Judging Freedom - Is the CIA Honestly Serving Biden? w/Phil Giraldi fmr CIA

Episode Date: August 9, 2023

Is the CIA Honestly Serving Biden? w/Phil Giraldi fmr CIASee 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, August 9th, 2023. Phil Giraldi joins us now. Phil, always a pleasure. Thank you for joining us. I want you to wait for just a second. I don't usually do this. But here is a comment from one of. 15,000 American flags flying. Flying freedom. Liberals won't come out west and see freedom. Thank you, David, and congratulations to you. It looks like you're former airborne. I hope there are some of the Gadsden flags flying as well. That's the don't tread on me. Excellent. Excellent. Okay, Phil, to our work, which is not as open and obvious as what David has just told us about, what is the significance, if any, of Joe Biden putting CIA Director Burns directly in the cabinet? Does this in any way change the role

and function of the CIA from provider of raw data to something else? Yeah, absolutely. It's a big change. It's happened a couple of times before under Ronald Reagan, under Bill Clinton twice. The thing that is accomplished by it is to tie the sources of information more closely to the political leadership. And it basically eliminates that space that was designated by the founders of the CIA with the National Security Act back in 1947, where it was intended to have that space so that the information that was being provided was objective. And this is a very sensible thing to do. Now, when you get the guy in the cabinet and he's in on the cabinet meetings, he's doing policy, which is something quite different. And so I think it's a very bad move in a lot of ways.

And it's basically done to control the message, I rather suspect in this case, because of course, Biden and his immediate crew are very much into that. So I think that's what we're seeing. You know, I'm not a fan of Harry Truman at all, primarily because of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. But I can't imagine that when he signed the National Security Act of 1947, which changed the wartime OSS to the full-time CIA, that he intended that CIA would be involved in policymaking as opposed to spying and revealing data to the president. Yeah, that's absolutely correct. I mean, there was no thought of that. I mean, the

the creation of the OSS and then as it morphed into the CIA was basically to preempt anything like Pearl Harbor. And the thinking there was that Pearl Harbor was knowable if there had been better intelligence collection and there had been better sharing of information in real time with the people who could have done something about it. Now, as it turns out, of course, many of us believe that Franklin Roosevelt was conniving at all of this anyway, but the fact was the thinking of creating the agency was to have this distance, to have this objective information coming in that could provide an early warning that there was about to be a war. How'd they do on September 11th, 2001? Well, that depends on who you talk to, like so many other issues. There certainly were a lot of warnings in the government system before the attack took place. And the problem was it wasn't getting side of its mouth and the intelligence agencies

were kind of dropping what they had into an empty bucket. So in the summer of 01 was George Tenet, at the time the director of the CIA, providing George W. Bush, at the time the president of the United States, with raw intel? Or was he spinning it so that he would tell Bush what he thought Bush wanted to hear? Or was he trying to influence the policy that Bush and his cabinet were propounding? Yeah, well, I would have to, of course, I wasn't in the room at the time, but I would have to suspect that tenant and knowing what tenants history was and and what kind of political actor he was he never worked as an intelligence officer

in his entire career uh he was a staffer at congress before he was he was taken over by would you guess bill clinton and then he he survived with the Republicans when they came in because he was a conniver. He was basically a politician himself. And I would bet when he was in that anyone or drive anyone into later on saying that he had not kept them carefully informed. You and Ray McGovern are exceptions to this, but you both have told us, along with Larry Johnson and others, that CIA senior leadership, our friend Jack Devine denies this, but he's sui generis. He's in a class by himself, and he'll be on later on this week. CIA leadership basically takes the raw data and spins it so that the White House hears what it wants to hear. How the heck can Burns do that and make policy himself? He's propounding and helping to mold the public policy of the government on information that he knows is

false or incomplete or being spun to please the president. What kind of intellectual honesty can this human being bring to the cabinet table? Well, he clearly is limited in that respect. I mean, the fact is that- You're being charitable. Yeah. If he's in a room and his objective there is to come up with a good policy, well, let's face it, this is not a good policy. Ukraine is not a good policy for the American people. It's a good policy for the Biden administration if they're naturally going to pick out the stuff that supports the argument that the White House wants to hear. And that's the whole point. That's why it's so frightening that this guy suddenly is in a policy position where he is

supposed to instead be in effect somebody who's telling the truth about what's going on. I would not rely on him to tell the truth about anything. Is it really 50,000 pages of data that come in each night or each morning that needs to be digested for a presentation to the president? Sure. You have thousands of analysts working at CIA alone. You have thousands more at the Pentagon. You have certainly hundreds, maybe thousands more at State Department. These people all have their own sources. The information comes in. It all goes into a big hopper where they go through it and say, this is important and this isn't. And then, you know, it goes on to another step where you start to present it or do present it to the policymakers,

and the policymakers are the ones who are the final approval of what they're saying. So this is an awesome process. When Bill Burns says, this is the CIA director, says things like dissatisfaction with the war in Russia will wear away at Russian leadership. I mean, that's a political or an emotional opinion. Is there any raw data from his agents in the field or his agents inside Russia to support that type of sweeping political Biden-esque conclusion? I mean that probably the agency and probably other agencies within the government have their own sources among disaffected Russians who are telling them certain things. And there probably is a lot of evidence coming from NSA, which is tapping telephones wildly inside Russia and also outside Russia,

where Russian emigres are living or diplomats are living. So they're tapping these phones and they hear people complaining on the phones. And this comes out as an intelligence report on the other end saying that there is widespread disaffection. Of course, they don't know how widespread it is. There are opinion polls that suggest the opposite, that Putin is still very popular. All right. I appreciate that answer. The CIA is engaged in social media advertising, advertising that it is recruiting agents or trying to flip people. Is this something that's often done openly and notoriously and on social media or on wherever you have a computer? This is the first time I've heard of this being done to such an extent. There certainly have been cases in the past where something would be floated in the media

or something would be floated and say, if you're at the cocktail circuit at the U.S. Embassy Rome, and you have Russian guests, you have this, you have that. You might be floating things so that you hope they will produce some reaction or response that would be in your favor. But this is the first time I've heard of something like this. And the fact is, of course, it's ridiculous. If you put out a video and you're targeting Russians, the Russian government is fully aware of it. And all it's going to produce is perhaps more scrutiny of some Russian officials who have access to the kind of information you don't want to get out. So it actually kind of, you know, sends up the flag to tell the Russians to be more careful. And that's the reverse of what you want to do.

Here's a clip from the video you suggested. It's in Russian, but we have the English subtitles. Dark and shadowy, but tell me what you think of this, Phil. Is this the life I dreamed of? The path I chose? The CIA has posted this video online as it aims to recruit Russian spies. The agency is reported to believe there is an, quote, unprecedented opportunity to convince Russians disaffected by the war in Ukraine and life in Russia to share their stories.

This will always be my Russia. I will endure. I mean, that is almost absurd. I mean, who is that going to draw out of the woodwork that the CIA using person-to-person contact couldn't already draw out. Yeah, exactly. I mean, somebody who's interested in defecting, the first thing going through his head is his own security. And he's hardly going to be wanting to link up to something which some entity which is advertising this kind of thing openly and and talking about all these russian defectors and things like that and and you know and the the whole thing is is silly in a way because you know there were a lot of russian defectors they were called walk-ins during the cold war where they would a russian official would make up his mind

to to leave russia and to go to the West, and he would defect. They were walk-ins, and he would bring all the information they could carry out with them. But it was a much different world then. The life in what was the Soviet Union compared to the life in Western Europe and the United States was substantially different. The freedoms that people enjoyed were different and today all of this stuff is is is much closer uh and you know i keep uh talking to people uh like scott ritter who've been to russia recently uh moscow is a

whole lot cleaner and safer uh and uh a much nicer working environment than New York City. So the lure that once existed for people to want to change their lives, it's just not there anymore. So does the CIA just cold call FSB, their Russian equivalent, does it just cold call FSB agents and say, hey, do you want to come over? And what FSB agents, knowing he's probably being monitored by his or her own boss, would take such a call? Yeah, that's the point. It's called a cold pitch, jargon of the agency. And it's the kind of thing where you would walk up to some target somewhere.

I'm not saying necessarily a Russian, but somebody you would want to get as a source. And you would stick a wad of hundred dollar bills in his hand and say, there's a lot more where this is, you know. But it basically is a is a last ditch effort to get a an agent to get a source, and it almost never works. He'll take the wad of $100 bills, and you'll never see him again. Or he could be a double agent and report back to his current bosses, whatever his new CIA masters are asking of him. I mean, this can be a triple agent. This could go on and on and on to the point of absurdity, could it not? Yeah, yeah, I mean, yeah, sure. My instinct, if this had ever been done to me when I was overseas, would be to go back to my boss and

we'd split up the money. But, you know, of course, I don't know a single instance. I was in the CIA one way or another for 22 years. I don't know of a single cold pitch that ever worked. And now this is what the U.S. government is staking its reputation and the intelligence community on, saying that we have this wonderful opportunity. They're delusional. If CIA made a cold pitch at an FSB agent, aren't the chances pretty great that it's being surveilled? Oh, yeah. For example, let me tell you about here in Washington, D. dc where back i heard about a year ago uh fbi the fbi of course has a

a post across from the russian embassy um on wisconsin avenue and uh they observe everything going on everybody going in and out of the russian embassy uh day and night and uh the russians of course have their own facility inside where they're watching the FBI watching them. And so, you know, this stuff goes on constantly. And I heard, as I say, about a year ago, that FBI officers who were assigned to that post were hanging around on the street. And when Russian diplomats would be coming in or going out, they would approach them with a pre-printed card, which says, the US government wants you to work for them.

We have wonderful things to give you in exchange. And this had a phone number on it. And the Russian was supposed to call the phone number to make the arrangement. And of course, nobody ever did. I want to run a clip for you of President Zelensky using a phrase that we had never heard before we saw this clip called Sky Shield, which he claims somehow exists in Kiev. Our military people have said it's fanciful, it doesn't exist.

But I'm going to ask you if you think there was CIA involvement in this or CIA needed CIA approval before he said it. The translation is from a computer, so it's a little tough to follow. But you'll hear this phrase shield, about two or three times. In this week alone, Russian terrorists have already used 65 different missiles and 178 attack drones against us, including 87 Shahids. We managed to shoot down a significant number of them. We will do our best to make the Ukrainian sky shield only stronger. Here in our skies, we can prove that terror is losing. All together we can prove it, all partners.

The responsible position of each partner in supplying air defense systems and missiles to them is very important. Complete protection against terror is needed here. Ukraine can win this battle, and our sky shield will eventually guarantee security for the whole of Europe. We are equally eager to see F-16 jets in action in Ukrainian skies as soon as possible. Now, we know that the CIA financially supports and underwrites the SBU, which is the Ukrainian intelligence.

So a statement like that, totally divorced from reality, we're going to strengthen that which doesn't exist, SkyShield, supported by SBU, funded by, supported by CIA, or just political crap, claptrap on his own. What do you think? Well, I would suspect it's intended to send the message that this major, of course, counteroffensive, which has never kind of gotten off the ground, is only one of the things in their arsenal that will enable them to defeat the Russians. And so I think this is a made-up component that we're seeing here. It could have come from anyone. It could have come from CIA. It could have come from, I mean, there are a lot of senior NATO officers on the ground who could easily have come up with this same nonsense. But I think it's got more the smell of a political kind of, let's tell them how effective we're being and what we're doing. And it was clearly written

by somebody else, which would suggest either a NATO officer or a CIA officer. Nonsense. Paul Jay What is the nature of the relationship between SBU, Ukrainian intelligence, and CIA? Well, it is probably the kind of relationship where the Ukrainians are dependent in so many ways for CIA resources, money, electronics, all kinds of things that they defer to the United States while at the same time probably doing whatever they think they can get away with. That would be a normal pattern for a liaison relationship in most countries. And I'm sure it's even worse in a place like Ukraine.

Do you think that Bill Burns, I want to get back before we conclude to where we were earlier, charmed his way into Joe Biden's life or heart or cabinet? Well, you know, it's interesting. Burns had, when he was a diplomat, you know, before he became head of the CIA, he was, of course, ambassador to Russia, among other things. And he did not have a bad reputation, even among people like myself. He basically was, as I was told, was one of the diplomats who said who very clearly saw the red lines that were emerging on Russian policies in terms of what might happen in Ukraine. And he reported as such. And the fact is, so he had a pretty good reputation, but clearly something has clicked. He's now the main kind of emissary for the administration

to do these private trips where he goes and he talks to foreign leaders and, you know, it's all on the hush-hush. This is, I'm head of the CIA and this kind of thing. He's doing that for the Biden administration. I think he's elevated his persona. Do you think that Joe Biden or any president understands that the CIA can spy on the president? Yeah, I think he understands that. And certainly there are historic precedents for government agencies to spy on their own leaders. You know, the FBI did so consistently when J. Edgar Hoover was in charge. And it's not unimaginable because once you get the tools to tap into communications and to do those sorts of things, you can do it to anyone. And whether the CIA does spy on government leaders. I don't know. But the fact is that they certainly have the

capability to do so. And if they're basically looking to gain influence in the administration, they would want to know things like that. So that would have to be my answer. Bill Giraldi, always a pleasure. Glad you're back with us. Thank you very much, my answer. BILL BLACK. Bill Giraldi, always a pleasure. I'm glad you're back with us. Thank you very much, my friend. BILL GERALD. Thank you. BILL BLACK. More as we get it, of course.

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