FBI and Russia.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Thank you. Hi, everyone. Judge Andrew Napolitano here for Judging Freedom. Today is Wednesday, January 8th, 2025. Aaron Maté is here. Aaron, I'll be late. Happy New Year to you. Thank you very much for all the time and effort and thoughtfulness and research that you brought to us in 2024. It's deeply appreciated by the audience, my team and me. And of course, I hope we can continue to do so in 2025. You recently received a response to a two-year-old Freedom of Information Act request that you filed with the FBI, and it has to do with the FBI and Donald Trump and Russia. And I want to ask you what you learned about that.

But before we get to it, Trump has been saying some unusual, startling, even threatening things two weeks before he becomes president. And I thought we could talk about that. On Gaza, he has said things like, these are all paraphrases, if the hostages are not returned by Inauguration Day, there'll be hell to pay, as if it isn't hell already. On Greenland and on Panama, he won't rule out the use of force to expand the United States territory, a la Netanyahu-like, into those areas. He's intimated. He's got his eyes on Canada. Is this a man of peace that we all thought? Or is this just thoughtless babble intended to produce some sort of negotiating advantage? Tough to get inside his mind, but going by the experience of his first term,

this is someone who ran for office in 2016, criticizing foreign wars, especially in Libya and Iraq. And then when he came to office, to his credit, and we have to acknowledge this, he didn't start any new wars, but he came close. He almost started one with Iran when he assassinated Qasem Soleimani. He did launch a regime change operation inside Venezuela. He did break the Iran nuclear deal and impose what he called maximum pressure, which really meant maximum sadism against the people of Iran, because it's not the government that suffers from having sanctions reimposed, it's the people. And so Trump was inconsistent. But look, he also has said sensible things over the years. And even

now, at his recent news conference, he said that Joe Biden blocked a peace deal between Russia and Ukraine. That's exactly right. And to the extent that Trump's comments reflect a change of policy, that should be welcome, because we're talking about a really dangerous and catastrophic proxy conflict between two rival nuclear powers. So he's obviously very inconsistent. As you said, when you threaten more hell to pay in Gaza, there already is hell. Gaza's destroyed. So if Trump is threatening more carnage, it's not only, I think, just objectionable on the face of it to threaten more carnage in a place that suffered a genocide, but just what more can you even promise? Well, can you imagine american troops

fighting side by side with the idf i don't even know if they would want that both the american troops and the idf yeah that's not going to happen and again one of the reasons it won't happen is because israel doesn't need u.s forces by its side for its operation in gaza which is not a war it's just a it's a genocide. It's just wiping out a civilian population and their infrastructure, making it unlivable. So Israel doesn't need U.S. forces to do that with them. It's doing that fine with U.S. weapons, which the Biden administration has continued to supply. Biden administration is going out of office by announcing more weapons for Israel. $8 billion worth was the most recent

figure, and I expect Trump will continue that. Trump also not in the same comment that he made about Greenland, Panama, and Gaza. And by the way, when he talked about hostages, he didn't mention the 10,000 Palestinian hostages confined in Israeli prisons without charge or prosecution. Some of those hostages were born in those prisons. Do I have that right? There are pregnant women that have been locked up by Israel. So yeah, it does make sense that people would be born in captivity.

Palestinians would be born in captivity. Yeah. Well, he said in another interview, he is Israel's best friend. What does that mean? Is that terrifying? What could he possibly give Netanyahu that Biden hasn't given him?

I mean, first of all, just the fact that this is treated as legitimate parlance in politics, that you call someone your best friend. I mean, we hear this often. Israel is our best friend. We're their best friend. As if we're in grade school and not in the world of serious international affairs. It's just a sad commentary on the state of U.S. politics. What Trump really means is, and what every politician who loves to trumpet what great friends are to Israel, is that they're the best friends of the Israel lobby who give

them a lot of money, whether it's AIPAC or the Adelsons. I mean, that's Trump's best friend when it comes to donor money. It's Miriam Adelson who spent tens of millions of dollars on his campaign. And that's who he's been a very good friend to. He's bragged about it. He's bragged about how he moved the U.S. embassy to Jerusalem. He recognized Israel's theft of the Golan Heights from Syria as a gift to the Adelsons. Those are his real best friends, not Israel.

If he was a good friend to Israel, he would join the rest of the world in accepting the major Palestinian compromise of a two-state solution with a Palestinian state and just 22% of their ancestral homeland. Palestinian leaders have accepted this. If Trump was an actual threat, a friend to Israel, he would join the rest of the world and the Palestinian leadership, including Hamas, members of Hamas, in accepting this, rather than encouraging Israel's scorched earth policy of genocide and continued land theft of Palestinians. His likely national security advisor, who without an FBI background check or Senate confirmation will soon have the job and a huge staff and access to national

security secrets, Mike Walz, who's currently a congressman, commented the other day that the Trump administration is interested in, he didn't use the word suppression, but dealing with speech that is critical of Israel and praiseworthy of the Palestinians. Well, what is the government going to do? They're talking about to uphold the First Amendment. Well, that's one of the scary prospects of this trump administration and it's all the more surprising because you know if you look at the way social media has been censored if you look at the targets of sort of um this shift in recent years of basically weaponizing the government people like trump have been the target of it you know uh basically him being framed as a russian

agent by the fbi the hunter biden laptop story being censored on Russian agent by the FBI, the Hunter Biden laptop story being censored on social media on the fake grounds that it was a Russian operation. That was targeted against Trump and his team. But yet Trump and his team feel comfortable using the same overreaches to go after people who support Palestinian rights. It's one of these things where Democrats are so bad that they created a huge opening for Trump to exploit as being a champion of free speech. But rather than take that opportunity seriously, you know, Republicans want to use those same tools, those same acts of repression against supporters of Palestinian rights. And that just reflects the bipartisan commitment to crushing dissent if it goes against Israel. It's as if the same mentality will occupy the West Wing as is about to leave it,

except they have an R after their names instead of a D. When I read what Mike Walz said, it made my stomach cringe. You know, I don't need to give a lesson on the First Amendment, but the whole purpose of the First Amendment is to prevent the government from evaluating and responding to the content of people's speech. It's none of the government's business. You recently received the response to a two-year-old, correct me if I'm wrong, Freedom of Information Act request to the FBI. What were you looking for and what did you get? So I filed this Freedom of Information Act request in August 2022, and I got an answer back on New Year's Eve, so more than two years later. And what I wanted

was the FBI's predication for opening up an unprecedented investigation targeting Donald Trump while he was sitting in the White House as a potential agent of Russia. This is a widely overlooked case, but it's incredibly important. And it followed the original Russia investigation. And that's the investigation that most people know about. That's Crossfire Hurricane, which was opened up in July 2016 by the FBI targeting Trump's campaign and going after people like George Papadopoulos and Michael Flynn and Paul Manafort, accusing them of somehow conspiring with Russia in the 2016 election. Now, that case is widely known and it's been discredited. John Durham did a lengthy investigation. He found the predication for that investigation to be basically baseless. If you read the opening FBI document that launched that case, they talk about Papadopoulos having suggested some kind of suggestion that Russia could help Trump without making any reference to the stolen emails that Russia allegedly stole, which I don't think they actually did, but that's a different story. The vaguest tip possible, I think that vague predication then was actually just a cover for

the fact the FBI was in real life relying on the Steele dossier, but didn't want to admit it. The Steele dossier being the collection of conspiracy theories paid for by the Hillary Clinton campaign in their effort to frame Trump as a Russian asset. But we know by now that that case has been discredited. No one takes that seriously anymore. But amazingly, as that case was already ongoing, after Trump took office, Andrew McCabe, in May 2017, decided, you know what, it's not enough that we would have one investigation going

targeting Trump and his circle for conspiring with Russia. Let's open up a second investigation, a counterintelligence investigation of the president himself personally, of being an agent of Russia and also possibly obstructing the ongoing probe into his campaign's ties to Russia. And so Andrew McCabe in May 2017 personally ordered this investigation and it was launched against Trump while he was sitting in the White House for being an agent of Russia. And We've never gotten an official explanation for why this investigation was launched. We got the official investigation. We got the official explanation for why the original Trump-Russia crossfire hurricane

investigation was open. And that was that Papadopoulos tip that was incredibly vague. We don't know what the predication was for this May 2017 probe. And the takeaway from my document that I just got from the FBI is they're still hiding it. The part of the document that says the factual basis for that probe is completely redacted. And now we're talking about more than seven years later. So we still don't know officially from the FBI why they felt they had grounds to investigate the sitting president as a Russian agent. Do the documents. How many pages did you get? Are we talking about 10 or 1,000?

Six pages, mostly redacted. Okay. Do these six pages reflect whether or not they went to judges' research warrants or whether they used authority under the Patriot Act, as crazy as this sounds, to hack into the communications of the President of the United States? Well, this is the opening document. So what we can glean from that is that it was launched as a full investigation. And I mean, you know better than I, if the FBI launches a full investigation, I assume that then comes with sweeping surveillance powers.

And what we know from the closing document to this probe, because after, of course, this probe turned out absolutely nothing because it was based on a scam that Trump was a Russian agent, the FBI in its closing communication said that they used a, quote, a variety of investigative techniques to pursue it. We don't know what that variety of investigative techniques entailed, but it's not hard to imagine that it involves surveillance of a sitting president on the completely baseless grounds that he was a Russian agent. And Andrew McCabe in public statements has said

the basis for this probe was that Trump had fired Jim Comey, which led him to believe that Trump was covering something up because why else would Trump fire Jim Comey when in real life there was a million reasons to fire Jim Comey? Comey can be fired at will. Chris Wray acknowledges that, his successor, which is why he very graciously is about to resign as the head of the FBI. That could hardly be considered probable cause or even

articulable suspicion to commence a criminal investigation. Here's the kicker, and I fear that the answer to this is no, and maybe you can dissuade me. Will what happened to Trump persuade him to dial back the surveillance state in which we now live by vetoing the extensions of the Patriot Act, by nullifying Reagan's Executive Order 12333. I don't know what Reagan intended, but the intelligence community uses it to unleash themselves by stopping the FBI from hacking into people's electronic communication. Or are we just going to get more of the same, even though Donald Trump personally was victimized by all of these techniques? I mean, great question. And if anybody now has the political capital to oversee such reforms, it would be Trump. He was personally the target of a plot abetted by the intelligence community to undermine his presidency, who did spy on his campaign. All the things that he says are true.

And now he's just won the presidency. He's coming back to office. And so he does have a mandate here, I think, to roll this back. He also has a right to know about all the deceptions that were committed in pursuit of Russiagate, including, by the way, the still unproven allegation that Russia hacked the DNC and gave the emails to WikiLeaks.

There's a lot of reasons to doubt that allegation, and there's been very little transparency when it comes to it. The few times we've gotten evidence on that, they undermine the allegation, including, and Ray McGogovern's talked to you about this on your show he's been tireless in exposing this issue when the c when the president of the firm crowd strike which was like christopher steel paid for by hillary clinton uh which first lodged

the allegation that russia hacked the dnc he admitted under oath to the house intelligence committee that actually yeah we have no evidence that Russia hacked these documents. So maybe under Trump now we'll finally get the transparency that has long evaded us. But, but back to your original question, it goes back to what we said before, you know, Trump talks a big game. He seems to, in his own, you know, uh, just personal capacity, have a lot of awareness about how Washington really works. But when you get into office, it becomes a different story. You're under a lot of pressure now. We saw him say a lot of things in the campaign trail in 2016, but then do the opposite when he came into office. We saw House Speaker Mike Johnson, before he became House Speaker, being a very articulate opponent

of government surveillance. But then what happened when he took over the House speakership? He caved and he basically adopted the positions on surveillance that he previously criticized. So similar questions hang over Trump. What will he do when he's actually back in office versus just being a private citizen? It sounds like he wants to double the size of the United States by using the military to seize real estate, even though Greenland, if you look at the top of it, is so close to Russia. Hard for me to believe that Putin would roll over over that. I want to play some clips for you just to raise your blood pressure, but also to get your comments. These are from Secretary Blinken's sort of farewell interviews. There's a long interview with the New York Times, but we

have some short clips. He repeats again that Putin has failed, but I'd like your thoughts on the context in which he says it. Chris, cut number two. Do you feel like you've left Ukraine in the strongest position that you could have, or what are the things that you could have done differently? Well, first, what we've left is Ukraine, which was not self-evident because Putin's ambition was to erase it from the map. We stopped that. Putin has failed. His strategic objective in regaining Ukraine has failed and will not succeed. Ukraine is standing. And I believe it also has extraordinary potential not only to survive, but actually to thrive going forward. And that does depend on decisions that future administrations and many other countries will make.

Earlier in the same interview, he says, we have set up Ukraine for a membership in NATO. It's almost as if his brain has been missing the past four years. If I were Ukrainian, I would be so angry at this guy. And, you know, understandably, many Ukrainians are obviously angry at Russia for invading their country. Fair enough. But Antony Blinken and his administration set up Ukraine to be destroyed. They discouraged Zelensky from accepting the Minsk Accords, which could have avoided all of this. And that was the peace deal reached in 2015 to basically grant some limited autonomy to the Donbass, to the ethnic Russians of the Donbass, to let them speak Russian, have some autonomous rights. And basically respect that Ukraine is a divided country.

So I'm not trying to pull it into NATO or any other camp. Just recognize that Ukraine is divided. Then Ukraine could have been in peace. But the U.S. didn't want that because they wanted to use Ukraine's conflict with Russia to its own advantage as a means to draw Russia in and bleed it. And that's why after Russia invaded, contrary to Blinken's claims that Russia wanted to erase Ukraine from the map, Ukraine and Russia immediately started negotiating over the same terms, basically, that were there in the Minsk Accords as to how to resolve the

problem in the East, where you had millions of people revolting against a US-backed government that took power in a coup in 2014. And again, we know now there was a peace deal. Donald Trump, as I said, recently acknowledged this too, but the U.S. stood in the way. And so Blinken, to justify and whitewash all of this, he says that Russia tried to erase Ukraine from the map and that we stopped them from doing that. But all Russia wanted was basically Ukraine committing to neutrality, not joining NATO, and respecting the rights of ethnic Russians in the Donbass. That was what Russia wanted, and that was basically the basis for the peace deal that the U.S. blocked.

So Blinken is just engaging in outright revisionism. And what's the result? Hundreds of thousands of dead. He says Ukraine is standing. When Ukraine's survival was never a threat, the issue was whether Ukraine would get to be a whole country or whether Russia, because of Ukraine's refusal to implement the Minsk Accords and then make a peace deal and then implement the peace deal that they negotiated,

whether Ukraine would then respect the rights of ethnic Russians. Because basically Ukraine refused to commit to that, Russia has taken more territory and continues to do that now. So that's what Blinken is bragging about. He's presided over hundreds of thousands of deaths and Ukraine losing more territory and standing to lose any more. Unfortunately, there are many people in the State Department and elite diplomats who agree with Blinken as unrealistic as it is, which leads me to this question. Do you think a lasting peace between the United States and Russia is feasible? I think anything is possible. If you look at Russia's demands shortly before it invaded, they put out this pretty extensive draft treaty between

Russia and the US and NATO. And everybody knows that Russia's demands were not take it or leave it. They were calling for a negotiation. And so what they wanted was for... The most important ask was neutrality for Ukraine, having Ukraine not join NATO. And they also wanted NATO to roll back its military infrastructure, especially the infrastructure that expanded after 1997, when there was a new round of NATO expansion. I think Russia knew it would not get all of its demands, but that's the point of a negotiation, is you make demands and then you sit down and talk. So there's no reason for me to believe that if a serious good faith negotiation was undertaken, that some sort of compromise could be reached. It has to start with, though, neutrality for Ukraine, which, again,

is not a radical demand. It was enshrined in Ukraine's founding declaration of state sovereignty. Year after year, polls in Ukraine showed that most Ukrainians supported neutrality. If you go back to 2008, when George W. Bush and Dick Cheney pushed through this NATO promise to Ukraine of one day joining NATO, most Ukrainians didn't even want that. So it's a good starting point to just go with what Ukrainian public opinion has long wanted and what I think is quite reasonable. And then from there on the other issues, there could be some sort of accommodation. So what it would take, though, is courage in Washington and a willingness to actually stand up to the forces of war and conflict who are invested in just perpetual conflict with a rival nuclear power. I don't think we're going to get that with the national the team he listens to. Will he listen to his Secretary of State Marco Rubio or his incoming National Security Advisor Mike Waltz? Or will he listen to his incoming Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard,

who has long advocated, I think, very sensible positions? She's very critical of this Cold War with Russia. And if you listen to Trump, that to me sounds like where his heart is too. Whether he has the political fortitude to go through with that, that's another question. And on that front, I am very skeptical, but you never know. Certainly with Biden and Jake Sullivan and Antony Blinken out of the way, I do think there's a lot more

of a likelihood, as small as that likelihood is. Aaron, my pleasure, my dear friend. Thank you very much for your thoughtfulness, for all your help, and we'll look forward to seeing you next week. Sounds good, Judge. Thank you. Okay, thank you. Coming up at three o'clock this afternoon, Phil Giraldi on his encounter with Jimmy Carter and Jeff Sachs, Professor Sachs. you won't believe who posted one of Professor Sachs' recent dramatic speeches. Judson Napolitano for Judging Freedom. Hey there.

Ritual here to give a big shout out to you for making it through the hectic holiday season. The magic of those family moments? That was you. And now there's new milestones to prep for in 2025. This new year, check clean, quality pregnancy nutrient support off your to-do list with Ritual. We've done the research to create science-backed pregnancy support like our prenatal multivitamin, natal choline, and fertility support, all designed to be taken alongside each other. But don't just take our word for it. They're also third-party tested for microbes and heavy metals and Clean Label Project certified. So whether you're trying, thinking about trying, or already there, we don't have to tell you that prioritizing yourself can be the hardest part.

That's why we're helping you get started today with 30% off a three-month supply for a limited time at ritual.com slash podcast. These statements have not been evaluated by the Food and Drug Administration. This product is not intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any disease.