Judging Freedom - Is Biden being Misinformed on Ukraine & China_ - Ray McGovern

Episode Date: April 17, 2023

Hi, everyone. Judge Andrew Napolitano here for Judging Freedom. Today is Monday, April 17th, 2023. It's about 10.15 in the morning here on the east coast of the United States. Ray McGovern joins us for his weekly chat. Ray, it's always a pleasure. Thanks very much for coming here. Thank you. clearance that would enable him to download and publish some of the most contemporary and sensitive secrets that the government has? Judge, there are very few things that are impossible in this world, but this is one of them. He's a patsy. He could not possibly have access to the kinds of information that have been revealed already. Only somebody very, very senior, somebody at the upper reaches of the Joint Chiefs of Staff

or the National Intelligence Director would have access to internal CIA documents, ex-disc cables from state. It all comes together at a very high point, not at a little dinky place out in Massachusetts. You know, let me start with a little bombshell. I think it's a guess. Sure, it's a guess. Sure, it's a guess. But when you look at Mark Milley, what he was saying just a couple of months ago before he shut up, look, Ukrainians have no chance of making progress here.

Maybe next year. You are speaking of the highest ranking military officer in the United States, currently the chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. That's correct. And a fellow who has done some weird things, like confessing that Ukraine can't win. Like back under Trump, didn't he call up the Chinese defense minister and say, don't worry about it. This guy's a little crazy, but I get everything under control here. Didn't he do that? Yeah. More or less, yes. So are you suggesting, as your colleague and our mutual friend Larry Johnson has, that this was a controlled leak and the boy is just the instrument through which some, not even all of it,

was released. Yes, I seldom disagree with Larry. I think he's right on on this and he's had a lot of experience at these higher reaches in the military, which I've been in the military, but not at the higher reaches. So what I'm suggesting here... here okay so you're suggesting that it may have come from somebody on millie staff or millie himself as a way of protesting this crazy suicidal policy of joe biden that's correct and i'm not alone in suggesting that i won't tell you his name but a very very perspicacious analyst of such affairs suggested to me this right off the bat. And I found, well, I've come around to the notion that nothing is impossible, except that Tuxera had all this information. What is possible is that very high level

Defense Department people want to blow the whistle on these sophomores who are advising Biden. Now, this happened before, as we mentioned, under Vietnam, a very number three in the Defense Department blew the whistle on Westmoreland, General Westmoreland's request for 206,000 more troops at a time when clearly the Viet Cong was winning, okay? Who did that? Leslie Gelb, number three in the Pentagon. When did we find out? Only when he died. He maintained an impeccable reputation.

He was President Emeritus of the Council of Foreign Relations until he died. And then we found out that he blew the whistle that with the help of Daniel Ellsberg, also blowing a whistle in March 1968, stopped Lyndon Johnson, who said later, I would have given Westmoreland the troops. Westmoreland wanted to go into North Vietnam, up to the Chinese border. We know from the Korean experience what would have happened then. So it's not at all, the circumstantial evidence suggests to me that was somebody at a very high level, if not Milley, then somebody in the Director of National Intelligence's office, because they're the only other people that get the secret CIA operations cables and exclusive distribution cables from state departments. So that's where it all comes together.

It's a very high level leak. The objective is to blow the whistle on this crazy escapade in Ukraine. Did you have a chance to look at the documents? I have now. Newsweek has just put out, well, they say they have four dozen documents. What's that, 48? And they have ex-employers right out there. Now, what I'll say here is that Newsweek is changing around, sort of saying,

well, you know, these show how the Russians are losing and all this business. Well, what was really interesting to me, as we mentioned last week, it seemed to me of great significance that the Washington Post and the New York Times were publishing these stories, these stories that went across the grain of what everyone was saying, especially Lloyd Austin and Blinken and the rest of them. I reviewed a couple of the titles that came in the Washington Post right after the leaks. Here they are. Leaked documents warn of weaknesses in Ukraine's defenses. Facing critical ammunition shortage, Ukrainian troops rash in shells. U.S. doubts Ukraine counteroffensive will yield big gains. DIA assessments suggest the U.S. does

not expect the war to conclude anytime soon. Those changes will happen next year. These headlines that you're reading now preceded the release of the documents. Am I right? No, they came right after the release of the documents. So that's why I come to this conclusion that initially the post had been primed. Look, these leaks are meant to serve one faction of the leadership there in the White House and especially in Joint Chiefs of Staff that doesn't want this damn thing to end up in a nuclear exchange. OK, and so publish these stories which give the lie to what what Mully himself has been saying recently and what Austin says. Now, the interesting thing is, if you read Newsweek this morning, they're not saying all these embarrassing things anymore.

They're still saying things like what Michael McFaul tells his former ambassador to Russia, Michael McFaul says, you can't believe a thing that Putin says. Anything he says automatically can be dismissed. So you have this juvenile or at best adolescent attitude to anything coming out with respect to the Russians. And the Russians, of course, are being accused, including in Newsweek, as the possible source of a lot of these leaks. Crazy. Did Lloyd Austin, the Secretary of Defense, lie under oath to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee when he said words to the effect of he's optimistic about Ukraine's military successes this spring and next winter, knowing what we now know he knew from these documents at the time he made the statements.

Well, Judge, there's a Catholic principle of invincible ignorance. Thank you, St. Thomas Aquinas, yes. Yeah, that's right. It gets you off the hook. You don't end up in hell. You go to purgatory, and then you have a chance to get to heaven. No, I kid you not. I mean, it's possible that he believes Ukrainian liaison reports, his best friend, Reznikov, the defense minister in Kiev, tell him everything's going to be just fine. It's possible that he's misled. I don't think that's possible. But we have to give the guy, you know, as theological principles suggest, give the benefit of the doubt. Either he's very, very dumb, too trusting, or he's lying. I don't know which it is.

How would it have worked? How would some senior person have been able to funnel this documents of this nature through this 21-year-old? Well, again, I don't think Tixiera had the whole nine yards. I think that what's been released has been made available to places like the Post and the Times and now Newsweek in a kind of, you know, a clandestine way, the headings themselves prohibit me believing that Tikshera had information of this sensitive nature that can only be available really at the Director of National Intelligence level. They're the only other ones that get CIA operations center memos in the raw and the exoduses, the notices, the no dissemination, the exclusive dissemination cables from the state

department. So it's where it all comes together. That's the National Intelligence Directorate. I wouldn't rule out the fact that April Haynes, who at least a couple of years ago seemed to have her head screwed on right. So, you know, I got to do something as an American citizen to stop the carnage and to prevent the likelihood of a possible nuclear war. OK, so as I understand it, what you're saying is Tixeira was an information specialist in the Air Force in Cape Cod. He had some top secret national security clearance, but he could never have accessed all of these documents which come from such a variety of sources, not just the military and not just the Air Force. That's correct. Out there in Massachusetts on Cape Cod, it's not likely at all that he had these kinds of documents. I don't know exactly how they manipulated the thing, but there are all kinds of ways to do this kind of operation. The meat of these things suggests that a faction really wants to stop

this war. They gave the Washington Post and the BBC carte blanche to publish these stories initially. Now there seems to be the recidivism here. They're saying now, Newsweek, oh, maybe the Russians were responsible for this, or, you know, it's sort of complicated, but we have 20, we have four dozen of these things, 48 of them. It's hard to put it all together, but you have to take a step back and say, well, wait a second here. To Sarah, he couldn't possibly have, who has incentive to do this? A guy like Milley. Now, Milley's on his way out. Right. He said he's going to be replaced pretty soon. And he's done these strange things in the past. It's not beyond the imagination to say a person like that who doesn't want to go down in history as responsible for carnage, carnage, carnage and and the risk of nuclear carnage, we'll release these documents.

So my former late great boss, Roger Ailes, always used to say, when everybody's watching one hand, watch out what they're doing with the other. So while we're all fixated on Teixeira and on these documents, what is happening in the communications between Russia and China, particularly the military communications between Russia and China, that is not on the front page thanks to Tashara, or thanks to what the government wants us to believe about Tashara? Yeah. Well, the Chinese defense minister arrived in Moscow yesterday, Sunday.

First thing he did was go see Vladimir Putin, president of Russia. Defense ministers don't usually get to see the president, and especially not right off the bat. So although the Chinese and the Russians have this little agreement, they say, now, wait a second, we don't have a military alliance aimed at anybody else. They have a military alliance aimed at us. Let's face it, that's de facto the situation. Now, you have people like Ambassador McFaul saying, in the wake of the Xi-Putin exchange,

Putin embarrassed, he humiliated Xi Jinping. Well, you know, if that were the case, then why did the defense ministry in China immediately upramp the joint exercises that they have planned and send their defense minister to Moscow. The Chinese are trying to give us a lesson here. Look, you know, we're in this together. We're in this in a global kind of way.

That's the word they use in this exchange. Global means you do something, you, America, you do something really strange in Ukraine, you're going to expect a lot of trouble, a lot of saber rattling and maybe worse in the South China Sea or across from Taiwan. Put your money down. That's what's going to happen. What does China want from Russia? Well, China is getting all kinds of oil and gas and all kinds of natural resources, a lot of military technology. It's really a matter of the common threat. You know, the common enemy is the United States. Now, this is not me paranoid. I mean, you just read U.S.

strategic documents. China's the main enemy. We get rid of this puny little Russia. We're going to get China. Hello. They can read those documents, too. And then they see the buildup out in the Pacific as well as. So it's not it's not a it's a no brainer to figure out. Look, it's two against one now. What they're trying to do is make it impossible for people like McFaul to tell those adolescents advising Biden, no, no, no, China and Russia are still at loggerheads. China is squeezing Russia. That's what they told Biden to tell Putin two years ago in Geneva. And we know that because Biden bragged about telling Putin, you know, I know you're being squeezed by China. We know that that's a problem for you.

Is China selling military hardware and ammunition to Russia for use in Ukraine? It's interesting. There's some evidence in these documents that in effect, Biden himself has no, we haven't seen any real concrete manifestation of that. Number one, there's no real need for that right now. Number two, why would you rule that out? Look what the U.S. is pumping into Ukraine. Why wouldn't China? Well, one reason, of course, would be to want to avoid sanctions that would come inevitably if it was discovered.

But, you know, if Russia needed it, China would provide it. Mark my words. And the adolescents, as you refer to them, and I agree with you, the sophomores that are advising old Joe, they seem to have dialed back their rhetoric or dialed back his rhetoric lately on whether or not the United States is willing to engage in a war to protect Taiwan. Well, that was never a real possibility, although the rhetoric, as you suggest three times, Biden suggested that U.S.

troops would be sent to protect Taiwan. Yeah, there hasn't been any of that for several months. That's a good point, Judge. I hadn't really thought about that. How would they even get U.S. troops to Taiwan? How would they get through a Chinese naval blockade? Right now we have 200 troops on Taiwan. You'd need 200,000 troops, which we don't have and can't get them there. Well, we have a couple of hundred there already. We couldn't get them there, no. The Chinese have just demonstrated how they could quarantine, to use John Kennedy's word with respect to Cuba, or blockade the whole island. Now, there's not a scintilla of evidence that China wants to invade Taiwan. That's not in the cards.

What does Biden gain by the saber rattling when he suggests that China wants to invade Taiwan and that he would send American troops to resist that invasion? What is in that for him other than this idea that he has that he wants to run for re-election as a wartime president? Well, you know, Judge, I don't really think Biden is all that accomplishmentous. I think when he brags as he has recently that, look, nobody F, nobody fools around with a Biden. I mean, that's adolescent, isn't it? Yes. His first speech about China, you know, China aspires to be the most powerful economic and political power in the world. That's not going to happen on my watch. Two years ago.

Well, why do you have to say that? I mean, the Chinese have this attitude. Look, can't we just get along? I mean, like, how about a win-win? There are a certain amount of natural resources in the world. Could we maybe think about sharing? You know, it's crazy. But Biden's got this mental attitude shaped by the adolescents, and I'm afraid that the adolescents are running the show. Last subject matter. if you're, and Larry Johnson's theory is right, and yours is more precise, Larry, I'll be talking to Larry in the next half hour, that it was General Milley himself or someone on

his staff. Will we ever find that out? We will, but if you look at the Vietnam example, although Leslie Gelb, number three in the Pentagon, leaked that in early March said, you know, Les Gelb was the last person anybody would have thought would have leaked that. And yet he did because he wanted to stop Westmoreland from bringing the war up to China. And he leaked that information in early to mid-March 1968. That's correct. And what happened on March 30th or 31st, 1968? I shall not seek and I will not accept the nomination of my party

for another term as your president. That's what happened. Actually, five days before that, Johnson talked to a small group of people and he said, those leaks to the New York Times did us in. We have no more trust about the war. I would have given Westy those 206,000 men, but now I can't do it. I'm not running for re-election. And on the 31st, he made that TV. I remember the TV performance quite clearly. And so these things are consequential. And as I say, we may not know who the real leaker was for several decades. Yeah. I was 17 years old. I had what was unheard

of in those days, a television in my bedroom that I shared with my brother, Jimmy. We both were watching this when it was over with. We went running down the stairs to tell my parents. Johnson's not running for re-election. He's gone. He's gone. Bobby Kennedy may be in, right? Wow.

Hi, Ray. It's always a pleasure, whether we're talking about history or the present reality. Thank you so much for your time. And thanks for your insight. All my best to you. Most welcome. More as we get it. Judge Napolitano for judging freedom.