Judging Freedom - Max Blumenthal: Who Is Sebastian Gorka?

Episode Date: December 4, 2024

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Thank you. Hi, everyone. Judge Andrew Napolitano here for Judging Freedom. Today is Wednesday, December 4th, 2024. Our dear friend Max Blumenthal joins us now. Max, a pleasure. Thank you very much for your time. I want to ask you in some depth about Syria and what's going on there. What's the American involvement and what's the IDF involvement? But before we do, Sebastian Gorka keeps rearing his face as if he speaks for the president-elect, and maybe he does. What can you tell us about him? Well, he's already caused a fairly high-level resignation in Trump world in the form of Michael Anton. So it's not as though he's not stirring controversy, even in Trump's inner circle. He's being portrayed by his enemies in the Democratic Party as a con man and you know he has embellished his

biography as a terror expert for sure. He's being accused of all sorts of malarkey but none of his critics seem to have picked up on what I and Kit Klarenberg wrote at the Gray Zone, which is that Sebastian Gorka has longstanding ties to British intelligence, to an intelligence apparatus that has been hell-bent on prolonging the war in Ukraine, the proxy war, for as long as possible, preventing any ceasefire negotiations, any territorial exchange that could lead to peace, and ending the slaughterhouse in Ukraine, where the U.S. is now pushing the Ukrainian military to lower the draft age. And Gorka is at the center of this. Gorka was, he always goes on these Twitter lives and yells at people. And recently he shouted out my colleague, Aaron Mate and Michael Tracy,

who I think might've been hosting the live or was participating in it because they are opponents of sending more billions of dollars of U.S. aid to Ukraine. And Gorka said that if Putin doesn't do whatever Trump tells him to do, then whatever aid Biden has sent, and they just authorized a new $725 million yesterday, will look like peanuts compared to what Trump sends to Ukraine. So this is Sebastian Gorka speaking on behalf of Trump, telling Putin to basically bend the knee, something Putin hasn't really

done over the years. And what we exposed at the Gray Zone was that Gorka, while he was still in university in London, joined an intelligence unit of the British Territorial Army. And this was after his father took refuge in England while serving as a British, apparently a British intelligence agent in the Hungarian revolt against its communist government. Of what country is he a citizen or countries? Well, he's a British citizen. That's why he speaks in a flamboyantly British accent, which makes him apparently in the minds of some MAGA supporters sound more intelligent than he actually is. And he not only participated in this intelligence unit as a young man,

but he was mentored by someone who was at the forefront of the Ukraine proxy war, a British military intelligence officer named Chris Donnelly, was Sebastian Gorka's mentor, endorsed his PhD thesis, hosted him on several panels at intelligence-linked conferences. Sebastian Gorka, you'll see him posing in photos in front of James Bond books. He fashions himself as a kind of Bond-like figure operating in the middle of Trump world. But what Trump's supporters want and what America First is supposed to represent is an end to this war that is just scraping the last remains from the pockets of American taxpayers to fund one of the most corrupt countries on the planet, paying their civil employees as well as delivering loads of corporate welfare to defense contractors. And Sebastian Gorka is right in the middle of this.

And so I think it's an issue. Oh, well, Britain, they're such a great transatlantic ally of the U.S. I think it's an issue for anyone who believes in the America first philosophy that you have this British character there. Here's the clip to which you referred with the infamous peanuts comment. I'll give one tip away that the president has mentioned. He will say to that murderous former KGB colonel, that thug who runs the Russian Federation, you will negotiate now, or the aid that we have given to Ukraine thus far will look like peanuts.

What the hell is he talking about? Well, yeah, I mean, I addressed it, and it's disturbing to think that someone who has the ear of Trump would actually say that on behalf of Trump and would deliver a more aggressive policy after Trump and his vice president, J.D. Vance, campaigned to end this war. Sebastian Gorka seems to be echoing the views of London there in a very British accent. And in 2002, Sebastian Gorka, when he was starting out his career as a national security expert, went to his parents' native country of Hungary and fashioned himself somewhat successfully as a national security commentator. He was advising

the first government of Viktor Orban. He's a fanatical anti-communist, and he started accusing a social democratic prime minister of being a communist agent. They dredged up something from his past about him having done counter espionage in the Soviet years, basically identifying spies. And Gorka was appointed to help lead an investigative committee in parliament to investigate that prime minister. But Gorka couldn't get past the national security office, which judged him to be too connected to British intelligence, even a British spy, and rejected his security clearance. And he immediately left Hungary and went to the United States, where he continued to be mentored by the British military intelligence officer,

Chris Donnelly, who is now presently overseeing, as we've exposed at the Gray Zone, with files and classified documents or documents that were confidential, not classified, confidential documents. He is overseeing sabotage operations inside Russia within the British military and produced the blueprints for the bombing of the Kerch Bridge. So that was Sebastian Gorka's mentor. And Gorka, we helped expose that Gorka met with him in 2018 when Donnelly was in the United States to expand a propaganda unit within British military intelligence called the Integrity Initiative. And Gorka has refused to address that meeting or his relationship with Chris Donnelly and gets very angry when reporters ask him about it. So, yeah, of course, if he could be connected to Russia somehow through some vague, the most vague, thinnest possible connection, then the whole American press would be up in arms.

But I think the relationship with the UK, which is hellbent on continuing this war, is far more dangerous. You know, I don't, I should know this and I don't. And that is the position to which President Trump has given notice and intent to nominate him if it requires Senate confirmation. Because if it does, all this information should be made available to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. It may be one of those White House jobs that doesn't require Senate confirmation. Yeah, it doesn't. And if it doesn't, then under the law, the president can give a national security clearance to anybody he wants, even if the person is secretly a double agent.

I mean, that's a terrible chance the president takes if he just gives out that security clearance because he happens to trust this guy. I guess that's him as a young man. Chris found this. Well, Donald Trump was spied on by Five Eyes Intelligence during the 2016 campaign. Figure Alexander Downer from Australian Intelligence was involved, as was Richard Dearlove, the former head of MI5, MI6. George Papadopoulos has talked about this at length as he was caught in the middle of this dragnet. And a FBI CIA asset with ties to British intelligence, Stefan Halper, was actually placed in the Trump campaign specifically to spy on Donald Trump. So-called professor, right.

So once again, I mean, British intelligence is not an American ally. It's a frenemy. Let's transition to the latest in the Middle East. Why did Netanyahu accept the so-called ceasefire went into effect in Lebanon. It's supposed to be enforced by the Lebanese army, which is forbidden from defending Lebanese territory against Israel. Israel's trying to prevent people from going back to Southern Lebanon as preventing funerals, preventing people from burying their loved ones, and preventing people from returning home, continuing its attacks. This was the caveat in the ceasefire deal that the Biden administration and its Israeli-born mediator, Amos Hochstein, oversaw. Hezbollah even had to retaliate after UNIFIL issued its report because the attacks are getting so severe.

So it's not really a ceasefire. I don't know what to call it, an interregnum between two conflicts. I think the next one is inevitable here. And the only reason that Israel agreed to any ceasefire such as it is, is so that it can intensify its attacks in the Gaza Strip, which have been horrific. Israel has just ethnically cleansed the last school that was a refuge in Beit Lahia in northern Gaza and is continuing its effort to push hundreds of thousands of people out of northern Gaza, where two of its top ministers from the religious nationalist camp are seeking settlements. There was just a major conference in Israel on settling the Gaza Strip.

This is sort of Netanyahu's concession to the religious nationalist fanatics who are holding his coalition together. So that's one principal reason why he agreed, but it's going to start again. Is it just a coincidence that on the day after the so-called ceasefire came into existence, everything heated up again in Syria. Oh, absolutely not. This was the cue. I mean, as Syrian Salafi jihadi leaders have been telling the media, this was their cue to launch the offensive. And it was months in the works. But Israel's assault on Lebanon, its weakening of Hezbollah was clearly the cue for them to launch this assault into northern Syria. And State Department asset, someone who has been one of the top liaisons between the U.S. Department of State and intelligence services, also British intelligence seems to have used him. His name is Muaz Mustafa. He was just quoted in the New York Times.

You might remember him as the guy who brought John McCain on his illegal visit to Syria back in 2013 when McCain was trying to drum up a U.S. military campaign. I think Lindsey Graham was with McCain, but of course that doesn't mean much. They were inseparable in those days. So this guy brought them there and he was quoted by the New York Times stating that HTS, this rebranded Al-Qaeda organization that had been based in Idlib under Turkish protection, NATO protection, decided to storm into Aleppo because they were inspired by the Israeli Pager attack against Hezbollah and the assassination of Hassan Nasrallah, and they wanted to score their own victory against the resistance axis, inspired by Israel,

and that they've also received encouragement and support from Ukraine. So in other words, this is World War III, and the forces that have stormed into Aleppo are on the side of Israel, the United States, and NATO in that war, even though they are, most of them at least, are Arab, Muslim, and happen to be inspired by Al Qaeda's original leadership, including Ayman al-Zawahiri, whose quotes and sayings were featured on road signs and walls

all across Idlib. So these are our allies. As Jake Sullivan, National Security Director, Jake Sullivan, chirped in an email to Hillary Clinton in 2012, Al-Qaeda is on our side in Syria. And Jake Sullivan was quoted by the New York Times this week declaring that he will shed, the United States will shed no tears for Bashar al-Assad's government losing Aleppo to these same forces, Al-Qaeda. Will there be any material change in American policy towards Syria under Donald Trump, Marco Rubio, and Michael Waltz? What is the case now? The answer is probably yes, we'll ramp it up. Well, this offensive, which is branded as sort of a rebel offensive in U.S. media, is seen as correctly as a blow to Iran and a blow to the resistance axis. That is the only force on the planet that is materially countering greater Israeli expansionism and militarism in any meaningful way. So of course not. Of course, Donald Trump's going to be told

not to shed any tears over Salafi jihadi Al Qaeda forces storming through a country that had been pluralistic. And anywhere they go, they have ethnically cleansed Christians, Druze and religious minorities, if not killed them or forced them to convert at gunpoint. And as I said, most of these forces are Arab, but not all of them. Many of those who participated in this offensive are Uyghur Muslims from the Xinjiang province who were given Turkish passports by Turkish intelligence under Erdogan's watch and sent into Idlib, given the homes of Christians who were driven out in their property. And there they raised up an army which had been repressed and crushed by China called the Turkestan Islamic Party using child soldiers, and they have now

quote-unquote liberated Syrian territory. Chinese Muslims from far, far away are supposedly liberating Syrian territory. Turkish flags have been flown over the citadel in Aleppo, and this is something we're supposed to be welcoming as liberation against a dictator. What's being done here is the establishment of thousands of dictators and a NATO protectorate over Syrian territory, which will lead to disaster. But for Israel, for the US, what they've always sought is the weakening of any power, any Arab state that still maintains a post-colonial foreign policy that resists Israel and Western imperialism. And Syria is the last Arab state after Libya to hold on. And we saw what happened

to Libya. Libya was destroyed and destabilized by design. What happened in Libya wasn't a failure of US policy, even though it produced slave markets and the return of ISIS, it was a success because it crushed a powerful Arab state that was still not so friendly to Israel. An Arab state that was the most prosperous in all of Africa until Mrs. Clinton and President Obama unleashed the CIA to destabilize. And of course, we all know what happened to Gaddafi. It was butchered. What are a thousand American troops doing in Syria other than protecting the theft of oil? That's what Donald Trump said they're doing there they said we need to take the oil he said that after his withdrawal plan was sabotaged by his own generals and he said well

we'll just keep them there and they will occupy the Canoco oil fields near Deir ez-Zor in northeastern Syria and continue to siphon the oil out of the ground off to various bandits and to sell it off on the black market. This is also a strategic card against the Syrian state. It's where a lot of the wheat fields are located. It's the breadbasket of Syria. And so Syria is being deliberately starved through this US occupation. A member of the Syrian study group, Dana Strahl, who's now in the Biden administration, said, we are the owners of one-third of Syria and we will use this to strangle the Syrian economy, along with Caesar sanctions, some of the most vicious, evil sanctions on the planet, which have driven the majority of Syrians into poverty. This is a weapon that was used to weaken

Syria to the point where Al-Qaeda mercenaries and fanatics were able to basically waltz into Aleppo with very little resistance because the militias that defended Syria originally against the dirty war, a lot of them have just been exhausted. They're average people and they haven't received any gains during the post-war period. They don't want to have to go through the grisly process of fighting, dying, and then going into urban warfare, possibly destroying entire neighborhoods all over again to get these forces, the forces of Al Qaeda out. So that's part of what the, that's really what the U.S. is doing there. And most Americans don't even know.

Yeah. Talk to me about the interplay of Turkey and Russia. I mean, is Turkey withdrawing its application to join BRICS after its military behavior in Syria? Great question. I mean, what was Bashar al-Assad doing in Moscow when this took place? He was summoned to Moscow and there are some rumors or some analysts saying that Moscow is pressuring him to accept a deal with Turkey. of many of the recycled gangs of bandits and jihadists that fought in the original dirty war, who were repurposed into a kind of mercenary army. The reason he supported it was because Assad had backed out of a deal to normalize with Turkey, Turkey which had preyed on Syria for so many years, which was responsible for ISIS and its presence in Syria, primarily responsible. I mean, the United States obviously had its role. So what we saw take place after HTS rebranded al-Qaeda and the Turkish National Army stormed

into northern Syria was that Russian air support did not arrive right away. We have to ask some questions about that. The air support and attacks ultimately came on convoys of HTS seeking to resupply their forces. They didn't keep them out. And there's a Russian airbase right there near the Syrian coast called Hmeymim. So what was the situation? Then there were rumors that Bashar al-Assad had either fled to Moscow or had himself been killed. He was silent for some time until he received the Iranian foreign minister. Then you have Iran, which has said, oh, they'll consider sending their troops. But Massoud Paseshkian, the Iranian president, does not seem very enthusiastic about getting involved. And he said Syria should go to the UN.

Like, what are they going to do with the UN? Right. Was Assad in Mexico? Excuse me, in Moscow? There were certainly discussions there. It was unclear to many where he was. Switching gears back to Israel, is there any significance to this statement by Moshe Yalan, the former head of IDF and the former defense minister, that Netanyahu was a war criminal? I mean, is that a crack in Israeli elite solidarity, or is Yalon, no saint himself, an outlier? Well, Moshe Yalon is from a faction. He originally comes from Likud, but he's from now a faction that you could call the gatekeepers of the Israeli state who oppose Netanyahu, consider him to be a rogue figure who's establishing a kind of political dictatorship that ignores the high command of the military and the intelligence apparatus. And what Yaelon has said is ethnic cleansing, correctly has said ethnic cleansing is taking place in northern Gaza. I mean, there's simply no denying it. What Israel's doing is

eliminating through bombing and raids every possible place of refuge. As I mentioned, the last school in Beit Lahia, northern Gaza city where people were sheltering, has been cleared at gunpoint. And then they're starving the population out, refusing to allow any aid in and relying on bandits, drug smugglers, who have been veteran Israeli collaborators to loot aid convoys so that Israel's, you know, its hands are clean and its fingerprints can't be placed on the sabotage of humanitarian aid, much of which comes from the United States. That's what they're doing. And they've established a Netsarim corridor, which is basically a military corridor that splits the northern Gaza Strip from the central Gaza Strip, where you have Deir el-Bala, the Nusarat refugee camp, in order to prevent that population that's already been pushed out of northern Gaza from returning. So what Yaelon said has caused enormous alarm inside Netanyahu's camp. They're condemning him. They're basically calling him an anti-Semite and a traitor. It's so obviously true. And, you know, there's another camp, the generals who are allied with Netanyahu in the religious nationalist camp. who's a former brigadier general who conceived the general's plan,

which is going into effect in northern Gaza, but actually in more extreme form because the religious nationalist commanders on the ground are just bloodthirsty sadists. Where does Netanyahu stand with the criminal prosecutions against him? Well, they're going to go forward. As Avichai Mandelblit, the judge presiding over one of the major cases of bribery, said they're going to go forward one way or another. But what Netanyahu has been able to do is hold his government together longer than anyone believed. The ceasefire deal in Lebanon has bought Netanyahu a lot more time.

But I mean, I look at these cases and yes, there's corruption there. He's getting bottles of wine and cigars from billionaires like Arnon Milchan, the Mossad asset who runs a studio in Hollywood. Compare that to the level of corruption in the United States, which is legal and out in the open. It's like night and day. I mean, Donald Trump just got $100 million legally from Miriam Adelson, whose late husband flew one of the biggest traitors in US history, Jonathan Pollard, who gave confidential classified Navy information about Navy activities to Israeli Mossad. Her husband flew him back to Israel when he was repatriated after he was let out of prison, literally rewarding one of the biggest traitors in the country. And she paid

Donald Trump $100 million to do whatever Netanyahu wants. This is all out in the open. So what Netanyahu is facing there is peanuts. Netanyahu's real crimes are in Gaza. Netanyahu's real accountability should come at the ICC. And what we're witnessing now that I think everyone should pay attention to is the threats that ICC judges are starting to face, as well as the governments in Europe, which have observed the Rome Statute. And we've even seen the government of Netherlands declare that they're seeking to find legal avenues through which Netanyahu can continue to visit the country which hosts the Hague where he is supposed to be put on trial. So the whole international legal system is being sabotaged before our eyes by Netanyahu's global network of manipulators and shysters. And his corruption trials pale in comparison to

what he faces on the world stage. Max Blumenthal, always a pleasure, my friend. No matter what we're talking about, thank you for your insight. Much appreciated. Thanks a lot, Judge. Of course. Coming up at noon today, Colonel Douglas McGregor. At 3 o'clock, Phil Giraldi. At 4 o'clock, Aaron Maté. Please remember to like and subscribe. We're oh so close to that 500,000 subscription goal by Christmastime. I think thanks to you, we'll make it before that.

Judge Napolitano for judging freedom. I'm Adam.