Judging Freedom - Is America still Exceptional_ (Ukraine War) - Phil Giraldi

Episode Date: April 19, 2023

Hi, everyone. Judge Andrew Napolitano here for Judging Freedom. Today is Wednesday, April 19th, 2023. It's about 11 o'clock in the morning here on the East Coast of the United States. Phil Giraldi joins us now. Phil, always a pleasure. Thank you for sharing your time and your thoughts with us. As I talk to former intelligence agents like you and Larry Johnson and Ray McGovern and others, there seems to be some debate going on in the intelligence community over the document leaks, which the federal government attributes to this young man in Massachusetts, Jack Teixeira. We can talk later about whether he's a hero or a criminal. I happen to think he's a hero because he exposed the government's lies and the American public has the right to know that. But what I want to talk to you about is not the philosophical view of a hero or a goat,

but the practical aspects of this. Is it likely that a 21-year-old weekend warrior, I don't mean to demean the National Guard, but he worked a couple of weekends a month. This is not somebody who works 60 hours a week in the Pentagon. A 21-year-old weekend warrior could have had access to materials of this classified nature on his own without demonstrating a need to know, or is it more likely that someone north of him on the totem pole, dismayed with the U.S. criminal involvement in the Russian-Ukraine war, fed this stuff to him so as to expose the government's lies and duplicity? Well, there are about four different theories floating around among my former colleagues, all of which are plausible.

Of course, the one theory is that he could not have had access in particular to some of the CIA assessments that were among the documents that he stole and posted. So that would be supportive of the theory that someone helped him get access to these things or may have provided him access with him being maybe unwitting of what exactly he was doing. Now, there are other theories that, in fact, he, in his capacity as a sergeant, was working for some officers in the National Guard that might have had access to these documents and that were careless themselves about leaving these things accessible or available. Now, that's another plausible argument too. In my own heart, I would very much like to believe that this was either way it played out, a deliberate act by him to expose all the lies that are going on and have been going on for over a year now

about the war in Ukraine. I would like to believe that that's the motive behind this. But at this point, since we haven't heard from the guy himself, which I find rather odd through a lawyer or through something that has come out with the uh the fbi investigation or something like that uh we don't really know what his motive was and uh as he sees it so i'd be very interested to to see that to hear that and i would probably have to reserve judgment but i would like to think that this was a whistleblower type act and that it will be seen by the U.S. public, which I think is kind of happening. Did you get a chance to look at these documents, Phil? Yeah, I did. To me, I think the last time we talked, I said they look to me like PowerPoints,

the sort of briefing materials that have a lot of different information on a page that someone is supposed to be in an audience and be looking at. So this kind of supports the theory that these documents were produced for somebody higher up in the food chain, and somehow this guy might have had incidental, coincidental access to them. So he has a bail hearing later today, and the feds, as they are good at doing, have leaked what they're going to say. They're going to say that the materials that you viewed and your colleagues viewed, he began posting in December, and the feds didn't notice this until April. How believable is that, that he was posting this stuff where the government says he was posting it to his buddies in this chat room for four months before one of them let the cat out of the bag?

I find that the most unbelievable part of the story um the the federal government has been basically tracking these kinds of groups and these kinds of individuals uh note how immediately when this guy was surfaced as the suspect they immediately the department of justice immediately started saying that he was a white supremacist, he was an anti-Semite, and he was a gun nut. Now, whose profile does that fit perfectly in terms of what your government has been looking into and the people that they've been tracking? So I find that the most implausible part of the story. Do you share my view that it's a positive good when this type of information that exposes the government for its lies, particularly its lies

about war and killing, so that the American public knows whether or not the government is worthy of belief? And before you answer that, the Secretary of Defense, who had to know the essence of what was in these documents, that Ukraine is losing badly, that its air defenses will be degraded down to useless by the end of May, testified under oath two weeks before these documents were revealed to the public that he expects a good spring and even a better winter for the Ukrainian military. So isn't it good when the public knows that the government is lying, even lying under oath? Yeah, it's good that the public knows that. But again, we're running into the problem of a media that basically is not getting the story out. I mean, this, if you want to hear what you just said, you have to go to the alternative media, you have to, you have to go when you and I are on or Larry Johnson or Colonel McGregor and people like that. That's the tragedy here. We are being denied the fourth estate. The fourth estate is not on our side anymore, not on the side of the people.

It's on the side of the government. And so the story is not getting completely out. But yes, it's good that the story is getting out at all, because it's clear that they were lying absolutely about how successful this war effort was going. How unusual is it for a 21-year-old non-commissioned to have the security clearance that the government says this young man had? Well, I'd have to say it is fairly usual. I had those clearances when I was a 22-year-old Sergeant E-5 in an intelligence outfit in Berlin. So it's not exactly unheard of now, but it does not mean you have need to know. That doesn't mean that you can go walk into a SCIF or a classified room and help yourself to documents just because you have the clearance. You have to have need to know. I don't think this guy had need to know. How is a need to know granted or monitored?

It's basically granted and monitored bureaucratically. If you're working for, if this guy was working for, say, a lieutenant colonel or something like that, the lieutenant colonel would be the one who actually would have to provide him with access to documents that he needs for his work. And that would be limited to documents that he needs for his work. Okay. Switching gears, you recently commented in one of your great articles about President Macron's visit to Beijing and the comments he made literally on his jet flight from Beijing back to Paris about wanting to create a multi-polar world and wanting to liberate Europe from the oppressive thumb economically and militarily and politically of the United States. Before you expand on that, I want to throw in the mix a comment that President Putin made about three weeks ago. You and I may have talked about this,

I don't remember, Phil, that the United States effectively, I think he may have said this a little tongue-in-cheek, still occupies Germany. He was referring, of course, to the long occupation by the U.S. of its segment of what was then called West Germany after World War II. But the reason he said this is because of the near universal acceptance today that the Nord Stream pipeline was destroyed by the U.S. and the utter silence over this from German leadership. So with those two ideas in the mix, let me have your thoughts. Well, I thought Macron's comments in China were refreshing. He said basically that France and anyone else who wants to get on the wagon should begin liberating themselves from

the dominance of the U.S. dollar. And that is, shall we say, in economic terms, a nuclear device going off. The numbers of countries that are trading free of the U.S. dollar and avoiding petrodollars is growing. So I think this is a refreshing move by Macron, and I hope it's the beginning of a much bigger move. What do you think will become the reserve currency, if not the US dollar? Well, I would say the obvious candidate is the euro currency, the eurozone, which already is a bigger economy than the United States. So it's an obvious one. And maybe the whole kind of concept of reserve currencies itself will become challenged. I think that's a possibility. So that was good to see. And the comment about Germany, of course, is essentially Germany has been the US poodle ever since the Second World War ended. And this more or less continues. And your example of Nord Stream, which was undeniably done by the United States, even after Biden's warning that he was going to do it, and is now being denied or avoided, I say avoided. Another example of where U.S. dominance is not necessarily good for the world.

What has Joe Biden gained by saber-rattling and threatening China? Well, I think his wife probably likes to hear it. And I don't know. I don't get the China phobia. China over Taiwan does not threaten the United States in any way that I can understand. And maybe if someone could explain it to me, or like Joe Biden explained it to me, I would understand it better, but I don't. I think Joe Biden wants to run for re-election as a wartime president, like his hero FDR, and he's willing to accept either a war in Ukraine or a war in China, neither of which could we possibly win. Phil,

have we won a war since World War II? Panama, wasn't it? I guess if you want to call that a war. No, of course we haven't won a war. And the ones that we act like we won, we've come up with all the things to support that belief that are not convincing. As I say, Panama is the one that comes to mind immediately. I realize you had had tongue in cheek. Why is Vladimir Putin's presidency an obstacle to the foreign policy of Tony Blinken and Victoria Nuland? Well, I think the whole story there is that the justification, and this also comes out of the Pentagon, is to weaken Russia so that Russia cannot be a dominant power in Eastern Europe and in the Middle East. I think that's the argument. But the fact is that Russia is a serious, major power, whether they like it or not.

And the theory that by grinding them down in a war against Ukraine, eventually they pretty well economically right now, even though both are the subject of draconian sanctions imposed by presidents. That's right. Both of them are selling oil to whoever wants to buy it with whatever currency they want to use. And they're doing quite well. And the stories of I'm sure you've seen some of the pictures of supermarkets in Moscow that look pretty well stocked. And so it's again, this is a propaganda that we're saying, oh, our sanctions are hurting them. Well, sanctions always hurt somebody, and it's usually the poorer people that get hurt. But the fact is that the

case that sanctions are a successful foreign policy tool, in my opinion, has never been made. The Wall Street Journal published an article about four weeks ago in which it purported to demonstrate that sanctions are beginning to bite, particularly Russian banks. Two weeks later, the author of the article was arrested and charged with espionage. All of this followed the FBI arresting a dark-skinned, blonde-haired British soccer star whom the FBI claims is really a KGB agent. Is there a connection with all these things? Well, the connection is that governments in general, and I don't exclude anyone from this, have to occasionally show that they're tough and are taking care of national security by arresting these people. I mean, I think this Wall Street journalist who was arrested in Moscow, it's another case like that.

This guy might have been feeding information to his embassy contacts. By that, I mean U.S. embassy contacts, which is normal procedure. I saw it over and over again in Europe time and again. But, you know, so is he a spy or is he not a spy? Is he this? We have to show we're being tough, so we make an arrest. The United States does this all the time. Does the CIA recruit journalists or dispatch officers under the facade of being journalists? Both.

Both historically speaking, and I would assume they still do it. There are certain things that you can't do. Like, for example, if you want to recruit an American journalist and put him in some situation where he's in danger, there are some prohibitions on that kind of thing. But if I were to recruit a German journalist or an Italian journalist, it's a free-fire zone. Cy Hirsch, famous in modern American history for all of his allegations, hugely embarrassing to the government on almost every one of these exposés, recently revealed that when William Burns, the director of the CIA, visited President Zelensky a couple of weeks ago, he handed him a list, and the list included 35 generals

and President Zelensky as having embezzled $400 million in cash from the cash that the U.S. government has sent over there to Ukraine to accompany the hardware and the ammo that it sent. So a couple of questions. One, is this credible? And two, why in God's name do we send cash? And three, how do we send cash? Is it wired from the U.S. Treasury to a bank? Or is it the way George W. Bush sent it to Iraq, literally pallets of $100 bills on cargo jets unloaded at an airport? Well, I'll answer the last thing first. I think in this case, the money would have been wired to the Ukrainian Central Bank. And then the fraud that was carried out was basically to get money to pay for fuel for the Ukrainian army. And then they were doing a job and buying the money was calibrated at world prices, which are like U.S. prices. And then they were going and buying

it from the cheapest seller, which was Russia and Iran and places like that. So they were buying the cheap stuff and charging us for the expensive stuff, and that's where the 400 million came from, more or less. Okay, before you get into the rest of this, I just want to jump in because when Larry Johnson told Judging Freedom this, I'm scratching my head, and now you're saying you're backing him up. Russians are selling oil to the Ukrainians. That's correct? Not directly. But see, oil is fungible. And once you sell it, you sell it to anybody, they can then sell it to somebody else. And I don't know the exact circuit that was followed to get it from Russia to Ukraine, but that's more or less what happened. And I believe it's

highly plausible. Why not? If you're going to get Uncle Sam paying more for something that you can buy cheaper. That's exactly the kind of business Zelensky and his buddies are in. OK, now back to the list. Is this the type of thing that the head of the CIA would do? Say, hey, Mr. President, we are aware of all of this thievery and we also know that some of it was done by you. You've got to do something about it. Is that the type of thing you'd expect the director of the CIA to be saying to the president of a foreign country that's begging us for military equipment and cash? Well, normally you wouldn't. You wouldn't expect that. But I think in this case, it's a

measure, if all of this is exactly as true as described, is a measure of the fact that the White House actually is starting to get concerned about the behavior of our allies, particularly Ukraine, and felt it had to send a message now that this this kind of thievery by zielinski has been going on forever and everybody's known about it and uh how many villas does he have one in miami one in switzerland one in israel that that are known of and and you know so this has been going on for a while wow and and this the reputation of the Ukrainian military and political leadership into which Joe Biden and the Congress has brought us. Yeah, yeah. And that's kind of one of the great tragedies, again, of this whole thing uh zielinski has been uh has been kind of uh praised

as the uh the new george washington um if i might use that metaphor and they want to put a uh a sculpture of them up in the uh the capitol building don't they uh this is all a fraud and and uh republicans are in just like the democrats yes if you listen to some of our eminent senators who want to invade Mexico. And so, you know, if this were a comic magazine or something that you or I were writing for and we wrote this story up, nobody would believe it. Phil Giraldi, always a pleasure. The Judging Freedom audience is so fond of you and believes what you say, and I do, even though some of this stuff from a rational basis is tough to take. Thanks very much for joining us. Well, thank you for having me again. If you like all this, like and subscribe, my friends. More as we get it. Scott Ritter right here, 4.30 Eastern this afternoon.

Judge Napolitano for Judging Freedom.