Judging Freedom - Biden Administration Transparency - NOT

Episode Date: February 4, 2022

Journalists were critical during two exchanges Thursday; one between Jen Psaki and NPR’s Ayesha Rascoe, in which Rascoe was skeptical about the story regarding civilian casualties during the raid that killed the leader of ISIS in Syria; and another exchange between State Department spokesman Ned Price and AP reporter Matt Lee, where Lee expressed skepticism about U.S. intel that suggests Russia may engineer a fake attack by Ukraine.#Biden #Russia #ISIS #warSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Hello there everyone, Judge Andrew Napolitano here with Judging Freedom. Today is Friday, February 4, 2022. It's about 2.30 in the afternoon here on the East Coast. I've come to the cameras to bring to your attention a rather significant dispute brewing, sort of inside the Beltway, but it's of interest to everybody because it involves the freedom of speech and the transparency of the government. And the dispute is between White House and State Department journalists on one side and the White House spokesperson and the State Department spokesperson on the other side. So yesterday, President Biden, when he was in New York City,

announced that the government had conducted a raid on a house in Yemen, a country with which we are not at war. And as a result of the noise and the bullets coming from numerous helicopters overhead, the principal occupant of the house, whom the government says is the current or was the current head of ISIS, blew himself up, took his wife and two children with him. And the government says those were the only civilian casualties, the wife and the two children. And those casualties, of course, were caused by their husband and father, who, and if this is true, it's reprehensible. He obviously didn't care about killing his wife and children as long as he killed himself. State Department stands by this and the White House

stands by it. Enter the Kremlin. They, of course, have criticized it and said, no, there were many civilian casualties and the United States government is not telling the truth. Now back to the reporters who are challenging the State Department version and the White House version. And the State Department is saying we have intelligence to reveal exactly what happened. Oh, and by the way, while we're talking about intelligence, the State Department spokesperson says we also have intelligence to reveal that the Russians are going to engage in some sort of a subterfuge. They're going to put out a movie claiming it's of dead Russians killed by Ukrainian soldiers and snipers, and they're going to use that to invade or to justify the invasion of Ukraine.

So the State Department spokesperson is really in the middle of two disputes, one over whether he's telling the truth about the number of people killed in this raid in Syria, and the other over whether he truly has or the State Department truly has intelligence, meaning materials gathered from American spies showing what the Russians are up to. He, of course, says he has the intelligence and claims that the intelligence consists of the words that came out of his mouth. Reporters are quite properly saying, well, that's not intelligence. Intelligence is whatever the president was told or whatever the secretary of state was told by the CIA and the spies on the ground. That's what reporters want

to see. And when reporters ask for that, the State Department spokesperson accuses them of siding with the Russians on this. Well, they're not siding with the Russians. Same argument is being made by the White House press secretary who says, when you challenge my version, the government's version of how many people died and how they died in this attack on this house in Syria.

I may have said Yemen earlier, but it's Syria. When you challenge this, you sound like you're mouthing Russian propaganda. Well, that is just just plain wrong. Reporters should never accept at face value whatever the government says. In fact, none of us should accept at face value whatever the government says. The government lies and the government steals. We all know that. And the government should be forced to prove the truthfulness of what it says. And government spokespersons put themselves in a dangerous position when they challenge the patriotism of the reporters because the reporters are just doing their jobs and their jobs consist in a substantial and material challenge to the government. Show us your cards.

Show us the proof. Show us the film that the president watched from the situation room. Show us how many people died. Show us the intel, the intelligence that the CIA has come up with to suggest that the Russians are going to make a fake film claiming that Ukrainian snipers killed Russian troops. I mean, this is just getting carried away. The government is in the business, should be in the business of telling the truth and of being transparent.

It's not just a criticism of the Biden administration. Every presidential administration does this. But it is a criticism of the Biden administration now. We have two very hot issues, one involving numerous fatalities. The unauthorized, unlawful, unconstitutional use of the American military in Syria to kill people. Are they telling the truth about who was killed? And the use of intelligence information to make the Russians look like clowns. Where is the intelligence on which this is based? We all want those answers. We all expect the

government to tell us the truth. Well, we expect the government to tell us the truth. Well, we hope the government will tell us the truth. We never expect it. Judge Napolitano, judging freedom.