Judging Freedom - Pres Biden Making Enemies Everywhere - Phil Giraldi fmr CIA

Episode Date: May 25, 2023

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Hi, everyone. Judge Andrew Napolitano here for Judging Freedom. Today is Thursday, May 25, 2023. It is 3.15 in the afternoon here in Zurich, Switzerland, where I find myself, 915 in the morning on the east coast of the United States, from which our good friend, good friend of the show, Phil Giraldi, joins us now. Phil, always a pleasure. Thanks for coming on and thanks for accommodating my schedule. The president and F-16s, I mean, the idea that the American government, which authorized the sale of these fourth generation jets to foreign countries with the caveat that the foreign countries couldn't give them away to another country without our consent, and the

president has now given that consent. Why do you think he keeps changing his mind? And won't these jets be—I know you're intel and not military, but you're a really smart guy and you know history—won't these jets be too little too late? Well, they're not only too little too late, they kind of go contrary to what Biden was saying a year ago, correctly, that this would escalate the conflict. And so now we're sending in materiel that only will serve to raise concerns among the Russians, which will not do anything to change the outcome. So this is ridiculous on two different levels, but this is precisely the kind of thing we've been seeing this administration do now for two years. We're going to play two clips. First,

President Biden, and then I'll talk between them. First, President Biden from the G7 in Hiroshima last week boasting about the F-16s, their fourth generation, and we're going to train the Ukrainian pilots to use them. Watch this, Phil. United States, together with our allies and partners, is going to begin training Ukrainian pilots and fourth generation fighter aircraft, including F-16s, to strengthen Ukraine's air force as part of a long-term commitment to Ukraine's ability to defend itself. What happens when one of those jets has an American in it, making sure it's operated operated correctly and the jet is is shot down and the American comes back in a coffin well and also what happens if that plane comes down inside Russia

that raises other issues it's uh this is insane the uh I am not an expert on military hardware, as you noted, but the fact is that the F-16 apparently is not an air superiority plane versus the Russian current, you know, top line fighters. So it's a question of you're sending in something that's going to be a sacrificial lamb, in effect, and it will accomplish nothing. It will just make the situation more complicated and increase the likelihood that this thing is going to escalate into something that all of us fear. I want to play a clip from President Biden about 13 or 14 months ago. The key words here, it's a relatively brief clip, the key words are the last three words that come out of his mouth. And I wonder what intel, this is what I

will ask you after we watch this together, what intel he might have received in the past year that caused the radical change of mind from what you're now about to see to what you just saw. Go ahead, Gary. War against Ukraine was never be a victory. Democrats are rising to meet the moment, rallying the world on the side of peace and security. We're showing a strength and we'll never falter. But look, the idea, the idea that we're going to send in offensive equipment and have planes and tanks and trains going in with American pilots and American crews. Just understand, don't kid yourself no matter what you all say. That's called World War Three. OK.

For once, he's probably right. But what would have caused this radical change? I mean, he actually said if we send in, he said trains. I don't know what he meant by that. Tanks and trains and planes. Well, we've sent in tanks and now we're sending in fighter jets. I don't know. Again, I don't know what he meant by trains.

What would have caused that radical change? It wouldn't have been Intel because intel would have told them they're losing it doesn't matter how much equipment you send in well i'm afraid and i and afraid is the right word that this is all political that essentially we have a guy with uh approval ratings that are sinking uh we have a war that increasingly is being seen even in the pentagon as as ultimately unwinnable in that there are no achievable objectives and so we have this uh this president who's desperate to get re-elected and he wants to look like a war president he wants to look like we're uh defending democracy if i hear democracy one more time, I think I'm going to get ill. We're not defending democracy anywhere. Ukraine is not a democracy. And the fact is that

this is all, I think, something that's being pumped up. Biden knows, for example, that this surge of new weaponry with American crews, which is the scary part that he's kind of implying and saying directly, is basically not going to swing the battle, and it's going to take months to accomplish, and there'll probably be ways to wiggle out of this before it actually goes into effect. This is a scary guy who's desperate to look like something he's not. Do you think that the Biden administration wants to drag NATO into this war? I mean, in the past two days, we've heard rumors of a coup in Belarus. The Poles are prepared to support the coup. Putin, of course, would be prepared

to repress the coup. That would be Russia against Poland, dragging NATO in. The president and his buddies in Hiroshima almost spoke with such bravado, Phil, about Ukraine Ukraine it's almost like they want to use Ukraine as a battering ram against uh Putin yeah there's no question about that being the objective uh what happens to Ukraine and what uh what this means for the Ukrainians or the future of a Ukrainian state is not even an issue here this is Ukraine is being used by uh members of NATO. I would say, obviously, the United States and Britain probably are the leaders in this push, is being manipulated to keep this war going. And yes, I think Biden and Britain would together very much like to see NATO flat out committed to an existential type struggle. I mean, this stuff is scary beyond belief.

And NATO has recently, you know, also taken up the cudgels against China. I mean, where does this ever end? Where is the logic in all of this? So the news this morning, although it's afternoon here, the news today in Europe is that Germany's in a recession. Two quarters of shrinking economic activity. No surprise after the destruction of the Nord Stream pipeline. Not a peep about the destruction of the Nord Stream pipeline anywhere in the European press.

Now, of course, I don't read all the languages here. I read the English translations of them. But not a peep about Cy Hersh, not a peep about the destruction of the Nord Stream pipeline, wringing of hands about how the sanctions are hurting those who impose them in this case germany far more than those who are targeted by them in this case russia yeah well of course the the story has disappeared from the the u.s media in fact disappeared from the u.s media almost immediately immediately and uh this is of course uh another indication of how government and the media are cooperating in terms of uh creating policy and um the the scary thing is if you you're an average american your average german your average brit all you're seeing is this kind of completely warped, this completely inaccurate and almost irrelevant narrative that's being pushed by NATO and Biden.

And God knows where it's going to lead up. Do you think that they will drag NATO into this war, which will be a functional equivalent? And Joe Biden used the phrase in the clip we just ran of World War III. I mean, there are 31 countries in NATO now, including Turkey, which has been accused of selling military equipment to Vladimir Putin, even though Turkey's in NATO. I mean, you can't get crazier than that. But do you think they really want to drag NATO into the war? 31 countries, including the U.S., in a hot war against Russia over ancient border disputes in Ukraine? Well, let's not forget Macedonia,

which would be on our side, and they have 200 soldiers in arms so you know it would bring a lot to the uh equation no they i think they will have a problem in dragging nato in because there are a couple of countries that are are part of nato and turkey of course is one you just cited uh depending on how their election turns out in a couple of weeks, Turkey would be resistant, Hungary is resistant. And there are signs that demonstrations going on in France and elsewhere, that a number of NATO countries would be rather reluctant to join something formulistic where there are obligations involving going to war, essentially, with Russia. You recently published a piece, Phil, brilliant as always, harshly critical of the president for playing the race card domestically. What did he do that got under your skin?

Well, he gave a commencement speech at Howard University, which is a predominantly black university in Washington, D.C., in which he basically came out with the line that the biggest terrorist threat against the United States comes from white supremacists. Now, you know, this is, to me, this is like putting a target on the back of many people like ourselves who happen to be Caucasian, who have basically no antipathy towards Black people or anything like that. It's playing the race card in an extreme way. And I think this goes back to what I said before about this is all a political ploy. Somehow Biden is being advised or he's coming up with this nonsense himself to make him look like a strong leader with certain constituencies that he wants to be on top of. But the implication of national security and terrorism leads me to your field, which is the intelligence community. Would he or his speechwriters or the senior people in

the White House have given the intelligence community a heads up before he made a statement as radical and preposterous as this? Or would he have asked for intel from the intelligence community in order to justify making a statement like this? I rather suspect he went the other way because this is a domestic matter. I suspect that the evidence that the FBI was the agency that was most in collusion with pushing this agenda, and of course they work for the Attorney General, who also has spoken similarly to what Biden has been saying about white supremacists, about domestic terrorists, and so on. They're pushing this agenda. And the FBI, as I indicated in the story I wrote,

has basically been fudging the numbers to make it look like there are many more terrorist incidents or domestic violence incidences that are attributable to what they would define as white supremacists. So I think this is another con job like we saw in 2016 with the Durham report just coming out telling us how the FBI and the CIA colluded, basically, with the Clinton campaign to link Trump to the Russians, which was not true. A recent revelation by a FISA court judge, it was the subject of my column in today's Washington Times and at judgenap.com and elsewhere, condemned the FBI for using its powers to spy on foreign individuals, which essentially are warrantless under Section 702 of the FISA Act, to spy on Americans for domestic law enforcement.

This, of course, is a direct contradiction of the FISA Act. A federal judge revealed this week that he learned this last year, just decided to make it public this week. So when the FBI uses Section 702 to spy on foreign persons, it's warrantless. So they just log on to the computer or listen to the phone call. They then are involved often in a phone call between a foreign person and an American. Under the law, that lets them capture but not listen to the conversations of that American and the conversations that person's conversants have, et cetera, et cetera, out to the sixth degree. So you produce a huge database of communications, American to American, all of which started with some foreign individual. It could be a bookseller in London or it could be a foreign agent in Moscow, whoever it is. In order to access that database, the FBI has to go and get a search warrant,

an old-fashioned traditional Fourth Amendment search warrant in which they demonstrate probable cause of crime. And it's more likely than not that in the place to be searched, the database, and the thing to be seized as specific conversation, there's evidence of crime. Now we learned last week from this federal judge that on 273,000 occasions, the FBI searched this database of Americans without a search warrant. So A, are you surprised? B, does the FBI routinely spy on Americans? C, how did the FBI get into the domestic spying business? As rough and tough as J. Edgar Hoover was, it was a law enforcement agency in those days. All right. Long question. My apologies. Yeah. Well, I mean, of course, the NSA has basically had similar authority to this for quite some time. And the theory that they operate under is that once an American is in contact with a foreigner who is an object of interest to NSA or to FBI or to anyone, you're on the hook.

And essentially these linkages get extended and extended and extended, and they wind up including a lot of Americans for whom there is no particular reason that they should be looked at by law enforcement. And this just goes on and on. It's a lot of the, I think a lot of the basic structures that enabled this to develop to the point that it's at

were unfortunately in the wake of 9-11, where Patriot Act and other things like that basically took the gloves off and said that, hey, we're the good guys, we're authorized to do anything we want. Does the CIA, I know they're prohibited by it under their charter, does the CIA spy domestically on Americans? That all depends on how you define the word spy. The CIA certainly collects, again, this is through linkages with foreigners

or with foreign organizations. They collect, I'm sure, a ton. I have to say I never worked in the domestic division. I was always overseas. But the domestic division certainly collected tons of information on U.S. citizens. And the extent to which it was shared with other federal law enforcement and intelligence agencies, I don't know. But I would imagine this kind of stuff did go on and it did go around let's uh go back to russia and ukraine uh you have jenny progosian uh boasting about the successful uh the success of the wagner group and bakhmut said his his guys will be

leaving around june 1st which is next week uh in turning bakhmutut formally over to the control of the regular Russian military. But of course, he couldn't avoid taking a pot shot at the Russian defense ministry. Here he is screaming and yelling. I'm going to read the subtitles because he's in Russian. There are English subtitles, but a lot читать субтитры. Некоторые языки очень грубые, я бы хотел знать, что вы думаете о этом. Поехали. ютубах и так далее, а у обычных людей дети приходят в цинке, разорванные на куски, и когда мать плачет над своим сыном, или как у меня вот тут видео прислали,

отец сидит около гроба сына и говорит, Владимир Владимирович, я понимаю, что вы генералам медали даете, но моему сыну-то за что не дали. Сын этого деда, он разорванный в клочья, там куски с землей, мясо лежат. А гаденыш в Арабских Эмиратах, он попкой крутит. И это раздвоение, оно все, чем может закончиться, это как в 17-м году революции. Когда сначала солдаты встанут, а после этого их близкие встанут. И напрасно думать, что их сотни. Их сейчас десятки тысяч.

Родственников убитых. Наверняка будут сотни тысяч. Мы от этого никуда не денемся. Я рекомендую элите Российской Федерации, соберите сука своих отроков, отправьте их на войну. И когда вы пойдете на похороны, когда вы

их начнете хоронить, то люди скажут, теперь все справедливо. now. All right, so you get his argument. The children of elites are sunning themselves on the Black Sea. The children of Russian working people are in the military because they've been drafted there. This may lead to, I thought this word was unthinkable in public in Russia today, unthinkable post-1917, a revolution. What do you think? It's interesting. He has demonstrated for some time now that he's quite willing to say things that others would rather avoid. So it's a kind of an interesting comment. I think he is reading the tea leaves that there is some dissent going on over the issue of who is serving. I mean, I often comment with

friends that I wonder how many people in the US Congress have children in the military, because there's an obvious disconnect here, where certain segments of society are paying the price of these wars that are constantly being initiated by both Democrats and Republicans in the United States. And yet these people don't put their own equities on the line. So the Russians probably have a pretty good perception in the same direction. And this is maybe a way of defusing it by talking about it uh but i certainly i certainly support what he said reminds me of my time when we were uh some of us were going off to vietnam i i get it phil thank you very much for that analysis you, he often makes sense in his own crude way. What is remarkable to me is that he gets away with saying this. I mean, dissent is not a cherished feature in Russian

society today, even though the freedom of speech is technically guaranteed and preserved in the Russian constitution. We won't go there. It's also preserved in ours. Phil Giraldi, always a pleasure, my dear friend. Thank you so much for joining us. Well, thank you for having me. And enjoy your time in Switzerland. Oh, thank you, my friend. More as we get it. Judge Napolitano for judging freedom.