Judging Freedom - Matt Hoh: Why No Ukraine Negotiations?

Episode Date: February 13, 2024

Matt Hoh: Why No Ukraine Negotiations?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 Tuesday, February 13th, 2024. Matt Ho joins us now. Matt, always a pleasure. My dear friend, thank you for joining us. Are you surprised, shocked, scandalized, or otherwise bemused that there don't appear to be any negotiations whatsoever between Russia and Ukraine, whether involving the United States or not? I wish I could say I was shocked about it. I'm ashamed about it. I'm upset about it, of course. You know, but just right before I came on with you, Judge, I saw Reuters has a report today, just in the last couple hours. Obviously, time to coincide with Tucker Carlson's interview with Vladimir Putin, where Putin talks about his willingness to negotiate and the willingness of the Russians to have negotiated. But this Reuters report from today talks about how through 2023, the Russians attempted to negotiate

over Ukraine with the Americans. And there were multiple attempts, including a phone call last month between Jake Sullivan and his Russian counterpart, where the conversation was supposed to be about this. And then when the phone conversation occurred, Jake Sullivan said, hey, no, sorry, we are comfortable talking with anything about our relationship other than Ukraine. I mean, and this is just the way the American empire has operated, this desire for military victory, for reasons of both the empire itself and for political reasons. Because again, these men and women are essentially politicians. That's who they are. That's what they grew up as. That's their background, their contact context. That's how they see the world. It's it's it's it's the lens in which they view things. So everything is political to them. And is it the American lust for total military victory or the Vladimir Zelensky fear of appearing weak by negotiating?

It's both. It's both. I think, one, there is the myth of World War II. I shouldn't say a myth, but certainly in American foreign policy, everything must be measured up against World War II. So any type of resolution, any type of final settlement, it's always going to be measured up against World War II. Certainly, the fear of being seen as losing. And remember, again, these are politicians on the American side. So everything is binary. Everything is zero sum. It's me against them. And so if it can't be spun as a victory, we don't want it. And so the hopes of what occurring with the Ukraine war, I think, is that eventually gets to the point where it's no longer being spoken about and a settlement can occur. Basically, I think it probably a de facto settlement at that point. But, you know, where an American politician doesn't have to say, you know, this is the deal we negotiated and it comes across as a compromise because everything has to be victory.

And we saw this, you know, we saw this in Vietnam. Right. We saw this in Iraq. I've talked to you about this before. I was like when I was at the State Department in 05 and 06, you know, we were working on a national strategy for victory in Iraq, which was just absolutely inane. I saw it again in Afghanistan, where there was no way the Obama administration was going to negotiate with the Taliban in 2009, 2010, 2011, because victory is what they wanted. It was best for their domestic political reasoning. I mean, so I think this is what they're up against here. And in terms of Vladimir Zelensky, he was promised to be the Churchill of our era. And if people remember, right, he came into office, he was elected on a peace platform. He said he would negotiate with the Russians.

And then through a variety of different things, pressure from both inside Ukraine, as well as from us and the Brits, he turned around on that. And I think he's had a corruption occur where he does believe he is the Churchill of his era. And so now, of course, if you're Churchill, you can't compromise. You can only achieve victory. Otherwise, you're not Churchill. I mean, so whether, you know, it's both aspects, Judge, of the inertia of empire, the realities of empire. Empire can't have anything other than victory, as well as the individual personalities involved, these politicians who, for them, anything other than victory is political defeat. A lot of our viewers have seen this, and you may have as well, but these are two clips back-to-back, T1, not just yet, Sonia, but after I finish introducing it, of

Tucker Carlson and Vladimir Putin. So in the first one, Carlson asks President Putin, would you ever invade Poland? The answer is an understandable and rational one. And then they get into the agreement in Turkey and Boris Johnson. Now, Karen Kwiatkowski reports that Johnson was furious that Putin said what he said. But I want you to listen to this and we'll talk about it. We've had people on this show who have denied that such an agreement took place, but this is proof positive that the president of Russia is holding his fingers up,

as I am with about an inch between my thumb and forefinger, showing how thick, how many pages were involved in the agreement, and that most, not all of it, but most of it was actually initialed by the Ukrainian negotiators. Well, you'll see here's T1, both parts of it and then your comments. Paul Jay Can you imagine a scenario where you sent Russian troops to Poland? Andrei Illarionov Only in one case, if Poland attacks Russia. Why? Because we have no interest in Poland, Latvia or anywhere else. Why would we do that? We simply don't have any interest. It's just threat-mongering.

So, I just want to make sure I'm not misunderstanding what you're saying. I don't think that I am. I think you're saying you want a negotiated settlement to what's happening in Ukraine right and we made it we prepared the huge document in Istanbul that was initialed by the head of the Ukrainian delegation he had fixed his signature to some of the provisions not to all of it he put his signature and then he himself said, we were ready to sign it and the war would have been over long ago, 18 months ago. However, Prime Minister Johnson came, talked us out of it and we missed that chance. Now, in fairness to Boris Johnson, this must have been in cahoots with Joe Biden and the American State Department. You know, you know, the British, they're they're they're the American State Department. You know the British. They're the American poodle.

They'll only do and always do whatever the U.S. counterparts want them to do. But Johnson apparently doesn't regret what he did. He doesn't even agree with President Putin's analysis of what he did. I mean, we know this to be a true event, and we know this to be a true event, Judge, because it's been spoken about by so many different people, many of them not on Russia's side. So we've had this report of both the near success of negotiations at the beginning of the war following Russia's invasion, as well as the interruption of that by Boris Johnson. We've heard this from the former chancellor of Germany.

We've heard this from the former prime minister of Israel. We've heard this from the Turkish foreign minister. We've heard this from people within Volodymyr Zelensky's own party who were members of that negotiating delegation. We heard this from Fiona Hill. She wrote about this in Foreign Affairs, which is the mouthpiece of the Council of Foreign Relations. I mean, so, right, I mean, like, we have heard this story so often now that the only way we can understand the denial of it is to look back and say, these are the same people who denied the reality of what was happening in Iraq. These are the same people who denied the reality of what was happening in Afghanistan. They're the same people who are saying right now that the genocide occurring in Gaza is self-defense by Israel. I mean, so you just have to understand these people for who they are

and take it and use that information and figure out a way to defeat them, to utilize their weaknesses, to bring them out of power, because that's what we're up against. You know, Judge, I had a conversation last week. I spoke with the chief of staff for one of the Democratic House members who voted in favor of Speaker Mike Johnson's $17 billion aid bill for Israel last week that didn't get through. And people recall last week, 45 House Democrats defied the White House and voted for Speaker Johnson's Israel bill. So the White House said to their party, do not vote for this. Israel is still going to get its money, but the president's priority is that we follow the Senate bill because that's best for us politically. This is what we need. And 45 Democratic members of the

U.S. House voted to support a foreign country over their sitting president for something, one, in support of genocide, but for something that ultimately all know they're going to get their money. I mean, talking to these people, you have to just recognize who they are, how craven they are, how cynical they are, how psychopathic they are. And so they are going to deny that events like this occurred. Just as the Reuters report I was just speaking about, the Americans deny it happened. They lie about these things all the time. That's the great, the great, ugly, horrible reality of American diplomacy is that it is full of lies. And those lies are creating the reality of this world that is dominated by

these catastrophic wars and by the genocide in Gaza right now. We've all seen that ridiculous clip of an MSNBC reporter or anchor asking Mrs. Clinton, former Secretary of State Clinton, what she thought of the Tucker Carlson interview. And her response was absurd and frivolous and didn't surprise me. And I doubt that it surprised you. I also doubt, and I know you want to weigh in on this, that you were not surprised by the general response of the American media to the interview, which is Carlson's an opportunist and it's the only reason he did it. Carlson's un-American. Oh, let's forget about it. Yeah, he may have helped get the young man from the Wall Street Journal out of jail. That's the only good that came from it. But a bit of,

not a bit, a lot of jealousy. Carlson's numbers were staggering compared to the best numbers that mainstream media gets, even all together. And he buried them. Right. Last time I looked, which was more than 24 hours ago, it had 200 million views on Twitter, which I don't know how that corresponds, what that means on Twitter, but I know it's a lot. And I mean, are you talking about Tucker Carlson basically reaching as many people with his interview as Vladimir Putin as, you know, the Super Bowl reached? You know, and so like this, I think it's very encouraging to see that in some of this response by the American media towards Tucker is, of course, because they are loyal servants of the empire. And they're so scared to death that if they don't say the right soundbite, that they're not going to get the interview to the White House Christmas party,

that they're not going to get an invite ever to fly on Air Force One, or that when Hillary Clinton comes around on her next book tour, they're not going to get a chance to have a cup of coffee with her. You know, I mean, like, so that's motivating a lot motivating a lot of it, plus their own beliefs in the American empire. Certainly you watch, say, CNN, you can't tell me that Jake Tapper isn't someone who believes in American exceptionalism. But then you also have this other aspect is they're so afraid of what this new technology brings. This idea that, wow, Tucker Carlson can go interview a head of state, which is the other aspect of this, right, that drives me nuts, Judge. Isn't that what journalists are supposed to do? And that's what I want to say to that MSNBC interviewer, to Alex Wagner.

Why isn't your question to Hillary Clinton along the lines of, why are you condemning a journalist, an American journalist, for conducting journalism? You know, what journalists would not want to interview a head of state, let alone a nuclear armed head of state. That is the American's chief adversary. Why aren't journalists pounding on the Kremlin door to get an interview? Why is it only Tucker Carlson is doing this?

Those are the questions I'd like to see the media asking towards, not just people like Clinton, but to themselves. But this idea of this new technology, Judge, the thing that you all are doing, this scares the hell out of them. The average viewing age of MSNBC is 68 years old, right? That's going to come to an end. I mean, that's got to come to an end. And so this idea of people being able to get information through a decentralized network, through people who are doing this because they are committed to journalism, to committed to truth telling, to committed to telling people stories that matter to them, as opposed to the corporate media, which is committed to one, its profits and two, to maintaining its place among the established elites of the American empire. Well, again, this type of thing that Tucker did, this is what you're doing, scares the hell out of them. Here's Tucker Carlson a few days after the interview when asked, why did you do it now? And he basically says, I've been trying for

three years, but the CIA and the NSA, my own American government, this is cut number seven, Sonia, tried to stop me. Why now? Well, I've been trying for three years to do this interview. The U.S. government prevented me from doing it by spying on my text messages and leaking them to the New York Times. And that spooked the Russian government into canceling the interview. So I've been trying to do this, but my country's intel services were working against me illegally. And that enraged me because I'm an American citizen. I'm 54. I pay my taxes. I obey the law. And there was no expectation in the America that I grew up in that my government and its intel services, NSA and CIA,

which were always outwardly focused on our foreign enemies, would be turned inward against American citizens. And I'm shocked by that, and I'm infuriated by that. You know, when I hear something like this it it saddens me and then i look uh over your left shoulder and i see julian assange a picture of him and then i realized in a couple of days this is final appeal i i made a small video maybe you've seen it, in which I addressed the judges directly. It's disheartening when the deep state always prevails. They did not prevail over Tucker Carlson.

He and I have had our differences when we were at Fox together, but I am an outward and open admirer of his courage and his intellect, and particularly what he did in this particular case. And anybody that criticizes him is probably doing so either because they misunderstand what he does, or they're jealous that they didn't get to do it. Well, I can't remember, I've listened to you speak to, you know, Professor Sachs and Mearsheimer about this and the Colonel Wilkerson. And the points you all have made about this are so are so astute. Right. And so critically important. But one of it just gets back to the ideas of who we are as a people, who we are as a society, who we are as a, you know, intellectual, educated society of people who want to advance ourselves as humans, rather than continue to make these catastrophic eras and commit these crimes. But one of the things that's been brought up repeatedly

is this idea of censorship and this idea of people wanting to censor Tucker Carlson, of not allowing this interview to be seen. If Tucker Carlson not be allowed back to the United States or if he shows back up, he should be arrested. And one thing I would correct Tucker about in that clip you just saw, judges at the American FBI and CIA have certainly been directed against the American public throughout their existence. The church committee found that every American president used the FBI for their own political purposes at some point. And of course, there was the COINTELP program that was utilized against the civil rights movement, against the anti-war

movement. So certainly, I think Tucker wasn't as thorough as he needed to be when he was discussing that. But what he's saying is absolutely true. And where we see this, and this is the case of Julian and WikiLeaks and what Tucker was talking about, where the surveillance of his text messages and an ascending of those text messages to the New York Times, the outing of him that way, if you want to call it that. You see this combined assault on both the First and Fourth Amendments, right? So in how they interact with each other, how they reinforce each other, this ability by both preventing people from speaking and then the government spying on people to reinforce that censorship, right? So that you're even afraid just to do your work as a journalist or to do your work as an academic or just as an American

to exercise your first amendment right to have an opinion and to speak it is compromised and is corrupted and made criminal by the ability of the American government to monitor everything you are doing. Well, the American monitoring of him is otherwise known as computer hacking, and it's a felony, except when it's done by American intelligence and law enforcement agents. I can't imagine they had a search warrant. I'm going to switch gears just a little bit because this is really off the wall. So, Sonia, I want to play eight, nine, and ten back to back to back. This is Senator Mitt Romney, whom I've met many times when I was at Fox, on the floor of the Senate. These arguments are preposterous, but I want you to hear them, arguing why the

United States government needs to continue to supply cash and weapons to Ukraine. If we fail to help Ukraine, Putin will invade a NATO nation. He may delay his next invasion until he rebuilds his decimated military. But we must be clear eyed. Ukraine is not the end. It is a step. If we fail to help Ukraine, NATO, the alliance that's prevented great power conflict for over 75 years, will falter and eventually disintegrate. If we fail to help Ukraine, we will abandon our word and our commitment, providing to our friends a view that America cannot be trusted. This nonsense was accepted by two thirds of the United States Senate.

I don't know what's going to happen to it in the House of Representatives. This is another one of those things where the White House wants it to be part of some other larger package. This one does involve Israel. It does involve Taiwan. And believe it or not, they're giving bombs to Israel, and now they claim they're also giving food and medicine to Gaza. Of course, the Israelis won't let the food and medicine in. Another argument for another time. But this is where we are today. The Senate took this vote in the wee hours and it was overwhelming. Yeah.

Just real quick on the aspects of this pertain to Gaza. This bill also defunds UNRWA. Right. I mean, so and we know what we're talking about. That's the United Nations entity that provides food, shelter, clothing, and medicine to refugees. Right. That is, that is practically the only mechanism available to provide assistance to the Gazans. There's no, you can talk about how you're going to send them food and water and support, but if UNRWA is not utilized, there is practically no way to get them that assistance

in a timeline that matters. And of course, the funding of UNRWA comes from one of the many, many lies, one of the many, many information warfare campaigns of the Israelis that have been successful is this lie that UNRWA was involved on the October 7th attack. Israel said 12 UNRWA employees out of 30,000 were involved on the October 7th attacks, and they presented no evidence. And it's been made clear that there is no evidence of this, and the United States has not seen any evidence. Yet the United States Senate went along with this provision to starve the people of Gaza, to continue to immiserate them, to continue to ensure this genocide is successful. And that's what we're dealing with here. So, Judge, the idea that these Cretans in the Senate would then go and make these, as

you described so rightly, preposterous claims that if we don't send $60 billion more on top of that, at least $120 billion we've spent in the last two years in Ukraine. I heard Tony Schaefer talking to you about this as well, how you got to tie in that in with hundreds of billions more spent over the last 10, 12 years with regards to Ukraine. How if we don't spend $660 billion more to Ukraine, well, then next stop Berlin for the Russian army. And then Putin's going to do what Hitler couldn't do. He's going to cross the English Channel. And I heard, you know, Tom Tillis, my senior senator from North Carolina,

saying similar things about this. Jack Reed, the chair of the Senate Armed Services Committee, said that American troops will go over there and fight the Russians if we do not pass this bill. I mean, so the preposterous nature of this is laughable. But it's also got to weigh that against who these people are, and how one, they're willing to believe anything, as long as it suits their interests, as long as it suits their purposes, and how they also just don't care for the consequences. They really don't care for the consequences. If sending all this money into an unwinnable war, the death, the destruction, the suffering, these people are unmoved by that. So we have to really embrace this understanding that these are not people who are going to be affected by moral or intellectual or legal arguments. The only thing that matters to them is maintaining their power. And that's why we have to find a way to weaken them. This will make you feel better, although his voice fell on only a handful of years in the same debate, cut number 12, Sonia and Chris, in the same debate,

Senator Rand Paul making the opposite argument. So I, for one, think that the American people are opposed to this bill. I think they're opposed to the concept of Ukraine first and America last. And I predict that this issue doesn't go away. I predict that the House of Representatives is not going to take up this bill. I predict that the vast majority of the Republicans in the House of Representatives are more conservative than the Republicans in this body. And I predict that this fight is not over. During this debate,

and the fact that we were able to delay and talk about this for five days, five and a half days, the Speaker of the House spoke out. And I don't know that he would have been prompted to speak out, although he has spoken out previously against this. But the Speaker of the House spoke out today and said he's not taking this bill up. See, they've put together border reform that actually would transform things, border reform that acknowledges that it's an emergency.

So I will be a no and continue to be a no on this bill because I think it puts a Ukraine first and America last. Worse than putting Ukraine first and America last because of their deplorable military situation, the paucity of troops that they have, commanding general whose own troops refer to him as a butcher, the political instability in Kiev, the cancellation of the elections next year. I mean, where is this going to go? But Rand Paul, Senator Paul, and his Kentucky colleague in the House, Congressman Massey, introduced legislation to have the funds scrutinized by an inspector general. Never came up for a vote.

Right. Why should it, Judge? It's not like we have the experience of the last however many decades of the global war on terror, the Iraq wars, the Afghan wars, the fact that the Pentagon has never passed an audit. I mean, why should we have an inspector general, right? I mean, like, the, you know, I brought up before about those 45 House Democrats who voted against their White House and for Israel. And we're seeing the same thing occur here. We're really getting the

questions that I never really thought I'd be addressing publicly like this about the actual allegiance of our members of Congress, because now we have Democrats in the House. Because the threat to Speaker Johnson is that if he lets this bill go forward in the House, the conservatives who brought down Speaker McCarthy are going to bring him down. And remember, four months ago when that happened, the Democrats let Speaker McCarthy fall. They didn't intervene, which I think was a strategic mistake on the Democrats' part. And as of now, they've got Speaker Johnson. They are now saying that we'll support Speaker Johnson. So Adam Smith, the ranking member of the House Armed Services Committee and other Democrats have

said, look, if Speaker Johnson brings forward this bill to support Ukraine, we will keep him in power. So now you've got the House Democrats saying we will keep the Republican Speaker of the House in power in order to make sure these tens of billions of dollars goes to the most corrupt government in Europe to support this unwinnable war that has just brought about a massive amount of suffering and destruction and has brought us to the brink of an apocalyptic third world war, possibly. We're going to support the Republicans and keep this Republican speaker of the house in power to make sure Ukraine gets its $60 billion. I mean, you have to look at that and say, my God, I don't

think I've ever seen anything like that in my life. And you have to question the allegiance of these members of Congress that take so much money, but also too, who have dual loyalty and who show up in the halls of Congress, like Brian Mast did, wearing the uniform of another nation's military. I mean, so we're getting to very fundamental things here, Judge, about how we're being governed, who we're being governed, things that I've not seen in my lifetime in terms of questioning the allegiance of these people. Yes, we have a system of legalized bribery

that is our political system. But this goes even beyond that. Eloquent as always, Matt. Thank you so much. Thanks, Judge. Thanks for your time. Thanks for your analysis. That last clip you just did was terrific.

We'll cut it and post it separately from the show. Thank you so much, my dear friend. All right. Thanks, Judge. Of course. Coming up at three o'clock today on the same topic, Lieutenant Colonel Karen Kwiatkowski and on all things Russian and Israeli at 430, Scott Ritter. Judge Napolitano for Judging Freedom. I'm I'm I'm I'm I'm

I'm I'm I'm I'm